Trick or Treat 2021 Welcome and Update

[pumpkinkingmod]

Hello, ghosts and goblins! It's time for another spooky season of Trick or Treat. I'd like to briefly introduce myself as the new Pumpkin King—Hello, I'm the new Pumpkin King! Thank you very much to the previous rulers who have made this event so much fun over the years.

The 2021 rules and FAQ post is here. The schedule remains as usual:

Sept 1 – Nominations Open
Sept 8 – Nominations Close
Sept 11 – Sign-Ups Open
Sept 18 – Sign-Ups Close
October 24 – Assignments Due
October 31 – Gift Reveals
November 7 – Creator Reveals

There is one significant update for the 2021 round of Trick or Treat; I've decided to add relationship nominations and matching as an option. If you love the traditional Trick or Treat character matching set-up, you can continue to nominate, request, and offer characters as usual! Relationship tags will just be an extra option for participants interested in that.

Due to these changes, I won’t be using an eternal tag set this year.

Let me know if you have any questions, and I'm excited for the tricks and treats to come!

Edit: Just a note that I'm slowing down on comment replies here but will get to questions as I can. The above changes are confirmed for the 2021 round. No decisions have been made about the 2022 round.

Comments

[snickfic]

I'm glad to hear the exchange is going forward this year! It's always been of my favorites, and I've done it almost every year since it began.

However, I'm commenting to ask if you might reconsider opening the exchange up to ship noms. ToT is one of the few exchanges that matched only on characters, and IMO that lends it a whole different vibe than the many exchanges that allow both ships and characters to be nominated. It makes it easier for us multishippers who enjoy just throwing a bunch of possible ship ideas at the wall without coming up with ideas for all of them, and it's also really fun as a writer to get to choose between different ship options for a character without getting locked into one. It changes my whole signup strategy, in a fun way, and is part of the reason I've done ToT for so long. It was one of the things that made ToT unique, as opposed to just being another exchange that matches on both ships and characters, and previous mods have been really committed to keeping it that way.

I know there've been requests in the past for ToT to match on ships, but these days we have Shipoween, which does exactly that. It feels a little weird for ToT to add ships now, after Shipoween has already been established for several years and purposefully runs on the exact same schedule as ToT.

This is also the kind of change that I think is nice to broach with the community beforehand. At this point, Trick or Treat is one of the longest-running exchanges besides Yuletide, and it has a lot of people who've done it a long time and are invested. (Like me!) So it feels kind of alarming to have this announced just a few days before noms, by someone new that we don't know or have experience with. You may not be aware, but there's been some pretty big drama recently over exchange modding, and I think people are going to feel warier than usual about big new changes made by mods they don't know yet or have any experience with.

Thank you for being willing to help keep ToT going. It's a fairly active exchange and a lot of work, and it's great of you to step up and put in that time! Please reconsider this big new change, especially since you haven't run the exchange through a full cycle yet. Thanks. :)

[pumpkinkingmod]

Thanks so much for the detailed thoughts! I'm not reconsidering the addition for this year, but the input is appreciated.

While I know this answer won't satisfy everyone, I hope multishippers who like character matching will feel comfortable signing up as usual. I definitely have fandoms where I prefer the ambiguity of character OR matching too.

I'll set aside the notes on Shipoween filling the shipfic niche, since Shipoween mod is retiring -- I know the timing of this comment section is a little awkward, since I posted before Shipoween mod.

Regarding recent drama and the question of trust... I know I'm new as PK and coming in with a couple of big changes, and "just trust me!" would be a hell of an ask right here. All I can say is that I have longtime investment in Trick or Treat as a participant too, and I intend to do my best by other participants as the exchange moves forward.

Thank you again!

[(Anonymous)]

The thing is, if you meant to do right by other participants, you would have consulted us before changing the fundamental format of one of the only large -and open to all fandoms- character matching exchanges around.

If your long term investment is just 'I'm gonna do it MY way now', that's not great for those of us who loved this exchange for what it was. And not a great way to build trust.