petronia

All these are Tumblr links, but Tumblr is eating link lists, bless it.

I will update this post gradually with the backlog, particularly stuff I wrote in S2. These are almost all posts where I am the OP, but in many cases I linked to reblogs, since most of my meta is in the form of reblog conversations.

Asterisk (*) marks new entries, or at least newly linked entries. I've also highlighted some key posts in bold, for anyone who may be looking at this massive list of links and not knowing where to start. XD;

( Click for links )

I've been posting these over at Tumblr since that's where people actually are, but Tumblr is zero good at archiving and I'm not entrusting this much text to Google.

Hannibal and wine (nerd exegesis 1)

Coherency of the TV narrative arc vs the books w/r/t the treatment of women (a follow-up to the whole fridging controversy)

Hannibal characters and perfume (nerd exegesis 2. Ever since I was at the Osmothèque in Versailles I've given this way too much thought. There was also a follow-up discussion whereby someone said Hannibal identified Bella's perfume as JAR Bolt of Lightning, which sets the bar way high. I have yet to rewatch the episode in question and uhh didn't understand Mads Mikkelsen's accent the first time, so. XD;;)

Pappademas' writeup in Grantland, queerbaiting (TL;DR version: the show totally is, but what is it going to do, make them get together 4 real? That would mean EVIL WINS :P)

Coherency of the TV narrative arc vs the books w/r/t the characters' sexuality (major spoilers for S1-S2 and all the books to date)

aaaaand A FANMIX: The Weight of the World and its Heaven (8tracks)

...Good thing I decided to do this since I'd already forgotten I wrote some of these posts. :P

I said this show reminded me of Tokyo Babylon halfway through S1, so when S1 ended I was like "yes ok sacrificial young woman tickybox" and thought that was that. Of course, S2 just charged ahead and did X:1999. In conclusion

canis_m noped right out like "no way am I doing the 'animal-loving nice boy falls in love with total raving psycho' trope again" and she was prescient to do so. XD;;;

1) That was also fanfiction but not Katie Forsythe (the motto of the BBC Sherlock comm). I hope the Whedon Avengers movie is also like this, i.e. a Billy-Crystal-Oscar-skit-esque summation of the entire preceding year in fanfictional thinking.

2) Moffat and Gatiss would like you to know that if you insist on writing ridiculous D/s-verse AU scenarios, you should at least get some Word Of God on who is what.

3) The "canon references" in this one are basically the

diggerdydum subject header approach, and I mean this in the nicest way (i.e. I LOLed). I hear you can already get a "geek interpreter" t-shirt.

(...I think I forgot to mention that that Gabaldon book contained toward the end the WORST groaner music pun of all time? Of all time!)

( Cut for more specific HIGHLY SPOILERY meta thoughts on the ending )

This is never going to stop being funny, sorry.

This week in comics! 08/03/2011 - Fresh Presentations: The Comics Journal weekly column containing a review of Captain America. This sparked off a discussion on Tumblr (Tari | Tom | Charmian | me) about narrative structure that had very little to do with Captain America. XD; Anyway, I originally wrote this in my response to Jonathan Bogart's post:

I went to see this yesterday, followed by Thor tonight, on its second run at the Dollar Cinema - I am actually experiencing a surprisingly amount of EMOTIONAL RELIEF at being All Caught Up and Things Finally Starting To Make Sense; so some part of this creaky setup is working, at least for people like me who know literally nothing about Avengers continuity, even though it was obvious circa Nick Fury’s ominous rumblings in Iron Man 2 that the writers didn’t have any plot to hint at, and at this point they’ve barely fixed on a McGuffin. That’s fine: I’ve seen worse seat-of-pants flying by Shounen Jump mangaka who in the end managed to land their cargo. But I absolutely reserve the right to wait for shiz to come round to the Dollar Cinema, where a popcorn and a movie set you back $3.50 inclusive of tax.

