#even beyond 'indie' pop he also assumes i hate like... 80s pop too

[cartoon-skeleton]

my dad has this weird misconception that i don't like pop music or 'old people music' ('old people' meaning his generation. so like early gen x.) which he consistently brings up whenever we discuss music... its like actually i think youre just inventing an entirely different version of me in ur mind because if im being perfectly honest ive been injecting midlife crisis pop directly into my veins for YEARS

[sleepyskunk]

Deconstructing the 2017 Movie Trailer Mashup

Why deconstructing a mashup? Because these videos are often perceived as a random mess of pretty images from movie trailers. While that’s absolutely true, there’s an opportunity to explore themes and also pay a few obscure tributes to elements that don’t belong in the video itself but that are generally widespread within pop culture. These montages have been going on for a few years now, and it’s hard to edit the footage in a way that won’t feel reminiscent of one of the many great retrospectives put out by other talented editors in years past. I have to say that trying to build a narrative with all that footage has now become more enticing to me than to highlight the moments that made the year in cinema within their proper context. Let’s get right into it, shall we?

Someone on Reddit commented: “starting off with GEOSTORM, that’s a bold move!” and it didn’t even cross my mind. The shot was exactly where I wanted to go right off the bat - a blend of childlike wonder and eerie caution reminiscent of earlier Tim Burton films. The track was composed for a television spot called “A Wonderful Day” from IT and it showcases major Danny Elfman influences. Thus, this was my small tribute to the Burton/Elfman collabs happening under snowfalls like EDWARD SCISSORHANDS or BATMAN RETURNS. I loved the contrast in dialogue from PERSONAL SHOPPER which was such an under-appreciated indie film this year. Every mashup has its horror section, but I am gently sneaking you in by the supernatural door this time around. It’s just innocent enough to deceive those who hate horror.

Childlike wonder flawlessly captured in one shot, from the lens of Matt Reeves. I can’t say I connect emotionally with his APES movies, but the quality control on every frame, CGI or otherwise, it pretty much above and beyond all industry standards. That facial expression is exactly what I needed, you can tell she’s not too sure whether she’s safe or not but without feeling properly scared either. This is like the part in the original POLTERGEIST where kitchen chairs are moving on their own and the family still thinks it’s kind of fun. Kind of.

KING ARTHUR is the best type of release when it comes to trailer mashups because 1) it had a fantasy undertone 2) it was tracking poorly and 3) it went way over budget. Big studios know months in advance if they have a major bomb on their hands, and they have two choices at that point: either stop spending a penny on it and dump it for a quick theatre run and VOD release (more common if the movie didn’t cost that much) or, like in this case, spend extra millions of dollars to sell the shit out of that movie on opening week-end before everyone realizes it’s bad. Those extra millions go towards CGI money shots like the one above, which is really meant to make the marketing more attractive and oh dear lord, did KING ARTHUR have some last minute money shots to offer or what? It was a joy to pick and choose from its nine trailers.

This is where I put my cards on the table, whimsy never happened and I am taking you all to creepytown. That shot from ANNABELLE: CREATION is one of the many that upstages the featured evil doll in that wonderful movie and the film’s cinematographer Maxime Alexandre reached out because he was happy so much of his work was featured. You never know in front of who your videos can end up and industry people are keen on celebrating the year in film, especially if their own works are included. This is just a top notch unsettling shot clearly inspired by THE SHINING (the girl’s dress and the way her arms look lifeless.) On a side note, I always manually add all sounds including that floor cracking. If anyone reading this is starting off editing mashups, I promise you one thing: using professional, isolated, studio-recorded sound effect packages such as BOOM library is much superior to the original trailer track (unless you get a clean sound within the trailer.)

Another random insight (if you’re interested in making your own movie mashups) is to try as much as possible to avoid that one marketing shot everyone recognizes. You can revisit a memorable moment but going straight to the most oversold shot of a film hurts you. While you’re eager to make everyone relive the most epic imagery of the year, some value gets lost when a studio bombarded the same shot over and over and you go for it. Two quick examples: Giant hologram JOI pointing at Ryan Gosling in BLADE RUNNER 2049. I wanted that moment, but the original side-scroller shot was so overused that I went with her from a closer angle (see video thumbnail). Another example is that uncomfortable sniffle from Daniel Kaluuya in GET OUT which I favored over the super overplayed mouth open crying paralyzed shot from every marketing piece. In both cases, I assume you know which shots I am referring to without having to show them. Trying the alternative makes us relive the moment without its obviousness. It gives that other shot they didn’t choose its moment to shine (and more often than not, it’s just as effective.)

