#anyway that's all i've had this thought in my brain in awhile and haven't sat down to share it properly until now ���

[crescentfool]

having the hc that minato is ace is incredibly funny sometimes when you think about how ryoji is oh so very bi because it's like. "ah. death stole my ability to be attracted to people," in the same way that ryoji stole minato's eye color and energy level. like wow, thanks ryoji, you just keep finding things to steal from minato!

[starrybouquet]

Star Trek, Stargate, and the Colors of Fandom

Like so many TNG fans the world over, the cast announcement for season 3 of Star Trek: Picard had me stunned, amazed, and then insanely over-the-top excited.

The entire TNG crew back together?!

It's the stuff of us fans' dreams.

When I need a serotonin boost, you bet I'll be playing that little preview video on repeat. (And reading co-showrunner Terry Matalas' tweets, which have been hilarious, if you haven't seen them.)

But my brain is still...my brain, and so of course it decided to insert its depressed, anxious thoughts into what should, by any measure, be 1 minute and 23 seconds of happiness.

If you're so excited about this, my depressed brain asked, why are you not at all excited about a new Stargate show?

Why are you so excited? my anxious brain asked. Aren't you worried they'll ruin everything you loved about TNG? You didn't like season 1 of Picard--remember?

My brain is depressed. And anxious. But it asks hard questions.

Really, I probably should have just ignored those questions. But it's my brain, and I can't really ignore them, so I started thinking. And this is what I came up with.

There are different colors of fandom.

Stargate is burnt orange. It's a blaze, burning, steady but true.

It's love and creation.

It's betrayal.

It grew from canon, yes, but really, my love for Stargate is its own thing now. I've fleshed out "my" versions of Jack and Teal'c and Sam and Daniel more fully than anyone could, in eight-ish seasons of TV. I write about them, I dream about them. I'm active in the fandom, and the community is better than the show. It's gotten me through a pandemic and given me friends and a writing hobby and a hundred photos of Richard Dean Anderson saved in my phone, and really, I'm grateful.

The betrayal I feel whenever I try to watch Avalon and see Cameron Mitchell, over and over, is both a blessing and a curse.

It's a curse because there's canon I cannot in good conscience like. At all. (I know many do enjoy it, and that's fine.) I waffle between disliking it and hating it and feeling like I'm an outsider among people who will just take canon as gospel, whether they like it or dislike it or just think it's meh. (There's a whole rant somewhere in there about how stupidly uncreative people are, trained to just follow the pack and too idiotic to do anything else. Not all of them, but some of them. But that's a post for another day.)

That betrayal is a blessing, too. That's what I realized when I sat down and tried to really think about the questions I was asking myself. The betrayal of canon is a blessing because it's the spark that causes me to write all the canon-divergent fluff deep in my heart. Canon-divergent angst, too, though that's much more difficult for me. It's a blessing that I should really be thankful for, because it forced me to create those versions of characters of which I am so proud. It forced me to write about them.

(I write about them far less than I'd like. But I do write about them.)

So I'm wary of a new show. The reasons I'm wary deserve their own post (there's one that's been sitting in my drafts for awhile--maybe it's time to release it into the world?) but really, I just need to let go of my wariness and embrace what Stargate has become to me. More than a fandom. Less than a complete show.

Anyway, Stargate is burnt orange. A blessing, a curse. Humor and loyalty and the campfire reflecting off four best friends who are closer than family. The color of the trees lining Jack's lake in the fall. The color of the sunrise Jack sees in Sam's smile.

TNG, though--TNG is indigo.

Calming. Serene. The color of royalty. Loyalty, too. (heh, a rhyme!)

TNG is royal. Untouchable, because somehow, despite the 80s spandex and the weird season 6-7 plots and the slightly problematic tone of some season 1-2 episodes, it is perfectly...complete.

I love every second of it.

Maybe it's nostalgia. (I spent so much of my childhood on the TNG DVD set.) Maybe I'm more willing to overlook the episodes I don't like. Maybe I--and I'm cringing as I type this--care about it less?

Yeah, that last one isn't true. What is true is that I really do love every second: the cringey seconds for being the cringe that washes away the seriousness, and the serious seconds for being some of the best sci-fi--scratch that, some of the best TV--that have ever been made.

Anyway, somehow I'm not too worried about TPTB ruining TNG. I've already made my peace with the fact that I'm always going to be on a different axis than most of the (active) Star Trek fandom. And, like I said, TNG is royal. It will stand like a statue, impervious to whatever we try to throw on top of it. It will stand there, and judge us, and that will be that.

Don't get me wrong, I'll definitely be disappointed if this reunion doesn't go the way I want it to. Somehow, though, I'm not so very bothered by that idea.

If I don't like it, I'll go back and watch All Good Things and imagine my own future for the best starship crew ever to grace a screen.

I hope I love it. But--sorry for being repetitive--TNG is indigo. The prospect of being fed a story I don't like doesn't burn the way burnt-orange SG1 does.

TNG is indigo like the depths of the ocean. The recesses of the night sky. Indigo like the surety of Picard's orders, the loyalty in Riker's grip on the observation room chair, the tilt of Guinan's hat and the steadiness of Crusher's hands. TNG is the color of Geordi's beloved warp core, glowing against the shiny 80s paneling of Engineering.

