#fannish babble

[ylkcheeeks]

Frickin. The details the animators put in as a gift to me, personally.

Oh what’s this, Haruka and Michiru in a car, at night, bantering? Sounds about right.

Oh wait, Michiru has a teapot? Like the exact thermal carafe that my mom had in the 90s? And Haruka has a mug, not a paper cup. These fuckin ding dang fancy magic teenagers are on a stakeout but Michiru is too good for gas station coffee.

AAAAH while I was typing this it’s become usagi not without a fight (you bitch) tsukino

Every neurodivergent little atom in my body is jiggling

[martiancake]

So I guess it takes a new DA game

to get me to log back into Tumblr....

The past two years have been hectic and at times distressing. Some totally superficial fannish takes on media I have consumed:

The Last of Us - got a PS5, so I replayed 1 & 2 and also watched the tv show, which I loved. I can't wait to see how they handle the dual protagonist/parallel story in the next seasons. Am very excited that Jeffrey Wright will play live-action Isaac.

Star Wars - Played Jedi Survivor and UGH I LOVED IT. Watched Andor and UGH I LOVED IT. Watched S7 of Clone Wars and UGH I LOVED IT. Watched Mando, Obi-Wan, and S5 of Rebels--er, I mean Ahsoka and they were okay.

Fallout - Watched the series and loved it. How did they get the tone so exactly Fallout-y? Chef's kiss.

Spider-Man - Replayed Spidey 1 and Miles Morales on the PS5, so fun and smooth and pretty. Played 2 and mostly dug it. Tony Todd has the perfect Venom voice.

Horizon - Played Forbidden West and adored it.

Let's see... played a lot of Civ when I was killing time. I haven't played Baldur's Gate yet, but I will, I will... Read a lot--A LOT--of KU trashy romance and I am not ashamed. Gimme those smutty alien dicks!

And then Dragon Age The Veilguard (DATV? DAV? What are we calling it?) was announced and I remembered tumblr. It looks good to me! I am cautiously optimistic and trying to rein in my wild speculations. But OMG I can't waiiiiiiit!!!

[anghraine]

Aww, Ash admitted to me when we were discussing Star Wars opinions that she's not only thought about these things before, she's actually really feeling like using her advanced creative writing degree to write ...................... fanfiction, and has actually done so in the past.

me, shoving my 67 SW fanfics on AO3 under the bed: Oh hey, awesome! That sounds really interesting.

[ravencromwell]

The poem evokes human greatness and human vulnerability. People are “godlike” in their courage and skill, but even the greatest mortals fall and clutch the dust between their bloody fingers. The beautiful word minunthadios , “short-lived,” is used of both Achilles and Hector, and applies to all of us. We die too soon, and there is no adequate recompense for the terrible, inevitable loss of life. Yet through poetry, the words, actions, and feelings of some long-ago brief lives may be remembered even three thousand years later.

--Emily Wilson's introduction to the Iliad

[malkaleh]

I am feeling like absolute tainted garbage pls send affirmations, headcanons and adorable babies I am going to take a nap.

[damienthepious]

ao3 isn't an option listed mostly because of the following bits from their TOS FAQ:

no but actually tho

[olderthannetfic]

Been getting back into Star Trek after binge-watching it with my dad as a kid, and stumbled across the - ahem - "encounter" between Data and the Borg queen in Star Trek: First Contact. (I really didn't remember those scenes like this lmao.)

Soo, being a Data fan who does find him very aesthetically pleasing, I went to look for shippy fanfics involving those characters, and I gotta say, I was really surprised to find a total of 3 fanfics on AO3 that have their tag, and also just a few on FFnet, and none on a fanfic site in my language (then again searching stuff there is a fucking nightmare because people really aren't too great at tagging stuff accurately).

I hope this doesn't come across as whiny and complain-y, I will probably write about them at some point, once I'm past starting a new semester at university and have more time.