I had a number of thoughts on Captain America itself, but the article up there covers pretty much all of them. (Actually, I have a chance to catch the '91 adaptation on Saturday; one of the things the Fantasia Film Festival is good for is catching you up on the history of terrible geek b-movies.)

( And then I rambled on in issen4's comments, expanded version )

...Anyway, that was just to gather up all the disparate content bits. XD;

#for Hostess Twinkies read (the bloodless victory of) capitalist consumerism

#the Sufficiently Advanced Science infodump passes Bechdel

#I would like the Avengers movie to address these conflicting visions of American identity via having Iron Man and Captain America yell at each other or something

#this is a deep plot by RDJ to surround himself with blond studliness AT ALL TIMES

#actually I just want Marvel vs. Capcom 3 fanfiction, do I have to go to FFN for it

15 – Warnings – What do you feel it most important to warn for, and what's the strangest thing you've warned for in a fic?

Ah, warnings.

When I edited SSBB I had a no warnings policy. Or rather, there was what was known as the Elves Rule, which seemed like a throwaway joke or an euphemism[1] but was really not. The guidelines have since been reorganized, and if you think my memory extends to the letter of this sort of text you are quite wrong XD; but I assume those who care remember what I’m talking about.

( Cut for yes I really did think about all this stuff. Maybe not in so many words. This doesn't really answer the letter of the meme. )

( Notes )

Important to warn for: see footnote [3].

Weirdest thing warned for: probably "blasphemy", in the Black Lagoon fic, which contained both killer nuns and nun killings. Mostly I was tickled that tag existed.

8 – Do you write OCs? And if so, what do you do to make certain they're not Mary Sues, and if not, explain your thoughts on OCs.

As someone who has, after all, won a fandom-wide Best Mary Sue award in the past, I think Mary Sue is way more of a bad word than it needs to be - symptom of systematized unconscious misogyny, the works. To build on my last post but one: faced with a canon with no female characters, or no good female characters, it's a natural goddamned reaction to want to redress the scale, give one's own (female) POV an avatar, a way into interacting with the universe. Not everyone solves the dilemma by learning (even preferring) to imagine themselves male.

Baby fans write the bulk of these stories, before they learn they're not supposed to, which admittedly creates quality issues in the aggregate. But it's baby fans who read them, too. There is and always will be an audience. Eventually, I suppose, everyone is meant to grow out of them and figure out less obvious and embarrassing ways of scratching one's id in public, and if one doesn't... time to break out the girl-on-girl shame stick! On the other hand, Stephanie Meyer snorkels in artificial lakes filled with $100 bills, so I'm not making a judgment call on who missed the boat.

From the perspective of someone who is indeed too old not to click the back button on Mary Sue, the worst thing about endemic Sue-phobia is that one has to worry about ridiculousness like "whether or not one's OC is a Mary Sue". For cripes' sake. If the story is longer than 10K words and is not set entirely in a private bedroom, a dreamscape, or a post-apocalyptic wasteland... you get my drift. Sometimes you're trying to make a point, like "there are 475 other people on this starship". Sometimes you invent an OC to make the plot work, and the ongoing canon later introduces a similar new character, because the creator(s) identified the same structural requirement you did. Sometimes, like dudes in real life, dudes in fiction are liable to encounter a beautiful, intelligent woman in the course of their lives. The constraint you do have is the one you would have in original fiction, i.e. tell this story with this protagonist, without either letting a supporting character (that you identify with more) take over, or reducing the supporting cast to ciphers meant to elicit action and emotion from the main character, without internal life of their own.

