Tag: fandom things

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Fannish_Fifty: Book Club (2018) A Visual Crackfic

Book Club (2018)  was An Experience. A cracktastic experience.

So the basic premise for this movie is “Four friends’ lives are turned upside down when their book club tackles the infamous “50 Shades of Grey.” From discovering new romance to rekindling old flames, they inspire each other to make their next chapter the best chapter.” (Thanks, Google)

That…that does not really capture how incredibly bonkers this film is.  Because this film is absolutely  B-O-N-K-E-R-S.   Like it’s two bananas short of a banana split.  

How I came to see this film since it had not been on my radar at all. Well, Spice #3 texted me and went “So I need you to watch this movie with me”  which was both very suspicious and very intriguing.  Anytime one of the Spices tell me “you gotta see this” it is always either going to be mind-blowingly awesome or mind-blowingly shitmazing.  There’s no in-between. 

It has an amazing cast,  Candice Bergen, Mary Steenburgen, Craig T. Nelson, Andy Garcia, Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, and Don Johnson are most of the main cast and it’s wonderful in the way that I snickered hard enough to strain muscles watching this movie. 

I straight up cannot believe this movie got made.   This is the kind of movie where you have Very 

Sincere Doubts that anyone involved in the writing was sober by any metric.  This is visual crackfic and I know crackfic.   I “came of age”  during the wild west fandom years – I have read crackfic and written crackfic, I can tell you what quality crack from non-quality crack is.

This was glorious crackfic of the kind where it took me back to the LJ days pre-Strikethrough and it was amazing.

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Fannish_Fifty: Top Gun Maverick (2022)

Top Gun Maverick 2022 – one of the more talked about movies in several friend groups I inhabit. AKA It’s COOL, Totally FINE, didn’t need THOSE EMOTIONS and also WHOO DOGFIGHTS movie.

I watched this one directly after watching the first one (for the first time)  which was An Experience.   I am un-endingly glad I did not see this one in theaters.   It was intense enough on my living room TV, watching it in the theater would have been bad for my nerves and senses. 

I came to the conclusion that much like with Star Trek (2009) and Zachary Quinto –  Top Gun Maverick needed to wait until Miles Teller was old enough to star in it.   The casting there placed against the casting of Anthony Edwards in the first one was absolutely stellar – especially visually.  Like that scene with the piano? The nostalgia tipped spear of feels that gave me was really visceral. That was only the beginning too.

Val Kilmer broke my heart and I was in a glass case of emotions for all of that. OW. This is supposed to be an action movie, it’s not supposed to rip out my still beating heart and show it to me as well.

I will admit a lot of the impetus for me to see this movie originally (and also providing the push needed to finally sit down and watch the first one) came from having read a spectacular crossover fanfic that got me super curious about the source material. 

I love the Mav and Hondo relationship – it’s the best.   Overall, this was a good successor to the first one.  Just enough callbacks to the first one and it was its own movie with its own plot.   It wasn’t a copy-paste New Generation remake of the first one. 

10/10 would rewatch (but not on a huge screen. I’m old and my heart can’t take the pressure). 

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Fannish_50: The Mummy (1999) : Jonathan Carnahan

This is one of my favorite movies, I won’t lie. I often put it on as background noise if I’m not watching or listening to something specific. It’s essentially my favorite kind of story – adventure, curses, found family, and hijinks. A kind of happy ending that gives me resolution while also leaving it open for future stories. However, one of my favorite parts of it is the characterization of the main protagonists. Specifically Jonathan Carnahan.

Jonathan occupies a really important role in the movie, serving as comic relief that is actually comic rather than stupid and who also serves as a valuable plot mover. He comes off as the incompetent buffoon except while the buffoon part could possibly be argued for, Jonathan is anything but incompetent.

So let’s review what we know to be true from the film itself. Jonathan can read Ancient Egyptian, even if it is not to the same degree his sister can. He’s clearly interested in archaeology to the point of being on digs himself – which would have required extensive schooling to qualify for those kinds of permits. The “dig down in Thebes” line alludes to that and Evie clearly believes him when he tells her where he found it.