Basically just came here to say that I am quite surprised that there are such few fanfics about them (or that I'm just too stupid to find more, which is very likely lol), since they're technically temporarily canon, and I wonder if it's just because of the context and its kinda sorta dubious consent or if it just happens to not be on that many people's minds and there not being too many people who like the ship enough to write about it. (I am guessing the latter, since I also don't write about stuff that I don't think about heh.)

(Then again, I do tend to ship rarepairs and often pairs that are considered problematic for whatever reason, and where shippers get shit for shipping and writing fanfics. Though I don't know if this particular pairing is considered terribly problematic or not. Have read youtube comments on their scenes, and many people there absolutely despised their scenes and found it disgusting that there weren't more comments saying the scenes were disgusting lol. Also, kinda unrelated, but one of my favourite ships is Hotch/Reid from Criminal Minds, and I just recently read that there are quite some people on reddit who hate that ship because "bla healthy father figure bla - he's his dad not his daddy - bla" and use nasty words to describe shippers, but I am very glad that there are lots of fun fanfics for these two nonetheless, ha! :D)

Sorry for babbling for so long, it's half past one, and I should stop rambling at your inbox and get some sleep. Have a nice day/night!

--

Ahahaha. No, it being problematic is not why.

It's far, far more likely there's none (or none that's easily findable) because the bulk of the fandom activity around TNG was around later seasons of the show. Maybe the Riker/Troi and Crusher/Picard shippers were more into early seasons, IDK. But a sequel movie that lots of people didn't even like or didn't even see is not going to be the source of the big ships in a TV fandom.

On top of that, a lot of the shipping patterns get set relatively early in a fandom. Sometimes, a character shows up later and changes the fandom a lot (Methos, Castiel), but often, many fans stick with how they saw things towards the beginning of canon.

Adding to that is the fact that the number of fic writers in 1996 was vastly smaller than now. Spaces also weren't always set up to accommodate rarepairs or rare fandoms. A lot of archives and lists were topic-specific, and that topic could be one single juggernaut ship.

If there was fic, I suppose it was probably on Usenet or a mailing list. The great era of fannish archives was in the 00s. This movie came out in 1996. Perhaps we even grabbed a relevant list in our attempts to save yahoo groups' data, but it's definitely not going to still be up with an easily googleable set of contents.

[abovethemists]

TMI Tuesday question based on current events: Have you ever met one of the celebrities of your fandom (actor/writer/creator)? How did it go? Did it have any effect on your fannish-ness? If you haven't, who would you want to meet?

I have! I met the whole cast of OUAT (briefly) along with Adam and Eddy at SDCC one year. It was nerve wracking and exciting especially to meet Emilie and Bobby. I don't know if it had any effect on my fannishness. They're super cute in person so I think it probably just made me like them more. I was caught unaware by Josh Dallas who was so strikingly beautiful in person it made me babble a bit. I think I even told him he was very attractive in person. His wife was there, my husband was there. Sometimes you just say things. I also asked Adam and Eddy to please give us one episode of Rumbelle happiness where they don't break up and they said they would and it would be all for me when it happened, so you guys are all welcome for "Beauty". ;-)

I also had the very great privilege to see Alan Rickman in the flesh years ago in NYC and that was pretty amazing. Especially since he's now gone.

As for people I'd like to meet, I don't know. Brett Goldstein?

[procrastinista]

Critical Role, Season 2 observations

Currently on episode 6...

Matt Mercer is an AMAZING DM. His voice work alone is incredibly impressive (that teenager with the cracking voice killed me) but he’s also just really great at describing their environments in wonderful detail, building story while letting his players make their own decisions. It’s really impressive to watch.

Marisha Ray is my hero. I absolutely love the physicality she brings to her roleplaying of Beauregard. I sometimes listen to the episodes on the podcast instead of watching, but you truly miss out during fight scenes where Beau’s kicking ass. That solo scene between just Marisha and Matt? That was sick! I think that’s the episode that truly sucked me into this season. Is there fan art of Beau in Marisha’s “sleeves are bullshit” shirt because THERE NEEDS TO BE.

