#basically dave fucks up: the subplot

[cringefail-clown]

i think my favourite tidbit ive written so far for cam cafe au is the Hal's Real Name debacle, bc in it hal is a name he got for himself when he first watched 2001 space odyssey at 13. jake first catches a wind of it when dave calls hal "dee", but hals like nah im not telling you it requires lvl 69 friendship and youre at best on lvl 3 so get fucked noob. everyone at the cafe and all jake and hals friends know but everyone decides to fuck with jake and not tell him. its a constant subplot through the story until its finally revealed at the end and i can tell you, yall aint ready for what the name is

#cam cafe au #hal strider #jake english #when the idea first came to my mind i fr laughed out loud #basically dave fucks up: the subplot #im not telling tho i wanna write that fic so yall have to wait #also lil sweet detail i wrote out its that only dave has the privilege to call hal his name #so dave uses a shortened “dee” for him #idunno it just makes me warm inside he loves his big bro

[antialiasis]

I totally failed to parse that the Morphic chapter was for April fools and read it thinking, "well, this is certainly a different take on the original concept, I'm not 100% sold yet but I trust Butterfree has a plan and it's gonna be cool as hell"

Ahahaha. I did write it in a reasonably legit way! There’s no intentional bad writing (just rushedness because I wrote the thing in two frenzied sessions over the last three days of March). I legitimately enjoyed several things about it, including the presence of significant whump, the delicious layers of all-new kinds of Dave torment, Jack and Gabriel being friends and dealing with suddenly being changed (and writing in little hints in the opening scenes that they aren’t morphs yet, and fun references to the original fic). I am almost tempted to continue this AU for the heck of it (okay, mainly because I am cackling with glee at the thought of the absolute mental rollercoaster Rocket Dave is about to go through trying to evade Rocket assassins with no actual plan of any kind beyond the intolerable pent-up guilt that drove him to drunkenly free eight Pokémorph children that should be none of his fucking business).

However! Even beyond the new premise being based on 2006-era Pokémorph fanfic clichés, this isn’t how I’d ever actually approach a rewrite for a story. In the end, as much rewriting as I’ve done, I’m really quite conservative with them! I’ve seen a lot of authors do rewrites that just fully revamp the entire premise of their stories, or take some entirely different approach to it, but if I’ve got a story that I like enough to rewrite it, it’s going to be fundamentally the same story. Things might be fleshed out, rearranged, paced differently, specifics tweaked, subplots excised or entirely redone, but the storyline will be basically the same. If it’s not, I would feel weird calling it a rewrite. That’s not an indictment of anyone who does liberally swap out the entire plot and still call it a rewrite (I know and support many writers who do!), but for me personally, if I’m going to write an entirely different story that merely shares some commonalities with it, I’m going to call it by a different name and use words like “adapted from” or “inspired by” rather than “rewrite”.

Kind of like with Sutoraiku High versus Scyther’s Story/The Fall of a Leader - you could technically call it a rewrite (ignoring that it’s a video game), but I would never use that word myself because even though it’s significantly inspired by the Scyther spinoffs and presenting a version of their characters and some of their events, it’s decidedly not as a whole telling the same story. One is not a substitute for the other. I kind of need it to be that in order to feel right calling it a rewrite. Just my own idiosyncrasies, but that’s what I mean when I talk about rewriting something.

#morphic #writing #ramble #themagnificentmags

[thespaceplayer]

The 5th Player Theory: How the Omega Kids will fix the Candy Timeline (Homestuck^2)

Okay, so let’s get the base of this theory clear. That would be this part here from the latest upd8:

If this was just some kid I wouldn’t think much of it, but since it’s John’s kid, I think it’s foreshadowing that Harry is a Breath player.

I don’t think he’ll be an Heir of Breath, but instead of mix of Roxy’s and John’s Godtiers. 

So what does this mean?

I think it’s very likely the kid’s classpects are:

Harry: Rogue of Breath

Tavros: Page of Life (based on his personality and namesake)

Vrissy: Thief of Light (just like Vriska)

Yiffany (*shutters*): Seer of Space (since we have an abundance of Light players)

Now that that’s established, here’s the theory:

The candy timeline will continue to get more and more incoherent, until it is completely unviable. The Omega Kids will play Sburb as a way to restart the timeline. However, in order to have a successful Sburb session, you need a Space player and a Time player - who is clearly absent. 

This leads to 3 possible outcomes:

The established four play a void session of Sburb.

They play a 5-player session of Sburb to include a time player.

They play a 4-player session of Sburb and it includes a time player instead of Vrissy.

So let’s break down how these scenarios would play out and why it’s Vrissy that’s excluded.

1. This is a straight forwarded outcome that will lead to a ton of shit that it’s too early to predict.

2. It’s a fact that Vrissy and Vriska are not team players. They tend to easily get jealous, possessive, arrogant, and narcissistic. I don’t think Vriska will stay with the group - she’ll either join the adult’s plot or doing her own thing. My theory is that Vrissy will betray or sabotage the Omega Kids for her own selfish reasons and, in this outcome, become a true antagonist or villain. Basically, it’ll be a friend-turned-foe plot and turning Sburb into a game of 4 v 1. Maybe something will happen with Yiffany (*shutters*) or Vriska, or some other Candy bullshit shenanigans will push her over the edge. Personally, I think she’ll want to outshine Vriska by going farther than she ever did.

3. In this scenario, I think Vriska will find a way to the Meat Timeline and take Vrissy with her. They’ll go have a little subplot about fucking things up, and Vriska will plot to get Meenah back. Before this, the Omega Kids will somehow meet a Time player and she’ll join their group. 

TLDR: Vrissy is not a team player and any small session with her will not work out. Her classpect is also not vital to the session.

-

So then who will be the 5th player? 

