I kinda wish I had a fandom Tumblr

[petronia]

So I could offer up thanks for the REAL TIME FANART RESPONSE, yesterday and early today. XD Definitely the sort of thing the platform does best. Not even gonna lie: thank the small gods of media Hollywood cast their X-Men movie for accidental resemblance to Hetalia characters. In fact, I don't have the value system that would make me want to lie about this. It should happen more often. For one thing, if they hadn't cast for accidental resemblance to Hetalia characters they may not have made the kind of numbers that would have justified a super-duper fancy artbook-y Japanese Blu-Ray release, so there you are.

In conclusion: thanks for coming through like a bro, Pixiv. Also whoever you are, the person who skinned Magneto's drag outfit in Sims 3 in 20 minutes flat. Also you, the Korean high school AU dating sim ppl. See you again for Wolverine II: Electric Weeaboo.

Really the one tumblog serves 85% of my real needs, assuming music ppl find relevance in the occasional photo of Iggy and Bowie being themselves. But sometimes you just want to comment back on everyone on your dashboard freaking the hell out without cluttering up your own feed with stacked quotes, bawling. Speaking of which guys, IDK, I've yet to see anyone build a case that Charles/Erik isn't canon (even poking through scans of the comics, aspects of which are properly intelligent), the extra-diegetic flotsam of the movie least of all. I mean, Take That? RLY?

...Should I make a fandom Tumblr? I suppose it's likely to contain shiz like The Economist finally revealing the identity of its editors.

Comments

[brooms]

IDK, I've yet to see anyone build a case that Charles/Erik isn't canon

Personally, I still don't think it is, writers apparently embracing the whole thing at SDCC and all. It's certainly not in comics.

You may already follow her and have read this, but just in case, I think this is what happened: http://some-stars.dreamwidth.org/2046480.html

[petronia]

Well, OK, I guess I should expand on that by saying that by "canon" I don't mean that the characters had to be boning (in fact Occam's Razor is they weren't), or even that they acknowledged romantic feelings to each others/themselves. XD; I think the romantic feelings were there, that Charles acknowledged them internally but didn't act on them, and that Erik would have acted on them but didn't have the framework to fully recognize them. This isn't my "slash possibilities" reading of the film, it's my actual reading of the film, based on everything that went on onscreen, diegetic (acting, script) and non-diegetic (music, etc.). I'm not really prone to slash goggles(tm), tbh, so I would think hard before saying this, though that doesn't mean you have to agree with me. XD; The film is pretty carefully balanced in the writing and editing to support differing interpretations on this count (my "slash possibilities" reading is that they could be boning, and there's no proof to the contrary there, either).

I definitely agree with some_stars that the timeline was farked, and that Erik never actually changes his mind about anything (neither does Charles... it's sorta the point of the characters, come to think of it). As for the "feelings", I... guess I have no problem just automatically assuming a lot of stuff falling between the lines by authorial intent, because I have the "Dorothy Dunnett fan" temperament both as a writer and as a reader. XD; I like it when writers skip over scenes and actors underact and make you work to construct an emotional model of what's going on! I mean, you can't demonstrate semi-acknowledged romantic feeling by actual onscreen/in-text makeouts (i.e. there's no sex in The Remains of the Day), even if you weren't obliged to do that annoying de rigueur 2010s wink-nudge bromance thing.

The comics are... XD;; I'm sure if one took aaallll the continuity one can prove and disprove anything simultaneously. With Charles Xavier and Magneto (and equivalent cases) it's almost the fault of the return to status quo rule, in the sense that it's been going on for so long you start to find it hard to imagine a psychologically valid scenario that would account for them still having caring emotions for each other. And yet as far as I can tell, the more recent the comic, the more soulmatey the talk is. I'm sure dudes didn't make out in actual panels anywhere because it would have been A Big Thing For Everyone, but I'm also sure Wolverine never smoked a joint in an actual approved comic panel.