Someone’s not getting much sleep. A CURE FOR WELLNESS is a gorgeous-looking film no matter what you think of its bizarre plot points. I spend much of the first segment flirting with the creative key points from IT. One I tried to play around with is the idea of Pennywise as a half-real/half-fiction monster, and how similar to Wes Craven’s A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET his realm of terror extends. A few winning concepts in both films: 1) He isn’t real but he can really hurt you so you have to stay on your guard at all times and 2) Only a select few have been cursed with having to deal with him, adding a psychological layer to an already spooky premise. Dane Dehaan looks like a kid from Derry, or Elm street if you prefer, whose mental focus seems affected by the fact that he saw something, and his friend saw him too. Meanwhile, I throw in a completely out of context quote from Vanessa Redgrave which ties in that mysterious “sickness” from Verbinski’s film.

A shot from PROFESSOR MARSTON AND THE WONDER WOMEN from a trailer edited by Kees van Dijkhuizen Jr. for Annapurna Pictures where he works as an in-house editor now. In 2015, I talked about Gen Ip’s storytelling approach and last year I praised Matt Shapiro’s famously epic crescendos, so this year, let’s talk about Kees a little bit because I find all their influences fascinating. My first observation is how far his much-adored Cinema series has taken him, and that one of the top production houses in the business (if not the top, sorry A24 and Fox Searchlight) hired him so he could bring his own distinct style onto their major features. The whole trailer mashup craze started off only a few years back and so many editors were recruited right off YouTube to turn their passion into a livelihood down in Los Angeles. I can think of at least six editors whose names you’d recognize and who are now living the dream, and I consider this to be really inspiring because none of them initially got into it thinking something like that was ever possible. (side note: I also moved to L.A. and was poached by a trailer house but prefer to keep things on the low-end until it’s been long enough. I wouldn’t want to jinx it.)

The second observation about Kees is how much influence he’s had on every mashup that gets uploaded on a daily basis every December (me included) - I will link his Cinema series below. Instead of pairing clips into a horror bit, an action bit, a laughing and dancing bit, a kissing and crying bit, Kees was always out to create new feelings and nothing ever seemed more important than proper flow. Many shots would pop-up that you would never expect thematically, images of moving objects like a breaking glass transitioned with a girl’s hair waving through the wind (also see the lie detector in the previous shot.) He would connect nature documentaries right along with major superhero blockbusters and the movements flowed so perfectly that nothing ever felt out of place, quite the contrary. He was the best shot curator we’ve ever seen, and the order in which he put them together was beyond logic and predictability. Imagine “One Perfect Shot” but with 275 perfect shots back-to-back. If you want a prime example of what I’m referring to (random objects and flow), check out 2:49 - 2:52 from his Cinema 2011 (links below). Kees set the bar so high that attempting an end-of-year mashup certainly felt foolish at times, but hoping to improve made the editing process all the more inspiring.

CINEMA 2008 | CINEMA 2009 | CINEMA 2010 | CINEMA 2011 | CINEMA 2012 

So apparently, they have the internet and flat-screen TV’s in RINGS but landline phones are still a thing. Quite frankly, I haven’t seen RINGS and I bet it’s aggressively ordinary, but how retro horror is that shot? Paired up with the voice of THE SNOWMAN saying “Mister Policeman” it’s a throwback to Nancy being terrorized by Freddy in the original Nightmare of Elm Street (minus the tongue.) I was also pleased with the aesthetic of HAPPY DEATH DAY, clearly the product of horror fans who grew up during the low-budget slasher craze of the early ‘80s. It’s got MY BLOODY VALENTINE written all over it (meanwhile their poster was paying homage to APRIL FOOL’S DAY.) Retro horror, in all its disturbing practical gore glory! Rick Baker, Tom Savini, how much we missed you in our modern times where only a few major productions have enough VFX money to escape the uncanny valley (and even then... *cough* JUSTICE LEAGUE.)