Well, it’s either someone we already know, a clone of someone we know, or someone entirely new.

It’s likely not an ecto kid, as they do not share the same aspect as their parent (Beta vs Alpha Kids).

So from the people we know, the only relevant Time players are Dave and Aradia. Every 4-player session of Sburb consisted of two boys (one “blond” and one burnet), and two girls (same thing). If Yiffany (*shutters*) is a burnette, then the “5th player” is extremely likely. If not, then the possible 5th player will be a burnette herself. 

It’s also unlikely to be Dave’s child, as he is now a robot who has no known children. 

My top guess is either a clone of Aradia or Aradia herself. I think she’s in this timeline for a reason, but she’s a passive observer and I’m not sure if she could play again as she’s already a Godtier. 

However, she’s a Maid of Time - she heals timelines. It fits so perfectly that I refuse to believe she won’t play a part in restoring Candy.

Unless we get another secret child or an entirely new character, I think 5th player will be a Maid of Time and a clone of Aradia.

#Homestuck #Homestuck^2 #Homestuck 2 #hs^2 #Omega Kids #harry anderson egbert #yiffany longstocking lalonde harley #Vriska Serket #vrissy maryam lalonde #Tavros Crocker #upd8 #aradia medigo

[kob131]

https://magicalhunterpaladin.tumblr.com/post/187569344123/34choco-i-really-fuckin-hate-posts-like-ugh\

The show also treats faunus traits like jokes (“lol Blake likes tuna and laser pointers and hates dogs and Sun likes bananas”),

A. The laser pointer wasn’t liked by Blake, she was annoyed.

B. Sun eats a bananna once. And he throws the peel in the guy’s face so it’s more likely that a banana was the better kind of fruit.

And C. That’s the show, not other characters.

described Menagerie as a dangerous place to live but showed it to be a tropical paradise with no Grimm whatsoever,

Do I need to bring up Australia again?

“had Blake live in a mansion and just straight up forget about covering up her ears when she left Menagerie”

Said ‘mansion’ never being said that Blake lived there and is on Meangrie so why would there be discrimination?

You mean when she was standing with the Fanaus and talking alongside them s if she was one of them?

“and most egregious of all hasn’t even attempted to explain how widespread systemic racism can even exist in a world plagued by monsters that are attracted to strong negative emotion.”

... Because people re people, they’re irrational and do stupid shit. You shouldn’t need to explain basic human attributes.

The portrayal of racism in RWBY is spotty as fuck.

Only if you ignore and misinterpet facts.

More than that, they need to stop attempting to tackle racism at all because the writers are a bunch of white people-

Miles Luna is part mexician. And considering your Trump hysteria, you would consider Mexcians to be the most oppressed people in America.

Not to mention that you try to pin this shit on Miles and Kerry when h biggest backfires in the subplot happened under MONTY, an ASIAN MAN. So nice try, you racist.

“Just be nice to your oppressors and be willing to die for them and eventually they’ll give you rights. If you respond to violent oppression with violence of your own you’re evil and deserve to be oppressed. :)))”

Yeah uh-

The show kind of has a general idea of ‘be better than the bad guys’ and being better than the racists has been shown to work better than being shitty (look at Daryl Daves.) So yeah, no shit.

Then again, you define your existence around hating RWBY and being bigoted so why am I surprised?

#magicalhunterpaladin

[naazaif327]

Klaus’s whole subplot with Dave is so goddamn stupid and cliched. I was totally fine with Klaus not having a partner or a romance even though all the straight characters got one. We the audience knew he was gay because he’s flamboyant, and he wore a skirt, and he wears a towel around his chest like a woman covering her breasts. Its like an amalgamation of all the ways the straight writers wanted to make clear to the straight audience that “this is your gay-male character. He’s here mainly for comic relief”. We didn’t need a romance for everyone to understand. Honestly, for the first 5 episodes, I was kind of happy he didn’t have a boyfriend. Gay characters are almost always assigned to romance plots. I want to see a gay superhero movie, or a gay spy thriller, or a gay scifi horror film, instead of the ten thousandth tragic romance.

But I guess the writers really wanted to put one in super quick for that sweet, sweet LGBT demographic to tune in for, but still fast enough that it won’t turn off the homophobes. I kid you not, the whole romance and tragedy happens over three episodes in the middle, and is basically stuck in there for no reason. Hell, the guy playing “Dave”, Klaus’s love interest is only credited for those three eps.

 It would be fine if it was written well, or maybe by gay writers, but this was clearly written by a straight writers room that wanted to put “diversity” into their script but were uncomfortable actually writing gay scenes. Like many gay storylines in TV shows (looking at you, Riverdale), the romance happens super quickly with almost no dialogue, but we’re supposed to be invested for some reason. Klaus gets suddenly transported back to the Vietnam war for a year, he meets Dave, Dave tells Klaus his name, they dance and get drunk at a bar, they make out, and then Dave dies. We literally don’t hear them have even one conversation, but we have to live out his slow death scene (twice because Klaus hallucinates it again at a club) and Klaus’s grieving for such a long time, because you can only have sad, tragic gay characters who’s fleeting happiness must be destroyed.

tbh, if it was written better I probably would’ve been more okay with it, but its all done so badly. At one point, we literally get the lines:

“What was your girlfriend’s name?”

“His name was Dave”

Like, what? First of all, Diego is asking him that question. Diego, his brother, who grew up with him and definitely knows he’s gay. Literally earlier in that scene, Diego is tying Klaus up and tells him not to get a boner. Second of all, seriously? Come on, that’s the most cliche gay/coming out line in the book. Its how Ellen came out on her TV show twenty years ago. The whole show is littered with cliched and recycled dialogue, but this one was definitely the most annoying. The writing is also bad because the whole year in Vietnam makes no sense. Firstly, Klaus is an addict, and whenever he gets sober, he has constant horrifying visions of the dead. But the whole year he’s in Vietnam, he never does drugs or have any withdrawals. I don’t know much about addiction, but I’m pretty sure “finding a boyfriend will immediately make you sober without withdrawals” is not a good message.

