#and was late in my media consumption lifecycle

[wheel-of-fandoms]

Great question! ... Moving on... Seriously though I have no idea....

OH wait, maybe I do? Basically, I got into fan fic very late, and even now don't read much of it, and what I do tends to just be... smut. I might read more of other types if I got back into reading more in general, but I have been struggling with that. Anyway, I can't at all what I might have read first on AO3 Anyway that said, what I just remembered was way back in my early 20s when I found a script-style Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffing on the famously bad "The Eye of Argon" short story. It wasn't just generically riffing on Eye, it was with the standard MST3K characters and all. So I suppose that counts as fan fic of MST3K. Even though I only seen a few parts of a couple episodes of MST3K.

It was probably 10+ years after that when I first read any fan fic on AO3 (and nothing on any site in between). I suppose I might have seen like individual posts that might have counted as micro-fics for some stuff.

Oh, and here is that MSTing of Eye if anyone is interested:

I do feel bad for Jim Theis though, he was 16 when he wrote it (and it was 1970, fantasy was full of purple prose in general back then). He died in 2002, only 48 years old.

Some other info about Eye and Jim

[weregonnaneedabiggerblog-blog1]

Logan (2017); The Gritty Grounded Superhero Movie that Got It Right

Consumption of media has always had a set of phases that I’ve recently noticed;

  ·         Aspect of life gains much mainstream attention and is promoted and viewed greatly by the masses

·         The aspect is consumed to such extents that people will become tired of the concept, meaning companies will either choose to abandon the aspect and promote something else, or try and reinvent it to try and give it more relevance.

  And it’s not just companies that do this. General people with a fascination of art will eventually drive for the norm to evolve into something other, as was seen in the post-modernism movement of the mid-20th century that lead to the current group of society that relish in pushing the boundaries of what our expectations for certain parts of culture.

  I, and many others also in their late teens by this point in their lives, have grown up with the rise of the self-proclaimed “subgenre” of the superhero movie, self-proclaimed mainly due to the fact that the only real guidelines the genre has is that it must feature larger-than-life beings protecting someone or something. In this time, films like Sam Rami’s “Spider-man”, Jon Favrau’s “Iron Man” and Joss Whedon’s “The Avengers” have acted as landmarks for what I believe to be the first phase of the superhero movie consumptions; its peak. Now that it’s the year 2017 and that this collection of movies have been indulged by the masses for almost 20 years now, I believe we’re about to enter the second phase of this consumption; the evolution, with the movie “Logan” action as its beginning.

  Now many would argue that this isn’t the first time that a superhero movie has tried to break the mould of what is expected, with films like “Watchmen” from 2009 and “The Dark Knight” from 2008. However, I would argue with this for one main reason, and that is these films were too early in the lifecycle of this consumption. The same year The Dark Knight was release, we got Iron Man, the film as I mentioned earlier, marked a big part in phase 1 of this consumption as it was the film to start the Marvel Cinematic Universe; a never before seen collection of characters spanning across dozens of stories and movies. I like to think of perhaps the most major landmark in this consumption being with Bryan Singer’s “X-Men” in 2000, due to being a primarily big movie for its time acting as a superhero movie with a lot of talented actors and filmmakers being attached to the product, including of course Hugh Jackman and his now iconic role as Super-Soldier Mutant Wolverine, also known as Logan. And after all these years of staying with these movies and staying with this character after being there at the beginning, I find it only fitting that Jackman, and more importantly the character of Logan’s swan song act as the jumping-off point for the future, experimental phase of the superhero genre.