Monitoring the starting conditions of an incipient ficcing fandom: my favourite activity! XD In XM:FC a pairing-centric comm seems to have won out as the pillar, which means it's going to look really different from Sherlock (where a mixed-use but strictly-enforced on-topic comm won) and NuTrek (where an ONTD-format comm won). I prefer the flexibility of the last option - the scope is both broad and conceptually well-defined - but suspect one would need a pre-movie head start, plus a canon backlog full of endlessly-trawlable deep weirdness thereafter (which the three I've just named have, of course, but eg. Inception didn't...). I think XM:FC is distinguishable from the earlier iterations of the X-Men movie fandom by... a lower activation energy? Perhaps? K-memes didn't really exist circa X1-X2, let alone as the sandbox environments they are now. I have a memory of sort of lacklusterly poking about on FFnet. XD;;; So there is an impact. On the other hand - should I even make an attempt to phrase this delicately - a lot of the younger characters had superpowers with narrow applications. Or ones where the interest was actually in the workaround. That is not the case with XM:FC. Possibly it is a truism in every 'verse that sex was better before the 1980s.

On the other-other hand, I am in my corner until someone comes to inform me that the geographical proximity of the words "Holocaust" and "kink meme" has come to an end, thx all the same.

EDIT -- I forgot to talk about the dreaded seme/uke issue, but that's because with NuTrek it was interesting, you could sort of ponder the wherefores. The wherefores of XM:FC = "the casting director's brief said to find dudes who are quote incredibly easy for amateur manga artists to draw unquote"

Well, that was great fun ( although )

Tomorrow I might even end up seeing it again! But I think this is all the rants there is. XD;

I finished watching Madoka Magica: You Can (Not) Advance last night. Then I read all the meta and reaction posts

canis_m linked, and all of the wiki, which inter alia demonstrates that one of the series' creative goals was to aid 4channers' battle against cognitive surplus (hard not to think of Jane McGonigal again). XD Not that multiple audiences and goals (more than one goal per audience segment!) are incompatible, or difficult for the series itself to juggle. The moe aspect passes me by, is all. I note it more as a visual language that attained standalone sophistication after I stopped watching anime omnivorously, so in a minor way it's like the culture shock of when I came into contact with ONTD/TMZ/Perez in 2008, after ignoring anything to do with celebrities for the better part of a decade. The line I'll always remember from Pattern Recognition has to do with the ability to unerringly parse fetish-foci without at all grokking the appeal XD although the character in question was thinking of baggy schoolgirl socks, this being the era of baggy schoolgirl socks, and I thought that was completely off-track.

Speaking of visual language, every aspect of this show is coded. And not in Utena's sometimes Lynchian-trolling way, but with purpose. By the by, apparently it is possible to watch Utena and be like, you know what, this is way too focussed on dudes and their feelings. Let's just not talk about male agency for a while, OK? OK.

( Cut for mild spoilers, and not a lot of thinky thoughts )

In the meantime, I am 1/3 way through the Dunnett, progress marked by an increasingly edgy sense of deja vu until it came to me: THIS SHIZ READS LIKE MIRAGE OF BLAZE. Not the first two Dunnetts (although, gawd, entire arcs of Mirage turn on the reader not having any idea why Naoe or Kenshin are committing the actions you see them committing), and not the really ridiculous Naoe/Kagetora bits, but maybe 70% of the actual wordcount of the Mirage of Blaze novels is just like this. The character types encountered, their motivations, their interactions and conflicts with yr protagonist, the no-win political and military SNAFUs. Even the narrative voice is similar, and the persistent feeling of not being able to pin motivations down properly, even when you seem to be told what those motivations are. Basically, you've got Christian knights in lieu of samurai, and the prose is much improved at the micro level.

So I will need to dash about in horror for a bit and get some fresh air, which I've been very short of this past week. XD;

There're like 1300 comments on this thing

It's been a week!

Doctor Who S05E06: ( Basically, this contains pie charts. )

( My only excuse for this is that it all went toward my wordcount in 750words.com. )

( On Billie Piper. )

( On writing women. )

All this and I haven't actually said anything about the episode. Man, I think I can safely promise less wankery next week. XD;

I have been staying well away from it. XD I don't want to find out that

canis_m and I started it all! This is probably overstating Kristin's and my significance, but not overstating Aja's.