 Also, it doesn’t narratively serve a purpose. Klaus is already fucked up and slightly estranged from his siblings. Sticking him the past for a year just fucks him up even more, and makes him even more estranged from his siblings, which is pointless. Maybe it would work if they helped him through his grief and it brought them together, but instead he ends up consoling Luther right after. Diego sort of talks to him about it, but that whole conversation is erased when time rewinds. And Dave just gets nothing. Being a gay man in the 50s and 60s was tough. You were likely sexually, emotionally, and romantically repressed, and you probably had problems with your masculinity, especially if you joined the army like Dave did. Imagine meeting a futuristic young man from the future who was completely free of shame and full of life, in the middle of a war, and falling in love. There’s a lot of interesting story, but Dave gets in maybe two lines before dying, and one of those lines is introducing himself. 

It was just so useless and painful and there was no reason for it. Like, if it somehow helped the plot along it might’ve been less awful, but there was absolutely no reason for it. It didn’t even change Klaus in any kind of meaningful way. 

#the umbrella academy #umbrella academy #klaus #klaus hargreeves

[momestuck]

Epilogues: Candy, chapters 6-13 [the rest of Epilogue 2]

I’m told that there are 40 chapters, and a postscript, in Candy - and also that it’s split into 8 individual ‘epilogues’ within that, of varying length. ‘Epilogue 2′ began with chapter 4, featuring Rose and Kanaya. So I kind of cut it off in exactly the wrong place. Oops!

Anyway I’m going to split these up by Epilogue section from now on. This one covers the rest of Epilogue 2, which mostly concerns shipping, and processing of feelings.

Here are the irons in the fire at the outset of chapter 6:

Gamzee is back! he claims to be setting out on a ‘redemption arc’

Terezi is in space somewhere looking for Vriska, but set to return at some point, and not all that happy that Gamzee’s back

Dirk has perceived some bad news. And briefly spoken about it with Jane, though without explaining anything.

But that’s all Epilogue 1 stuff - old hat!

Rose has suddenly recovered from her illness, and is patching things up with Kanaya

Jade has attempted to push Dave and Karkat to admit they’re into each other, but really just made things worse

Jane attempted to run for President of Earth C - to the trepidation of the Karkat, who hyperbolically suggested this would amount to troll genocide - but abandoned the idea

That’s all interesting but let’s talk about money! This is something I didn’t pick up on in the last post:

KARKAT: OK, SO LET ME GET THIS STRAIGHT. YOUR PRIORITIES ARE: NUMBER ONE, THE ECONOMY, WHICH LET ME REMIND YOU IS BUILT ENTIRELY ON INFINITE, FAKE MONEY THAT WE CAN MAKE AS MUCH OF AS WE WANT.

Elsewhere, Jane’s megacorp and stocks are mentioned.

One wonders why, given the machinery to manufacture just about anything by means of alchemizer, the forms of money, stocks, and corporations are retained... what sort of productive and reproductive labour is regulated and mediated by these markets? Or are they merely acting out the vestigial forms of capitalism as a bizarre drama...

As for the consequences of an infinite money supply, let’s not get into the ‘modern monetary theory’ debate on a Homestuck post, maybe.

on to chapter 6+

This is a Jane chapter. It opens almost immediately with economic discussion; Dave apparently once accused Jane of ‘neoliberal corporate welfare’ for trying to bolster the ‘struggling locksmith industry’ rendered unnecessary on a planet without crime.

She’s visiting Jake, who’s probably my least favourite Homestuck character (who’s not an alpha troll). About Dirk... Jake (Jane says) seems to still have a bit of a thing for him, and Jane, meanwhile, still “has no idea why she can’t get [Jake] out of her system, even after all these years.”

The reason Jane cancelled her run was, it turns out, because Dirk said ‘cancel everything’. She gets drunk, very quickly... and hits on Jake, who is completely oblivious to her advances. She speaks of wanting to abandon business to raise a family, which Jake himself notes is something rather new for her (though the whole traditional gender thing she does isn’t lol)

Jake/Jane isn’t a ship I have any sort of opinion about, honestly. Dirk/Jake’s terrible collapsing relationship was kind of interesting but yeah, here’s a thing. What even are heterosexuals though? “I want to clean your giant house and have a lot of children”... incomprehensible!

One thing I will give credit for is the narration: it creates pretty strong images of like, these characters as fully embodied people, being intimate in like, subtle physical ways. that probably doesn’t make a lot of sense... whatever lol. it works

chapter 7

...brings us back to Gamzee. fittingly, i’m listening to the friendsim soundtrack as i read this, and i just hit ‘take me to clown church’.

anyway since this whole story basically seems to be an exercise in developing ships along the lines of ‘A is into B, B is obvious to their advances’... Roxy’s hot for John now I guess? or at least, so Callie thinks. she insists they’re all going to be ‘very, very happy’ despite her disappointment.

anyway, then we get Gamzee saying a bunch of casually misogynist stuff to John about Roxy. in this context, basically two interpretations are shown: a shallow ‘oh he’s redeemed now’ attitude from Roxy and Callie, and a ‘oh god i hate this person keep him away from me’ attitude from John. Gamzee’s repulsive qualities are underlined by the narration (from John’s perspective): he’s unhygienic, he’s casually misogynist (which seems like a new element, and rather out of keeping with the gendered-but-somehow-theoretically-not-patriarchal Alternia)...

chapter 8

Rose and Kanaya chapter. Jane’s possible presidency is once again the subject of discussion. Jane apparently wanted to apply some kind of anti-troll eugenics policy, and tried to bring Kanaya on board - and got told to fuck off for it. Our two good lesbians agree that, if Karkat were president (and Dave running the economy), things might have worked out ok...

