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silveradeptChallenge #8 asks us to show our work about why we love the things we do
As is the usual case, I'm blanking on things to talk about. I still think the Machete Order is a useful way of watching both Star Wars and RWBY (4, 5, 2, 3, 6 and beyond, 1 wherever you feel like it,) but it's not something to devote an entire post to.
Some of it is that I've been in the era of fandom where there's still a certain amount of reluctance to engage fully, lest you attract the attention of an antagonist(s), either IRL ("what kind of 'man' gets so invested in this girly shit?") or online ("I cannot believe you ship this morally reprehensible ship / are a fan of the works of this entirely cast out author.") Some of it is because I tend to invest in plot, setting, and worldbuild more than get invested in a specific pairing or character. It makes some amount of my writing easier when I can concentrate elements of a character or setting and then use them when putting them in new situations, canon-compliant or no. Or focus hard on an aspect of the world that I want to explore and figure out who would be best to bring along for the ride.
Sometimes I want to see the other story, the one happening in the background while the foreground stays with the chosen protagonist, or what happens after the adventure is concluded. What goes on with Yui Hongo and her seven warriors, who do not intend to be her friends or romantic partners, but want to use her as the ultimate trump card in a war? Can Yui and Miaka salvage their friendship after their time in the book? What happens if we actually follow all of the implications of the world out for the Dragonriders of Pern, instead of resolutely following dragonriders, Harpers, and those sympathetic to their positions? How many other storytellers have traversed the dream world of Epistory, and what was their journey like? Did Hitomi Kanzaki retain some of that esper skill she had magnified on Gaea when she came back to Earth? All stories leave questions, and some of those questions are things I want there to be stories of.
Some of the things that make a thing resonate with me are intensely personal, and I'm not sure they'll translate to someone who doesn't have compatible experiences. Given that some of those experiences are profoundly negative, I wouldn't wish it on anyone to have things happen to them so they can understand better. Nimona resonates hard for anyone who was rejected or transformed into a monster for being their authentic selves, but that there are so many people that it resonates with is a condemnation of the society around us for creating all these people who feel like monsters and have to be defensive about everything or they'll get hurt again. I don't want to write the one that's about how I fully understand what Ruby did in Volume 9, and I get what Jaune was like in Volume 9 as well, because I've also put those kinds of pressures on myself and accepted the framing of others as valid, even though it was hurting me to do so, and I was not doing well with the failure to live up to impossible standards. These kinds of things are supposed to get people to watch a series, not to worry for their mental health from watching it.
And sometimes, I think my manifestos actually come out as pocket summaries, because I don't always retain all the details I'd need to turn it into something longer-form. Steven Universe is unabashedly a show about feelings, and what people do as a result of those feelings, but the feelings that you bring to the show will influence how you read the feelings of all the others in the show. Over the Garden Wall will frighten you, not because of jump scares or gore, but because you can see the pathways and decisions that each character makes along the way that put them or others in frightening and terrifying situations, whether from ignorance, prejudice, self-sacrifice, or self-preservation. Or the way that so many of the cast are deceived into becoming a monster or behaving monstrously in hopes that some positive result will happen from their (supposedly) temporary monstrosity. The Ninth through Twelfth Doctors have companion arcs that are Icarean, the consequences that happen to someone who forgets the that being close to a god does not always mean he will be there to save them. Or they forget that when goods grant boons, they are not always beneficial to the humans that receive them.
The original Trigun is not a comedy, but you won't know that until after it's made the turn away from comedy. Shakespeare's funniest scenes are the ones that precede and succeed the tragic ones. Into the Woods is a story about generational violence and how sometimes you've been chosen to atone for the bad deeds of those who came before you, even though it has a lot of genuinely funny things in it as well. She-Ra and the Princesses of Power runs right up to the line of "there's nobody to save you from your own worst self." (RWBY goes "hold my Strawberry Sunrise" about that, even as it is also a critique of putting the expectations of the Chosen One onto someone(s) who is/are definitely not mature enough to shoulder them.)
The three Tortall protagonists I've looked at so far are an interesting triple in how they react to hostile situations: Alanna blends in and then catches you by surprise, Daine flees until she has no more escape routes, and then she eviscerates you with all the strength of a cornered animal, Keladry roots herself and refuses to budge. (Which I think makes her the most dangerous of the three. Alana and Daine both have magic that makes them deadly, but Kel will keep at you until you kill her or die, and you're more likely to die than she is.)
So it's not as much "deliver a manifesto" as much as it is "Which one would you like to hear?" Or, perhaps more accurately, "How can I help you develop yours?" Because my professional training is reflective, to help the person making the inquiry succeed at finding a credible resource they are looking for, or a specific resource even if they know what they'll get from it is slanted and skewed. It's about listening to you talk about the blorbos from your shows and then seeing if I can supply you with more shows to get more blorbos, or more adventures of your blorbo. Most of how people get to know me, I suspect, is through the comment sections of their journals, or through replies, and being in shared spaces, rather than because I have prodigious amounts of output that get shared around the Internet far and wide, drawing a throng that flocks to me to listen and converse about the topics of my choosing.