I always tend to edit right on tempo, which means switching shots at the exact moment the music beat tells you to. But over here, I thought this elevator drop from FLATLINERS looked so frenetic and out of control that I started it half a second before as if the beat couldn’t keep up! Like in cartoons when the car accelerates so fast that it takes off but their eyeballs are standing still for a little fraction. This whole mashup sequence is meant to be a little cartoony and tongue-in-cheek. To anyone who found this to be disturbing (and yes, I heard from a few viewers who said it was too much) I must admit that it wasn’t my intention. I won’t apologize for my work, people choose to watch if they want to or not. But if I really tried my best to scare the crap out of you, I can assure you THE LEGO NINJAGO MOVIE wouldn’t have made the cut.

Now channeling a CHILD’S PLAY vibe thanks to this retro television shot from the highly underrated BRIGSBY BEAR. A kids program works well as an element of fear because it’s supposed to be a safely protected zone of positivity and care, just like a doll or a clown for that matter. Once that turns on its head and begins to attack, you basically have nowhere else to hide. It also makes for great contrast, and Andy Muschietti must have had an absolute blast this year incorporating this component into his remake of IT. The bear costume was one of the many shots that wasn’t from a horror movie and yet I used to great effect in this section. I know there was a new CHILD’S PLAY movie this year but sadly, it didn’t hold a candle to the Hitchcockian original.

“At the end of the day, people are out for themselves.” That’s not true, and only people who are out for themselves could believe that. Because if you’re weighing low on the morality scale at some point in life, you still wanna go to bed thinking you’re a good person. So if you can’t justify what you did, the best logical next step is to convince yourself that human nature is to blame, that everyone else would have done the same as you. Ask people who were charged with insider trading on the stock market, they’ll always say “everybody was doing it.” I could refer to a certain World War to keep hammering that point but instead, I’d like to point out the interesting contrast between this and Part 3. I try to disprove that very statement by showing in the finale that everything we do that matters is for others, and others are the only thing that matters once everything else has come and gone.

The KING ARTHUR studio spending extra millions of dollars to sell the shit out of that movie on opening week-end before everyone realizes it’s bad money shot festival continues. EPIC! In fact, that shot is so gorgeous, you could place it anywhere in any mashup ever and it would probably work.

Having a bit of fun giving a more literal visual cue to IT’s “We all float down here” with Guillermo Del Toro’s hypnotically beautiful THE SHAPE OF WATER. However, it’s not the tudum tssshh, get it? movie connection that works here. It’s the underwater sound effect and the incredible sound mixing by trailer house Buddha Jones so that Georgie’s voice seems to come from the bottom of the ocean. This is likely the best sound work you’ll hear in the entire mashup, and I didn’t mix it, the editors behind that teaser trailer did. In fact, their work was so effective at scaring people that it earned twice the amount of views on YouTube than what Avengers: Infinity War received. A fact Kevin Feige will likely never admit.

That moment when you realize your manic pixie dream girl wears white socks! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I've used vulgarity in the past but not every year, depends whether it brings value. Some of you may remember “Game on, c***suckers” from KICK-ASS 2 in 2013 or “Nap time, motherf***ers” from COOTIES in 2015. Perhaps there’s another guilty pleasure at play here, however, which is that feeling of pure creative freedom. As mentioned earlier, not everyone digged the horror undertone of this year’s Part 1 and that’s okay because it went exactly where I wanted to go and no compromise was made. No client notes. No studio revisions. No censor beeper (which makes it worse because we seek to find out what the word was.) If you get into professional careers that are creative in nature, you’ll find that teamwork, compromise, and not taking anything personally are all essential components for success. But when the movie trailer mashup comes around, I report to no one. And that moment from THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING MISSOURI is one I wanted included as soon as the red band trailer came out.

