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Hey, everyone! Long time no speak. Nostalgia has been the name of the game for me lately, fandom-wise. I've been cleaning out my email inbox, for example - or at least making one of my periodic heroic attempts at it - and oh man, the nostalgia is killing me.
I miss fandom the way it used to be, guys. I miss LJ being a primary fandom hub. I miss the style of communication and the community-building we had here, and sometimes I really regret being too shy to make the most of it while it lasted. Communicating and connecting with people and organizing by interest on tumblr is awful.
I miss when fandom was fundamentally understood to be for fun, there was a better divide between IRL activism and awareness-raising and said fun so that you could actually HAVE that fun to destress and escape all the shit the activism and awareness is for without getting the shit thrown back in your face at every turn, and wank and hate didn't always get dressed up in such faux-weighty language. Tumblr seems to have forgotten how to disagree with each other without turning everything into an SJ-flavored guilt trip. I've gotten plenty of good out of the place over time (Tron fandom will always stand out as a highlight for me), but hot damn, I hated the way it works when I joined, and now that the honeymoon phase is over and the obsession has worn out, I've arrived right back at hating its guts again in that regard. I miss when discussions were simple to have, when content was at least relatively easy to find, when people with similar interests were easy to search for and communities based around interest easy to make. How do you meet people on tumblr except by accident? I've been there for six years and I still don't have a clue!
And I'm not even going to mention twitter, because... no. Just no.
Part of it is also that I've been around long enough now to watch fannish cornerstones disappear. The Church of Lemons stopped just a few years after I started participating. GeoCities is gone. I think Blissfull Ignorance has croaked twice since I first joined as a green little baby fan, and all the links to the fic I used to host there are dead. The Gundam 00 archive I was invited to post my kink meme fics to disappeared when I wasn't looking. I lost all my image folders a couple of years ago, and the loss of the ones I used for more than just "pretty pictures I want to keep hold of" purposes in particular still punches me in the chest sometimes. I'll never build my collection of icons up again, and with the demise of LJ as the place to be, I never did get to fill in the gaps in my archiving needs. Everywhere I look, I find only broken image embeds. Even kink memes are a dying breed.
My childhood died a little along with Sirius and Harry's innocence in Order of the Phoenix back in the day, and after months of crossing my fingers and hoping the MCU wouldn't follow HP's example, Civil War's relentless downer ending and lack of resolution for Bucky struck me down and left my fannish soul in the dirt the same way. Agent Carter was cancelled. Jane isn't returning for Thor: Ragnarok and every new thing I learn about that movie is more WTF and concerning. I don't care about Hulk!! I'm not really looking forward to anything the MCU is coming out with until Black Panther, and that's a looooong ways off still. Star Wars VII and The Cursed Child undid their long-established and, it turns out, deeply cherished happy endings. (Though on the one hand, The Force Awakens was otherwise lovely and filled with hugs, and on the other, the question of how much of CC JKR even wrote herself makes it non-canon for me by default.) I wanted Fantastic Beasts - screenplay credited to JKR and JKR only! - to be good so badly, and when my scriptbook comes in it probably will be, but the slow, dawdling, cringing, twitchy acting style and overly Muggle-looking visual worldbuilding carried over from the HP movie adaptations, which I loathe, was such a turn-off for me that I left the movie theatre feeling more sadly disappointed than anything. Tron 3 is a no-go...
FAMOUS PEOPLE I GREW UP WITH KEEP DYING. ._.
All in all, 2016 wasn't a very satisfying year for me, fandom-wise - and the less said about IRL politics or the weird, discombobulating "hurry up and wait" place my personal life has been in for the better part of the year, the better. So this trip down memory lane is hitting me in the maudlin extra hard.
*sighs*
Oh well. On the other hand:
Some of the smaller fandoms I've been in over the years have been so, so wonderful. Canaan, Prétear, Inception, The Man from UNCLE. Tron was the most fun I ever had on tumblr, and the friendliest and most welcome group of fans I can remember. The movie's leading lady attended our Virtual TronCon two years in a row! And while it's been five, almost six years since I last wrote anything for GW, I can still vividly and fondly remember how it led to me writing my first fanfic on the family computer in the living room, and finding my footing in online fandom on dial-up, and getting a third-hand computer in my bedroom that I didn't have to share with anyone or limit my internet time on, and MSN, and going out to meet fellow Dutch fans at Amsterdam Central Station.
