Due South Canadian 6 Degrees Big Bang

Challenge
Name:	Due South Canadian 6 Degrees Big Bang
Date(s):	2009-current
Moderator(s):	feroxargentea and missionlameturtle
Founder:	zeenell and akamine_chan
Type:	Challenge, Big Bang
Fandom:	due South, C6D
Associated Community:	Dreamwidth; discord; LiveJournal, Archived version;
URL:	Big Bang Collection at AO3
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The Due South Canadian 6 Degrees Big Bang is a Big Bang challenge for due South and the connected C6D fandoms. C6D stands for Canadian 6 Degrees and includes other projects that the main actors from due South have worked on. The challenge is a collaborative project between writers and artists to produce original due South or C6D novellas (20,000 words minimum) with accompanying artwork or vids.

C6D fandoms with fanworks created for the challenge have included: Battlestar Galactica, Blade: Trinity, Slings & Arrows, Blood Ties, Twitch City, Wilby Wonderful.

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Although the Big Bang asks for the typical minimum of 20,000 words, it bills itself as the "World's Slowest Big Bang" because it offers writers and artists a longer lead time to write and draw: For a measly 80 words a day (or some art) you too can be a part of the World's Slowest Big Bang!

Sage came up with the "World's Slowest Big Bang" title, because with the usual set of seasonal challenges that were running, it looked like our Big Bang was going to stretch from October to June - nine months. Most Big Bangs run a couple three months at most.^{[citation needed]}

History

The first Big Bang ran from June 2008 with the stories and art being revealed June 2009. 48 authors, 21 artists signed up and 11 authors and 14 artists completed.

The second Big Bang ran from October 2009 through June 2010, with five completed stories.

The third Big Bang began in November 2010, with a planned 'go live' date of August 2011. 41 writers and artists signed up.

In 2012, akamine_chan and lucifuge5 stepped down as mods and handed the reins over to a new team, mizface and hazelwho. Part of the changes the Due South Canadian 6 Degrees Big Bang underwent was to shift the emphasis away from rewarding authors for completing the challenge.

As hazelwho said in the initial interest post:

The second, very exciting change is that we will be allowing more types of fanworks, both as primary pieces and their complements.

Primary fanworks will include fic, art, podfic or vids. Complementary art includes well, pretty much anything. Fic based on primary art, icons, fanmixes, heck, you can knit something if you’re inspired to!

So instead of the traditional fics of 20,000 words and artists matched to stories, we are looking for a primary creative contribution (a fic of 20K, a vid of 3 minutes, a significant art project) that will be worked on from May 7th to September 1st. Then every primary creative contribution that has a draft in by the deadline will be eligible to receive a complementary creative contribution (2000 word fic, fanmix, short vid, small art project, etc) that another fan will have a month to work on. The whole thing will go live on Monday, October 8th, 2012 and we can all celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving with brand new dS/c6d fanworks!

Additionally, the website shut down and posting of stories moved to the Archive Of Our Own, with subcollections for each year's fanworks.

The community was moved to Dreamwidth in 2015. In 2018, hazelwho and mizface stepped down as mods and handed the reins over to feroxargentea and missionlameturtle, with 16 fanworks completed that year. A discord server was created in 2019 to host Big Bang chats. In 2020 the schedule was temporarily extended to end on US Thanksgiving, in view of disruption due to the pandemic, but it reverted to Canadian Thanksgiving in 2021, with 22 fanworks created that year.

The 2022 big bang saw 15 fanworks posted to the AO3 collection. The 2023 big bang had 7 fanworks posted to the collection.