#i will go ahead and make a fic and vid rec post later

[silviakundera]

Ok, upon request my thoughts on Bad Buddy, a good queer romance drama that doesn't get much if any international exposure outside the circle of Thai BL fans. Full spoilers.

after consuming literally dozens of BB videos, the best trailer to the drama imo is actually the talented samyvids' "Just My Type" songvid. Perfectly captures the setup.

* the hook: 2 boys raised by their feuding families to be rivals end up attending a university that has a childish Jets vs Sharksesque historic rivalry between the science/engineering vs artistic/architecture majors. Despite these 2 barriers, the boys stumble into a secret bromance and then into love. Secondary couple here is f/f, though it's basically just soft girls meet cute then getting together (no conflict).

* Comedic and light-hearted drama that doesn't take itself too seriously, while also swerving into the appropriate amount of angst for its set up.

* This '20-something bros in love' dynamic reminds me vividly of what a lot of SPN J2 RPF and Hockey RPF has tried to capture. The 2 leads feel like your prototypical good natured university bros and falling in love never changes that. Friends AND Lovers is a challenging dynamic to capture imo but Bad Buddy succeeds

* It helps the Bros In Love vibes that the actors look less primped & polished than many other asian BL productions. They seem like guys you could have actually had in your classes in uni.

* If you welcome the drama's tone and just vibe with it, I think it successfully executes 4 popular romance tropes:

- rivals to friends to lovers

- forbidden (hidden) love

- fall first vs fall harder

- golden retriever bounding around paw cleaning cat

* If you are going to sell me on a modern day romeo & juliet esque queer rom-com, without the bloodshed, then you BETTER put your money where you mouth is and make their love actually forbidden.

* Thankfully, Bad Buddy understood the assignment. It's not just a misunderstanding. Their parents truly do have a feud and they truly are forbidden to even be friends, forget a romantic relationship. 2 kids obligated to be enemies since birth, bound by this twisted shared experience that no one else understands.

* Pran falling first, with enough time to comprehend how cruelly impossible they are. Pat falling late, fast, and hard - too impulsive to consider the consequences and wearing his heart on his sleeve.

* Both characters won me over quickly:  cautious & restrained Pran who likes order, chaotic Pat who craves his attention

* Love that the dramatic tension & hiding in all the early episodes isn't revealed to be pointless. If there was no consequence, then it removes the poignancy of its classic rooftop kiss scene. Prans' fears must be justified in order for the angst to stand up in a rewatch. Pran's friends DO reject him at first. Their parents DO refuse to accept the relationship, including his mom considering this a personal betrayal.

* Prans' fears are painfully rational and everything he is scared of does have to be confronted. But that also gives romantic weight to his decision to give in to the feelings and accept the consequences.

* In the way that scifi authors will try to explore sociopolitical topics through allusions & metaphor, and that Hunger Games author keeps writing dystopian YA whenever she gets heated about politics, Bad Buddy does a good job imo of using the feuding families setup to address the reality of existing in a homophobic and transphobic society while being queer -- demonstrating it in a way that straight cis people can relate to. And approaching from this angle allows the production to tell that story with a certain emotional distance for queer viewers who have experienced such struggles.

* The bittersweet ending sells me completely on this drama. Closeted but not. Open but not entirely. Accepting that you can't change the world and make all your family & friends & coworkers accept your truth... but refusing to abandon them OR your truth. It's a decision so many queer people have made over the years, in different countries and decades. And it's tinged with hope.

* Let's acknowledge that indeed there is tons of product placement in this series. Sometimes to hilarious ends. But frankly, without this sponsorship the series would not exist. So I'm very grateful to suffer through the marketing that helped fund it.

* Available streaming in multiple places, including YouTube.

[maester-of-spreadsheets]

someone give that yuletide fic a reflection post!

I've never really done one of these Yuletide reflection posts before, but this year I have SO MUCH TO SAY OMG that I'm making one of these to get it out of my system.

So I wrote this fic with Subwoolfer fans basically trying to bend time and space to win Eurovision. Because whomst among us has not wanted to do that for a Eurovision fave at some point? (Eurovision juries turn on your location I just want to chat about the scores you gave Keiino) Except longterm subcubs are also space wolves (probably?) so they don't quite get it right.