And there's a couple of surprises lurking in the back of my inbox! Have you ever forgotten that you've written a fic? Like, completely forgotten a five-part, published series with four more parts in the works and at least half a dozen glowing reviews per installment? Because it turns out I did!
Agent Carter should've had twelve more seasons and a movie, but what we did get was perfect. I liked Jarvis taking on a more comedic role in season two. Even the dreaded love triangles were done well! It finally hit me recently why I fell so hard for Violet, too; when she and I were both still in our teens, I had a huge crush on her actress as Mallory, the mean-but-still-good older sister in the Spiderwick Chronicles movie.
There are now continuities wherein Jane is Thor and Peggy is Captain America. The MCU version of Peggy, even, who is BRITISH. Avengers Academy is a treasure, a gift to mankind, the cutest and most hilarious cesspit of a crack den in the world.
The Nanoha franchise is aliiiiiive~ (even though Vivid Strike doesn't use the name and stubbornly refuses to show the faces of Vivio's mamas, like it's gonna be a surprise to anyone if they show up at any point, ha).
Ghostbusters was rebooted with an all-female cast, an all-female Ocean's 8 is coming, and we're getting a Splash remake with Channing Tatum as the mermaid someday too...
Aw, hell. It's been far too long since I had a good ramble here about the media I'm consuming, so let's have some!
A fairly long time ago, I started watching EVERY SINGLE GUNDAM SERIES EVER. I wanted to watch Turn A with all its predecessors under my belt, because it's supposed to be set into a far far future where all of said predecessors had been part of its history somehow. I'd already watched GW, G00, and SEED/SEED Destiny independently of this project, and somewhere along the line I watched G Gundam too, but my goal was to watch everything else roughly in order of publication. I made it through all the UC shows and shorts that were out at the time and then by the time I got to Gundam X, only one installment short of the goal, I kind of never wanted to watch another giant mecha battle again I was so burned out, so so much for that endeavor. The Gundam Unicorn OVAs had started by then, but at a release schedule of 1 or 2 episodes a YEAR, I was like fuck that, I'll wait. Apparently the OVA series finished in 2014. But it was adapted into a regular anime in 2016, at which point I finally remembered it existed, so now I've finally watched it!
Yep, they sure did spend a lot of time and effort on the animation! Maybe a little too much time, because I'm not 100% convinced it was entirely for the better. Relaaaax, animation. It's okay. Settle down just a bit, please. As for the story: I wonder if the anime felt less disjointed? Some things, like Loni, just popped up out of nowhere to make a semblance of Big Impact, and then disappeared just as suddenly. I kept goung "please don't make the big reveal aliens, please don't make the big reveal aliens, please don't make the big reveal aliens", and hurray, it was NOT aliens! I was expecting Mineva to be a bit more interesting. Banagher was a decent enough protagonist, but could've done with more developement outside of the cockpit. But, BUT!! When he cried, people told him it was okay. Marida even HUGGED HIM. If ever there was a sign of changing times... O: And speaking of Marida: NOOOOOOOO, NOT ANOTHER PURU DOWN. ;A; JUST LEAVE THOSE PURUS ALONE. *hugs her and Two forever*
I also watched Gundam Thunderbolt, or what's out so far, anyway. Interesting twist to have the gundam unit piloted by a psycho douche! ...and to make everybody else various shades of off-putting too. Zeon quadruple amputee dude is like the only likeable character so far. The art style is so awful though, whyyyy. T_T
Man, though, you take a half a decade break from a megafranchise and suddenly you have 4 to 8 MORE installments to catch up on. My brand loyalty is misguided.
Frozen Teardrop ended a while back and... I completely lost track of it LONG before that point. The AnimeSuki thread about it was a really bad place to have to go to get plot updates and summaries, but it was the only one I think I ever found. I wish there was some place where it was all collected in one place. No, okay, I wish the novel would just get officially translated into English, and I would settle for the money to hire a professional to freelance translate the novels for me, but that's a pipe dream.
