drhermannhottlieb

[drhermannhottlieb]

I prefer this version

He had his eye on the prize and he went for it

[drhermannhottlieb]

I don’t expect anyone to see or care about this post but for my own posterity… we hung out with Bri, he kissed us many times, I felt his tummy rumbling, we gave him shirts that he later wore, and I’m still not over it.

This last photo from a different show entirely two weeks later, after I started an email chain that began with “do you know you’re following this hashtag, Brian?” and ending with him inviting me backstage, what is this world we created

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My God, the mad man did it.

Just reminding you lovely humans that this exists!

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The most Brian May sentence I’ve ever read in my life

is Brian May issuing this monumental understatement about why he couldn’t complete his Ph.D. thesis in 1974 as though anyone reading fucking Brian May’s thesis isn’t gonna fucking know

“REGRETTABLY, I WAS THE LEAD GUITARIST IN QUEEN”

[drhermannhottlieb]

My fab fun Trek-frand filled Star Trek Las Vegas was lit, y’all, ask me anything

Featuring @cerebrosbeforehoes in the role of Jaeger co-pilot, COULDN’T HAVE DONE IT WITHOUT YOU GURL 💋

[drhermannhottlieb]

anyone else losing it over this walter koenig tweet

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I’m sorry, Hermann… they’re in my head.

[drhermannhottlieb]

WE WERE COMPLETELY REMISS AND I’M SORRY HAHAHAHA

When we were all laughing about it I was like “DAMN I should have recorded this” but I didn’t want to pull my phone out and be like “HEY YO I’M RECORDING THIS NOW BUT KEEP ACTING NATURALLY”

And you’re right, online interactions are so easily misconstrued (CC: JAVIER MUNOZ 🙄), and you wouldn’t want him to misunderstand when you can’t be there face-to-face to explain. My friend was @-ed​ into a convo with Anthony Rapp last week and Anthony was ready to throw down with him after misunderstanding why he was tagged into the convo (tbh, it’s still unclear). I messaged my friend about it and he was like “I’M LAUGHING WITH YOU NOW BUT I WAS ON RED ALERT!”

drhermannhottlieb replied to your post “Ahhh, I’ve been smiling about the Wilson Cruz post signing experience…”

I am so glad you got so much joy out of it! NGL I thought there was a small chance you’d be like “WTF I didn’t want him to see this shit” (and also that he’d be like “WTF r u tryna say” hahahah), but I figured on the whole we were all on the same page, and good times were had. The one thing I was remiss about is NOT RECORDING HIS REACTION #whyself. I s2g when he got to the punchline he laughed so loud and long and suddenly in a skyward direction. Then he wrote my name and hesitated with his pen poised for like a full half minute going, “I want to say something so bad but I shouldn’t…” and eventually settled on this. 

WHY DIDN’T YOU RECORD IT??? I mean, it’s fine, but also WHY IS THIS NOT DOCUMENTED?????? D: No but seriously, it’s fine, I’m glad you at least got to witness his reaction and retell it to everyone!

Regardless, I’m so happy you and your friend had an amazing time with the post and his reaction to it! Thank you for sharing the story with me! It honestly made me so happy I didn’t stop thinking about it for hours! :D

Honestly, the only reason I didn’t @ him on Twitter directly is because I didn’t know how he’d respond. In face-to-face interactions, it’s much easier to gauge that sort of thing, especially if you’ve been talking for a little while. Online, it’s harder to know. With people you’re becoming friends with, that’s not a problem, misunderstandings happen, but he’s an actor and I admire his work. It’s a different kind of situation. Especially since he followed me on Twitter and I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHY AND IT’S BEEN OVER A MONTH. But I’m glad he got that it was a joke and not me throwing some serious shade his way. I would never!

All that said, I don’t mind if people share my posts with others off the site, even actors or other creators. This blog is an extension of myself (albeit a very nerdy extension) and I’m not ashamed of what’s on here. I don’t mind at all! All I ask is that people tell me what happened and send me a picture of the signing (not that this is ever going to happen again, but, you know. XD)

[drhermannhottlieb]

Additional conversation tidbits:

- “Yes, I’m shirtless a lot. I wouldn’t wear clothes most of the time if it weren’t legally required.”