My comment to

xparrot's post (which is in the grand and beloved tradition of pointing out that people are using the same word to mean different things in an argument):

Actually, none of these types of Mary Sue bother me. They're too obvious, so I either look past them, or find them charming in the way of juvenilia. XD; The type of self-insert that bugs me is the one written by people (fan or pro) who "know better" - yanno, who're too old and sophisticated ~~and self-doubting~~ to even have retained the ability to imagine themselves into the setting as the beautiful violet-eyed plot-warping woobie heroine. Instead they imagine themselves in as a secondary character who is clearly stated to be Not Beautiful, but is obviously Very Intelligent, allowed to wander around in the background doing as she pleases, and (key!) is friends with the main characters but Definitely Not Crushing on anyone, and in fact Completely Unimpressed By And Resistant To Their Charisma, Really.

Examples will NOT be provided upon request. XDDD

Is all over my flist today! I did manage, even though bt was kvetchy and I had to trawl for rapidshare links. XD;

( Mmmmnnn )

( What actually is different )

( Speaking of Wendy Darling )

( Digression: a word on Susan Pevensie )

Done! Finally!

( Florence and the Machine, Bebel Gilberto, Owen Pallett )

* I'm sort of serious. XD; Perhaps this needs to be a coordinated effort? Someone else has to request it, after all.

** In particular re: subjects I find truly relatable despite never having articulated them (eg. the ontological muddle of being the avatar of an RPG/adventure video game vs. moving said avatar around according to the player's will vs. treating the character as an entirely separate entity for purposes of eg. perving -- surely PhD theses have been written about this -- Heartland is a natural extension of the premise of "He Poos Clouds" merely with a different controller interface, one conveniently transportable to concert stages, i.e. the narrative is not something that has happened, it is happening during Pallett's performance in the same way that the story of Link is happening whenever you boot up Twilight Princess), although that's less because Pallett is more articulate than because I'm... not all that bothered? I mean, do you ever worry about the possibility of your "muses" having a crisis of faith when they realize their life stories are flimsy excuses for dodgy authorial gay sex fantasy? And breaking the fourth wall to murder you in revenge? EVERY DAY, HUH?

In other words Pitchfork never actually grokked why "Final Fantasy" was an appropriate name for the project, although that's okay because I choose to believe Squeenix did.

Rice wine soup: my philosophy is that if you're going to make this stuff, make it tooth-rottingly sweet and eat a smaller portion. It turned out we didn't have flour for tangyuan, though, and it never occurred to me to buy them pre-made because we never do - what I care about is the osmanthus syrup anyway. XD; So I used, uhh, bubble tea tapioca.

Chocolate cookies: I forget what these were called in the book. They turned out to be the Danish butter biscuits that come in a tin, basically, only with cocoa - sort of smoky-tasting. Good basis for cookies'n'cream type desserts I'd imagine... next time, stick a chocolate chunk in the centre, sprinkle with crystallized sugar, and give them 12 minutes instead of 10.

***

Darker Than Black: in

lacewood's comments a few days back, discussing how DtB was one of the few anime series with a reasonably non-faily and nuanced portrayal of foreigners; Chinese characters in particular (going as far as knowing subversion, eg. sticking Kirihara in the cheongsam and buns instead of Alice). Then again, it had better be, considering it's an immigration/xenophobia parable. XD; Just not as overt as - say - District 9, due to viewers being kept in the dark for 20-plus episodes as to what anyone's motive or provenance is. But there aren't many non-gaijin Contractors in Tokyo, that much is evident.

Then there's the OAV ep, which... I don't know what to say. XD;;; BNF PROTIP: IF YOU MEET A MASKED, SUPERPOWERED ASSASSIN IN ACTUAL REAL LIFE MEATSPACE, DON'T BASE YOUR GARY STU ON HIM

Nnnh have to confer with T re whether we're watching Ryuusei no Gemini. Meanwhile Amber's chara settei made me so nostalgic for C.C. I've picked up Geass R2. That shiz qualified in shark jumping at the Olympic level from episode one but whatev, I really love seeing that rabid little weasel Lelouch get wound up like a ticky toy.