Maybe I should start reading The Glory of Losers instead. I've always ignored it because the pace was soooooooo utterlyyyyyyyy glaaaaaaacial, but the Gundam Wikia suggests that it's reached somewhere between episodes 30 and 40 by now? *does the math* Yeah, okay, no, at an adaptation speed of +/- 35 episodes in 6 years, I can wait another while before I go looking for a scanlation of that one. *sigh* (GoL started serialization in 2010! Good god, where did all that time go?)
Still idly crossing my fingers hoping for a new Wing sequel anime with the next gen (or s gen after that) cast, but that is neither here nor there.
A while (a long while) back, I complained that the Avatar comic "The Search" ended with Azula just noping off into the night after way too much focus and build-up to make such an ending satisfying. After putting off reading the comics that followed for far too long, I finally found out why that was: she showed right back up in the next one! *head desk* So those books are finally a real continuity, instead of feeling like almost-independent contained-and-complete stories within the same universe. Gotcha!
I really hope the upcoming Korra comic ("Turf Wars") doesn't mean the AtLA comics are cancelled now, though. The last couple AtLA comics made me so nostalgic for the AtLA cast, and as nice as it would be for Korrasami to become explicitly canon in those comics and for that relationship to develop further, I just never loved the Korra cast the same way. I don't wanna say goodbyyyyyyyeeeeeee.
After two and a half seasons of boredom, frustration, and slowly increasing RAGE, I finally dropped Agents of SHIELD, and good riddance to bad rubbish. No, I don't want to actually talk about it. I just want to off-handedly mention how much I hate it, because that's how much I hate it. At one point, I wrote and reblogged like 100,000 words of rage-fuelled liveblogging meta dissecting every single way in which AOS pissed me off. Hatespam of SHIELD: my greatest legacy. My distaste for everything AOS has touched is so great that the Inhumans show that's coming is dead to me until such a time as it is confirmed that it completely ignores everything AOS has already done with the subject matter. B|
I'm looking forward to the upcoming Runaways and Cloak & Dagger shows, though. It looks like they'll be a lot more YA-ish, which gave me pause at first, but honestly seems like a plus to me. One of the things that made Agent Carter such a delight, especially in season two (YES, I LIKED SEASON TWO. I LOVED SEASON TWO. IT WAS A FUCKING GIFT. FITE ME. I WILL FITE YOU), was how much humor was in it. Unlike, say, AOS, which has been getting steadily more self-importantly mope-whine and grimdark and joyless over time. A similar thing is why the Netflix Marvel shows never really clicked for me; too much srs bsns, not enough fun. Something aimed at a slightly younger audience seems like it would have better odds of a lighter tone, so I'm hopeful!
Magical Girl Raising Project was described to me as a spiritual successor to Puella Magi Madoka Magica, and I thought, sure, why not. But nah. Not my thing. It doesn't feel like a magical girl show at all. It's a show about magical girls - in the meta sense. It's a show about how magical girls are perceived from our side of the screen, and how that can be completely and utterly corrupted. It even makes a point of it that only one of the dozen magical girls it stars really looks like a magical girl. The others are all basically just dressed in random magically enhanced costumes. Plus, it's SO relentlessly grimdark that it all honestly just starts feeling pointless.
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Vivid Strike! was lovely, though I do hope the franchise goes back to tactical nuke magical girl battles and doesn't wander off into vaguely magical martial arts in frilly costumes forever. The first three installments of the francise are still my favorites. Fuuka and Rinne were really nice though. THE DARK MAGICAL GIRL ALWAYS GETS REDEEMED, FUCK YES. Nanoha never fails to deliver. And I'll admit, what Rinne did to those girls at her school was hella fucking satisfying.
Izetta: the Last Witch isn't a magical girl show in so many words, but close enough. It's about the epinomous witch basically curb-stomping WWII with her ~power from an andient era~, it's charming and touching and really femslashy. My only complaint is the bog-standard "sexual harassment/embarassment for shits and giggles" fanservice, and that it isn't twice as long. I feel like it would have really benefitted from a longer run to flesh everyone out more and build the stakes and such better.
Oh, and I watched Flip Flappers recently, which was either ass-random or charmingly whimsical depending on how generous you feel about it. I'm leaning toward the latter. Think magical girls meet Inception. Sort of. There are Tron and Mad Max and giant robot homages, and probably more I didn't catch.
