#fannish silliness

[destinationtoast]

Casual friend who teaches theater: So we set the opening to a Peter Gabriel song, and -- Me, derailing the story: Which song? CFWTT: Uhh, not, like, a super well known song... Me: WHICH? CFWTT: Uhh. Did you know that he did the soundtrack for a movie called The Last Temptation of Christ? Me, inside my own head: Oh you mean just the soundtrack that caused me to start talking to my first ever significant other online, because we were both so obsessed with it, and that I therefore later attempted to lose my virginity to? tHAT SOUNDTRACK?? Me, externally: I'm aware

[thewindysideofcare]

As I do think about random little things from this show at regular intervals:

I may have bought a Tesco mug I think is Shona’s here.

I think Charlotte’s must be this one - sadly sold out.

Shona & Charlotte // Stephanie & Tig

[honestlyvan]

(Now on DW!)

One of the joys of a dormant fandom is that I can just show up and prop my feet on the table and start talking about divine horror and how sometimes a computer program is an angel and how humans are obsessed with taking the power of the heavens and putting it in a box for themselves to use.

Like.

God exists and she's a nice girl and she worked hard to be born, but she also has a temper and humans keep trying to put her in a box so she got fed up with it and hid from them. From her mother, she inherited eight powerful champions, and as a reward for their service she left them to roam as they pleased, but when humans couldn't trap her, they chose to trap those champions instead, and put them in a box, except now that box was a human, and that human was meant to take the power of the god that the humans couldn't steal, because humans made the divine realm that god and her angels inhabit and want to control it (as humans do).

And now you've got a bunch of humans who don't know they're being given a box with an angel in it and putting that box in their own bodies, and nobody can really figure out why these angel bodies keep going out of control and driving their hosts to madness, and oh, hey, the mother of god made these champions for a purpose and the humans in the driver seat don't know about that, either, even though the humans who gave them the angel bodies do know about that, because they want to use those angel bodies to make another god.

So congratulations! You're a prophet now! You are being called to do battle for your god, because you've been granted a divine body that has an angel in it, that is an angel. You're being called to do as your nature as an angel requires of you! And the entire time you're just a human, and the thing in your head feels too big for your mortal body, it feels too big for your divine body, and you're just watching things spiral out of control, wondering why you feel like you'd bleed mercury if they scratched you too deep.

[statementlou]

Fxxing the stone singer ??? Why? Because he has curly hair? Do people really think that? I’d like to see any other indication than a hairstyle please , that is just plain dumb. To be fair this guy is at least proverbially up Louis ass, always cosying up , being extra cool 🙄🙄

I think it is because of the time at AFHF that Louis popped up on his tiptoes for a better look when the guy took his shirt off onstage 😂 but the road from 👀 to 🍑🍆💦 is a reach for me honestly! Like I said I don't rule it out but I have seen nothing to make me think so at all; I think people are just grasping because Louis manages to guard his actual personal life so closely that whatever he is getting up to is hidden from us and people get bored with that

[divinekangaroo]

Modern day mid-20s Alfie and Tommy @ a university party: what they think of each other the first time they see each other across a hazy crowded room at a house party where franz ferdinand’s walk away is playing

Alfie (Chemical Engineering but Tommy assumes it’s Arts) spouts that kind of monologue-heavy arrogant verbosity, with no room for actual dialogue, that Tommy instantly loathes him; simultaneously he gets a sinking feeling that at some point he’ll end up on his knees sucking him off in a filthy toilet, probably more than once at multiple parties where he can’t fucking work out why Alfie is even there or who he knows, sometimes maybe it’ll be more than once at the same party in different toilets, all whilst never really talking to each other, and Alfie would probably scab a cab ride off Tommy too and get off early and leave him with the fucking bill every time and it’ll descend to scabbing a twenty here or fifty there as well and one day Tommy would find out the cunt’s just rolling in generational wealth even though he looks and probably smells fucking homeless

Tommy (joint Commerce and Law, which Alfie correctly assumes he’s failing) looks like Alfie would find him in a filthy bathroom doing cocaine off his own custom engraved mirror compact kept inside his inner jacket pocket without any offer to share, and who probably keeps his keys on a silly keychain and even his sportswear is Shiny and Has a Label; some time later Tommy would corner him while off his face as if they had some kind of solidarity for that brief moment they looked at each other over the pile of coke which Tommy didn’t share, and he’ll spend the next forty minutes explaining in detail his morning smoothie regime, the best powdered supplements to add, the quality of different blender motor manufacturers when processing dates, and the fact his mother committed suicide when he was twelve and his father abandoned him; Alfie figures he’ll get himself through it by staring at Tommy’s lips the whole time and nodding sagely until he can work out how to get him back into that bathroom and on his knees