This shot comes from a small movie you should seek out called MY NAME IS EMILY starring Evanna Lynch (aka Luna Lovegood in the Harry Potter movies.) The film was directed by Simon Fitzmaurice who was diagnosed with Motor Neuron Disease (ALS) a few years ago, the debilitating disease for which the viral ice-bucket challenge was based on. He wrote the screenplay for this movie while his body was entirely paralyzed, and the only way he could communicate with the cast and crew while shooting the film was through eye gaze technology. There was a documentary following his brave journey that played Sundance called IT’S NOT YET DARK. Check it out if you need some real work ethic motivation and want to feel truly inspired about overcoming challenges. Much better than THE DISASTER ARTIST which is a spoof about a millionaire with no talent who mistreated the people who worked on his film. Okay, it’s still very entertaining and James Franco is hilarious but I don’t get a ‘never give up’ vibe from it, more like ‘maybe this isn’t for you.’

With the second segment, I was going for a British Gangster film vibe, hence the music cue Main Offender by The Hives. No movie captured that feeling better than Ben Wheatley’s FREE FIRE this year. I find the criminals in British movies are equally as clever in their quips as they are dangerous and often have the appearance of fair, well-behaved citizens until they have a reason to go mad. Jon Hamm’s performance in BABY DRIVER was also a textbook definition of that archetype, because all the build-up scenes where he acts friendly and discusses music with the titular character only bring an element of surprise at the end of his arc (spoilers: he’s not that nice in the end) I am aware that BABY DRIVER takes place in America but it’s directed by a Brit so it counts!

If Kubrick only knew his famous jump cut from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY that connects a flying bone to a space shuttle would lead to this fifty years later. What a shit show jump cuts have become! But they’re fun, and let’s be honest here: 7 minutes of serious quotes about life would get a little heavy. The way you edit jump cuts is the same way to solve a puzzle with over a thousand pieces. Extract dozens of short action clips onto your timeline and try to make them fit with one another over and over until you’re entertained. I mean, the music stays the same in the background, all I am doing here is deciding which projectile this pair of underpants from CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS will become. The answer was a tranquilizer from the underground mall chase sequence in Bong Joon-ho’s excellent OKJA. Maybe we should try one really long domino of jump cuts one day. Should take forever to edit, but how much fun would it be?

Did you know that Academy Award winner Alicia Vikander was a professional ballet dancer before she started acting? Work ethic applies in everything you do. When you hear about successful actors, you often discover people who are world-class at delivering under pressure and dedicating themselves to their craft with an insane amount of work. Acting is hard and yet so many people think they can do it, which makes it even harder. At least ballet puts constraints right off the bat, you need flexibility and a specific body frame. Part 3 is about finding your passion AND putting in the work. Just finding your passion is hard! It’s not always the bottomless pit one could hope for, especially when it becomes a real job with hours upon hours of work. Many people don’t even know what their passion is, they know what they’re good at but don’t love it. “Without your passion, it’s very hard to find our place in the world.” I don’t think you need your income to come from your passion in order to find said place, but I wish everyone that many of the limited hours they have each day goes towards their passion, and not towards something that feels like a waste of time. Wanting to wake up has everything to do with what happens after your first cup of coffee. Put your time towards something meaningful to you, even if it’s only on evenings and week-ends and you’ll never make a penny from it. If you love animals, volunteer at a shelter. If you love to travel, just GO!

But what happens when your family conflicts with your passion? Would you leave them behind to pursue your dreams? We all remember the tragic scene from DEAD POETS SOCIETY where a young scholar gets forced by his father to become a doctor instead of his passion and commits suicide. And then we have this year’s COCO, Pixar’s big comeback, where music is prohibited in Miguel’s family but it’s all he dreams about. But that conundrum doesn’t even have to be confrontational in nature. What if you wanted to work in a low-paying field like online journalism because it’s what you love but your single parent (who always took care of you) became sick and needed you to take care of their treatment. What happens then? What comes first? I humbly try to answer that later in the segment, of course.

We always told you Daniel Radcliffe... you’re special. That’s why you have a scar on your forehead that looks like a bolt... Just kidding, poor guy. I look at Mark Hamill in THE LAST JEDI and keep thinking that if studios are still a private enterprise in 40 years, some new Harry Potter movie will come out in which an old bearded Radcliffe will be teaching at Hogwarts. (PS: he keeps making bold choices, so much so that I am willing to watch anything he’s in.)