[brooms]

I mean, you can't demonstrate semi-acknowledged romantic feeling by actual onscreen/in-text makeouts

But you can make it clearer to the audience either by cutting out the noise or using bigger flashcards. You have to be able to differentiate from emotionally intense platonic friendships, because those exist, too.

I'm really interested in the deleted Moira/Charles scene, because the fact that they bothered with Moira/Charles at all is an example of noise to me. Louder than Erik/Raven, because their little bedroom scene was a consequence of something else entirely.

My actual reading of the movie is that Charles and Erik were lonely people and each other's first glimpse at an equal/kindred spirit, so their connection was quick and powerful. I'm very sure they fell in love with each other and that this is what the movie was selling to me, but not that it was romantic love (even though that's my preferred angle).

in the sense that it's been going on for so long you start to find it hard to imagine a psychologically valid scenario that would account for them still having caring emotions for each other.

Tbh, they read like convincing estranged brothers who used to be really close in the comics to me. Not in UXM - they were really into each other (more Charles into Mags than the other way around) in an ambiguous way in UXM (still less ambiguous than XMFC, though). But in 616, I don't see it. Stan Lee apparently thought of making them half-brothers for a while and imo it still shows in recent renditions.

[petronia]

You have to be able to differentiate from emotionally intense platonic friendships, because those exist, too.

My instinct is that I don't care about differentiating between those two types of emotion, because functionally (in action) they are the same. To me. XD; But this is definitely a personal thing. I think Erik-the-character would differentiate, so it's interesting that I read his feelings so clearly as non-platonic.

I'm interested in seeing the Moira/Charles deleted scenes too - how they were meant to advance the story or the characterization. Structurally speaking they were supposed to parallel Erik/Raven, clearly, but the Erik/Raven scenes are hugely important to Raven's character arc, and Moira... doesn't get a character arc. So maybe they were cut because they didn't advance the story/characterization XD; but I actually think they were cut for the same reason a bunch of the Kirk-Gaila scenes were cut in Trek AOS: because the more you see of that, the more Charles's actions at the end would have seemed indefensible.

Editing choices... Charles can be a bit creepy, but not too creepy. He can be flirty with Erik, but not too flirty. He can be heterosexual, but not too heterosexual. There seems to have been much less post-prod farking about with Erik's scenes. Maybe Charles is just a hard character to write XD; (I suspect ppl do generally find it harder to write Prof X than Magneto).

Tbh, they read like convincing estranged brothers who used to be really close in the comics to me.

That was my reading of the previous movies, and it made sense with the backstory aspects stated/revealed in those movies. Which XMFC contradicts, despite the fact that the writers seem to think it's the same 'verse. orz|| 616, as far as I can figure, is somewhere in between timeline-wise.

[brooms]

but I actually think they were cut for the same reason a bunch of the Kirk-Gaila scenes were cut in Trek AOS: because the more you see of that, the more Charles's actions at the end would have seemed indefensible.

I hadn't thought of that, but I suspect you're right. They had already given Charles a couple of damaging scenes (with Raven, and the just following orders).

Moira WAS supposed to get a character arc and the writers really wanted it in, as they talked about it here: http://collider.com/ashley-miller-zack-stentz-interview-thor-thor-2-x-men-first-class/101175/

(You might have seen this, if so, my apologies! I was just so validated when I saw this because I've always thought it was really odd that they name-drop her in one of the big scenes, and she was supposed to be a counterexample to *Shaw*, a much bigger figure in the narrative.)

There seems to have been much less post-prod farking about with Erik's scenes. Maybe Charles is just a hard character to write XD; (I suspect ppl do generally find it harder to write Prof X than Magneto).

IAWTC 100%. I think everything about Mags is just so much... clearer. You get where the anger is coming from and you sympathize, you get how phenomenal his powers are and you can enjoy them in use most times without the extra scrutiny because they're not inherently unethical, he's not as wrapped up in privilege as Charles so his views tend to come off as more practical - he's just very solid. It's no wonder to me he's such a popular character and when writers like Grant Morrison try to write him as a real villain, there's an outcry. But when Whedon and others write him as twisted man or a fascist, the reaction is basically, "eh, I always knew the old man was like that".