Has anyone else tried out Voltron: Legendary Defender, by the way? I've gotten totally hooked (my favs are Shiro, Allura, Keith and Pidge), and I'm pretty sure I'm gonna wish I had waited a couple more years to do so, because the show is clearly in no hurry at aaaaaaall to tell the story and unveil the secrets it means to. But it's too late now, so PLEASE SUFFER WITH ME!
I miss fandom the way it used to be, guys. I miss LJ being a primary fandom hub. I miss the style of communication and the community-building we had here, and sometimes I really regret being too shy to make the most of it while it lasted. Communicating and connecting with people and organizing by interest on tumblr is awful.
I miss when fandom was fundamentally understood to be for fun, there was a better divide between IRL activism and awareness-raising and said fun so that you could actually HAVE that fun to destress and escape all the shit the activism and awareness is for without getting the shit thrown back in your face at every turn, and wank and hate didn't always get dressed up in such faux-weighty language. Tumblr seems to have forgotten how to disagree with each other without turning everything into an SJ-flavored guilt trip. I've gotten plenty of good out of the place over time (Tron fandom will always stand out as a highlight for me), but hot damn, I hated the way it works when I joined, and now that the honeymoon phase is over and the obsession has worn out, I've arrived right back at hating its guts again in that regard. I miss when discussions were simple to have, when content was at least relatively easy to find, when people with similar interests were easy to search for and communities based around interest easy to make. How do you meet people on tumblr except by accident? I've been there for six years and I still don't have a clue!
And I'm not even going to mention twitter, because... no. Just no.
Part of it is also that I've been around long enough now to watch fannish cornerstones disappear. The Church of Lemons stopped just a few years after I started participating. GeoCities is gone. I think Blissfull Ignorance has croaked twice since I first joined as a green little baby fan, and all the links to the fic I used to host there are dead. The Gundam 00 archive I was invited to post my kink meme fics to disappeared when I wasn't looking. I lost all my image folders a couple of years ago, and the loss of the ones I used for more than just "pretty pictures I want to keep hold of" purposes in particular still punches me in the chest sometimes. I'll never build my collection of icons up again, and with the demise of LJ as the place to be, I never did get to fill in the gaps in my archiving needs. Everywhere I look, I find only broken image embeds. Even kink memes are a dying breed.
My childhood died a little along with Sirius and Harry's innocence in Order of the Phoenix back in the day, and after months of crossing my fingers and hoping the MCU wouldn't follow HP's example, Civil War's relentless downer ending and lack of resolution for Bucky struck me down and left my fannish soul in the dirt the same way. Agent Carter was cancelled. Jane isn't returning for Thor: Ragnarok and every new thing I learn about that movie is more WTF and concerning. I don't care about Hulk!! I'm not really looking forward to anything the MCU is coming out with until Black Panther, and that's a looooong ways off still. Star Wars VII and The Cursed Child undid their long-established and, it turns out, deeply cherished happy endings. (Though on the one hand, The Force Awakens was otherwise lovely and filled with hugs, and on the other, the question of how much of CC JKR even wrote herself makes it non-canon for me by default.) I wanted Fantastic Beasts - screenplay credited to JKR and JKR only! - to be good so badly, and when my scriptbook comes in it probably will be, but the slow, dawdling, cringing, twitchy acting style and overly Muggle-looking visual worldbuilding carried over from the HP movie adaptations, which I loathe, was such a turn-off for me that I left the movie theatre feeling more sadly disappointed than anything. Tron 3 is a no-go...
FAMOUS PEOPLE I GREW UP WITH KEEP DYING. ._.
All in all, 2016 wasn't a very satisfying year for me, fandom-wise - and the less said about IRL politics or the weird, discombobulating "hurry up and wait" place my personal life has been in for the better part of the year, the better. So this trip down memory lane is hitting me in the maudlin extra hard.
*sighs*
Oh well. On the other hand:
Some of the smaller fandoms I've been in over the years have been so, so wonderful. Canaan, Prétear, Inception, The Man from UNCLE. Tron was the most fun I ever had on tumblr, and the friendliest and most welcome group of fans I can remember. The movie's leading lady attended our Virtual TronCon two years in a row! And while it's been five, almost six years since I last wrote anything for GW, I can still vividly and fondly remember how it led to me writing my first fanfic on the family computer in the living room, and finding my footing in online fandom on dial-up, and getting a third-hand computer in my bedroom that I didn't have to share with anyone or limit my internet time on, and MSN, and going out to meet fellow Dutch fans at Amsterdam Central Station.