A man’s reach... (or woman, btw) should exceed his/her grasp. Words from a poem by Robert Browning, suggesting that, to achieve anything worthwhile, a person should attempt even those things that may turn out to be impossible. The downside with attempting the impossible is two-fold, however. 1) You may spend your life trying and never succeed. 2) If you do get there after so much sacrifice and effort, the world will expect you to do it again, or to keep doing it at the same level or better. If you won a Gold medal at the last Olympics, what are the expectations for the upcoming Olympics? That’s where passions and dreams enter a darker road, one many people choose to avoid altogether. But whatever happens, it’s worth the risk as long as you have the one thing along the way that’s a hundred times more important. And that thing is...

...people who love each other! Look at this guy, he just figured it out!

Kate Mara in MEGAN LEAVEY really seems to be the one thinking out loud in this shot while we hear a quote from THEIR FINEST. I had a blast with the Freddy Krueger references earlier but this is my favorite part. Audiomachine make the best tracks to bring that crescendo to its proper peak. You can say this part of the mashup is more in my comfort zone. And the influences from Kees that I discussed earlier can be felt here. Some shots of objects and landscapes that aren’t thematically connected but keep a nice flow. I also handpicked the best cinematography of the year all at once here. MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS was a damn pretty movie, then SHAPE OF WATER, then THE MAN WHO INVENTED CHRISTMAS, then OKJA. Every shot looks like a million bucks. Notice the use of paper, letters and ink. I want to see you again, a character from EVERYTHING EVERYTHING writes on a sheet.

Family comes first is nice, but along with family comes conflict and distance at times. Things we said that we regret. Times we let each other down, or weren’t there when we needed to. All the papers dropping from the bridge, all the shots that refer to letter writing, that’s where I was going with that. Not always obvious because it moves so damn fast which is why I do this deconstruction blog post every year!

The final big lift from Disney’s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST! Also, the first frame I added onto my AVID timeline. This is how I organize my work basically. I pick the right songs, then I identify the exact moments in that song where a big moment should happen - if you use trailer music, it will be crystal clear what those are. And then I try money shots in each of these spots over and over until one really, really fits. Then, I ask myself how did we get here, how can I get to that point? And build around these big moments. The second shot I added into the mashup was the little girl in Part 1 under the bed who points to another version of herself sleeping in her bed and says “Shhh! That’s not me.” I put that in right when the music stopped, it became a big moment, and then I built around it in order to get there. Every editor works differently, but I am just sharing how I personally prefer to do it. Back in 2012, the first clip I added onto the timeline was “I have an army. We have a Hulk.” from THE AVENGERS which means I’ve been editing this way for five straight years.

Those letters of reaching out to people you care about. Apologies or wondering how they’re doing. Flying everywhere around Winston Churchill (that’s my dog’s name, he’s a Pembroke Welsh Corgi!) I guess you should always be the one to reach out in difficult situations with important people. The mistake is to not reach out, or convince yourself that they were dragging you down and you’re better off without them. That’s rarely the case, and you’ll never get over them when you know that’s not the case. Maybe they will reply someday, maybe they never will. But you swallowed your ego and you decided to give it one more shot. That’s the bravest thing we can do in this life, and I hope you’ll see it that way if the time comes. Happy New Year! Achieve your passions, take care of the ones you love and make it a wonderful day! (Halle Berry: “Aaaarrh!")

- Sleepy Skunk

[flourish]

My life with comics

My best friend as a child has issues of Witchblade. Her parents bought it for her? Maybe. She has video games too, other things that I am allowed to engage with at other people’s houses but that I am not encouraged to bring home.

I love the sexy, powerful women in it. I don’t know that I want to be them, but I want to look at them forever. I don’t know how to get more issues. I know my mother wouldn’t approve.

I’m in high school. My best online friend is involved in scans_daily, and I’ve seen how much she loves superhero comics. I want to get into comics so I can talk with her about them.

There’s a comic shop about a quarter-mile from my house and I walk there in the Central Valley heat, ignoring the catcalls from the road. I’m used to it: in my suburb girls with long blonde hair don’t walk anywhere, and when they do they are fair game for any and all harassment. I’m still in the closet about being bi, still always femme, still painting my mouth with bright red lipstick. I don’t know any other way to be yet.