Jonathan also doesn’t miss when he shoots and he clearly has some boxing experience. Given the timeperiod of the movie, he’s the right age to have fought in WWI (So’s Rick and the French Foreign Legion did fight in WWI but that’s a different post) and that makes everything about him make so much more sense.

Jonathan, much like Phryne Fisher in one of my favorite period mystery shows, hasn’t taken anything seriously since 1918 and for pretty much the same reasons. He’s exactly the sort of soldier who got disillusioned from seeing what he did and since it didn’t actually kill him, he’s jumped from that into something slightly less dangerous. Archaeology was dangerous, not necessarily from curses, but just from people with guns shooting at you. He’s living it up when he can and trying not to give in to those darker impulses.

Evie: Have you no respect for the dead? 

Jonathan: Of course I do, but sometimes I’d rather like to join them.

John Hannah, who plays Jonathan, conveyed all this perfectly on screen. He didn’t have to spell it out for us, just the hints of it existing were perfect.

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Wheel of Time (Series)

Books That Made Me Part Whateverith: Wheel of Time (series) by Robert Jordan (feat. Brandon Sanderson for the finale)

When I was younger and living overseas, one of the greatest gifts that I could or would ever get were the huge Media Mail bags of books from my former librarian grandmother. We didn’t always have the best of relationships, but she never failed to support me in what I wanted to do and she would always send me books. Books of all stripes and sizes and genres that she would get at library sales and used book fairs. It was not unusual to get several books in a series, all out of order. So I’d get book 1 and then book 5 and book 7 and then have to piece the rest of the series together by myself. However there was one M Bag that carried a prize beyond measure – sometime between late 1999 and early 2000 – we got an M Bag that held all eight of the Wheel of Time books in it.

A complete series (so far – as the 9th book had not yet been published) was a rare thing to find in these bags and I immediately set upon them like a starving feral child who hadn’t seen decent food in a while (according to my sibling at the time). It caused a bit of conflict with my mother who worried about me potentially reading things that I wasn’t old enough to understand until I pointed out that if I had questions, I had a track record of asking them to explain stuff. I was 14 almost 15 and exceedingly resolved that nothing was going to get in my way of reading these books. The covers were glorious and catnip to my brain and I cannot stress enough how amazing it was that they were all there so I did not have wait or wonder what happened next or how exactly we got from point C to Point X. It was all there for me and it was a glorious feast.

I sped through these books faster than I think anyone would believe possible (unless you’ve seen me read and I was faster then than I am now) and I was completely subsuming myself in the Wheel of Time world and the characters and everything about them. I got to the end of Book 8 and screamed out loud because that was a nasty cliffhanger and where was the next book? Was there even a next book? Surely, we’re not going to be left hanging forever right?!!? Understandably everyone else in the household was not amused by my outburst but I maintain the scream was warranted. Might have helped that it wasn’t almost bedtime when it happened.

I remembered the Internet was a thing and started diving into the Wheel of Time fan sites and the forums and reading through all the different fan theories and speculations and the excitement over the ninth book coming out and I was a joyful fanthing. Waiting for books 9 and 10 was horrific especially since I had yet to be able to convince anyone back home to send me book 9 – I had to wait until I was back in the states briefly myself in order to pick 9 and 10 up. I was exceedingly fortunate that our departure date was the day after the release date for book 10 and that I had very understanding grandparents who did not mind the emergency trip to the nearest bookstore. It helped that they knew that if they didn’t take me, I was totally going to find the nearest bus route or hitchhike to the nearest bookstore that carried new releases. I was 16, looked about 10ish, and would not be stopped from this quest.

My second email address was failebashere@***** and I legitimately could not get enough of Perrin and Faile and Egwene and Gawyn and then Mat who stole my whole heart and then some. I loved watching Lan and Nynaeve and them being the definition of “its complicated.” I still (forever) want all the backstory and the additional tales of the time of legend even more so than what we did get. I could happily lose myself in this world for ages upon ages and never ever get bored. If I was stuck on a desert island with only one book series for the rest of my life, it’d be this one. No contest.