Maybe this reverses. Maybe I hate season 3 of Picard, and my indignation blazes up into red-hot fandom-ing. Maybe SG1 cools into cool seafoam green and there aren't any stories left in me. It's happened before, for other fandoms. It's the cycle of fandom life.

I don't know the future, but I'm going forward with a little more clarity on how I see my fandoms, and a little more color in my day. <3

[awizardmademedoit]

(( So this is my Jan Patreon reward from @spacelingart . It seemed to fit perfectly as part of the Winter Solstice Incident, so I wrote it! ))

"That went better than expected!" They'd barely reappeared wherever it was Calleo had decided they'd end up after disapparating from his grandfather's now in half ruins, definitely chaotic house and already had another "cigarette" lit.

"And you? You were positively brilliant!" Calleo grinned at Aldig, "I don't know that I could have managed to pretend not to understand a language around a group of people like that for nearly as long!"

It took Aldig a moment to get his bearings; after all, they had all been (technically) aiming at him. "When that cousin of yours, after spending an entire day staring at me, remarked that she thought Goblins were a myth, I was so, so close to breaking character I--" he looked up at Calleo, "--just how many of those things did you bring with you?"

Calleo gave what he was smoking a too long, overly critical look before he handed it to Aldig and answered, "At least enough for five or six days; I had no idea exactly how much things would need to be escalated to make it a solid, '...and never let any of us see you again' level incident."

"You know, it's alarming that you apparate while using these but also not the least bit surprising," he snatched the offered thing from Calleo, who had started chattering on about all the various things about the various relatives that had been present that he didn't like. 

At some point, that "cigarette" ran out of anything to burn and Aldig finally interrupted Calleo, "Thing is, your idea was all right, but I thought it was a little too obvious being half done like that."

"Half done?"

"Added a few touches to it before you got the door open, that's all," Aldig canted his head and cocked a brow. As he brushed his hair back into place he grinned up at Calleo.

"...where'd your tie go? And when did you roll your sleeves up like that? You've got your shirt collar in one hell of a state as well!"

Satisfied, after a few passes, that his hair wasn't an unseemly mess any longer, Aldig shrugged lightly, fished his tie out of one of his pockets and tossed it to Calleo. "I know that, that's what I was telling you; the way you did it wasn't convincing at all."

"You can't just loosen a tie and screw up my hair, that'd annoy them but probably wouldn't have got them as irate as they were; this actually makes it look as though you did something while we were outside for that ten minutes!"

"If I'm going to play a part, it's going to be convincing. If I weren't good at that, I'd be terrible at my job."

For awhile, a very long while, Calleo stared owlishly at Aldig, which wasn't unsurprising considering how far he likely was from sober.

"...I've never seen you without a tie. "

"The hell you haven't, you've seen it multiple times over the years," Aldig examined the half burned thing Calleo had been smoking, "What's this one anyway? Aside from being strong enough to make you look at a room full of people fully prepared to kill both of us and remark on their poor aim, I mean."

Of course, Calleo was now fixated on the lack of tie; seeing Aldig look even remotely casual was a rarity.

"If you walked in looking like that, I'm not nearly as surprised at their willingness to blast the front of the house off!" He laughed though most of that statement.

"These are some new ones the Muggle lady two doors down grows; the one who thinks I have some kind of in road with law enforcement and all I did was put a modified Muggle repelling charm around her property! It's mean to have an excessively calming effect without turning one's brain off in the process."

Calleo sat down on the ground, not even near one of the trees, just where he was standing, "One of the places Koggot takes holidays in is near here; didn't want to apparate right in as I don't know if he's done any redecorating lately and getting splinched would have put a damper on the evening."

Eventually, after enough looking around the area, Aldig relit what Calleo had handed to him, "This the one in Switzerland or the one in Finland? Or do you have no idea which direction you went?"

"Third option!" The response was more a laugh as Calleo shifted from sitting to stretched out on the ground, "It's one of the two! I'll know once we get inside, they're decorated differently. They're different on the outside as well, but it's dark."

"...but it's dark..." Aldig repeated after a drag. "Hunðeow, if you've forgotten how Lumos works, it's time to put that thing out and not light another one!"

Calleo might have tilted his head if he hadn't been laying on the ground. Instead, he lazily lifted a hand and pushed an equally lazy appearing ball of light from his fingertips over to Aldig's face, stopping it just short of bopping the Goblin's nose with it.

"Seems to work just fine!" He watched with some curiosity as Aldig swatted at the light, snuffing it out with the gesture.

"You really haven't been to one of Koggot's 'I'm completely fed up with other people, I'm going to go live in a cabin in the woods for a week'--only since it's Koggot, 'cabin' is more just...another house with stuff he ran out of room for in one of his other houses?"

"Considering you don't know whether you apparated us to Switzerland or Finland or somewhere else entirely that just happens to look similar in the dark, I can't answer that on account of not knowing where we are."

"Apart from in the woods." Calleo pushed himself up and, as he passed Aldig, ruffled the Goblin's hair back into one of those unseemly messes again.

That earned a clawed swat, though it hadn't been nearly hard or well aimed enough to cause any real damage. 

"Apart from in the woods, right."