The City of Death: oshi brb writing 1,000,000 essays on Baudelarian flânerie/dandyism/the Chanel-Beauvoir garçonne WITH FOOTNOTES

Made a couscous (ground meat, onions, potato, pepper) but with quinoa instead of couscous, and blessed Nigella's chocolate-cherry cupcakes, but in little loaves. XD I gave them a couple extra minutes and a lengthy cooldown in our speedy convection oven, they were great. [EDIT -- note for future self: substituted self-raising flour, Double Fruit chunky jam] Quinoa is all right albeit fussy to wash; it's also bland to eat by itself, in a way that even couscous isn't.

(I always meant to mention this: at one point I was sat in Indigo reading a Phaedon coffee table book comprised of a Q&A with Charles Saatchi - he's a notorious recluse, so apparently at one point had loads of questions collected from media/the public/etc. and answered them all at a go, in order not to have to do it anymore. About 15% of the questions were variations on "Soooo what's it like being married to the perfect woman," and as I wended through the answers I very gradually realized that Charles Saatchi's wife was Nigella Lawson. For the record, his take is that he's abjectly grateful she deigned to take notice of him but that he has no tastebuds to appreciate with, due to a post-war English childhood.)

WHEN I HAVE TIME AND ENERGY:

* Nitsuh Abebe's rant on identity erasure in discourse re: Vampire Weekend and their fans (pt1 | pt2 | pt3), with my bonus semi-related rant on how I want Fandom and Music to be one conversation even though they're completely not, particularly when the conversation is about something like this; but the gap is unbridgeable out in (internet, even!) reality even though the synthesis operates in my head, because the 0.1% of ppl with requisite depth of redoubled interest/background/stake in the matter srsly have better shiz to do ~~like draw Scott Pilgrim~~

(Not as facetiously: in that 0.1% I include U GUYZ eg. Nat, Bing, Janni... Creed, Cis, Fiona, Elfie... this is not saying you have to be interested, it's vaguely wondering why we're not - enough - to post about it; or am I merely the only one for whom the OBSESSIVE COMPARTMENTALIZATION is imploding at least w/r/t intellectual inquiry/fanwank)

* Moar thoughts on Mary Sue, following my stealth contribution(tm) to that particular conversation - borrowing technique from the Music side this time not subject matter

( Donna )

( Martha, Redux )

( Jack )

( The Master, who is not a Companion I KNOW )

Mmn one more post or rather I'll keep adding to this one. XD

( Proper S4 ending plus specials, I have been cutting this DOWN XD srsly afraid of running a wordcount on these last few posts )

In conclusion re: Eleventh Doctor, redheaded Companion = I am onboard, never claimed not to be cheap. (Also I have Theories, but not to wave about in advance; just to watch and chortle to myself. XD)

( Martha )

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Entries tagged with meta

Hannibal meta master list (WIP)

Hannibal meta fanstuff

Additional thoughts on Sherlock S2E1

Your cosmic cube refuses to obey you because it's enjoying the Hostess Twinkies

30 days of fanfiction meme (day 15)

30 days of fanfiction meme (day 8)

I could probably write a white paper on this, sadly

X-Men: First Class

Evangelion jokes have surpassed entropy

Kink memes are the rapid prototyping methodology of fandom: DISCUSS

Vampires! In Venice!

The Mary Sue debate

New Doctor Who

Gigz (the return of table format)

Combination Chinese New Year and Valentine's Day

Douglas Adams you have trufax ruined my life as surely as Conan Doyle

Yesterday

Doctor's Companions; Part 3

Last of the watchlogs

Doctor's Companions; Part 2