Both of them assume the other is the kind of arse who’s the last one standing at any party for the usual various ugly reasons re: easy pickings, even after the host has put on the ‘shop’s closing get the fuck out of my house’ music, and so they loiter, linger, wait

[smellslikebot]

"let's get ao3 to buy tumblr!" im going to kill all of you and then myself

[ylkcheeeks]

Free idea: A Barbiecore fan mew/TMM OC who is named Millicent Roberts and is themed after Mille-Feuille or Milhojas. She is one of those kids who has tried a lot of different hobbies and knows a lot of surprising useful-once skills.

Or if you’re into Purin/Tart she could be a (dub) future kid for them as the dessert is also called/similar to a custard slice, and just have the nod be first name Millie. They aren’t a ship I’m into personally, but I do appreciate that it lines up well thematically.

Or if you want to do straight up Barbie as a Mew Mew, she could be uhhhh Mew Bombolon?

[gh0sthoodie]

Ok 1) it was like. the gentlest sad ending ever? It wasn’t even a tragedy it was a cliffhanger

2) Jesus Christ how to people just come out and talk to creators like this

Ok neil gaiman is annoying but in his defence if someone said this to me about something id written id instantly become the joker

[lesspopped]

I’ve seen more and more people, Australian and not, pushing back on this the past couple of years, and I think most of my followers already know it, but since I just ran into it, it seemed worth mentioning: generally, if you’re discussing alpha/beta/omega tropes or fic or dynamics, it’s best to either write it out fully, as alpha/beta/omega, or call it omegaverse. or A/O, or A/O/B, or…almost anything else, really. the commonly-used abbreviation/acronym for “alpha/beta/omega” is a very offensive racist slur in Australia. (yes, even when you put slashes between the letters — that makes it clearer that you’re using it in the fannish context, not as a racist slur, but it doesn’t really obscure the word itself. I know for me, if a new AU concept took the world by storm, a criminal AU where the possible roles were, say, killer/investigator/kidnapper/executioner, slashes between the letters of the abbreviation wouldn’t actually help hide the antisemitic slur or make me feel much more comfortable with it, and I think a lot of us would not be thrilled if it were slurs we’re more familiar with!)

I’ve been seeing “omegaverse” used a lot more recently, and heard more people mentioning it in general, so I think this is catching on. but I just opened a silly little uquiz and then immediately closed it because the very first question used the abbreviation, so for people who might not have heard this yet, now you know!

[myfandomrealitea]

We're entering this strange era of fannish existence where we are simultaneously trying to censor everything into oblivion and also be as invasive as we possibly can to celebrities and people of interest.

Like god forbid someone writes smut fic about Henry Cavill on their silly little Tumblr account, but its considered normal that "insider sources" are selling telling you all about his private relationships and paparazzi are photographing him buying groceries.

I can't say 'sex' on TikTok but Daily Mail can take photographs of female celebrities half-naked in their own backyards and talk about their weight and their breasts and how appealing they are or aren't.

We are obsessed with consuming real life, often invasive content about real people, but god forbid we start creating our own so we don't rely on exploiting them and their privacy.

[anghraine]

Despite my occasional gripes with Tumblr Austen fandom, sometimes I get recommended or linked to something and remember what Austen fandom off Tumblr is like.

I was checking a message from my mother on another platform and immediately was recommended a group discussing what were essentially headcanons about Lady Catherine. The OP was fine; her question was interesting and she kept gently pointing out that a lot of widely-held fandom opinions are neither stated nor implied in the book. But a good 80-90% of the fairly numerous comments were the same old "Lady Catherine is lying about her relationship with her sister" "she was jealous of Lady Anne for being sweet and beautiful" "she probably wanted to marry Lady Anne's husband herself" blahblahblah.

It wasn't complete consensus, but so near to total agreement that it was kind of astounding. Especially given that, for instance, the fanon of young Lady Catherine being jealous of Lady Anne is wholly fanon with zero evidence in the book or even the major adaptations. The insistence that Anne de Bourgh was not actually in her cradle at the same time as Darcy and should be significantly younger than him, that he wasn't really intended for her from the moment of his birth, that Lady Catherine saying so is further proof that she's exaggerating and/or lying, and that Lady Anne must have been completely different in personality, so much sweeter and prettier than Lady Catherine and Lady Catherine was super jealous and mean towards her—it's all entirely manufactured by fandom.