We are briefly introduced to a new character, a jadeblood troll called Swifer Eggmop. Her character archetype, we are directly told, is ‘1920s newsboy’.

We bear witness to an egg hatching (in prose, anyway). This particular baby grub out closely resembling Vriska... which Kanaya says is because she comes from a slurry based on the original 12 trolls. Rose notes this would make Vriska the troll’s Ancestor, which raises an interesting question of whether Ancestors still exist as a social concept on Earth C. Anyway, Kanaya wants to adopt baby Vriska, which can only be a fantastic idea...

KANAYA: There Are Two Things Of Which I Have No Doubt

KANAYA: That You And I Are Going To Be Happy For The Rest Of Our Lives

KANAYA: And That We Are Never Ever Going To See Vriska Again

I think we can safely assume that neither of those things are true. The emphasis on ‘happiness forever’, voiced by multiple characters, is interesting... also the turn towards reproduction.

I went to uni with people who have kids now. Heck I have friends who have a child (who they are trying to spare from gender)... but for most of my social circle, which is to say almost entirely 20-to-30-something trans women, even the idea of adopting is incomprehensible? It’s somehow weird to think of ‘wanting kids’ as the narrative of 20-something year olds...

Kanaya is right. Vriska is dead, and despite everything, she died a hero. Vriska was a complicated figure of contrasting extremes; her heroic actions were matched in scale only by her monstrous ones, and since no one had actually witnessed her end, it was impossible to say which side the pendulum swung and judged her death—Heroic or Just.

It would be a fitting memorial for her and Kanaya to raise a version of Vriska who would be given every chance to make good on her noble characteristics. A true, symbolic redemption arc. Something about the thought appeals to Rose’s taste for the dramatic flourish. It would be proof that this was all worth it in the end: the destruction of multiple universes, the death of Kanaya’s friends, the circuitous rites of suffering experienced by the nearly infinite splintered versions of every being to inhabit Paradox Space...  

Once again, the notion of a ‘redemption arc’ enters the narrative explicitly, directly echoing fandom discussion. Unlike Gamzee, this is studiously neutral on the Vriska Question: steering exactly between ‘Vriska did nothing wrong’, nor ‘Vriska is a monster’. Regardless... I think it’s probably safe to say that everyone’s prophecies are wrong and we haven’t seen the last of the ‘true’ Vriska.

chapter 9

More of Jade trying very hard to ship her friends, to the discomfort of everyone involved. Jade kisses Karkat, and Karkat explicitly names what she’s doing as sexual assault, a violation of boundaries and consent - Jade attempts to convince him that no, it was really Dave who kissed him!

This prompts a long monologue from Dave in which it’s obvious that he has put some thought into kissing Karkat. Point seems to be: they sure are into each other but Jade’s intervention is not at all welcome. At least I hope that’s the point. I would prefer not to see Jade vindicated by the narrative.

Anyway, other things of cultural note: grub spaghetti is apparently still eaten on Earth C. I always thought it was implied that ‘grubs’ in Troll food were like, actual troll babies, but maybe they’re just ordinary (for certain values thereof...) bugs bc I don’t think Kanaya would stand for that.

chapter 10

The ‘Jane running for president’ subplot has largely disappeared, because what we’re really here for is... shipping! This time, a John/Roxy chapter. I think they call it Roxygen or something? Terezi explains the ‘pair the spares’ logic of the ship (dequirkified):

TEREZI: Um, yeah John.

TEREZI: We are not idiots. We can all do the math on this.

TEREZI:  It’s not like you were going to fuck your human mom or human sister.

TEREZI: And you are “not a homosexual,” which takes Strider dick out of the equation.

TEREZI: And Kanaya is the only girl troll left, and she lesbian married one of the two remaining eligible human females.

TEREZI: Oh and Jake is a double threat. A human dad with a human dick!

TEREZI: So by a process of elimination, of *course* you were going to “fall in love” with Roxy.

Equation of ‘dick’ with ‘male’ there terezi but whatever... (god is this fic going to get into the question of what a ‘nook’ and a ‘bulge’ is...)

(lol i’m calling it a fic...)

Anyway, my position on this one is: Roxy/Calliope was a fine ship worth upholding, and I do not see any reason why anyone would be into John. Though I may be biased on that front.

Terezi also brings up the Calliope question. John is trepidatious on that front.

There’s an interesting line from Roxy here, when John tries to assure her she doesn’t have to wear makeup:

ROXY: john...

ROXY: do u ever think about like

ROXY: gender???

JOHN: ???

JOHN: uh. not really, i guess?

JOHN: but i don’t think girls should feel like they HAVE to wear makeup just because they’re girls.

ROXY: lol

ROXY: thats not what im getting at

JOHN: what do you mean then?

JOHN: are you, like...

ROXY: like what

This is where I’m conscious of the ‘trans character’ tag on this one.

They talk about adulthood, as a performance that they do not feel ‘ready’ for. At that point Dave shows up, clearly aflustered after Jade’s intervention:

DAVE: anyone can be a dude if they really want thats part of the beauty of living in this brand new world with none of the baggage our old world had like gender and sexuality and relationships only involving a very specific number of people

chapter 11

So yeah now to pick up the torch on Dave starting to understand he’s gay. here for this

DAVE: theres a metric fucking ton of shit about to come down on me because i dragged my heels on doing some serious self reflection

JOHN: is this just some more stuff about...

JOHN: being gay?

DAVE: maybe yeah

DAVE: ok definitely yeah

DAVE: its 110% about being gay

JOHN: i thought you’d already worked all that stuff out?

