Fandom Snowflake 2018 #8: A Broadside of Canon

In your own space, share a favorite piece of original canon (a TV episode, a song, a favorite interview, a book, a scene from a movie, etc) and explain why you love it so much.

Why shouldn't the collective noun for canon be a broadside? It tends to hit hard and its very likely to sink ships, so that seems like an appropriate word to use.

More seriously, though, this one is a lot easier for a fan whose canon is moving pictures, audio, or a visual art, because places like YouTube or Imgur make it ridiculously easy to find and embed the item you're looking for, even if the copyright laws frown on the creation of such things. (In the United States, at least, you can argue that an excerpt for critical or scholarly purposes qualifies as a fair use exception.) If your canon is textual, though, that can make it harder to just easily share your best bits and have it deliver the impact intended, because there's a lot more context that needs to be delivered to make text sing than other media that can deliver it in their own way. Not everyone hears characters in the same voice. And sometimes the performance of the textual material can be crystalizing, such that if you don't want to see it that way, you start using that as your reference of comparison.

So let's take a look at a piece of the Harry Potter canon that I quite like. Unsurprisingly, it's not actually any part of the narrative of Potter, but a story within the story, the Tale of the Three Brothers. A wiki with a reasonable summary of the story, if not the full text itself. This is supposedly one of the tales told to children, what appears to be a lesson about hubris and demanding what you want, only to have those same things come back to harm you later. It's almost a Monkey's Paw story, with the way the artifacts get used. Textually, it's pretty slight, almost a fable or nursery rhyme of a thing.

Of course, then you get to hear it.

The Three Brothers as an audiobook, for example.

Or then you get to see it.

The Three Brothers as a stage puppet show.

Most of us, though, get to see it when it comes to us in a movie form.

The Three Brothers as an animatic, narration Emma Watson.

For the intended audience, it's some worldbuilding in the context of learning about the truth of the artifacts that Harry has owned or is seeking. And it makes a nice story as a quiet breather in between scenes of intense action.

For the slightly older audience, those of us that might have had opportunity to take a class on works of the English language (or lucky enough to major in the Medium Aevum), this story might raise a ping or two. Where else might I have heard a story about three men meeting Death, getting promised a reward, and then having Death come to collect them because of their greed?

(Jo Rowling mentioned that this story is possibly based on the Pardoner's Tale herself, so you would be in the right ballpark to think this story might be a Whole Plot Reference, even if some of the details get changed.)

I like the animatic, and I think Emma Watson can narrate audiobooks forever, but I also really enjoy this as a microcosm of the nature of stories. Fanfiction is Older Than Dirt, given that we're fairly certain the Aeneid is fanwork of the Odyssey, and it shows up in the most interesting of places, even if the acknowledgment isn't direct, or someone isn't fully cognizant of the references they're making. Even here, in what was supposed to be a child's tale, in a small way, in a thing that is supposed to be an original story, there are bits that are from other stories woven in, little fan parts and pieces all the same.

And that's why I like canon and fanon and the way they interact and pull and push and reinvent themselves and talk to each other, officially and unofficially, over the generations and the places and the archives. Each person charts their path and travels it, and their footprints stay for others to see, and possibly walk themselves.

Amnesty Dump #1

Expect more than a few of these as I try to clean out a backlog.

Regardless of how many there are in your relationship, the emotional labor should not fall solely on one person to carry. If you do that, the relationship is in seriously bad trouble. This may become even more complex if one or more of your people is neurodivergent.

School time - how do you beat embarassment over dress code issues? First, have a closet of compatible clothes available for anyone to take and keep something that works and make it available without judgement. Even better? Write the dress code explicitly to ensure that students are allowed to express themselves and will not be shamed for their choices in public.