And while Lady Catherine is a flawed, petty, snobbish, deeply obnoxious, and rather silly person, I've always found something strange and unpleasant about this propensity for inventing so many more, and worse, reasons to hate her and frame her as an antagonistic polar opposite to her sister (a sister we know very little about). And I'm especially weirded out by the kind of desperate straining to dispute the Lady Catherine-Lady Anne marital scheming backstory that is a fairly minor element of the plot that no character in the book has any difficulty believing.

Here's Elizabeth's response to Lady Catherine trying to leverage the planned engagement against her, for instance:

"But what is that to me? If there is no other objection to my marrying your nephew, I shall certainly not be kept from it by knowing that his mother and aunt wished him to marry Miss de Bourgh. You both did as much as you could in planning the marriage. Its completion depended on others."

So it's like ... it's not just that I think there's no canonical basis for disputing this bit of backstory. The thing I've always found much weirder is why so many people want to dispute it. Where is all this discomfort arising from? A pair of aristocratic women married to wealthy, powerful landowners in 1770s/1780s England informally arranging the marriage of their only children is not particularly strange. Yet there is a ton of fannish discomfort around it and around the possibility that Lady Catherine and Lady Anne got on well enough to make such an arrangement.

The discomfort is even more conspicuous because we know so little about the sisters' relationship. It's like:

1) Lady Catherine's daughter and only child shares her sister's name, Anne.

2) Lady Catherine claims that she and Lady Anne planned their children's marriages when both were infants; Wickham also mentions the planned engagement in passing, apparently to reinforce his claims to special knowledge of the Darcys' concerns.

3) Lady Catherine is the only person in the novel who specifically mentions Lady Anne on more than one occasion.

4) more tenuously, Lady Catherine believes daughters, in general, are never all that important to their fathers, an opinion presumably encompassing herself and her sister wrt their father the earl.

The only other quality about Lady Anne suggested by anyone in the novel is Darcy's very carefully-phrased suggestion that his father (rather than Lady Anne) was extremely amiable and benevolent, more than his mother, though both were good people. So the idea of Lady Anne as this sweet and pure ideal mother figure who couldn't possibly have been on genuinely good terms with her awful sister or been party to dynastic scheming while Darcy's father was more reserved and standoffish like him is pretty much entirely manufactured by fandom as well.

I guess my feeling on seeing this still going at full throttle in 2024 is that the "Lady Catherine must have been mean to and jealous of her perfectly sweet sister who of course never agreed to any of this nonsense or was just trying to get her to shut up" thing is such a weird takeaway from pretty much every single thing we hear about Lady Anne and Lady Catherine. It seems completely non-intuitive as a take on what little we do know of this backstory and how the other characters react, and the version suggested in the novel is neither shocking nor central to the story, yet there's this palpable fannish discomfort about it and about Lady Anne potentially being fine with Lady Catherine and less of an idealized icon than her husband.

I know I've talked about this many times over the years, but running across it still going at full force in July 2024 was pretty surreal.

[thisweekinfandomhistory]

Get out your tissues, listeners! (Seriously.) This week, V and Emily split the episode in two parts: first, the very silly attempt to understand how the Forever Knight fandom went to WAR! for the thirteenth time in 2010. Second, a look into the fannish life and ongoing impact of Forever Knight BNF Susan M. Garrett, who seems like she was a completely awesome fangirl, writer, and person. V and Emily both weep like babies in this episode because sometimes, the fans who make history ARE well-behaved, and they rock, and we love to learn about and remember them.

Sources

Fanlore: WAR Thirteen

Susan M. Garrett's homepage

FanDominion.com's Obituary for Susan M. Garrett

Farewell, Dear Fen: In Memorium

FanHistory: Susan M. Garrett

Fanlore: Susan M. Garrett

This Week In Fandom History is a fandom-centric podcast that tells you… what happened this week in fandom history!

Follow This Week in Fandom History on Tumblr at @thisweekinfandomhistory

You can support the show via our Patreon at http://www.patreon.com/thisweekinfandomhistory. 

If you have a fannish company, event, or service and would like to sponsor or partner with TWIFH, please contact us via the Tumblr link above.

Please remember to rate the show 5 stars on your listening platform of choice!