And there's a couple of surprises lurking in the back of my inbox! Have you ever forgotten that you've written a fic? Like, completely forgotten a five-part, published series with four more parts in the works and at least half a dozen glowing reviews per installment? Because it turns out I did!
Agent Carter should've had twelve more seasons and a movie, but what we did get was perfect. I liked Jarvis taking on a more comedic role in season two. Even the dreaded love triangles were done well! It finally hit me recently why I fell so hard for Violet, too; when she and I were both still in our teens, I had a huge crush on her actress as Mallory, the mean-but-still-good older sister in the Spiderwick Chronicles movie.
There are now continuities wherein Jane is Thor and Peggy is Captain America. The MCU version of Peggy, even, who is BRITISH. Avengers Academy is a treasure, a gift to mankind, the cutest and most hilarious cesspit of a crack den in the world.
The Nanoha franchise is aliiiiiive~ (even though Vivid Strike doesn't use the name and stubbornly refuses to show the faces of Vivio's mamas, like it's gonna be a surprise to anyone if they show up at any point, ha).
Ghostbusters was rebooted with an all-female cast, an all-female Ocean's 8 is coming, and we're getting a Splash remake with Channing Tatum as the mermaid someday too...
Aw, hell. It's been far too long since I had a good ramble here about the media I'm consuming, so let's have some!
A fairly long time ago, I started watching EVERY SINGLE GUNDAM SERIES EVER. I wanted to watch Turn A with all its predecessors under my belt, because it's supposed to be set into a far far future where all of said predecessors had been part of its history somehow. I'd already watched GW, G00, and SEED/SEED Destiny independently of this project, and somewhere along the line I watched G Gundam too, but my goal was to watch everything else roughly in order of publication. I made it through all the UC shows and shorts that were out at the time and then by the time I got to Gundam X, only one installment short of the goal, I kind of never wanted to watch another giant mecha battle again I was so burned out, so so much for that endeavor. The Gundam Unicorn OVAs had started by then, but at a release schedule of 1 or 2 episodes a YEAR, I was like fuck that, I'll wait. Apparently the OVA series finished in 2014. But it was adapted into a regular anime in 2016, at which point I finally remembered it existed, so now I've finally watched it!
Yep, they sure did spend a lot of time and effort on the animation! Maybe a little too much time, because I'm not 100% convinced it was entirely for the better. Relaaaax, animation. It's okay. Settle down just a bit, please. As for the story: I wonder if the anime felt less disjointed? Some things, like Loni, just popped up out of nowhere to make a semblance of Big Impact, and then disappeared just as suddenly. I kept goung "please don't make the big reveal aliens, please don't make the big reveal aliens, please don't make the big reveal aliens", and hurray, it was NOT aliens! I was expecting Mineva to be a bit more interesting. Banagher was a decent enough protagonist, but could've done with more developement outside of the cockpit. But, BUT!! When he cried, people told him it was okay. Marida even HUGGED HIM. If ever there was a sign of changing times... O: And speaking of Marida: NOOOOOOOO, NOT ANOTHER PURU DOWN. ;A; JUST LEAVE THOSE PURUS ALONE. *hugs her and Two forever*
I also watched Gundam Thunderbolt, or what's out so far, anyway. Interesting twist to have the gundam unit piloted by a psycho douche! ...and to make everybody else various shades of off-putting too. Zeon quadruple amputee dude is like the only likeable character so far. The art style is so awful though, whyyyy. T_T
Man, though, you take a half a decade break from a megafranchise and suddenly you have 4 to 8 MORE installments to catch up on. My brand loyalty is misguided.
Frozen Teardrop ended a while back and... I completely lost track of it LONG before that point. The AnimeSuki thread about it was a really bad place to have to go to get plot updates and summaries, but it was the only one I think I ever found. I wish there was some place where it was all collected in one place. No, okay, I wish the novel would just get officially translated into English, and I would settle for the money to hire a professional to freelance translate the novels for me, but that's a pipe dream.