One of my college friends and I became friends because she was reading The Great Hunt and I legit just sat down across from her in the cafeteria, held out my hand, and said something along the lines of “Hi I’m [x] and I have never seen anyone else actually reading these in real life, I think we should be friends.” We are still friends to this day.

Another college friend allowed me to commission her to make me an Aes Sedai shawl. It’s handknit -the pattern assembled from 3-4 separate patterns and combined to make one of the most priceless fandom costume pieces I own. She didn’t charge me nearly enough for it, either.

I have found amazing people through this series and it never ever gets old. The squee we all share is intensely and deeply infectious and joyful. It’s one of the happiest fandom communities I get to share in.

I never ever thought I would see an adaptation of Wheel of Time – especially not a live action one. I have been cautiously hopeful during the initial announcements and then we got casting news and I got more excited. We got a teaser and my faith and confidence grew.

We got a trailer and I’m pretty sure I stopped breathing for a good minute there as I just got overwhelmed with FEELING. My roommate watched me blink back tears as I watched the trailer another three times, just to make sure I was actually seeing this in real life and not an extremely detailed dream/hallucination.

We’ve got a show. The first episode premieres tomorrow. We’re getting an adaptation that as far as we can tell looks like its going to be AMAZING. It looks like the showrunners not only understand the source material but they’re respecting it. The cast looks lovely and the settings were breathtaking from what we got in the trailer.

Just like there were no words for what it meant to me to have been seen and represented in Every Heart A Doorway, there really aren’t the words to encapsulate what it means to see this world in live action, to be able to watch this story that I love from the beginning. To know that the show is going to bring in new fans to come and share in the joyful squee. It’s exhilarating. I can barely wait.

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Fandom Firsts

Fandom Firsts/First Introductions have been on my mind a lot this summer. It’s been the kind of summer where work-life balance is a joke when it comes to my day job. All I’ve done besides work is ponder stuff and occasionally watch something on television. Mostly rewatching comfort stuff because that’s all I’ve had the spoons for. I was rewatching Babylon 5 season one with my dad and it hit me when we got to the first Bester episode that this show was my first introduction to Walter Koenig as an actor. My parents knew him first as Chekov from Star Trek, but I wasn’t introduced to the Star Trek movies and original series until several years after I’d found B5. Seeing him as Chekov was a hell of a headtrip that first time, I kept expecting him to be working some kind of angle or having a shady plan (Dad was particularly amused by this).

Same thing happened much later on as my nerd household started watching Falling Skies and it took me a couple of episodes to place where I’d seen Colin Cunningham who played John Pope before ( I keep forgetting IMDB is a thing ya’ll. I remember a time before it) and that was an even bigger headtrip. Cunningham played Major Paul Davis on Stargate SG-1 who is a character that was a direct opposite to Pope in just about every possible way. It’s still kind of a headtrip when I watch episodes of either series. Cunningham’s range is great.

Or how, since I was a Disney Afternoon kid, getting introduced to the “Indiana Jones” kind of character via Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers years and years before I ever actually saw Raiders of the Lost Ark. Same with the “Magnum P.I” character type. Granted 90’s Cartoons were a million times smarter than they had to be (and a lot of them still hold up which will never not be hilarious and amazing) and a lot of them were packed full of references and visuals that would not necessarily make sense to the target demographic but would be fun easter eggs or references to their parents. I mean The Mighty Ducks: The Animated Series had several episodes that were spoofs or parodies of popular movies (including but not limited to Die Hard and Pulp Fiction). In a cartoon. On the *Disney* Channel.

These are all just a handful of examples – this post could go on forever if I tried to list them all out. Tell me about some of your Fandom Firsts/First Impressions in the comments!

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Books/Fandoms That Made Me: Star Wars (Part Two)

The NJO came out and rocked my world, I got my first one from a bag of mixed books from one grandparents (it was Balance Point which I promptly opened up, read the first page and then “HOLD ON WHAT.” I got the entire series for Christmas and birthday after my grandparents realized that no really, that is all I wanted and that I was getting “lost” in bookstores just to actually read those books in the actual store because I was that into the ongoing plotline.