[brooms]

But when Whedon and others write him

The him here is Charles! I suck.

[petronia]

Thanks for the video! I hadn't seen it in fact.

Yeah cos Magneto is Nietzche's wet dream I MEAN he is almost more a tragic hero, actually, in the Aristotelian sense that he has the fundamental forces of the universe at his fingertips, and his basic urge is for good, but he will fuck up terribly and inevitably in his actions because he has a major internal error in the way he responds to the world and cannot get over it. As revolutionary leaders go, he's the kind that ensures the success of the revolution if someone puts a bullet in the back of his head at exactly the right time. Though of course that wouldn't work on him. XD; Anyway, status quo dictates he can't put a cathartic end to the tragic hero arc by dying, or derail onto the Christian-era hero arc and be redeemed instead.

With Professor X I think it's (well, if you talk to ppl I know) the fact that he is The Side Of Good always, except for all the instances where he does stuff that is not kosher by way of careless writing, which then gets handwaved. People remember the non-kosher-ness, though, and it builds up until it's finally acknowledged.

[charmian]

You totally should make a fandom Tumblr!

I'm thinking of doing it (when I am less tired from offline things).

[canis-m.livejournal.com]

Why not! I kind of wish I had a non-fandom tumblr, or even a fandom tumblr that hadn't settled quite so incorrigibly into OTP wedding portrait spam mode.

One of these days I will watch XMFC lawl

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I enjoy the wedding portrait spam! ♥ My reading list is mixed as usual, but I assume anyone who followed me who doesn't know me did it for the movie reviews and music stuff, so.

XMFC is lingering in its first run, and the download link I had has died. But at this point you don't need to watch it, you could just read the super-moe Charles Xavier askblog. ALL PLOT DETAILS ARE ACCURATE AS PRESENTED

(Also ppl ask it for IRL advice, which sororial unit assures me also happens for the Blaine-from-Glee askblog. I... guess it's good that fans focus on characters who are likely to say something life-affirming.)

[canis-m.livejournal.com]

Oh, I too enjoy the wedding portrait spam! and am glad you do XD; but it's limiting in that I now feel sort of unable to post/reblog anything too divergent out of fear of genre whiplash. Or tonal dissonance. Or something.

Someone furnished me with a torrent link that I may or may not avail myself of--am trying to torrent fewer W-media since getting a warning notice from internet provider, ahaha whoops. But XMFC is legit out on dvd in a couple weeks! so I'll watch it then in any case. Saving the askblog for that time. XD;

p.s. I know you read Nat's quality primer but are you watching No.6 yet. When are you going to watch itttt

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Same here! Hence the dimly perceived need for another tumblog for wedding portrait spam random meta commentary on gif parties or whatever.

I dunno actually, I'll have to find the time. XD; I'm barely keeping up with Mawaru Penguindrum, and T wants me to watch Tiger & Bunny too. If I were on the ball I should download it and watch it on the plane to Venice, I think.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Okay so I am watching it, and the main character is STILL teenaged Charles Xavier from Tumblr, cardigans and all. This is really weird.

[canis-m.livejournal.com]

Ahaha is everything XMFC? Soon Shion will obtain his moe angel white hair to better differentiate? Also Nezumi is 900x hotter than Erik in drag.

SO GLAD YOU ARE WATCHING, YR FURTHER THOUGHTS PLS aflsjdflksdjk tbh I too am barely keeping up with Penguindrum. And now nyonyo is touting the CLAMPtasticness of Blood-C?! What to do.

I passed out halfway through episode 5

[petronia.livejournal.com]

He has basically the exact same personality though (fanon version). I keep waiting for it to do something else with the character but nope, it is legit fandom's fave story of teenaged Charles getting his privilege checked. It's gotta be something in the water. Nezumi is physically not at all like Erik but he has much of the same personality too. Although there is something weird going on there... like the HP movies where the story is Ron/Hermione but you can tell the director prefers Harry/Hermione. I swear to gawd I feel like the story wants Nezumi to be uke but the director wants him seme. XD;;

The girl, too... at first I was like "OK so this is how this SF-verse deals with sexuality," then I realized that it's just the character who is kinda Aspergers, bawling.