Maybe I should start reading The Glory of Losers instead. I've always ignored it because the pace was soooooooo utterlyyyyyyyy glaaaaaaacial, but the Gundam Wikia suggests that it's reached somewhere between episodes 30 and 40 by now? *does the math* Yeah, okay, no, at an adaptation speed of +/- 35 episodes in 6 years, I can wait another while before I go looking for a scanlation of that one. *sigh* (GoL started serialization in 2010! Good god, where did all that time go?)
Still idly crossing my fingers hoping for a new Wing sequel anime with the next gen (or s gen after that) cast, but that is neither here nor there.
A while (a long while) back, I complained that the Avatar comic "The Search" ended with Azula just noping off into the night after way too much focus and build-up to make such an ending satisfying. After putting off reading the comics that followed for far too long, I finally found out why that was: she showed right back up in the next one! *head desk* So those books are finally a real continuity, instead of feeling like almost-independent contained-and-complete stories within the same universe. Gotcha!
I really hope the upcoming Korra comic ("Turf Wars") doesn't mean the AtLA comics are cancelled now, though. The last couple AtLA comics made me so nostalgic for the AtLA cast, and as nice as it would be for Korrasami to become explicitly canon in those comics and for that relationship to develop further, I just never loved the Korra cast the same way. I don't wanna say goodbyyyyyyyeeeeeee.
After two and a half seasons of boredom, frustration, and slowly increasing RAGE, I finally dropped Agents of SHIELD, and good riddance to bad rubbish. No, I don't want to actually talk about it. I just want to off-handedly mention how much I hate it, because that's how much I hate it. At one point, I wrote and reblogged like 100,000 words of rage-fuelled liveblogging meta dissecting every single way in which AOS pissed me off. Hatespam of SHIELD: my greatest legacy. My distaste for everything AOS has touched is so great that the Inhumans show that's coming is dead to me until such a time as it is confirmed that it completely ignores everything AOS has already done with the subject matter. B|
I'm looking forward to the upcoming Runaways and Cloak & Dagger shows, though. It looks like they'll be a lot more YA-ish, which gave me pause at first, but honestly seems like a plus to me. One of the things that made Agent Carter such a delight, especially in season two (YES, I LIKED SEASON TWO. I LOVED SEASON TWO. IT WAS A FUCKING GIFT. FITE ME. I WILL FITE YOU), was how much humor was in it. Unlike, say, AOS, which has been getting steadily more self-importantly mope-whine and grimdark and joyless over time. A similar thing is why the Netflix Marvel shows never really clicked for me; too much srs bsns, not enough fun. Something aimed at a slightly younger audience seems like it would have better odds of a lighter tone, so I'm hopeful!
Magical Girl Raising Project was described to me as a spiritual successor to Puella Magi Madoka Magica, and I thought, sure, why not. But nah. Not my thing. It doesn't feel like a magical girl show at all. It's a show about magical girls - in the meta sense. It's a show about how magical girls are perceived from our side of the screen, and how that can be completely and utterly corrupted. It even makes a point of it that only one of the dozen magical girls it stars really looks like a magical girl. The others are all basically just dressed in random magically enhanced costumes. Plus, it's SO relentlessly grimdark that it all honestly just starts feeling pointless.
Izetta: the Last Witch isn't a magical girl show in so many words, but close enough. It's about the epinomous witch basically curb-stomping WWII with her ~power from an andient era~, it's charming and touching and really femslashy. My only complaint is the bog-standard "sexual harassment/embarassment for shits and giggles" fanservice, and that it isn't twice as long. I feel like it would have really benefitted from a longer run to flesh everyone out more and build the stakes and such better.
Oh, and I watched Flip Flappers recently, which was either ass-random or charmingly whimsical depending on how generous you feel about it. I'm leaning toward the latter. Think magical girls meet Inception. Sort of. There are Tron and Mad Max and giant robot homages, and probably more I didn't catch.
Has anyone else tried out Voltron: Legendary Defender, by the way? I've gotten totally hooked (my favs are Shiro, Allura, Keith and Pidge), and I'm pretty sure I'm gonna wish I had waited a couple more years to do so, because the show is clearly in no hurry at aaaaaaall to tell the story and unveil the secrets it means to. But it's too late now, so PLEASE SUFFER WITH ME!