A strong argument for decentering love as the primary component of a relationship and replacing it with things like consent, information, and fluidity, which would allow for a much wider range of relationship possibilities, from the most casual hookups to the longest-term monogamies, to all fall within the realm of "good relationships". It definitely would be a shift away from the Western cultural insistence on Abrhamic-religious-sanctioned-relationships as the model of what a good relationship looks like.

The explosion of bad men behaving badly in media is... a situation that so so many newsrooms that had men in them scrambling to figure out how to report the story...by figuring out how to get the men to understand and then actually write good articles. Things like how to flirt with someone without crossing the line into creepiness. But also, trying, however desperately, to get across the magnitude of what's been happening to women on a daily basis so that those same men would actually get a clue and it would stick.

Because everyone deserves relationships that aren't abusive, and the tools to keep themselves safe if they are out of abusive relationships. And the space to be exactly who they are, even if that includes mental illnesses. (Tips on maintaining friendships while being a person with mental illness, in one opinon.)

It is entirely possible to believe in the ideals and basic tenets of a movement and to thoroguhly critique that movement for simplifying in the wrong ways, getting obsessed with celebrities, and otherwise engaging in behaviors that impede the effective goals of that movement.

A person at Google (when they wrote it) believed that diversity is useless and a political operation that left Google unable to operate fully because it did things like trying to make women into engineers. There's a really good reason why this manifesto is a horrible idea, not just on the merits, but on the amount of damage it does to the idea of Google as a company. There's also the part where the science itself isn't that great at all. On the more snarky front, applying the same logic to sex work to conclude that men are just worse at sex than women are.

Tolerance is not a moral precept, however, and so there's no reason why Google as a company, or the person that supervises the manifesto-writer, has to tolerate anything that person does or says when it's horrible. It's the same idea that any time you talk about people of color or representation, you're not actually talking about the quality of the work anymore, which is often used as a dodge of "but I don't want to have to consider anyone outside of my small bubble of people like me."

Google sacked the person responsible for the manifesto.

This kind of behavior is being inculcated in boys right from the beginning of their toy choices. And it continues well into their lives, where men, regardless of their orientation, are taught that things associated with women or femininity are weak and to be avoided.

We could use some extra examples of badass women, too, like Tinker Fett, the Bounty Hunter of Pixie Hollow.

A women's suit advertisement draws the eye with the use of strategically placed nude men.

The perfect headline - a bro-tastic company tried to hire a woman as the CEO, and ended up only having, well, men after all the possible women said no. A different bro gets schooled on the history of clothing.

Women-only screennings of the Wonder Woman movie for an Austin theater may have been disciminatory. Which is a useful application of "equal under the law", even if it does somewhat rankle of privileged people complaining they're not being invited to spaces for marginalized people.

Rebecca Solnit on masculinity and femininity and the myriad of ways that they trap people from being the person they would much rather be, even as they provide advantages that are desirable. Additionally, please remember that children are functional, autonomous beings that deserve to be treated in that way. And then, perhaps, enjoy that the idea of mansplaining has worked its way into several languages and view a refutation that biology somehow causes manspreading.

Trying to do the work of social justice from a privileged position means you will screw up, because you lack the experience to do it right, and because you're human. Do it anyway. Spare a thought and a prayer for those who are killed needlessly at the hands of police, and work to make it so that they don't have more deaths to mourn. Understand there's an entire framework in place to lower you into it gently because others suffer the consequences when you complain about having to learn it.

Justin Bieber made a song that he doesn't know the words to, in a language he appropriated, and it became wildly popular. Which has the words "problematic" written alllllll over it.

Josh Whedon is even more of the hypocrite that he's turned out to be to the fandom, according to an ex-wife. (Whedon claims there are inaccuracies and refuses to commment further.)

There's been a change in a show that I like - and people who aren't used to having to deal with a story with a person who isn't them as the main character are terrified of what it might mean. Also, Does the Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton exist in the Marvel Universe? Signs suggest a definite maybe.