(And yet, someone that I respect highly told me recently that she respects my opinion. I made the Surprised Pikachu face and checked that she was sure.)
But if I do have to talk about something, maybe it can be this: I like that we have scads of digital interactive fiction, from IF using a Z-Machine or interpreter, through Twine and visual novels (and that apparently, Ren'Py can do all kinds of things), and the applications that we can get that are essentially interactive fiction where the dice rolling all happens in secret, but could we bring back the gamebook format into print? Chooseco isn't necessarily the only game in town these days, but there used to be an entire explosion of interactive fiction with RPG elements while I was much younger, and while I could tell that some of those adventures were going to be very tough to complete as intended, with the dice rolling and the keeping track of one's vital statistics, it was nice to have them as passages and puzzles and trying to do things. (Even if some adventures really did hinge on a coin flip as to whether you were going to win or fail at the last step.) They were pulpy and sword-and-or-sorcery, and they probably don't hold up all that great. Yes, I know that Project Aon exists, if I just need a specific kind of fix, but there were so many other types of it at the time, and they all just kind of vanished, and because they were pretty well pulp adventurers with a small amount of RPG mechanics, they haven't been preserved nearly as much, as best as I can tell. So, for another generation of kids (and grownups) who might want some solo adventures while they're away from their tabletop and who might have people telling them not to use their electronics so much, maybe we can bring back the format and showcase the many different ways that someone can do fantasy worlds. And possibly slightly more forgiving adventures, as I recall an awful lot of them end in the same way that a lot of Chooseco books do, with an abrupt death. These ones have that abrupt death based on whether or not you had good RNG as much as whether you made good choices. These gamebooks were being made in the era of Sierra games and the H2G2 IF that were specifically all about ending your adventure if you forgot to find the one secret object that only glints on Thursdays. We've had many more years of knowing how to craft a better adventure, so why not do it?
Seems like we all spend a considerable chunk of our fandom time trying to convince loved ones, friends and total randos alike that our blorbo is in fact the best. This can take shape of anything from watch parties/read-alongs to capslock squee in DMs to relentless gifsets to PhD dissertations.
One of my favourite forms of this is the "fandom manifesto" or "fandom primer," wherein one writes up an outline of what their blorbo is, why it's great, and links to where one can find more (with more or less detail and formality, depending on the venue).
Challenge #8
In your own space, write a promo, manifesto or primer for a beloved character, relationship or fandom.
As is the usual case, I'm blanking on things to talk about. I still think the Machete Order is a useful way of watching both Star Wars and RWBY (4, 5, 2, 3, 6 and beyond, 1 wherever you feel like it,) but it's not something to devote an entire post to.
Some of it is that I've been in the era of fandom where there's still a certain amount of reluctance to engage fully, lest you attract the attention of an antagonist(s), either IRL ("what kind of 'man' gets so invested in this girly shit?") or online ("I cannot believe you ship this morally reprehensible ship / are a fan of the works of this entirely cast out author.") Some of it is because I tend to invest in plot, setting, and worldbuild more than get invested in a specific pairing or character. It makes some amount of my writing easier when I can concentrate elements of a character or setting and then use them when putting them in new situations, canon-compliant or no. Or focus hard on an aspect of the world that I want to explore and figure out who would be best to bring along for the ride.
Sometimes I want to see the other story, the one happening in the background while the foreground stays with the chosen protagonist, or what happens after the adventure is concluded. What goes on with Yui Hongo and her seven warriors, who do not intend to be her friends or romantic partners, but want to use her as the ultimate trump card in a war? Can Yui and Miaka salvage their friendship after their time in the book? What happens if we actually follow all of the implications of the world out for the Dragonriders of Pern, instead of resolutely following dragonriders, Harpers, and those sympathetic to their positions? How many other storytellers have traversed the dream world of Epistory, and what was their journey like? Did Hitomi Kanzaki retain some of that esper skill she had magnified on Gaea when she came back to Earth? All stories leave questions, and some of those questions are things I want there to be stories of.
Some of the things that make a thing resonate with me are intensely personal, and I'm not sure they'll translate to someone who doesn't have compatible experiences. Given that some of those experiences are profoundly negative, I wouldn't wish it on anyone to have things happen to them so they can understand better. Nimona resonates hard for anyone who was rejected or transformed into a monster for being their authentic selves, but that there are so many people that it resonates with is a condemnation of the society around us for creating all these people who feel like monsters and have to be defensive about everything or they'll get hurt again. I don't want to write the one that's about how I fully understand what Ruby did in Volume 9, and I get what Jaune was like in Volume 9 as well, because I've also put those kinds of pressures on myself and accepted the framing of others as valid, even though it was hurting me to do so, and I was not doing well with the failure to live up to impossible standards. These kinds of things are supposed to get people to watch a series, not to worry for their mental health from watching it.