I will ramble about the music aspects about this fic, but I also do want to talk about the writing parts! Basically I'm actually... a relative newcomer to Eurovision. I'm an American who started tuning in in 2018, but I really got on board last year when 2021 was so freaking fun and culminated in one of my actual faves that year winning! This somehow translated in me keeping up with the 2022 contest from early on... I think I started following along when Lithuania's song was announced and never quite let up. There's a lot of downtime in between Eurovision events, though, so I also became obsessed with Eurovision data vids. The ones like "biggest flop between semifinals and the final" or "songs with biggest differences between jury and public vote" (again, justice for Keiino.) This had me backtracking into Eurovision history a LOT over the spring and retroactively falling in love with a lot of different songs/moments.

Then, of course, 2022 Eurovision itself also had a lot of meme worth moments. Like the broken kinetic sun fiasco absolutely killed me. But there's a whole Eurovision 2022 iceberg meme that nailed the chaotic vibes of that contest in general.

So basically the writing of the fic was an attempt at a loving/joking synthesis of my times in music related fandoms in general, but also everything I'd absorbed in Eurovision fandom in particular. (And yes the author note about needing a VPN was a joke about how I have to use one to watch any of the performances on youtube.)

As for the music aspects of the fic... So, I've wanted to get into music editing/remixing/production etc for years now but kept getting cold feet about it. Eurovision this year was actually the thing that pushed me to finally go ahead and just do it. And I'm so glad it did! It also meant it felt appropriate to actually work on some music for this assignment.

I mostly only have things to say about the two full remixes.

First the bardcore cover. So, this one most involved just finding piano sheet music and then painstakingly programming the notes into midi files on my DAW. I quickly found out that just recreating those exact notes wasn't going to cut it, though. First the chorus... In the vocals, it's pretty much just a repetition of the same note over and over. That's fine in the original song because the point of the chorus is the intense beat drop. You don't really have that going for you in bardcore, though, so I spent a lot of time yeeting the vocal notes around... across octaves, across different stringed instruments, etc. I also put in a lot of movement in the instruments functioning as the bassline to create more interest.

Although, regarding the beat drop... I also spent an embarassing amount of time trying to reverse engineer what was going on with the drum beats in the song and reflect hem in the drums I had in this. There definitely came a point one night where I was giggling to myself over looping the second chorus over and over and over to try and figure out whether the drumming was different from the first chorus and if so how? and how do I reflect that?

And of course the final chorus does stuff with instruments that's really... not bardcore at all. The string instruments there sound more like orchestras from centuries and centuries later.

But, hey, these remixes were made by space wolves. They can't get everything right!

The lofi beats mix was almost the opposite experience. Instead of meticulously recreating the song, here I was basically... scrapping it (and several others) for parts and seeing how many times I could use the same small melody in different ways. This was because all of Subwoolfer's songs get incredibly bombastic early on and never let up. I'm not yet skilled enough at getting stems to, say, pull out of just a synth from one of the loud parts and slow it down. Limitations can be fun, though, and I definitely had a great time exploring these snippets of the songs from different angles.

It did make me a bit sad I really couldn't find a way to incorporate Grace Kelly or especially Turin. I say especially Turin because of the line "we're here to win that Eurovision/but with a broken kinetic sun it might tough." But then I was able to use audioclips from those in the mix, so that was something, haha!

Probably the most bonkers thing I did was isolate audio of Subwoolfer dropping those plastic balls with questions in them, and then using them as audio texturing for the lofi remix haha.

Okay, that's probably enough rambling from me! So, yes, tl;dr I got a fantastic assignment this year and had a lot of fun working on it.

[olderthannetfic]

Fuck branding and consistency: For my precious Miami Vice, we’re going full 80s!

Miami Vice is a cop show from the 80s that helped usher in an era of neo noir and radically altered how television is cut and scored. It is both an ensemble crime show and a buddy cop show. The central duo are Sonny Crockett (Don Johnson, center) and Ricardo Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas, on the left). They start out pointing guns at each other and end up best friends... with a detour through amnesia and attempted murder along the way.

Their boss, Martin Castillo, is played by Edward James Olmos, who has had the exact same death glare for his entire career as you can see above. Rounding out the main ensemble were two comic relief guys, Switek and Zito, and two women, Trudy Joplin and Gina Calabrese.

Yes, they’re super hot, and I ship them too, along with the very obvious Crockett/Tubbs, but that is... not what the fandom shipped. More on that later.

MV had only a medium size fanfic fandom. As a source of annoying middle aged men who own that speedboat and still don’t wear socks, however, it is unparalleled. It was a mega-hit in its day but is largely ignored now.

As far as I can tell, the height of the slash fandom was just after the show ended, around the time Escapade was getting going. It was something that was in the air (hah) at the time but not popular enough to make it onto the program much. There were a scattering of vids and panels in that era, including:

1992 - Miami Vice (cops and music, right, well, maybe there's a little more here...)