Star Wars (and Nanowrimo) also gave me my best friend (now roommate) because of a write in and an offhand comment and then suddenly there was a person there who loved pilots as much as I did. Who even had met the two authors that had written some of my favorite books ever in the EU. I found out later she actually worked for them over Labor Day weekends at this thing called Dragon*Con.

We’ve been fast and best friends since 2006 and cohabitating since 2011 and there is an entire wall of Star Wars Legends books in chronological order surrounding a smallish pilot shrine. The small collection of current canon novels is also arranged on one side.

I’d been so used to being the only fan in the city I had lived in, that meeting actual humans who geeked as much, if not more than I did, over shared stories and characters was three kinds of a blessing.

It wasn’t all sunshine, Ewoks, and fighter ships. I broke up hardcore with the fandom for a while during the time after the NJO. The Dark Nest trilogy left me cold and then the series after that…there were some deep and abiding characterization issues that led me to just fall out of the fandom for a while.

It hurt too much to go back when you had people taking a character that you loved, that you had grown up with in a literal sense and twist them into something incomprehensible with little to no explanation for how he got from point a to point zed. When just the description of the events unfolding made you so vicerally and incandescently angry.

Because this fandom was home in a way that most of my other fandoms had never been. Because this fandom and the characters and the people were one of the things that had kept me going in some really dark times.

The advent of the last X-Wing book, Mercy Kill (read by me as my roommate drove us to Atlanta so she could cackle at my reactions) was what brought me back. Sitting in the panel room, listening to Aaron Allston talk about it was engaging and there were flickers of that same spark that had consumed so many days during my pre-teen and teen years. I’ll never forget however when someone from the audience stood and stumbled a little bit over their words before getting to the meat of the question. “Is it safe to come home now?”

This was before we had an Episode VII or even really the concept of any of the anthology films and the fervor swept over all of us again at the thought of more new Star Wars movies. After the prequels, I hadn’t thought that I would see more new films in the franchise so soon. Especially given the way that the second trilogy had been scoured and picked apart and judged by everyone with a blog and an opinion.

That question from that audience member resonated with me and quite a few others in that track room. Aaron assured us that yes, it was safe to come back now. That the fandom still had room for us and while we couldn’t change what had happened in the past, that there was space to move past it.

So we came home. And glory of glories, we got more movies and more books and while there were serious upheaval moments (the movie canon becoming separate from the EU/Legends canon was one), we were still a family.

The representation in Rogue One and Episodes VII and VIII were magical. It was like walking into a dream where your favorite fanfic had just become canon. It was the Star Wars we loved with people who actually looked like us. There was more than one badass female character, there were young and old characters, and the storytelling was good.

Every third person was not a white dude and the stark change from the original trilogy was a little more magical because of it. 8pm Thursday night showings became the new midnight showings and the sheer joy of being in a theater with a hundred other excited fans all reacting at the same time to what was on the screen will never not be amazing.

You meet some of the best people at these things, especially in tense moments on screen where your right hand is being clutched by your roommate and your left is being held by the guy next you because the need for physical comfort was so high (Ep VII, you probably know the part).

And then there was the pushback from other fans, who couldn’t quite understand the need for all that diversity. For the additional women on screen or the need for the stories to evolve.

The people who grew up thinking they’d be the Rebellion and instead became the Empire. Unlike the controversies in the fandom before, this one wasn’t much of one. The people buying into that mindset were the vast minority, albeit a very vocal one. The core of Star Wars fandom is still there, glittering like our Space Mom, and eagerly awaiting whatever we get to experience next.

We have so many new stories coming out from a variety of media formats. We have amazing inclusive books and short stories written by so many amazing people, it’s impossible to name them all here.

We have an entire Disney park dedicated to the full immersive experience of being inside the Star Wars Universe.

I can’t wait to see what we’ll get next.

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Books/Fandoms That Made Me: Star Wars (Part One)

So I love Star Wars, this is not news for people who know me.