The fighing going back and forth about making fandom space safer for the younglings through censorship is touching a deeper nerve that many of those same younglings recognize yet. Because many of the older fen, and any librarian worth the ALA Code of Ethics will tell you, censorship of the young is a useless endeavour and encourages both seeking the forbidden and treating any scrap of something on the subject as if it were true because it required significant effort to obtain. (Not to mention that most censorship schemes are easily foiled by the inventive youth and the people who support them anyway.) I have no problems with younger fen wanting to carve out a space for themselves to squee without seeing the presence of older people around, but they don't get to insist their rules apply everywhere, especially not to the people who spent the same time of their life specifically looking for things that were forbidden to them so they could build their true identity. On the prime importance of fanon, and the ways that it can strive, influence, and provide alternate pathways through the same material, even if there's an insistence that there is a true pathway through and all others are wrong. If you ask the fans, though, they're pretty divided on what the copmonent parts of fanworks actually are.

Sock Dreams has stripes in your preferred pride.

Interviews with people at the forefront of fat positivity, along with the ease in which diet companies and marketers of deadly drugs corrupted the FDA and the legislature into making being fat a health crisis. How "clean eating" gathered a following, even after it became apparent that following those guidelines could do real harm to a person.

Alternate advice: Eat food. Stuff you like. As much as you want, and trust that your body will tell you what it wants.

Excuse me for a moment while I swear. What the fuck, San Francisco paper, for juxtaposing an article about a bodybuilder who chose to gain weight and feel better about themselves with images upon images of weight-loss applications? Do you not understand the words coming out of your own writers? Or, more likely, did someone say "Eh. Weight-loss, weight-gain, same difference, run them together" and then scratched their head when people told them what kind of assholes they were for doing it?

The District of Columbia library system hid some books routinely on the banned or challenged list in the area and held a contest for the people of the area to find them. Speaking of books, notice the trend in Young Adult to write sex-positive stories? That's because young adults are (mostly) being taught, or teaching themselves, about sex in sex-positive ways. Some people are concerned that the younglings have no method for getting good sex ed, even though the younglings are pretty good at it themselves (or at least equally as good as they were when it had to be transmitted by magazines).

Sometimes being thoroughly aggravated about what sucks in your life is the thing you need to be able to be okay with what sucks in your life. And sometimes, working through the problem of entropy involves admitting to yourself that there are things you want to stay permanent, even if nothing actually does. A Pratchettian lie.

The battery theory of disability, which might ring truer to people in the electronic age, Accessibility means a lot more than just screen readers - it covers motor control issues, contrasts, distractions, and other things that will aggravate or make it impossible for a person with a disability to use a website.

Making mathematical and creative designs in the snow, one shoeprint at a time. There are some beach designs, too, and then a fantastic snow dragon.

Speaking of, is it too much to ask for the dragon to get the girl in the end? Or for more lizards to look like dragons? And also, dragons that will ensure that holidays are on display in their proper season? Because some of your Internet friends are probably a pile of dragons in a trenchcoat.

The appeal and permanence of wings in stories.

A cat in a UFO-catcher machine - can you spot it before the claw tries to catch it?

Spirited Away takes places over the course of days - what mostly changes is Chihiro's understanding of what to see and what not to see. I like that interpretation a lot.

Various London stations not currently in use, due to line shifts, new stations, and the like.

Burlesque in and using a wheelchair, because being super-bendy is a thing that needs consideration when wanting to do dance. And also because burlesque is often about giving two happy middle fingers to societal conceptions of beauty and sexiness. The pictures look wonderful, so I hope the show is/was the same. A different story about EDS and the panic it can cause if someone's not aware and pulls something out of joint.

Medicine has a problem with women, choosing to assume wrong things about their ailments long before actually testing them for their health, assuming they're persistent enough to keep trying. Because more than a few people want all illnesses to act like a broken leg in a Hollywood movie, but also because medicine as a practice has been excluding women and assuming results in studies of men apply to women for decades.

