2025 Show Your Colors Challenge

When

June 1-30, 2025, your timezone

What

A challenge to celebrate queerness in your setting

How

Write an article that celebrates LGBTQ+ identities in your setting and share a link in a comment

Welcome to Pride Month! This is the second annual Show Your Colors challenge, an unofficial (community-run) challenge asking you to add some queerness to your worldbuilding. This time, I'm working together with Mochi to bring you extra-rainbowy flair.
This challenge is unjudged, but we'll highlight a few favorites after Summer Camp.

Challenge

Celebrate Pride Month by celebrating the queer people, places, and things in your setting.

Mochi and I are looking for worldbuilding made with love for the queer community - articles that trend positive, hopeful, or uplifting, even in the face of conflict and struggle. This challenge also encourages showcasing the human behind the screen, and we'll prefer articles that aren't made with generative AI tools.

Rules

• Don't over-exert yourself! Save your energy for Summer Camp.
• The challenge starts on June 1 in whichever timezone you're in and ends on June 30.
• Write an article during the challenge that celebrates queerness in your setting.
  • Your submission must be created on/after June 1 and submitted on/before June 30.
  • It must be at least 300 words, but there's no word count maximum.
  • You can use any template as long as the article supports the spirit of the challenge.
  • All work is welcome, but we have a preference for human-made content - articles without genAI text or images.
• Submit by adding a comment here containing your article as either a mention link or article block. See sidebar for instructions.
• This challenge is unjudged, so you are free to edit your articles after the challenge ends.
• We'll highlight a few favorites after Summer Camp.

Common Worries

I don't know how to write LGBTQ+ characters.

We're just people. If you know how to write other characters, you know how to write us.

There aren't any LGBTQ+ characters in my setting.

Now's a great time to add some!

No, really. It's not a concept that exists.

And why not? Not only have we existed throughout human history, but there are gay penguins and transgender fish and many more examples across nature. In any society with expectations and norms around relationships and reproduction, there will be those who don't fit.

Okay but what if my article isn't gay enough?

As long as your article overtly relates to queerness, it's plenty gay for this challenge. This includes focusing on aspects of queerness, such as The Employment Contract of Charlie Lancaster , as well as focusing on other topics that happen to feature queer individuals, such as Sofi Casabella .

Hosts

Councilor of the Inner Sanctum Mochimanoban

Mochi

 

I hope you have a great day!
Explore the endless planets brimming with life of the Yonderverse! Go after creatures, discover new places, and learn about the people you find along the way.

Creator of the Yonderverse and A To Zoo , Mochi specialises in worldbuilding creatures and ecosystems, but diversity and queerness is an important aspect of their award-winning writing.
Show Your Colors Inspiration

Casilla Maw

Creator of wow that's a lot of stars and the world you're on right now, Rin's specialties are in characters, relationships, and the conflicts that result. They love articles that focus on writing and storytelling.
Show Your Colors Inspiration

Trey

Grandmaster Those2Nerds

Rin Garnett

Cause problems in wow that's a lot of stars
Take a WA unofficial survey
Celebrate Pride with a June Challenge

To add this badge to your articles, use the image ID 6677129

Submitting

Submissions are open throughout the month of June, in whichever time zone you're in. There are several ways to get the links needed to submit your article, but these are the two easiest:

• On any page where you can see the left sidebar, click the magnifying glass (or press ctrl+k) and Search for your article. Copy either the bbcode link or bbcode block.
• When viewing your article on your world, scroll to the button and click the clipboard icon to copy article block.

Paste your copied link into a comment here with any commentary you'd like to add, and you're done!

Sharing

When making WA community posts, use the tag #SYC25 on posts related to this challenge, and #pride for anything related to Pride Month.

Submissions

This challenge is open for submissions until the end of June 30.
Submit your articles in the comments and they'll be added to this list!

Master Vibeca