Sam Riegel has created something truly special with Nott the Brave. His voice & character work have really brought her to life. Makes me want to kill off my drow and reroll a goblin rogue for my current campaign, honestly. She’s an absolute delight. And credit where it’s due, part of the delight is in her relationship with the stinky mage, Caleb, and Liam O'Brien is no slouch in the RP department. Their relationship has provided an oddly resonant emotional core to the ragtag group of adventurers.

Oh, and it’s such a pleasure seeing more of what Travis Willingham can do in terms of RP. His warlock half orc is a straight shooter with a sharp mind and an ability to form a rapport with each and every other member without it seeming forced. He’s slowly emerging as a possible leader and I love the way Travis is playing it.

Anyway, I’m only on episode 6, but I’m hoping to catch up to the live show soon. I just discovered that I get a Twitch subscription with my Amazon Prime account, so if I can catch up I can try and catch it live some night. Sounds fun!

[quordleona03]

Many, many years ago I developed an interest in the X-Files. (This is relevant: bear with me.) This was the very first time in my fannish life where I watched a man-woman pair of characters interacting and I thought "hey, I would like to read fanfic about this relationship!" I was very much a slash fan but didn't want to read Mulder/Krycek or Mulder/Skinner: I saw the Mulder/Scully relationship on screen and I thought "I want to read fanfic about THAT." So I looked for it. And did I find it? Oh yes. Yards of it. Marathons of it. Gooey, sweet, hearts-and-flowers, romantic fanfic locked into standard models of heterosexual relationships: not looking in the least like the intense, focussed, brittle, intelligent pair with chemistry and reason not to get involved (work! FBI regs! Mulder is actually under suspicion! Scully's been abducted! Everyone is out to get them! Trust no one!) that I could see on screen.

I went back to reading healthy, normal fanfic stories in which men who are emotionally screwed up get into relationships they shouldn't with other men and screw each other up still further.

But. If I were inclined to look for heterosexual fanfic about Hawkeye, which I am not, particularly, it would occur to me that in canon, Hawkeye has - not that long before he was drafted - been dumped by a woman he had lived with for 18 months during an intense surgical residency: a woman who left him because (as far as we can tell from canon) she realised that Hawkeye was first of all committed to his work, and personal relationships were secondary.

Kellye - whom we've seen cheerfully flirt with Radar, Charles, and Hawkeye - complains that Hawkeye doesn't treat her the way he does women who are "5'9" and slinky with long blond hair and a perky little nose that would fit in a bottle cap" - women who look like Carlye Breslin.

You could, in short, write a perfectly good saga of Hawkeye at the 4077th who is, throughout the war, still in the process of getting over Carlye - a process interrupted and delayed by the fact of still being in surgical residency, getting drafted, meeting Carlye again at the 4077th after they'd broken up and discovering she'd got married, having a brief affair with her and getting dumped again.

It is entirely possible to make a case for 1950 being the year that Hawkeye Pierce:

got dumped by Carlye Breslin

finished his surgical residency and passed his board qualifications for thoracic and general surgey

got drafted for the Korean War

was appointed Chief Surgeon of a MASH unit

turned 30

saw his best friend since fifth grade die on his table in OR

It's way more fun to write Hawkeye as a flamboyant pansexual who has never in his life wanted to marry and settle down until he falls for (depending which way your tastes incline) Trapper, Radar, BJ, Charles, Mulcahy, or Margaret.

But you could make a seriously good case for him being a surgical resident who was planning to marry Carlye Breslin once he got out of residency and had a proper job that paid enough money to support a wife and kids (this being the 1940s) and then 1950 hit and Hawkeye from 1950-1953 is in babbling recovery from the batshit year in which the woman he thought he was going to marry dumped him, he got drafted, and a man he'd been friends with since they were ten years old died with Hawkeye's hands literally inside him trying to keep him alive. Onnce out of Korea and back in a normal job in a normal hospital Hawkeye meets a nice blonde nurse, gets married, settles down, has four kids, and occasionally thinks of his years in Korea with a bemused "did I really have sex with that many nurses? Good thing we had rubbers."