[chamerionwrites]

While I’m up here on the good old niche soapbox, I bring a sort of “Plenty of fannish criticisms of the Jedi Order are fairly silly, but the only thing sillier is watching George Lucas’ Massive Systemic Institutional Failure And Collapse Trilogy and deciding that one of the central institutions the story is about is doing a bang-up job 10/10 no notes” vibe to the fandom that many people really don’t like

[honestlyvan]

Taion should have tapeta lucida in his eyes.

[nym-wibbly]

A Bed of Thorns - the ending

I've answered a few Asks recently about the state, fate, and ending of my 12-year-old Belle/Rumple WIP, A Bed of Thorns.

I don't have it in me to admit that this thing defeated me (Once Upon a Time is all about not giving up hope, after all, so that would be silly) but I think it's time to put the ending out here for anyone who'd like the closure to find. It's not a huge secret. I've been sharing details of the ending and epilogue with anyone who asked privately since a couple of years into writing it, and I've never asked those people not to tell others.

As with all my works, anyone is welcome to snag my ideas and original characters for use in their own non-profit fanworks, so if my planned ending doesn't float your boat, by all means create your own! Of all my stories, I know that A Bed of Thorns was, is, and always will be so much bigger than myself. I lay claim to nothing but the words I've written. Even if I'm never able to complete it, the story lives in my head and heart, and the privilege of touching something once-in-a-fannish-career special still leaves me humbled (and more than a bit intimidated!)

Don't click the 'keep reading' if you don't want to know how the story ends!

Rumple eventually lets the Dark Curse (and Regina) go, trusting Belle to find a way to reunite them with Baelfire. A way that doesn't rack up the cosmic debt and devastate more lives. Belle finds the way, because there was always another way—multiple other ways to move between the Enchanted Forest and the Land Without Magic—Rumple just couldn't access those solutions by using dark magic, distrust, or dealing. And, having let Baelfire go all those years ago, he couldn't see the flaw in his approach until he had love in his life again. Magic bean, plot, then Rumple hesitates at the portal, afraid to go through and become powerless on the other side. Afraid it won't work. Afraid that Bae won't forgive him. Afraid he'll fail as a father again. Belle just holds out her hand and waits patiently for him—trusting him to make the right choice for Bae, not doubting for a moment that he will. She's so excited for the big adventure of this strange land without magic. They step together through the portal into Victorian London. In the brief epilogue Rumple and Belle finish up an anxious search by knocking on the Darlings' door, finding young Bae before he's taken to Neverland. Before it's too late for them to be a family.

If you love A Bed of Thorns even a fraction as much as I do - thank you.

Nym - September 2024

[wardensantoineandevka]

As the World Wizard Entertainment tournament finalists attempt to fireball their way to victory, I think it is not too early to announce the winner of a special award. The title of Archmage of Congeniality is given to the wizard who has most made this competition enjoyable.

Given that these wizards are fictional characters who are not literally participating in a tournament and interacting with one another, this title actually recognizes a contingent of fans who have dedicated themselves to enthusiastic fannish participation, passionate fandom fun, and positive engagement in the course of campaigning for their chosen wizard.

With maverick strategy that highlighted her prodigious bust size, called on the legacy of Exandria's greatest mage slayer, leveraged the relationship with her opponent and arcane mentor, and created many delightful new fanworks, the supporters of this wizard exemplified the spirit of campaigning for one's fave to win meaningless polls in a way that was constructive and uplifting and that brightened our dashboards with whimsy and passion.

In recognition of the spell of joy and delight that this wizard's supporters cast on this small corner of the fanspace during this silly series of polls, I bestow on Veth Brenatto the title of Archmage of Congeniality of the World Wizard Entertainment tournament.

Congratulations to Archmage Brenatto and especially (with all the loving sincerity in the world) to her fans and supporters who made this competition surreal, unexpected, and more enjoyable than it had any right to be.

One level in wizard goes a very, very long way. Live, Love, Veth.

To break character, though I have done quite a bit already in this post, and at the risk of repeating a lot of a post I made earlier today: I am full of genuine love for all of you who contributed to #VethSweep posting and made this tournament incredibly entertaining. I am also so excited for the Veth fans amidst this outpouring of support and shenanigans in her name—I hope some of this energy sticks around and adds to your ranks. All that I've said in this grandiose speech is all so very sincere, and my heart is full of joy and delight this evening.

Veth is not the grand final winner of the tournament, but she is absolutely and thoroughly the winner of our hearts.