Are there only 11 episodes to this? A ton of shiz happened in the first 2.5 eps and then the pace slowed down massively. ARE THEY ALL SOYLENT GREEN FOR BEES.

finish ep 5!! It has the dancingggg

[canis-m.livejournal.com]

I swear to gawd I feel like the story wants Nezumi to be uke but the director wants him seme. XD;;

ACCURATE no srsly. I blabbed about this in one of my blab posts. The arc of the story is Shion's development in the general direction of semehood, at least insofar as semehood = responsible adult personhood, lol. The novels' spin is more Nezumi uke, though it's not clear cut even there. J-fandom on the whole at this point is split (with Nezumi seme majority gaining due to anime influence XD;) or can't decide/doesn't care/votes for switching. Acceptance of reversibility is one of the highest I've seen. I'd like to think the anime choices were made to deliberately confuse everyone XD or undercut the paradigm or whatever, but that may be giving too much credit.

it's just the character who is kinda Aspergers, bawling.

It's some of both! Safu is like that, but sex education is also terrible in Beeville. Things are different in the US No. 5.

There are supposedly only 11 eps, and I have no freaking clue how they're going to fit everything left to fit in the last 3. The pace did get too leisurely in the middle for the amount of race left to run.

tl;dr my favorite subject

[canis-m.livejournal.com]

Should add that I feel pretty strongly about paradigm avoidance with these two, to the extent that I get grumpy when J-fen come down inflexibly on one side or the other. XD; Nezumi's potential history and abused-animal status make me leery of locking him into anything immutable. I see where ppl get Shion seme, because he's much more the pursuer, but (esp. in the books) it smacks of shoujo-style f -> m pursuit, the kind where the slightly doofy heroine is enthralled with this really cool guy and has lots of akogare and wants to level herself up to stand shoulder to shoulder with him. I get a lot of shoujo bildungsroman vibes in general. I do love Nezumi's yin, though! Fave pixiv tag is still the one that calls them "homoyuri."

Re: tl;dr my favorite subject

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Well, the mixed signals re: Nezumi really confuse me (also I think I just have an issue with the voice acting in this one, overall... lots of shoutiness...). I guess the thing is, hypothetical!seme!Nezumi is an Erik type seme, but hypothetical!uke!Nezumi is a Lymond type uke, and those are conflicting models of personality. It's more about getting a coherent sense of character rather than whether he tops in bed. But Shion being fanon teen Charles Xavier means I can't see him as seme, so that is that. XD;; You're probably right that the issue ought to be avoided, but the series itself seems to be diving into it merrily.

On vulnerability: the way I have (carefully) come to conceptualize it is, everyone has vulnerabilities. In a relationship - a "pairing" if you will - you want person A's vulnerabilities to be complemented or met by strengths on person B's side, and vice versa. "Bottoming during sex" constitutes one nexus, because it can code for (or be made explicitly about) submissiveness, ceding of physical control, lesser strength or initiative, whatever. But "being the uke" is not just about holding that nexus as it were, it's about possessing an overall pattern of both strengths and vulnerabilities that happens to include that one. And there are MANY patterns that include that piece, like making Tetris with the T or the L-block (weird analogy alert??). And they can match up to different patterns on the "other" side. Depending on the pattern(s), "bottoming" or "topping" doesn't even have the same meaning: the semiotics of an uke giving a bj vs a seme giving a bj is ttly different. It just happens to be the axis one finds psychologically easy to classify on, because if A and B form a romantic pairing, chances are there's some sexual element.

The thing I noticed immediately about XMFC fandom is that everyone finds the sex ridic easy to write, because the above is reified in canon to a hilarious degree. One character has fundamental control over the fabric of the physical universe on top of basically being James Bond, but is emotionally and psychologically a mess. The other one is in a wheelchair and could pretty much rewrite people's brains from scratch if he wanted.