And sometimes, I think my manifestos actually come out as pocket summaries, because I don't always retain all the details I'd need to turn it into something longer-form. Steven Universe is unabashedly a show about feelings, and what people do as a result of those feelings, but the feelings that you bring to the show will influence how you read the feelings of all the others in the show. Over the Garden Wall will frighten you, not because of jump scares or gore, but because you can see the pathways and decisions that each character makes along the way that put them or others in frightening and terrifying situations, whether from ignorance, prejudice, self-sacrifice, or self-preservation. Or the way that so many of the cast are deceived into becoming a monster or behaving monstrously in hopes that some positive result will happen from their (supposedly) temporary monstrosity. The Ninth through Twelfth Doctors have companion arcs that are Icarean, the consequences that happen to someone who forgets the that being close to a god does not always mean he will be there to save them. Or they forget that when goods grant boons, they are not always beneficial to the humans that receive them.
The original Trigun is not a comedy, but you won't know that until after it's made the turn away from comedy. Shakespeare's funniest scenes are the ones that precede and succeed the tragic ones. Into the Woods is a story about generational violence and how sometimes you've been chosen to atone for the bad deeds of those who came before you, even though it has a lot of genuinely funny things in it as well. She-Ra and the Princesses of Power runs right up to the line of "there's nobody to save you from your own worst self." (RWBY goes "hold my Strawberry Sunrise" about that, even as it is also a critique of putting the expectations of the Chosen One onto someone(s) who is/are definitely not mature enough to shoulder them.)
The three Tortall protagonists I've looked at so far are an interesting triple in how they react to hostile situations: Alanna blends in and then catches you by surprise, Daine flees until she has no more escape routes, and then she eviscerates you with all the strength of a cornered animal, Keladry roots herself and refuses to budge. (Which I think makes her the most dangerous of the three. Alana and Daine both have magic that makes them deadly, but Kel will keep at you until you kill her or die, and you're more likely to die than she is.)
So it's not as much "deliver a manifesto" as much as it is "Which one would you like to hear?" Or, perhaps more accurately, "How can I help you develop yours?" Because my professional training is reflective, to help the person making the inquiry succeed at finding a credible resource they are looking for, or a specific resource even if they know what they'll get from it is slanted and skewed. It's about listening to you talk about the blorbos from your shows and then seeing if I can supply you with more shows to get more blorbos, or more adventures of your blorbo. Most of how people get to know me, I suspect, is through the comment sections of their journals, or through replies, and being in shared spaces, rather than because I have prodigious amounts of output that get shared around the Internet far and wide, drawing a throng that flocks to me to listen and converse about the topics of my choosing.
(And yet, someone that I respect highly told me recently that she respects my opinion. I made the Surprised Pikachu face and checked that she was sure.)
But if I do have to talk about something, maybe it can be this: I like that we have scads of digital interactive fiction, from IF using a Z-Machine or interpreter, through Twine and visual novels (and that apparently, Ren'Py can do all kinds of things), and the applications that we can get that are essentially interactive fiction where the dice rolling all happens in secret, but could we bring back the gamebook format into print? Chooseco isn't necessarily the only game in town these days, but there used to be an entire explosion of interactive fiction with RPG elements while I was much younger, and while I could tell that some of those adventures were going to be very tough to complete as intended, with the dice rolling and the keeping track of one's vital statistics, it was nice to have them as passages and puzzles and trying to do things. (Even if some adventures really did hinge on a coin flip as to whether you were going to win or fail at the last step.) They were pulpy and sword-and-or-sorcery, and they probably don't hold up all that great. Yes, I know that Project Aon exists, if I just need a specific kind of fix, but there were so many other types of it at the time, and they all just kind of vanished, and because they were pretty well pulp adventurers with a small amount of RPG mechanics, they haven't been preserved nearly as much, as best as I can tell. So, for another generation of kids (and grownups) who might want some solo adventures while they're away from their tabletop and who might have people telling them not to use their electronics so much, maybe we can bring back the format and showcase the many different ways that someone can do fantasy worlds. And possibly slightly more forgiving adventures, as I recall an awful lot of them end in the same way that a lot of Chooseco books do, with an abrupt death. These ones have that abrupt death based on whether or not you had good RNG as much as whether you made good choices. These gamebooks were being made in the era of Sierra games and the H2G2 IF that were specifically all about ending your adventure if you forgot to find the one secret object that only glints on Thursdays. We've had many more years of knowing how to craft a better adventure, so why not do it?
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Date: 2025-01-21 04:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-21 06:22 am (UTC)