  No-where better does Logan address its objective than in its own title. This is by absolutely no-means a glossy, over-blown superhero epic that acts as if every single one of its actions could mean the difference between the end of the world and saving it. Rather this is a down-and-dirty look at Logan and how everything in the hundreds of years he’s been alive have led to this point in his life. This isn’t Wolverine’s movie, it’s Logan’s. This is seen in subtle call-backs to previous movies, such as when Logan speaks to Charles Xavier about how there hasn’t been a mutant child born in years, leaving Logan to think of his entire sub-species as “God’s mistake”, undercutting almost everything Logan and the X-men fought for in terms of Mutant civil rights in past adventures. On top of that, near the film’s conclusion, we learn that Logan himself has been carrying with him an adamantium bullet, the only thing in the world that can kill hum, in case he ever felt he couldn’t take the train on him anymore. Logan is attempted to be persuaded otherwise from his bleak outlook on life by Charles Xavier, no-longer acting as the head teacher at his school for you mutants, but now acting as the only real reason Logan is still living, given the several medical conditions he has obtained in his later years such as dementia and stroke-prone, something very dangerous with the powers that Xavier possesses. As Logan, as Charles puts it, “Waits for him to die”, he is given problems in the form of X-23, a genetically bread super-soldier with the nickname of Laura. As Logan is begrudgingly forced into escorting her away from her creators and former captives, due to him discovering her to be a genetic clone of himself and therefore his daughter in some-sense, Xavier tries to show Logan the good still left in the world as they help Laura to her destination, eventually spending a night with some local farmers whose horses the trio helped round up. However, this only leads into more death, as another clone of Logan attacks the house and brutally murders the residents, including Xavier himself, who gets no final words, and the following scene is buried by Logan and Laura before they move on. This acts as a prime example of the bleak, but never forced, tone of the movie, with all of these actions showing the mental pain Logan endures due to all the lives he’s lost and is responsible for loosing (some of which are implied to have included other X-men). And keeping with the non-conventional superhero structure, the film doesn’t have some big ridiculous ending where the villain is in full power and the hero must use what they’ve learned to defeat them, rather ending with Logan sacrificing himself so Laura and her fellow mutants escape from their creators. Whether he chose to do this due to some sense of obligation to Xavier or due to him actually feeling some sort of fatherly instinct to protect Laura, it still acts as an incredibly sad yet heroic farewell to the legacy of Logan.

  Much of the technicality also makes this film excellent. Hugh Jackman, as expected, gives a marvellous final performance, as does Sir Patrick Stewart as sometimes-kind hearted sometimes-bitter elder to the group that adds a great amount of leverage to the film, helping in being able to care from and sympathise with these people, regardless whether you grew up with or have experienced any of the other x-men movies. The relatively unknown Dafne Keen, portraying the young mutant Laura, also gives what is possibly one of the best child performances of the year, always having a sense of unknowing of what she’s thinking, primarily due to her major lack of dialogue for a majority of the runtime, instead having a very cold expression to a majority of what happens around her. As well as this, the primary dry, dusty scenery of the Texan-Mexican border setting is also surprisingly powerful, and almost gives the movie a road-trip-esc feeling with the stops the main trio make, from casino hotels to abandoned lookout-posts. This execution is likely in no small part due to director James Mangold’s experience with his remake of western “3:10 to Yuma” (also returning from directing 2013’s “The Wolverine”, which hinted greatly at his greater understanding and love for the character, despite falling that film falling short in many areas). Those mistakes however are likely circumvented with his greater involvement with this movie, being also credited as co-writing the screenplay with Scott Frank, a returning writer from “The Wolverine” who also helped with penning Spielberg’s 2002 effort “Minority Report”, another film with an excellent sense of incoming danger.

  Many years ago, the genre of the Western was also in a state of popularity that the Superhero sub-genre is currently flourishing. However, the genre sadly never chose to evolve into anything more and eventually burnt itself out, leaving us with a genre that, whilst helping to inspire the scope and scale of films to come, only has one film every few years now. I feel that where superhero films differ is that it has proven itself many times already to evolve and become more, and hopefully if my predictions comes true, then this final nail in Logan’s coffin will also act as the final nail in the era of nothing-but-formulaic, filler superhero adventures, and the birth of something bigger than the character himself could ever be.