In that scenario, Hawkeye's multiple comments about BJ's happy marriage are both envious and wistful, because Hawkeye would give anything if that was him - if he'd had time to get out of residency, propose to Carlye, get married, get her pregnant, and have a wife and kid at home to go home to.

And if I were going to write that story, I'd probably have Hawkeye end up with Kellye.

But I'm not. Still, it is - done well - as appealling to me as the thought of some good Mulder/Scully fanfic was when I was first watching the X-Files, because Carlye's decision in 1950 to ditch Hawkeye, not because she (then) wanted to get married to someone else, but because she was clear-sighted enough to see that Hawkeye was never going to put her first in his life even if the first-of-all was not another person but a commitment to his vocation as a surgeon. Carlye is, like Tommy, incredibly convincing as a one-off character who we're meant to believe is important to Hawkeye: and her actions as we know them from canon are of a woman with a tremendous sense of self-respect and self-worth.

Hawkeye in Welcome to Korea is like "me? haha no I will never get married! I will settle down when pigs fly!" and then in The More I See You his ex shows up and he's like oh yeah we lived together for over a year and BJ is like "until you broke up with her?" and Hawkeye is like "yes exactly except for the part where she broke up with me and I am very much over it except for the part where I'm not over it at all."

[rubberbandballqueen]

i love to post abt different aspects of the same activity to different blogs so that the people following both can feel special

[ceescedasticity]

Okay, I deleted my snippy reply, but kids: As fanfic authors go, I have a relatively mild reaction to questions about when the next update is. That question is a berserk button for some authors. It is not a question you want to get in the habit of asking.

If you didn't know that: Now you do, and I'm glad I could provide this service before someone exploded.

If you did know that and asked anyway: 0_0

If for some contrived reason you are being required to ask when to expect an update: Some authors will react negatively to "Hi, I'm really enjoying the story! I was wondering if you have an estimate when the next chapter will be ready?", but I believe more authors will react negatively to "next chapter when?".

[earlgreytea68]

How's pete genius? Unleashed your thoughts please, I want to hear them as well.

haha WELL

The person I was talking to was speaking from a musical perspective, and I’m not really going to ever win an argument, I don’t think, that Pete’s some kind of bass-playing prodigy, because he knows that he’s not. And the person I was talking to was saying something about, like, Pete Wentz’s mediocrity as a musician and yet him being in a successful rock band and I think that the person’s point was something about the fickleness of fame and success, which I don’t *entirely* disagree with.

But.

I think in Pete Wentz’s case, like, the more I read about and learned about Pete Wentz, the more I became convinced that he wasn’t some guy who happy-go-luckily stumbled upward into fantastic success, and I think that narrative about him is wrong. There’s a way in which it connects back to that whole “boy band” idea of devaluing what “girls” like, you know: Well, Pete Wentz is a good-looking guy and girls went crazy for him so he can’t be that good or smart, he’s just got pretty eyes and a nice smile and hot tattoos. But there’s also a way in which the dominance of “aw shucks it’s all dumb luck” narrative is a strategy in and of itself, letting people underestimate you. But anyway, I’m babbling. What I said to the person that night was:

Pete Wentz might not be a musical prodigy, but Pete Wentz is absolutely a genius. It takes a genius to come up with the strategy Pete did and then to execute it as perfectly as he did: to get their band together, to get their band noticed, to get their band signed. There’s a line in that (otherwise weird) autobiography where someone has a quote about Pete where he used to go around the Chicago scene talking about Fall Out Boy like it was going to be a huge band and that, the way he was about the band, everyone believed him. (Here is a video that talks through Pete’s strategy in a lot more detail.)

Pete talks in interviews about building their fanbase from the ground up, and this is when the internet was still so new that it wasn’t like everyone out there had a Twitter or a TikTok to gain views. What Pete Wentz had was a literal LiveJournal, because he’s got a fannish personality at heart, and that fannish personality meant that he understood what it means for a band to talk to its fans, and the rabbit hole of Pete Wentz’s early interactions with the fans on the FOB message boards was the original thing I loved most about him, when I discovered them on my first day of Googling who Pete Wentz was. There he is just sitting there patiently responding to people writing about their grandmothers dying and their boyfriends breaking up with them, and I’m not saying he’s not a nice guy who genuinely cares about people, but I’m also pretty sure he was performing the emotional labor of building those interactions with an eye on his prize.