Star Wars was and is a huge part of who I am today. I fell in love with the series when I saw it with my dad at the age of nine. Some of my earliest fanfiction was me in the Star Wars universe, exploring things and having all kinds of adventures. My family, of course, was always Corellian. It seemed to fit them the best (still does).

I learned there was an Expanded Universe when I saw The Crystal Star by Vonda N. McIntyre in the Paperback section of our local KY Kroger. I begged and pleaded for my mom to buy that for me. I was a tiny kid who was already reading on a college level at 9. My parents had an easier time keeping me in sneakers than in books.

It blew my mind. Because here was the after I had been looking for, the what happened next, and this book wasn’t the only one. Luke was a full blown Jedi, Han and Leia were MARRIED. WITH KIDS!! My nine year old mind was over the moon. Here were all the details and the stories that happened after! Scoping through some of the pages, I saw that it wasn’t the only one either.

So I fell into this universe in a way I hadn’t before with any of the other things I loved, unless you count reading as a fandom of its own. Star Wars was really the first IP where I actively became part of the fandom as much as I could.

It was pretty slow at first, that was right around the time that we were moving overseas. However Episode 1 came out and saved my life (I wrote about that over here). That Christmas, I got the score and the novelization from visiting relatives and I fell further down the hole of fandom.

As I got older and had more access to the internet, I found websites like TheForce.Net and fanfiction.com and I started reading everything I could. I couldn’t get enough of it.

I joined a forum specifically geared towards Jedi Girls and through it, I met the first person I fell in love with. We moved again and our closest “neighbors” that worked for the same agency my parents worked for had a kid my age that owned a HUGE chunk of the Legends books that had come out at that time. They went back stateside for a year and I got to babysit the books while they were gone. It was kind of a dream come true.

I got to take my time reading through the Expanded Universe and revelling in all of the words and the adventures and the characters. The good and the bad and the weird (I still am not exactly sure about what the hell even The Black Fleet Crisis was about, it’s been 16 years and “Bzuh” is still my entire reaction to that trilogy).

These were the books that taught me what “canon”, “deuterocanon”, and “apocrypha” actually looked like, where 3-4 years of studying religious doctrine and history couldn’t. How piecing together different campaigns from across several books/trilogies actually functioned and the importance, not just of gaining knowledge, but also sharing it (Wookiepedia and so so so many fansites in the Geocities/Angelfire years) so that others could also nerd the hell out.

I fell in love with pilots to the point of ordering the entire X-Wing series with birthday and Christmas money from Amazon.com and having them shipped to me overseas (the estimated time of arrival without having paid for expedited shipping because I really didn’t want to give Amazon an actual kidney was anywhere from 6 weeks to 4 months, depending on the mail and customs). The books I was babysitting for my friend didn’t have all the X-Wing stories so I had to procure them elseways. This drove me bananas, because my impulse control to read all the things had to contend with the fact that I knew reading them out of order would mean that my brain would hyper-focus on what I’d missed.

Pretty sure that the only people happier than me getting those books were my family members, having to put up with my anxious slightly manic self. They were in 3 packages and I didn’t get them in order. I remember getting books 1,2, and 8 in the same package and agonizing because I wanted to read them in order and waiting until I had all of them was a special kind of torture. It paid off though because the joy of getting to binge read the entire series was so good.

Episode II came out and I saw it three times in the regular Brasilian theaters and then wonder of wonders, it was still in the Imax theaters near my grandparents when we landed stateside for a brief assignment. My dad took me and my sister to a late night Imax showing of it and it was the best thing in the world.

Episode III was the one where I camped out for tickets. Nothing was getting in my way from seeing this. Coming out of the theater from that movie and then pretty much getting back in line for tickets because I needed to see again. There was so much there that my brain needed to unpack and filter through what we already knew of the universe and how it fit into the EU and this opened up so much more of the already vast universe.

Part Two Tomorrow!

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Making It: When You Know You’ve Gotten There

When you know you’ve made it – this is a question that I get a lot at various panels and workshops that I do. I know that it’s also something that several of my colleagues get asked often.