Doctors that provide pregnancy termination have quite a bit to say about their practice, and a lot of it relates to their desire for care, compassion, and a medically sound procedure to be available to those who undertake it.

I would very much like for choosing a GP in the US to be capturable as a procedure, like choosing a GP in the UK can be.

Juxtaposition of people not seen as royals in the society, clothing that makes them look imperial, and the palace of the Sun King, which makes it all come together in great pictures. Headpieces and makeup to transform ordinary humans into fantastical visitors. Maui cosplay with great attention to detail and the body type of the character in the movie.

The archives of Galaxy Magazine, a science fiction magazine from the 1950s. Contains some rather interesting stories. Illustrations of Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children by Rovina Cai.

Women belong as part of the story of music, not as people to be pushed off to the side, but as pioneers and power players. So take a listen to 150 of the greatrest albums made by women.

The choreographers for Atomic Blonde make the stunt fighter fight like a woman against men, and it looks great. Superhero movies could stand to cast people off the models in the comic books (except possibly the newest Ms. Marvel). All Hail Robin McKinley, pioneer of YA with women as protagonists. All Hail Gillian Anderson, who does so much neat stuff and doesn't take bullshit.

Plants move roots in the direction of running water, if the sound of running water is close enough for them to understand it, a colony of bats took up residence in a plastic triceratops, other animals taking up cozy residence in mugs and glasses, the resilience of trees, bonsai trees made of origami cranes, a wheel organizing teas by their flavor profiles, sea jelly-like sculpture made of plates upon dripped glass, portraiture in fruit and vegetable,

In technology, the practice of screwdriving, where one looks for Bluetooth-capable adult toys and sees whether or not they can be hijacked or taken over. Also, there's been a lot of research into a hormonal contraceptive for men, and yet, nothing seems to have made it out into the market. Instead, people want to market ideas like a dangerous alternative to condoms that believes taping the penis shut is sufficient protection against pregnancy.

Credit card breaches continue to place the country, frustrating consumers and annoying security people who are waiting for merchants to implement even the barest minimum of security measures.

Dream Daddy is a game about dating dads, which might explain why it's so popular - it's about dating dads. With all the complexities that come along with that. Transport for London changed their announcements to use gender-neutral language.

The Phrontistery, a place where the odd and interesting of language becomes prominent.

A Channel 4 reality show purported to have people working together close to nature, and instead became a documentary on all the ways toxic masculinity and other gendered ideas get in the way of working together.

3D-printing a spare key from a good picture to open a mailbox, rebinding an old book to preserve it from falling apart due to a 19th century attempt at rebinding, the troutslap of IRC extended to the physical realm, the ephemera present in the fansubs of the VHS era (and others, too), trying to get Twitter to take down hateful tweets by spraypainting them outside their office, a reminder about password strength, where doing things that are easy for humans to remember makes it harder for computers to guess, a testament to the skills of a costume deisgner, along with the work of the curators at a museum exhibition of clothes, preserving songs recordede in the 78 RPM format and releasing the results online for free, authors telling stories on Twitter, jars meant to entice and then fatten up doormice so they could be consumed, a 40th anniversary message to Voyager spacecraft, as it continues to pass out of the Sol system into the space beyond, a plan from a Netflix founder to sell you a pass to see all the movies you can in the theater for $10 a month, reasons why not to post things with barcodes online, an infographic about the languages of the world and their speakers, a way to get a Roomba to stop mapping your house (although you naturally lose convenience features if you do this), product labels that add something extra to be memorable, and maps of many, many different types, shapes, and distortions.

Last for tonight, commentators having fun while a rabbit is chased off a football field. A saving throw on why a dad is being asked why he wears a dog collar. Poems by a Roman that would not be out of place in a comment section.What would have happened if Ariel hadn't taken Ursula's deal. And the complications that come from trying to make a bilingual sticker with swears.

Also, A simple timer to help someone understand whether men are talking too much in a conversation where they shouldn't be.