Now did he or does he get everything in his life 100% right? No, of course not. But he is an incredibly smart person who was incredibly focused about a very particular ambition at the perfect point in time for him to make it work. He didn’t fall into success, he worked really, single-mindedly, determinedly hard at it. Patrick says somewhere that he’s got to keep an eye on Pete because if he turns away for a second, Pete’s made a million decisions that are going to affect the band for the next five years. Patrick has said somewhere else that the thing that most defines Fall Out Boy is Pete’s taste, which is an unsurprising revelation, as Pete’s been shaping their future for them since the very beginning. One of my very favorite little Fall Out Boy details is that it was Pete who registered their trademark for them originally, with his old AOL email address as the contact, and this is both adorable to me and also so smart, he did it SO EARLY.

And then he did exactly what he should have done and transferred it to the band’s LLC when they were big enough to get one, which warms my heart.

Pete is very clearly a writer, and I could have talked about that, about how he obviously writes compulsively in that way of people who need words. I could have talked about how he’s been a writer his whole life, how his dad has talked about how important books are to him and how he was writing his own in elementary school. I could have talked about what a *good* writer he is, too, how his lyrics are densely packed with layers of meaning.

But Pete didn’t just write books in elementary school: he also went around selling them door to door. His entrepreneurial streak has always been there. He understands marketing and thinks about it deeply. He is, as he proclaimed once in an interview, not stupid.

In the end, though, here’s how you know Pete Wentz is a genius: He met this teenage drummer who *was* a musical prodigy, and he saw immediately what he had stumbled onto and he held on tight. Meeting Patrick Stump was luck. Convincing Patrick Stump to sing in his band, that was Pete’s first act of genius.

[anghraine]

ngl, one of the other reasons I get a kick out of Tolkien saying that Númenóreans became barely distinguishable from Elves “in appearance, and even in powers of mind” is because a lot of the fandom is extremely committed to all Men being strikingly inferior dissimilar to Elves in both appearance and abilities, and their arguments against Tolkien’s characterization can be very funny.

ROP has made this even funnier because the casting has re-activated a lot of people’s investment in sharp, visible differentiation between Elves and Númenóreans in ~canon~. Whenever someone brings Tolkien’s quote up to them (not me, since I don’t respond directly most of the time, but other people do), they’ll be like, “oh it is you who misunderstands! when he says they became barely distinguishable in appearance he means in fashion choices not actual physical appearance! and by powers of mind, he of course only means that they’re strong-willed and perceptive not literal powers, and the stories of them mentally communicating with their horses must be mistaken, and the most mundane possible interpretation of them in LOTR is the only plausible explanation—”

[risoris]

Do you think we can bring back ROTBTD in 2021?

(Oh wow I mulled over this ask for quite some time. I hope this is somewhat helpful!)

If by "bringing back" you mean restoring the crossover to something close to its former popularity, then no, I honestly don't think we can. I think more than just a fandom, part of what made RotBTD so well-known back then is because it got picked up as a tumblr trend, and trends move on. Not to mention with the lack of new source material, the possibility of coming up with inspirations for fanworks (something that creators need, and i feel like this is particularly harder for crossovers) as well as topics to talk about are pretty limited, so it's understandable that most people who participate decided to leave for good after having their share of fun. This is just the way things are.

On a brighter note, it's not like the fandom is actually dead, far from it. The fans are very much still around; there are those who never left (salute to you guys, seriously), those who return (like me!), and those who get into this old fandom late. Discussions are still happening. New fanworks are still being made; lots of it! And though the traffic might be slower, I think a lot of people would agree with me that there's been something like a fandom revival recently.

And this is just my personal opinion, but I do think that what we have right now is even better than what we had back then. The community is much more chill. There’s a deeper appreciation and understanding of the four franchises as well as the characters that the earlier fandom frankly lacked. People are respectful about shipping. I can go on.