DAVE: turns out it takes a long time to figure out your sexuality after a childhood filled with repression and abuse

nice to see it named as such i guess

the dialogue in the last couple of chapters has been really good. i’m getting properly drawn into this, the characters feel extremely well-realised. threads which were long latent are finally being made explicit.

Dave is struggling with very abrupt self-realisation: he definitely has feelings for Karkat, he has complicated feelings for Jade, but the ‘simple’ solution of just entering a non-mono relationship both is not feeling ‘right’ to him. John isn’t really able to help... he’s gonna talk to Dirk.

This chapter does a lot, I really like it, but at the same time I’ve not got a tremendous amount to add to it.

chapter 12

in our latest chapter of ‘homestuck but they fuck now’, Jake and Jane did that - while up on various substances, including at least alcohol and the trickster lollipop. Jake is having second thoughts but when he tries to back out, Jane looks sad, so he decides to go for it. This can only end well.

Also damn I guess someone on the team thought ‘what would it be like to fuck while high on the trickster lollipop’ so uh, that’s a thing now.

chapter 13

Back to the Strider boys. There’s a heavy intro...

Dave and Dirk don’t talk that much about the heavy stuff. They don’t need to. Dave can hear his brother’s voice in his head.

Not, like, literally. That would be insane. But Dave knows what his bro is like. Dirk, or a version of him, instilled in Dave a way of living and thinking that would, for better or worse, persist far beyond the first thirteen years of his upbringing.

Yeah huh.

Can’t believe Rose and Kanaya have the dubious honour of being the most ‘together’ characters in this.

Anyway in this case Dave still feels like he needs to talk to Dirk - who we know has gone awol, for some mysterious reason. He meets... Gamzee, who says some religious clown stuff, and offers Dave a redemption arc (really running this joke into the ground huh), but Dave brushes him off. Then he finds a fembot that Dirk was working on, with a note.

We don’t get to read the note yet. I would guess that’s the end of epilogue 2.

Sure enough it is.

Epilogue 2, taken as a whole

I quite enjoyed this, Gamzee sections notwithstanding. The prose is tight, the dialogue is hitting its flow, and a lot of relationships that were left vague in Homestuck proper are finally being given time to develop.

Obviously it’s kind of risky bringing in explicitly sexual themes, but I think they approach them in the ‘right’ way: focusing on the emotional meaning of relationships that now might - now we’re dealing with 23-year-olds - include sex, rather than just porn lol. It does slightly strain credibility that, in all their time on Earth C, none of them have made any meaningful friendships or relationships outside the core group of 8 kids and a handful of surviving trolls, but I can also understand the desire to focus on the already-developed characters. That’s a common problem for ‘endgame’ ships: in truth dating exclusively within a tiny friendship group is probably a recipe for disaster, but in fiction it makes a work manageable.

I am enjoying just how gay Homestuck has gotten. If Homestuck is the comic for Very Online kids who were around 13 in 2009 when the comic began, it’s somewhat fitting, because our cohort has, at least to a degree, done the same thing lol. Of course, that’s shaped by my personal experience of like, transitioning and moving to a friendship group that’s like 99% trans lesbians and bi women, but I suspect statistics would bear out the idea that more and more people are comfortable identifying ourselves as not-straight in some way. I could be wrong about that though lol.

Of course, it’s too much to hope that this trend - insofar as it exists! - is like, the beginning of the end for Gender as a system of social relations, violent exploitation and coercion - especially since periods of ‘more acceptance’ often seem to precede violent repression (c.f. Weimar Germany and then, the nazis; the period just before the AIDS crisis; much earlier, the construction of colonial/modern gender in the first place on the bones of less rigid gender systems...)

Anyway, let’s see what’s happened to old Dirk. I’m still wondering who the “trans character” is going to be, and how they’re going to handle that. It’s going to be tough to match fic like @rememberwhenyoutried‘s An Earth-Shattering Confession, but we shall see.

#momestuck

[vintagegeekculture]

Dead Fandoms, Part 3

Read Part One of Dead Fandoms here. 

Read Part Two of Dead Fandoms here. 

Before we continue, I want to add the usual caveat that I actually don’t want to be right about these fandoms being dead. I like enthusiasm and energy and it’s a shame to see it vanish.

Mists of Avalon

Remember that period of time of about 15 years, where absolutely everybody read this book and was obsessed with it? It could not have been bigger, and the fandom was Anne Rice huge, overlapping for several years with USENET and the early World Wide Web…but it’s since petered out. 

Mists of Avalon’s popularity may be due to the most excellent case of hitting a demographic sweet spot ever. The book was a feminist retelling of the Arthurian Mythos where Morgan Le Fay is the main character, a pagan from matriarchal goddess religions who is fighting against encroaching Christianity and patriarchal forms of society coming in with it. Also, it made Lancelot bisexual and his conflict is how torn he is about his attraction to both Arthur and Guinevere.

Remember, this novel came out in 1983 – talk about being ahead of your time! If it came out today, the reaction from a certain corner would be something like “it is with a heavy heart that I inform you that tumblr is at it again.”

Man, demographically speaking, that’s called “nailing it.” It used to be one of the favorite books of the kind of person who’s bookshelf is dominated by fantasy novels about outspoken, fiery-tongued redheaded women, who dream of someday moving to Scotland, who love Enya music and Kate Bush, who sell homemade needlepoint stuff on etsy, who consider their religious beliefs neo-pagan or wicca, and who have like 15 cats, three of which are named Isis, Hypatia, and Morrigan.

This type of person is still with us, so why did this novel fade in popularity? There’s actually a single hideous reason: after her death around 2001, facts came out that Marion Zimmer Bradley abused her daughters sexually. Even when she was alive, she was known for defending and enabling a known child abuser, her husband, Walter Breen. To say people see your work differently after something like this is an understatement – especially if your identity is built around being a progressive and feminist author.