Indeed there was, but you won’t find that out from most people! The cultural osmosis version of this show is deeply offensive to me, far worse than “womanizer Kirk” and its ilk.

I. How I got into the fandom

Miami Vice is a brilliant show, so far ahead of its time that it instantly dated itself and has been a subject of constant mockery by people who only know it vaguely from cultural osmosis during the 90s. Its revolutionary editing is what inspired me to go back to film school. Its cinematography is equally iconic. The soundtrack literally changed television forever. And no, children, synthesizer is not automatically a bad or cheesy instrument. Jesus.

I got into MV in 2010. I’d been reading about it in the first Film Noir Reader and had been intrigued by the black and white stills. I looked it up and found that it was a rare DVD release that secured all of the music rights, unlike the butchery of Wiseguy and too many other shows. I bought it on the spot.

It was a religious experience.

By 2010, even the little Yahoo Groups fandom it had eventually grown was long gone. The zine fandom certainly was. I started buying all of the used zines I could get my hands on. One thing stood out to me over and over: Rico, my favorite character, does have great fic, but it’s all gen and het. The slash zines treated him with absolute contempt. The only fan from the 90s slash fandom who had any clue how to write him was @flamingoslim​.

So I did what any fan would do: I got into her current fandom, Starsky & Hutch, and stalked her to her S&H con.

What?

II. Why didn’t fandom love Rico?

So why were the slash zines like that? Yes, okay, the answer is racism.

But the more zines I read and the more oldschool fans I’ve talked to, the more apparent it is that the way it played out is specific and interesting, not some generic “he’s not hot” thing. The big problem was that the slash zines came from a tiny handful of publishers, with the more popular ones coming from a single publisher. Looking at their editorials in the front of volumes, I see cartoons of the two of them dressed as their ship, Crockett/Castillo. I’m getting full on otherkin vibes from how they talk about that ship.

This was very clearly a case of hating the other man who got in the way of the OTP. Even so, the particular way Rico was written in many of the stories in those zines is incredibly racist. Flamingo writes him as a supportive best friend to Crockett. This was... not the norm.

This wouldn’t be such a big problem except that this was not an era when you just go on AO3 or even FFN and post whatever you want. Getting a zine together is hard. It takes money. It means finding a printer that is willing to print gay shit--something that can still be an issue in 2020. It means having a job and a lifestyle where being outed as a publisher of gay shit will not fuck you over. They were the only game in town, and their bad takes ruled the fandom.

Contrast to the gen/het zines: Rico wasn’t specifically more popular than other characters, but he wasn’t in the way of somebody’s OTP, so he shows up pretty often as a major character, written similarly to how he is in canon.

The gen/het zines are also just plain well written, making all of the characters more nuanced and interesting than in a lot of the slash fic. That’s what happens when you’re dealing with tiny fandoms and tiny numbers of writers: one or two great talents shape the whole feeling.

The other answer to why people weren’t super into Rico is simple: Castillo.

MV is a show full of buddy duos. And then there is the boss, a mysterious lone wolf whose identity only goes back a handful of years. He is aggressively moral and incorruptible, yet also executes a counter-revolutionary in cold blood rather than let the CIA take him back to South America to continue his reign of terror.

What, you think Castillo isn’t a murderer?

Hate to break it to you, but not only is he, but Rico is the one who found out and never reported him. It’s one of the most interesting moments between them.

I’m not surprised fandom wanted to ship Castillo with someone. I just wish people hadn’t only ever reached for Crockett/Castillo when Castillo/Tubbs has just as much great material. But if I get started on my ship manifesto for that, we’ll be here all day!

Suffice it to say that MV suffers from what lots of old fandoms do: people only rewatch certain parts, and it’s hard to remember which bits are fanon.

I’ve heard people say that Rico didn’t seem like he really cared about Sonny on the same level that the oldschool slash juggernauts did. I think this is a combo of not rewatching the episodes more heavily focused on him and of fandom liking a particular kind of woobie/enabler ship. Rico usually caved in the end, but he set boundaries in a way some of these ships never did. He was also portrayed with a particular kind of bragging confidence that is way more common in black characters. I think it reads wrong to some people, though in fact, he’s just as much of a ride-or-die bestie as the usual slash duos from back in the day.

The same thing happens with a lot of specific moments fic does heavily reference. Many significant Crockett/Castillo moments involve Crockett being the only one who can get through to Castillo, yet in those actual scenes, it’s Tubbs who does or it’s both Crockett and Tubbs.

Yes, friends who I will be seeing at Escapade, even that scene and also that one. You are just flat out wrong.