I get to the shop. It’s in a strip center that’s seen better days, and if you didn’t know it was still in business already, you might assume it was abandoned. I’ve been places like this to buy Magic cards before, got in and got out quickly, keeping my head down. I knew what happened when I played Magic with strange boys: they laughed at me, beat me hollow. After a few experiences like that I kept the cards not to play but just to look at the illustrations and imagine the worlds beyond them. I wanted to play, but I didn’t want to be humiliated.

No one speaks to me when I enter. I thumb through longboxes, feeling the eyes of the men behind the counter on me. I can feel the sweat drying on my back. I don’t want to ask questions. “Shopping for your boyfriend?” one of them finally ventures.

In retrospect, it was probably meant as a kindness.

At the time, I fled.

A few months later I’ve met a guy online. He’s into comics, so I gather up the courage to try again. This time when I go in to the same shop I can say “yes” when they ask whether I’m shopping for my boyfriend, but it’s not true. I have heard about Neil Gaiman’s 1602 and I want to get it weekly.

I go back over the course of months to pick up my one, singular comic. Once or twice someone tries to pick me up. Once the sales guy quizzes me on my knowledge, holding the issue hostage behind the counter as I struggle to explain that I don’t have a history with comics, that I just picked this one up because I like Neil Gaiman. He finally, grudgingly, gives it to me. “You should read—” he says, but then he catches himself: “it’s not out in trades and I don’t think we have all the issues.”

It doesn’t matter. I couldn’t afford to buy a long run of single issues anyway. My parents could, but I don’t have pocket money, and I’m supposed to be focusing on school, not getting a job. Or reading comics.

I like 1602, but I don’t get it. It’s so referential to characters I don’t know, storylines I can’t track. Every time I go into the shop, I feel more like an outsider. I’ve crossed the Rubicon. I am a regular, or anyway, a person who regularly comes in, even if I still don’t know anyone’s name. So why do I feel more left out than ever?

I end up at the same college as the guy I met online. He runs the comics library. Even after we break up, I’m welcome there. I finally feel like I can come in and flop down, pick up any comic I want, read it. I don’t have to talk to anyone if I don’t want to, and if I do talk to people, they are people I already know. I will not be quizzed.

The comics are in hardback books comprised of many single issues. I know they’re sent to a monastery to be bound together. (This is, though it seems fantastic, true.) I suppose that the monks are puzzled by the contents. My imagination doesn’t yet stretch to consider that some of the monks probably loved comics as boys, that they probably enjoy illicitly reading the issues as they bind them.

I can go back as far in comics history as I want to, here. There are first issues of all sorts of things. But I don’t. Every time I pick up something from the 80s or before, it’s too old, I don’t get it. When I try to pick things up in the middle, even the spots where people say “here’s where to start,” I feel that shivery misery of out-of-placeness. Maybe I’m not made for these. Maybe these are not made for me.

I read the full run of Ultimate Spider-Man, because I don’t have to know anything about what came before. I read V for Vendetta. I read Bone. I read Blankets. I read zines published by local artists. I don’t read any more superhero comics, after awhile. It’s not any individual person’s fault. It’s my fault, for not being more persistent. I shouldn’t have been put off by those actually-nice-guys who were just trying to be welcoming in an awkward way. After all, no one ever did anything really offensive. I should have listened more to my kind feminist boyfriend, to the scans_daily friend, even to my childhood best friend who somehow managed to get her hands on all sorts of pop culture that I wasn’t privy to. I shouldn’t have been daunted by canons that stretch back years before my birth. It’s me. I’m the one who’s at fault.

I watch people love superheroes from, it feels like, a long way away.

What if I loved superheroes?

I wax poetic about the new Spider-Man movie, about how much I hated the Tobey Maguire films because they weren’t really about a high school student. I scream with delight when the trailer comes on at SDCC, when I’m in Hall H and suddenly Peter Parker is in a high school comedy and Zendaya is flirting with him and it’s so great. Elizabeth is startled to find out that I care at all.

What if I was a fan of Spider-Man?

It’s not possible that I am a fan of Spider-Man. I know nothing about him. After all, I’ve only read Ultimate.

I feel confident at Comic-Con, going to the CBLDF party, walking around the floor. I know a lot about this stuff compared to most of the people here. I am a True Nerd.