Robotech

I try to break up my sections on dead fandoms into three parts: first, I explain the property, then explain why it found a devoted audience, and finally, I explain why that fan devotion and community went away. Well, in the case of Robotech, I can do all three with a single sentence: it was the first boy pilot/giant robot Japanimation series that shot for an older, teenage audience to be widely released in the West. Robotech found an audience when it was the only true anime to be widely available, and lost it when became just another import anime show. In the days of Crunchyroll, it’s really hard to explain what made Robotech so special, because it means describing a different world.

Try to imagine what it was like in 1986 for Japanime fans: there were barely any video imports, and if you wanted a series, you usually had to trade tapes at your local basement club (they were so precious they couldn’t even be sold, only traded). If you were lucky, you were given a script to translate what you were watching. Robotech though, was on every day, usually after school. You want an action figure? Well, you could buy a Robotech Valkyrie or a Minmei figure at your local corner FAO Schwartz. 

However, the very strategy that led to it getting syndicated is the very reason it was later vilified by the purists who emerged when anime became a widespread cultural force: strictly speaking, there actually is no show called “Robotech.” Since Japanese shows tend to be short run, say, 50-60 episodes, it fell well under the 80-100 episode mark needed for syndication in the US. The producer of Harmony Gold, Carl Macek, had a solution: he’d cut three unrelated but similar looking series together into one, called “Robotech.” The shows looked very similar, had similar love triangles, used similar tropes, and even had little references to each other, so the fit was natural. It led to Robotech becoming a weekday afternoon staple with a strong fandom who called themselves “Protoculture Addicts.” There were conventions entirely devoted to Robotech. The supposed shower scene where Minmei was bare-breasted was the barely whispered stuff of pervert legend in pre-internet days. And the tie in novels, written with the entirely western/Harmony Gold conception of the series and which continued the story, were actually surprisingly readable.

The final nail in the coffin of Robotech fandom was the rise of Sailor Moon, Toonami, Dragonball, and yes, Pokemon (like MC Hammer’s role in popularizing hip hop, Pokemon is often written out of its role in creating an audience for the next wave of cartoon imports out of insecurity). Anime popularity in the West can be defined as not a continuing unbroken chain like scifi book fandom is, but as an unrelated series of waves, like multiple ancient ruins buried on top of each other (Robotech was the vanguard of the third wave, as Anime historians reckon); Robotech’s wave was subsumed by the next, which had different priorities and different “core texts.” Pikachu did what the Zentraedi and Invid couldn’t do: they destroyed the SDF-1.

Legion of Super-Heroes

Legion of Superheroes was comic set in the distant future that combined superheroes with space opera, with a visual aesthetic that can best be described as “Star Trek: the Motion Picture, if it was set in a disco.” 

I’ve heard wrestling described as “a soap opera for men.” If that’s the case, then Legion of Super-Heroes was a soap opera for nerds. The book is about attractive 20-somethings who seem to hook up all the time. As a result, it had a large female fanbase, which, I cannot stress enough, is incredibly unusual for this era in comics history. And if you have female fans, you get a lot of shipping and slashfic, and lots of speculation over which of the boy characters in the series is gay. The fanon answer is Element Lad, because he wore magenta-pink and never had a girlfriend. (Can’t argue with bulletproof logic like that.) In other words, it was a 1970s-80s fandom that felt much more “modern” than the more right-brained, bloodless, often anal scifi fandoms that existed around the same time, where letters pages were just nitpicking science errors by model train and elevator enthusiasts.

Legion Headquarters seemed to be a rabbit fuck den built around a supercomputer and Danger Room. Cosmic Boy dressed like Tim Curry in Rocky Horror. There’s one member, Duo Damsel, who can turn into two people, a power that, in the words of Legion writer Jim Shooter, was “useful for weird sex...and not much else.”

LSH was popular because the fans were insanely horny. This is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the thirstiest fandom of all time.  You might think I’m overselling this, but I really think that’s an under-analyzed part of how some kinds of fiction build a devoted fanbase.  

For example, a big reason for the success of Mass Effect is that everyone has a favorite girl or boy, and you have the option to romance them. Likewise, everyone who was a fan of Legion remembers having a crush. Sardonic Ultra Boy for some reason was a favorite among gay male nerds (aka the Robert Conrad Effect). Tall, blonde, amazonian telepath Saturn Girl, maybe the first female team leader in comics history, is for the guys with backbone who prefer Veronica over Betty. Shrinking Violet was a cute Audrey Hepburn type. And don’t forget Shadow Lass, who was a blue skinned alien babe with pointed ears and is heavily implied to have an accent (she was Aayla Secura before Aayla Secura was Aayla Secura). Light Lass was commonly believed to be “coded lesbian” because of a short haircut and her relationships with men didn’t work out. The point is, it’s one thing to read about the adventures of a superteam, and it implies a totally different level of mental and emotional involvement to read the adventures of your imaginary girlfriend/boyfriend.  

Now, I should point out that of all the fandoms I’ve examined here, LSH was maybe the smallest. Legion was never a top seller, but it was a favorite of the most devoted of fans who kept it alive all through the seventies and eighties with an energy and intensity disproportionate to their actual numbers. My gosh, were LSH fans devoted! Interlac and Legion Outpost were two Legion fanzines that are some of the most famous fanzines in comics history.

If nerd culture fandoms were drugs, Star Wars would be alcohol, Doctor Who would be weed, but Legion of Super-Heroes would be injecting heroin directly into your eyeballs. Maybe it is because the Legionnaires were nerdy, too: they played Dungeons and Dragons in their off time (an escape, no doubt, from their humdrum, mundane lives as galaxy-rescuing superheroes). There were sometimes call outs to Monty Python. Basically, the whole thing had a feel like the dorkily earnest skits or filk-singing at a con. Legion felt like it’s own fan series, guest starring Patton Oswalt and Felicia Day.