III. The Fanworks

First, my eternal rec. It’s het with an OFC. No, no, come back! MV was one of those fandoms where this was sometimes the best fic, and all the more so since the ship is with Castillo, he of the mysterious past and not enough personal connections.

Dark Side of the Moon by @dejlah​

I also really love Temper of Revenge by Mary Van Deusen. It’s one of three she did to the same song and it’s about the dark, dark ending for the comedy relief duo. If you’ve heard Francesca Coppa talk about vidding history, you’ll have heard of this vid. (No, we’re still not the same person.)

I’m also a big fan of MVD’s Crockett/Castillo vid, Ready for the Times. It manages to perfectly capture the dominant fanon take on the ship. I can’t even put into words exactly why, but it brought back all that fic powerfully.

This fan-made trailer does a good job of showing the kinds of twisty episodes he got:

My first vid I ever sent to Vividcon was a Gina/Trudy one that gives a good sense of the awesome costumes and also how often they had to go undercover as hookers. (AO3)

And finally, for those of you who don’t want to watch five whole seasons of 80s TV, I vidded that arc. (AO3)

Wow, this is only like 15 screens. Practically a haiku when it comes to me talking about Miami Vice!

[olderthannetfic]

Escapade 2017 Con Report

I gave @rhaegalks​ a lift, came home, and flopped on my bed for a few hours. It turns out that a gross head cold plus a ton of parties plus the hotel’s alarm going off at like 7am is not good for my ability to be upright and functional. Zzzzz.

This year, we were in a new and fabulous hotel. Let’s hope we can afford it next year too. (Check out Escapade’s crowdfunding campaign.) The rooms are big, with an excellent fold-out couch in the outer room and two TVs: it’s the perfect set up for room parties.

Not that I had any of those this year. I was too busy helping with the Friday night dance party and hosting the Saturday night after party in the con suite. I would have thought that the hotel’s layout made sound travel, but we had no security issues, so I guess the sound proofing is better than I thought or we just weren’t that loud.

Booze and food:

What? You don’t think those are the most important parts of a party?

The hotel has happy hour every day. All the ehhh wine or basic mixed drinks you can cram down from 5:30 to 7:30. I didn’t eat at the hotel restaurant; reportedly, the burgers were dry. The old hotel is just across the street, and its restaurant is very good, if overpriced. I brought some real food for the con suite. I wish I’d been able to do more. Maybe next year, a few more of us can bring entree type offerings. I love how BASCon let you just eat lunch out of the con suite to keep things cheap. (RIP, BASCon. ;__;)

Friday, there were three specialty cocktails served by the hotel bartender. Vodka (ew), more vodka (ew), and a specialty margarita (pretty good for a bar at a hotel event). The hors d’oeuvres were great: little egg rolls and beef skewers.

Saturday, a bunch of us went out for swanky Mexican a short drive away. (The con is in the cultural wasteland that surrounds LAX, so the options are mostly bad chains, plus terrible Mexican, better Mexican, and swanky Mexican. Not so much with the variety. There’s a Greek place I’ve still never been to.) I had duck molé and regaled @t-cupsandtime​ with my many lolwhut fandom adventures. (Yes, I talked about myself all through dinner. Why do you ask? ;D)

Later, after the vid show, I hosted the after party in the con suite, where I set up a bar to serve a variety of lovely cocktails, each a different color. (Predictably, I got caught up dealing with tech issues in another room, so people just drank all the vodka and poured themselves whatever they felt like, but I did have a cool cocktail menu in theory!) 

We also watched a few vids and, more importantly, I was able to inflict Always Crashing in the Same Car on a whole roomful of fans. Come dwell with me in terrible kinky porn land, friends!

My cocktail offerings were:

Negroni - in honor of Killa always eying my sugar death bomb drinks with alarm

Moonlight - in honor of Joi McMillon’s gushing at Visible Artists over the editing process on Moonlight (you fangirl, you!)

Amaretto Sour - because I had a lot of home-grown lemons

Grasshopper - because SUGAR DEATH BOMB

China Blue - no, not that vodka bullshit in a martini glass: the tropical weirdness with lychee liqueur, blue curaçao, and grapefruit juice

White Russian - can’t go wrong with the Dude

Penguin - frothy, pink, and full of gin--in honor of Escapade’s mascot, gay penguins

Vids

This year, there was just a vidding 101 panel (which I did not attend) and vid review (which I did). The Friday dance party was my playlist, which you can see on Tumblr here. It wasn’t as OT3-y as I wanted, but it worked great as a dance playlist.