However, I understand that it could still feel less lively than the RotBTD fandom that you remember and wish to bring back. And I’m afraid I only have one advice to assuage that: try to reach out and engage more with the current community. 

Look for people who like the same characters/ships/AUs that you like and follow them. Reblog fanarts that you like and maybe even tell the artist what you like about their work. Comment on fics you enjoyed and maybe share it with others that might appreciate it too. Send asks to folks whose headcanons you’d like to see more of. Maybe join one of the discord servers and hang out there. Or if you haven’t found a particular thing you’d like to see, make a new post and just talk about it! 

Like I said before, many of us are still around and kicking, and I think it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that everyone here is open to having another person to talk to about our interests. So if what you're looking for is a livelier experience, simply chat and interact with other fans! After all, having like-minded friends/acquaintances/mutuals of some kind helps a lot in making fannish experience more fulfilling.

oh and please don’t read this as an imperative to be sociable, but rather as an assurance that it's okay to be more present in the fandom space!! If the idea makes you uncomfortable, there’s always the option to use the anon feature or only pop into the fandom tag once in a while. Just do what feels right for you, and remember that just because it's a smaller fandom now doesn't mean you can't have fun.

(Also a little off-topic but i feel like we often forget just how big BIG rotbtd was. It was like a giant stone soup collaboration across all types of media: fanfic, fanart, fancomic, gifsets, edits, RP blogs, fan videos, fan songs, animation, cosplays, fanzines, etc. It felt like everyone was doing it and pitched in with something new or at least knew about it and passed it around. Of course it would feel a lot emptier when we're being compared to that.)

I’m aware I pretty much just assumed the intent behind your question and ended up babbling here lmao so feel free to message me again and correct me if I misinterpret your ask in any way! 

[driftward]

Signpost

This is a post I’m making purely for me

So to say I’ve been enjoying my time in the Final Fantasy community would be an understatement. I’ve been babbling at my partner about ‘our blorbos’ (OCs and favorite characters), I’ve been playing the game quite a lot a lot, I have alts in this game which is not very alt friendly. I have been looking at everyone’s art and loving it, and reading everyone’s writing and loving it, and learning about everyone’s OCs and loving that. I’ve been chatting with friends about the game a lot on Discord, I’ve organized a few raids, and I’ve been just writing -so much-. I haven’t engaged this hard or this much with a game in a long time. It’s like a mix of my time in Homeworld, Descent II, and World of Warcraft as far as game obsessions go. It’s like all the time I spent in the Star Trek and Avatar fandoms in terms of fannish engagement. It’s, well, it’s a lot. Anyway, I have forty plus works in progress, and they have been an absolute blast to write. I think I’ve been holding back on finishing any because they’re not Good Enough <tm>, but I set up an entire -process- to help me get past that, I’m just not using it. Anyway, the process is simple. I post roughs to Tumblr. Whatever it is, when it’s done, it goes on Tumblr. At some future point, it gets an editing pass, a cleanup pass, maybe even completely rewritten, and then it goes up on Ao3. Tumblr is not an archive, Ao3 is, so it’s more important (philosophically, to me), that whatever I put on Ao3 is Good Enough. Whatever I put on Tumblr is good, too, because I do like writing and I think my output’s pretty okay, but the standard to clear is lower. Anyway, this signpost is here so I can come back and have a touchstone. A post I’ve put out into the void for myself. I’m going to keep writing, I really like doing it, but now I’m going to start posting, too, as I like that also. I don’t know how far I’ll get. I have outlines all the way out to the end of Endwalker, and I know what I want to do after that. As a joke to myself, I’ve decided that my writing will have one single f-bomb in it before the end of Endwalker. It’ll be anticlimatic and disappointing to the reader when it drops. But if I make it that far, that’ll be the other end of this signpost. I don’t know if I’ll make it that far, but so long as I have fun trying to get there, well, that’s good enough for me. I’ll see me on the other side -a drifter