It helped that the boundary between fandom and professional was incredibly porous. For instance, pro-artist Dave Cockrum did covers for Legion fanzines. Former Legion APA members Todd and Mary Biernbaum got a chance to actually write Legion, where, with the gusto of former slashfic writers given the keys to canon, their major contribution was a subplot that explicitly made Element Lad gay. Mike Grell, a professional artist who got paid to work on the series, did vaguely porno-ish fan art. Again, it’s hard to tell where the pros started and the fandom ended; the inmates were running the asylum.

Mostly, Legion earned this devotion because it could reward it in a way no other comic could. Because Legion was not a wide market comic but was bought by a core audience, after a point, there were no self-contained one-and-done Legion stories. In fact, there weren’t even really arcs as we know it, which is why Legion always has problems getting reprinted in trade form. Legion was plotted like a daytime soap opera: there were always five different stories going on in every issue, and a comic involved cutting between them. Sure, like daytime soap operas, there’s never a beginning, just endless middles, so it was totally impossible for a newbie to jump on board...but soap operas know what they are doing: long term storytelling rewards a long term reader.

This brings me to today, where Legion is no longer being published by DC. There is no discussion about a movie or TV revival. This is amazing. Comics are a world where the tiniest nerd groups get pandered to: Micronauts, Weirdworld, Seeker 3000, and Rom have had revival series, for pete’s sake. It’s incredible there’s no discussion of a film or TV treatment, either; friggin Cyborg from New Teen Titans is getting a solo movie. 

Why did Legion stop being such a big deal? Where did the fandom that supported it dissolve to? One word: X-Men. Legion was incredibly ahead of its time. In the 60s and 70s, there were barely any “fan” comics, since superhero comics were like animation is today: mostly aimed at kids, with a minority of discerning adult/teen fans, and it was success among kids, not fans, that led to something being a top seller (hence, “fan favorites” in the 1970s, as surprising as it is to us today, often did not get a lot of work, like Don MacGregor or Barry Smith). But as newsstands started to push comics out, the fan audience started to get bigger and more important…everyone else started to catch up to the things that made Legion unique: most comics started to have attractive people who paired up into couples and/or love triangles, and featured extremely byzantine long term storytelling. If Legion of Super-Heroes is going to be remembered for anything, it’s for being the smaller scale “John the Baptist” to the phenomenon of X-Men, the ultimate “fan” comic.

The other thing that killed Legion, apart from Marvel’s Merry Mutants, that is, was the r-word: reboots. A reboot only works for some properties, but not others. You reboot something when you want to find something for a mass audience to respond to, like with Zorro, Batman, or Godzilla.

Legion, though, was not a comic for everybody, it was a fanboy/girl comic beloved by a niche who read it for continuing stories and minutiae (and to jack off, and in some cases, jill off). Rebooting a comic like that is a bad idea. You do not reboot something where the main way you engage with the property, the greatest strength, is the accumulated lore and history. Rebooting a property like that means losing the reason people like it, and unless it’s something with a wide audience, you only lose fans and won’t get anything in return for it. So for something like Legion (small fandom obsessed with long form plots and details, but unlike Trek, no name recognition) a reboot is the ultimate Achilles heel that shatters everything, a self-destruct button they kept hitting over and over and over until there was nothing at all left.

E. E. Smith’s Lensman Novels

The Lensman series is like Gil Evans’s jazz: it’s your grandparents’ favorite thing that you’ve never heard of. 

I mean, have you ever wondered exactly what scifi fandom talked about before the rise of the major core texts and cultural objects (Star Trek, Asimov, etc)? Well, it was this. Lensmen was the subject of fanfiction mailed in manilla envelopes during the 30s, 40s, and 50s (some of which are still around). If you’re from Boston, you might recognize that the two biggest and oldest scifi cons there going back to the 1940s, Boskone (Boscon, get it?) and Arisia, are references to the Lensman series. This series not only created space opera as we know it, but contributed two of the biggest visuals in scifi, the interstellar police drawn from different alien species, and space marines in power armor.

My favorite sign of how big this series was and how fans responded to it, was a great wedding held at Worldcon that duplicated Kimball Kinnison and Clarissa’s wedding on Klovia. This is adorable:

The basic story is pure good vs. evil: galactic civilization faces a crime and piracy wave of unprecedented proportions from technologically advanced pirates (the memory of Prohibition, where criminals had superior firearms and faster cars than the cops, was strong by the mid-1930s). A young officer, Kimball Kinnison (who speaks in a Stan Lee esque style of dialogue known as “mid-century American wiseass”), graduates the academy and is granted a Lens, an object from an ancient mystery civilization, who’s true purpose is unknown.

Lensman Kinnison discovers that the “crime wave” is actually a hostile invasion and assault by a totally alien culture that is based on hierarchy, intolerant of failure, and at the highest level, is ruled by horrifying nightmare things that breathe freezing poison gases. Along the way, he picks up allies, like van Buskirk, a variant human space marine from a heavy gravity planet who can do a standing jump of 20 feet in full space armor, Worsel, a telepathic dragon warrior scientist with the technical improvisation skills of MacGyver (who reads like the most sadistically minmaxed munchkinized RPG character of all time), and Nandreck, a psychologist from a Pluto-like planet of selfish cowards.

The scale of the conflict starts small, just skirmishes with pirates, but explodes to near apocalyptic dimensions. This series has space battles with millions of starships emerging from hyperspacial tubes to attack the ultragood Arisians, homeworld of the first intelligent race in the cosmos. By the end of the fourth book, there are mind battles where the reflected and parried mental beams leave hundreds of innocent bystanders dead. In the meantime we get evil Black Lensmen, the Hell Hole in Space, and superweapons like the Negasphere and the Sunbeam, where an entire solar system was turned into a vacuum tube.