So how DO you know when you’ve “made it” in your chosen field or genre? This, just like the majority of the writing advice you’ll encounter online and offline is subjective. It depends on who you are asking and what they’re using as their goalposts.

It could be awards or recognition of your works at a national/international level, it could be when you’re invited to a convention or conference as a guest instead of program participant. Those are fairly common ones. So is making one of the NY Bestselling Lists. These goalposts can be huge or small – it all depends on the person(s) involved.

One of my dear friends, herself a fabulous author/blogger, has said that she’ll know she’s made it when someone comes up to her at a convention or signing dressed as one of her characters.

For me, personally, I grew up with fandom during the late 90’s/early 2000’s. The earliest LiveJournal posts I have were back in 2004 and I remember an Internet where finding fanfic meant toggling between locked Yahoo Groups, Fanfiction.net, Fiction Alley, and a thousand other Geocities or Angelfire websites. All of it depending on the fandoms you were in and the easiest way to find good fic was rec lists on Live Journal rec comms. Some fandoms had hundreds of thousands of fansites; others had two (maybe).

I am never-endingly thankful that Archive of Our Own (A03) exists is what I’m getting at here. And it ties into my own “made it” milestone. I will officially consider myself to have “made it” when there’s an A03 fandom tag for my works and it’s Yuletide eligible.

Everything else mentioned before would be awesome, don’t get me wrong. Winning a Hugo or Nebula would just blow my socks off, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. Hitting a bestseller list would make me squee (high pitched dolphin noises) for weeks, if not months. Someone cosplaying as one of the characters in my stories would have me blinding people with the sunshiny smile on my face.

But to be Yuletide eligible and have an A03 fandom tag created for fanworks of my writing? That’s my gold standard right there.

So if you’re a writer/creator, what’s your “made it” moment? Share it in the comments if you like. I love hearing about them from other creatives.

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Beta-Readers, Alpha-Readers, or No?

It’s been a interesting weekend. Hypericon was this weekend and even though I technically wasn’t a formal guest, I wound up moderating three panels anyways. Occupational hazard, especially when you’re also staff at the con.

On one of them, the topic of beta-readers and alpha-readers came up and I learned something interesting. Not everyone treats them the same way or as the same thing.

I grew up in fandom and my understanding has always been that a beta-reader is someone that helps you during your developmental phase before you hit the copy-edits and proofreading. Alpha-readers on the other hand are people that help you catch whatever last typos and kind of serve as a preliminary ARC reader.

Some of the people on the panel don’t have both or what they call a beta-reader is more like my understanding of an alpha-reader. Some of them will use betas during the copy-edit phase. Some people don’t use them at all, just working with their editor.

Please don’t misunderstand me, editors are fundamentally crucial to the writing for publication process. However, I have also found it helpful in a lot of cases with some of my writing to also use beta-readers – I find them really helpful.

So I thought I’d open up this question to any of the other creatives out there. What about you? Do you use beta-readers or alpha-readers? Some of them, both of them, or none? Leave your answers in the comments and let’s chat about this.

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Sound The Bells

So this is a thing I love a lot. Sound The Bells by Dessa set to PacRim clips, telling a gorgeous story conveyed through exquisite craftsmanship.

In the past couple of weeks, my day job has been rather more intense than normal, which was expected (there’s a reason we refer to it as the year end deathmarch) so I’ve been laying low in my off hours. It was not exactly a stellar year and I’m closer to actual burnout than I want to be. So it’s time to read and rest and refresh myself. Part of that is going back to some of my favorite things. Things that make me happy.
I’ve been kicking around fandom for longer than I care to admit and one of the things that I love the most is the boundless creativity that springs up from it.

One of my friends linked the above video ages ago and I had to click on it – a fanvid set to one of my favorite songs using one of my favorite movies? It was a gift. I keep coming back to it too. The transitions are beautiful and the song pairs so well with the movie clips and even if you know nothing about the movie, you still get a great experience out of watching this video. It’s delightful artwork and it reminds me that fandom is supposed to be fun and it’s supposed to bring you joy in what you love.

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