Re: tl;dr my favorite subject

[canis-m.livejournal.com]

Well, when J-fandom can get through a 9-volume novel series and still come out largely waffling at the end of it...seme/uke is a lens, but when it doesn't help one see, why insist on trying to peer through it idk. Especially if the text is playing Stump the Chumps. In the books I can't always tell to what extent Nezumi's contradictory characterization is crafted and to what extent it's sloppiness XD; but in part he's intended as A Mystery as much as Project Bees is a mystery. Anime!Nezumi is clearer...I do read him as situationally seme-esque w/r/t anime!Shion due to superficial shiz like voicing and height rule and Shion being a shoujo heroine (or fanon teen Charles Xavier, which having seen the film I am now hitting up pixiv for), but it doesn't fully obtain. Fan characterization starts to go off when ppl stray too far in either direction.

There's a certain configuration...dunno what to call it but the "homoyuri" conceptualization has real merit, ahaha. In f/f seme/uke sometimes applies, but I don't find it useful with e.g. Fumi and Aa-chan from Aoi Hana, at least not so far, and I have no trouble placing m/f or m/m pairings into that same space...they have to be that age, I think. Adorable kids who fall into each others' arms before they're fully ossified, or something.

Many patterns, yeah...agreed on all of this. The semiotics of a submissive uke giving a bj vs a domineering uke giving a bj are yet again different, right? I need to dig up my old failed attempt at typology. And since there are multiple nexii, it's inevitable to have some cases where two charas who each hold a more-or-less equal number of uke-nexii and seme-nexii within themselves end up romantically involved.

(Lymond is uke?! lol now I'm spoiled for Dunnett.)

Re: tl;dr my favorite subject

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Well, the Asian Sherlock fandom waffles, too. (Very good-naturedly! Holmesians of any stripe tend to be equable people.) Not really surprising why they waffle, either... but neither Sherlock's nor John's canon/fanon characterization feels unstable the way Nezumi's feels to me. With, yanno, my vast character knowledge consisting of 5.5 episodes.

That kind of pairing disturbs me on some level, though. XD; It's like there are no stakes involved, in some hard-to-define sense. They're probably closer to the majority of IRL relationships (even m/f ones) but there's no frisson of intrigue, for me... probably because it removes a lot of the relationship's potential for dramatic internal complexity, leaving mostly cute. Which is really nice for, like, a manga oneshot.

Lymond is reversible, like a fur coat (and he has relationships with women, too - these are more important drivers of the plot than his pseudo-relationships with men). But he's made subject to a lot of "female"-coded plot stuff, and the other uhh contestants are all more seme than he is.

[arboretum]

if you made one, i would follow it!? :D

[petronia.livejournal.com]

OK, I guess there are enough votes for, but now I have to figure out what I want to call it. XD;

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

Reblog it so we'll see it and then delete it later so you can stay on-message with your tumblr? I do that sometimes, and I don't even have a message.

[naanima.livejournal.com]

Work has been making tumblr stalkinge xtremely difficult. BUT OMFG! The XMFC explosions on my dash has been all sort of glorious.

YES! MADE FOR HETALIA!

[petronia.livejournal.com]

It's just too funny to see ppl literally RUNNING FOR THEIR WACOMS. XD; You get fanart or gif explosions on LJ but you have to be on the right thread for it to happen... then again I guess shiz like Magneto in a pretty dress doesn't happen every day, rolling.

That awkward conversation Angel will have with Raven 6 months later where she's like, "Wait, you thought your brother was straight...? Uh."

[uminohikari.livejournal.com]

I don't think it would be possible to claim that Charles/Erik isn't canon.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

The Dreamwidth entry (http://petronia.dreamwidth.org/27670.html) spawned a long conversation re: the canonicity of Charles/Erik, actually. XD

[uminohikari.livejournal.com]

Haha, so I see! I'm not well enough versed in comicsverse to really comment... /out of my depth.