- “My uniform stays pristine because of ~future technology~ that makes the blood just fall off. And honestly I probably 3D print a new one every morning.”

- Wilson: “I remember you, were you wearing that [DISCO shirt] last time, or a uniform?”

Me: “I was wearing this.”

Wilson: “Yeah.”

Me: “And I also picked you up.”

Wilson: “OKAY NOW I REMEMBER”

(throwback:)

- (upon seeing the above) “OMG I almost wore the same shirt today, thank God. Aw, look, we’re cute! (to his handler) I was heavier than she expected.”

[Side note: He wasn’t; Doug wasn’t; even Shazad was exactly as heavy as I expected. Anthony, who took a flying leap, was A LOT FUCKING HEAVIER THAN I EXPECTED.]

- Me: “This morning I misread your Instagram caption as, ‘I hope to see you at @bignipplecomiccon!’”

@aemarachlian: “Well, which one are you most likely to be at?”

Wilson: (tips his head down and laughs as though remembering all of his life’s mistakes)

Sent: I just wanted to let you know that he loved it, full body head thrown back laugh included. I had no say in this caption but it’s exactly what I expected. (I don’t think he read your tags dw)

My Reply: OH MY GOD HOW COULD YOU DO THIS I’M DYING THIS IS HILARIOUS I’M SO GLAD HE THOUGHT IT WAS FUNNY THANK YOU FOR SHARING BUT ALSO I’M SCREAMING THIS IS MY FAVORITE THING TO EVER COME FROM THIS WEBSITE THANK YOU

[drhermannhottlieb]

With Hermann on the bottom. They knew.

you gays will not believe what we found today

[drhermannhottlieb]

I'm sorry to go anon and you can totally disregard this but I just had to say... I know DCWT is really divisive and some ppl had bad times with it/CWR. But it's also really meaningful to some people, like me, and so posting in its own tag to call people who love it a cult other ppl should stay away from seems really unnecessarily hurtful? I respect everyone with different experiences than mine but to go into this tag to connect with ppl who felt like I did and get this instead really sucks/hurts

[in response to this post]

I didn’t post in its tag to hurt anyone, but to inject a sense of reality and balance into the CWR frenzy that still sees people doing things like messaging specifically to challenge @irisbleufic on the fact that their fic rec list didn’t include DCWT (because it’s “a classic”!!!).

Side note: Anthology ( @irisbleufic )is a classic. Seeing in Color ( @what-alchemy ) is a classic. In the Hour After Zero ( @everybodyilovedies ) is a classic. Among many, many quintessential fics of early PacRim fandom. The good old days. But although all of these are better than Designations, none of them have attracted the hysteria and rabid stanning of Designations. No one goes around going, “Excuse me, I saw your fic rec list and WHY was Progressing to Flight ( @patster223 ) not on it???” No one is formulating conspiracy theories that the writer of Occam’s Razor ( @blairtrabbit ) must have been a writer of Uprising. No one goes around harassing BNFs to publicly promote Lights On (@berlynn-wohl). It doesn’t happen. Why, then, with Designations?

The point of this shaking-up is not to say, “You all are bad, you like a bad thing and you should feel bad.” If that were the point, we’d be in the tag frequently, over the last several years we’ve been discomfited by all this. The point is that people maybe need a little jolt to ask themselves some needed questions, like: Why did CWR ascend so rapidly to godlike status despite the fact we know basically nothing about them? Fam, say what you want about their fic, like it if you want; the writing itself isn’t that bad and CWR is clearly an intelligent author. But it isn’t so disproportionately above fics that it justifies all this baffling brouhaha that seems to accompany any discourse about it.

So why is it in the tag? Because now that CWR has flown the coop, DCWT exists now only in fragmented records and lingering hype from its uberfans, and it’s important that any fans new to the fandom have the opportunity to decide for themselves rather than being swayed by blind indoctrination (hence, cult). Have we always been at war with Eastasia? Was there not once a time where we were at war with Eurasia? The truth is in the records and the records deserve to be shown. I’m sorry for infiltrating your tag but you may also take it upon yourself to hide that post, as you may hide this one.