I’ll mention again that I started my vid search based on the fandoms on people’s profiles on the Escapade website. 90% of you didn’t fill anything out, so I didn’t look for your fandoms. Just saying! The dance party also takes suggestions, both for fandoms and for specific vids. Suggest early; suggest often!

I did a lot of my vid hunting on AO3. Unlike Tumblr or Youtube, you can search it properly for just things that are fanvids or just for fanvids in specific fandoms, and you can find things that were posted longer ago than last week.

The Saturday vidshow is the big one where vidders premiere their vids for a rapt audience as opposed to a bunch of loud drunk people... unless you’re in the loud room, in which case, it’s still a bunch of loud drunk people. This year, it was a little underwhelming. While the vids were all excellent--maybe even better than in other years--they were also heavily drawn from last Festivids and last VividCon. As often happens, many of them were rather heavy. For the dance party, I chose based on music, even if the only copy of a vid I had was grabbed from Youtube and full of pixilation. The real vidshow tries to keep image quality higher, and that makes finding vids much harder: most vidders don’t think in terms of HQ files that will look good on a projector. I think that’s a pity because, while our numbers at Escapade are small, we’re a very dedicated audience. Make pretty HQ versions, vidders! Let us love you! And post to AO3! Let us find you!

Panels!

Lots of meta and recs panels for me this year. I ran a panel on films about fandom: the problematic ones that exist, the ones we’d like to see, and my grad school thesis that I’d like you to donate to when the indiegogo goes up.

I also ran The Fannish Dating Game, the panel where you pimp your fandom by being a bachelorette and answering our lovely contestant’s questions. Certain People having failed with McHale’s Navy last year were determined to drag everyone into Barney Miller this year. When I was a contestant, the three options turned out to be The Eagle, Master and Commander, and Cardcaptor Sakura--all fandoms I used to be in. Heh. I think I’m due for a turn back through Hornblower, to be honest, but maybe another Age of Sail frenzy will follow.

The Kids Are Not the Problem: I know I attended this, but I can’t remember a thing about it other than who the mods were... Doh.

Home on the Web: This was a panel about what’s missing in Tumblr or other alternatives today and where we should go. The discussion circled around the idea that there needs to be a fannish-run social media site and that we need a good backup/download tool for Tumblr lest it go away some day. I don’t think we really discussed what’s wrong with Dreamwidth: many things are great about it, but it lacks some of the audiovisual aspects that I’ve grown to love elsewhere. One thing that came up again and again for me is that some of the requested things exist or could exist, but we either aren’t making use of tools we should, like filling out our AO3 profiles or using AO3′s bookmarks feature, or we don’t know where to find the good fuckyeah tumblrs and other replacements for fannish newsletters. In my opinion, everyone should go ahead and invest time in tumblr even if its economic model is unsustainable, but we should figure out how to back it up ASAP. Everyone should also go have the threaded discussions they want to in AO3 fic comments.

Let’s Collab! New Forms of Collective Fan Creativity: I couldn’t make it to this since it conflicted with Home on the Web. I’d love to know how it was.

How to Threesome: We played with posable dolls and nattered about what kinds of sex we like in OT3 fic and whether or not it’s similar to what makes sense in real life. (Answer: of course it’s not. It’s exactly like two-person couples in erotica and romance in that there’s lots of Souls As One simultaneous shit and much less realistic sex where one person takes a lot longer than another.)

The Slash Book: This is really cool. There’s talk of a slash book that combines fan and academic perspectives.

OT3 for Me: Another panel of OT3 squee. (It’s Escapade 27, so the theme is OT3s.) We all wanted more canons with OT3s and other poly arrangements. What year is this again? Surely, there should be more in self-published ebooks at least by now? Lots of us talked about shipping teams together: buddy cops = OTP, Leverage = 2+3, MCU = team orgy.

It’s Canon, but is it slash? I proposed this but didn’t run it, so it spent a lot of time on the meta question of what defines slash. I was more interested in the question of whether pro m/m is scratching the same itches and what’s good. We concluded that it theoretically could, but the vast majority of it doesn’t because it’s just not good enough at setting up the iddy character dynamics before it gets to the fucking. Give us buddy cops and superhero-supervillain feuds before they bump uglies, please!

You’re Totally Welcome on my Lawn, but I Wish You Wouldn’t Pee on the Grass: Not, as it happens, my panel. Anyone have a panel review?

We’re All Going to Hell: Obviously an amazing panel full of all of My People. Now where are my noncon xeno recs?

Wank: It’s Coming from Inside the Fandom: We tried to define both ‘wank’ and ‘The Discourse’ and never really settled on anything, but we did get to explain His Wife, A Horse to the unwary. Muahahahaha!