I’m not a True Nerd. I only know a lot about comics compared to the Muggles.

The fact that I call them “Muggles” and not something else, something comics-specific, only illustrates that fact.

I read indie comics. My husband likes them more than me. I can’t compete with his expertise. I can’t compete with anyone’s expertise. So I begin to say, “I don’t read comics.” This is a lie.

I personally buy many of our comics, but they still feel like they belong to him.

I don’t look femme anymore, at least not high femme. I see myself in zines I buy at Printed Matter or at St. Mark’s Bookshop or online: people with long eyelashes and men’s haircuts. I don’t, somehow, connect these people with Witchblade, or with 1602. Their work is sold in bookstores. Their work is sold in Artists’ Alleys. They aren’t comics. Or they are, but they’re not that kind of comics.

They’re the kind of comics that I can read, not the kind of comics I can’t read.

I lift weights a lot. My favorite shirt reads THE SAVAGE SHE-HULK. I have never read a comic about She-Hulk.

I begin to think I might be non-binary, but I don’t care enough to insist on pronouns.

Maybe I do care enough. But I am set in my ways. People assume I’m straight, people assume I’m absolutely female. When I send up a test balloon about it, the reaction is stark: what the fuck. I don’t want to get into the argument.

I also don’t want to get into the argument about comics. I would rather not read superhero comics than have to defend my enjoyment of them, or have to fight my own instincts in order to enjoy them. So I don’t. I’ll study them and know all about them, intellectually, and I’ll watch the movie when it comes out but I won’t give my heart away.

This makes me a coward. I have recently come to recognize that I belong in Slytherin. I guess it comes with the territory.

I study fandoms for work. My closest colleague loves to read single issues, loves Marvel and DC. She follows a million superheroes, she writes criticism for fun in her off hours, she brings great insights. We do projects to look at superhero fandoms together and I know I’m resting in the fact that I can focus on just the parts I feel comfortable with and leave the rest to her. If I squint it’s almost like I’m just engaged in the fandom spaces I always have loved, the spaces that are familiar to me. The internet spaces where people write fanfic and make fanart. The spaces that are mostly female and enby.

On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog.

So why is it that I know so many women, so many women who are much more femme than me, so many women who are much more women than me, who embrace superhero comics?

Who identify as comics people, even if not superhero comics people?

Why can’t I seem to do it too, no matter how much I read?

I don’t normally self-disclose this way, for a lot of reasons. My work involves actively trying to ignore personal feelings about fandoms, checking and double checking against data to make sure that they’re being represented accurately and truthfully and honestly and fairly, and I think I do it pretty well. More to the point, I do it with a team, and we check each other.

Fansplaining involves criticism of fandom as well as celebration of it. A lot of times our experiences as hosts are beside the point. When Elizabeth said she thought we needed to do a big quadruple episode and address racism in Star Wars fandom, my stomach sank. Star Wars was my jam. I wept at the new movies. I owned a whole bookshelf of extended universe novels at one point. I didn’t want to look at how the fandom was flailing (and failing). But she was right. And my feelings were beside the point.

Still, it’s impossible to set aside everything you feel.

Are we really negative about comics on Fansplaining? I can’t tell. Or, I can: I combed through every time we’ve discussed them, and was satisfied that we weren’t. But then I got to the end and had another email from another listener saying that we were. I know from experience that perceptions are untrustworthy. My perceptions are untrustworthy. Relying on your gut means you get things wrong.

I resent that I feel obligated to write this post. I don’t want to talk about how easily intimidated I am. I don’t want to talk about my life as a teenager, when everything to do with gender felt momentous. And I don’t want to have my voice, as an upper middle class white person who isn’t usually visibly non-binary, be the voice that’s heard on this subject, when our interviewees on Fansplaining have surely been speaking from experiences of racism as well. But I guess I’m writing it anyway.

I don’t know how to unpick this knot. I don’t want to be unfair, but I don’t know how to be “neutral,” not in the podcast that Elizabeth and I manage to produce by the skin of our teeth around everything else in our lives. If it were my job I could do it. But I already have a job, and I do have to be neutral there, and I can’t do it any more than I already do.

There’s no answers here, but maybe there’s something useful.