It’s not hard to understand why Lensmen faded in importance. While the alien Lensmen had lively psychologies, Lensman Kimball Kinnison was not an interesting person, and that’s a problem when scifi starts to become more about characterization. The Lensman books, with their love of police and their sexism (it is an explicit plot point that the Lens is incompatible with female minds – in canon there are no female Lensmen) led to it being judged harshly by the New Wave writers of the 1960s, who viewed it all as borderline fascist military-scifi establishment hokum, and the reputation of the series never recovered from the spirit of that decade.

Prisoner of Zenda

Prisoner of Zenda is a novel about a roguish con-man who visits a postage-stamp, charmingly picturesque Central European kingdom with storybook castles, where he finds he looks just like the local king and is forced to pose as him in palace intrigues. It’s a swashbuckling story about mistaken identity, swordfighting, and intrigue, one part swashbuckler and one part dark political thriller.

The popularity of this book predates organized fandom as we know it, so I wonder if “fandom” is even the right word to use. All the same, it inspired fanatical dedication from readers. There was such a popular hunger for it that an entire library could be filled with nothing but rip-offs of Prisoner of Zenda. If you have a favorite writer who was active between 1900-1950, I guarantee he probably wrote at least one Prisoner of Zenda rip-off (which is nearly always the least-read book in his oeuvre). The only novel in the 20th Century that inspired more imitators was Sherlock Holmes. Robert Heinlein and Edmond “Planet Smasher” Hamilton wrote scifi updates of Prisoner of Zenda. Doctor Who lifted the plot wholesale for the Tom Baker era episode, “Androids of Tara,” Futurama did this exact plot too, and even Marvel Comics has its own copy of Ruritania, Doctor Doom’s Kingdom of Latveria. Even as late as the 1980s, every kids’ cartoon did a “Prisoner of Zenda” episode, one of the stock plots alongside “everyone gets hit by a shrink ray” and the Christmas Carol episode.

Prisoner of Zenda imitators were so numerous, that they even have their own Library of Congress sub-heading, of “Ruritanian Romance.” 

One major reason that Prisoner of Zenda fandom died off is that, between World War I and World War II, there was a brutal lack of sympathy for anything that seemed slightly German, and it seems the incredibly Central European Prisoner of Zenda was a casualty of this. Far and away, the largest immigrant group in the United States through the entire 19th Century were Germans, who were more numerous than Irish or Italians. There were entire cities in the Midwest that were two-thirds German-born or German-descent, who met in Biergartens and German community centers that now no longer exist.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote a lot about how the German-American world he grew up in vanished because of the prejudice of the World Wars, and that disappearance was so extensive that it was retroactive, like someone did a DC comic-style continuity reboot where it all never happened: Germans, despite being the largest immigrant group in US history, are left out of the immigrant story. The “Little Bohemias” and “Little Berlins” that were once everywhere no longer exist. There is no holiday dedicated to people of German ancestry in the US, the way the Irish have St. Patrick’s Day or Italians have Columbus Day (there is Von Steuben’s Day, dedicated to a general who fought with George Washington, but it’s a strictly Midwest thing most people outside the region have never heard of, like Sweetest Day). If you’re reading this and you’re an academic, and you’re not sure what to do your dissertation on, try writing about the German-American immigrant world of the 19th and 20th Centuries, because it’s a criminally under-researched topic.

A. Merritt

Pop quiz: who was the most popular and influential fantasy author during the 1930s and 40s? 

If you answered Tolkien or Robert E. Howard, you’re wrong - it was actually Abraham Merritt. He was the most popular writer of his age of the kind of fiction he did, and he’s since been mostly forgotten. Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons and Dragons, has said that A. Merritt was his favorite fantasy and horror novelist.

Why did A. Merritt and his fandom go away, when at one point, he was THE fantasy author? Well, obviously one big answer was the 1960s counterculture, which brought different writers like Tolkien and Lovecraft to the forefront (by modern standards Lovecraft isn’t a fantasy author, but he was produced by the same early century genre-fluid effluvium that produced Merritt and the rest). The other answer is that A. Merritt was so totally a product of the weird occult speculation of his age that it’s hard to even imagine him clicking with audiences in other eras. His work is based on fringe weirdness that appealed to early 20th Century spiritualism and made sense at the time: reincarnation, racial memory, an obsession with lost race stories and the stone age, and weirdness like the 1920s belief that the Polar Arctic is the ancestral home of the Caucasian race. In other words, it’s impossible to explain Merritt without a ton of sentences that start with “well, people in the 1920s thought that...” That’s not a good sign when it comes to his universality. 

That’s it for now. Do you have any suggestions on a dead fandom, or do you keep one of these “dead” fandoms alive in your heart?

#fandom history #lensman #robotech #prisoner of zenda #mists of avalon

[zigsexual]

Wait what do you mean Manny's subplot was stolen from Glee? I don't watch it so I couldn't possibly know but I'm intrigued

ah yes, #tbt to my glee blog days [cracks knuckles] let us begin

ok so basically there’s a character named dave karofsky who is literally manny, case in point:

• dave is a football player• he’s a HUGE asshole• especially to kurt (aka the gay one. well, the first gay one at least)

when kurt joins the football team dave’s like totally pissed, starts fucking up all of kurt’s life, calling him names and bullying him and shit and being generally homophobic

then one day kurt is over it and he’s just like WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM WITH ME????? and they get into this weird altercation and dave kisses him and surprise! dave is a secret gay (:

#ask #zenobia-is-hot #fuckin glee follows me wherever i go #anyway kurt transfers schools after that and gets a boyfriend #and then dave transfers schools and tries to kill himself #but then he's ok and then much later kurts boyfriend dates him????? fuckin glee #i hate this plot #glee