[drhermannhottlieb]

I found your old Newmann reclist floating around Tumblr! There's some awesome stuff on there and I love your fics, too. Question, though, why would you leave Designations Congruent with Things off there? It's a classic.

*taps desk, thinks about where to begin with this*

All right, so: anyone who knows me knows the following things.  One, I’ve been in fandom for 23 of my 36 years; it is very difficult to faze or shock me.  Two, I actually do believe in letting people ship what they ship and write what they write; if I don’t like it, I just steer clear, and I expect people to do me the same courtesy.  Three, there are some things out there that I don’t like, and for very specific reasons, and I only talk about those things when people ask, because discussing them otherwise is pointless.  I do not abuse people just because I dislike what they’ve written, but, anon, you’ve just made it necessary for me to give an account that some people in Pacific Rim are going to remember very well, largely because they had the same unsolicited negative experiences with the author of DCWT that I did.  I will try to make this brief.

In December of 2013, I saw Pacific Rim for the first time.  I fell head over fucking heels.  That’s an understatement, really; to this day, Newt and Hermann are two of the characters that I’ll defend more fiercely than most of the others in my backlog, barring Aziraphale and Crowley.  I started writing Anthology without intending for it to ever be a series.  What’s currently the first chapter was only ever meant to be a stand-alone, but by the time I had managed to add nine more installments to it, I thought it was close to done.  It had evolved into a series, but how much of one, I didn’t know.  By that point, I had also managed to write a couple of stand-alones, Become What We’ve Always Been being the chiefest amongst those early ones.  I bring it up because it figures into this social account.

By that point, in my participation in PR fandom, let’s say January of 2014, I had received several obnoxious messages from a Tumblr account called elementals_ao3.  This account claimed to be the “fandom assistant” of the author of a piece on AO3 called Designations Congruent With Things, which I had not investigated because a) I was extraordinarily busy reading my new friends’ stories in PR fandom and the writing I was doing on my own account, and b) well, this weird elementals account was being obnoxious and messaging me about it, and I don’t take kindly to being harassed to read something by a stranger.  It was in January that I consistently started getting messages from friends saying, roughly, Hey, can I talk to you?  There’s this fic called DCWT that’s getting super popular as fast as your Anthology is getting popular; have you read it?  It’s disturbing in extreme ways and doesn’t tag or warn for the ways in which it’s disturbing.  The author’s got this weird sidekick that keeps messaging like all the high-profile PR blogs it can find, and it’s getting really obnoxious.  Not only does the fic not warn for what it’s doing, but the author seems really unrepentant and thinks they’re all that.  Thanks for writing something I can read to get away from the weird, cult-like DCWT hype.

And I thought, oh God, it’s that fic I’ve been messaged about by that elementals account a handful of times.  Huh!  But I still didn’t look at it until near the end of January, possibly early February, because that was around the time when cleanwhiteroom read Become What We’ve Always Been and left me a comment.  When someone I don’t know in a fandom I’ve newly entered comments on some of my work, I consider it common reciprocal courtesy to check out their work and comment on at least one or two pieces (more if I end up genuinely enjoying their work).  So, armed with the wary knowledge that this was not only the fic that the elementals person had been harassing me about, but also the fic that had traumatized so fucking many of my new friends, I decided to take a look at it.  I chose a bad night to do that.  I’d been doing laundry for about four hours; it was three in the morning when I finally clicked.  I think there were between ten and twelve chapters of DCWT in existence at the time I read.

I had never before that point been physically ill due to a piece of written media in my life.  Enough said.  Many of you know that I’m fine with exploring twisted relationship dynamics as long as that’s what I know and accept from the base-canon, but to see a relationship that I saw as so essentially stable and hopeful warped beyond recognition, and also have no clear warnings on either the piece of fiction or in the concerns that friends had sent me?  Yikes.  Maybe now you understand why Precursor-possessed Newt is such a trigger-point for me, and why I’m so disgusted by the majority of the new film’s comment.  I backpedaled in a hurry.  And continued to get the occasional creepy advertising message from elementals_ao3, and saw a number of comment threads in which cleanwhiteroom completely dismissed readers’ concerns about the lack of warnings.

To put it bluntly: harass me (or have your “assistant” do it for you) and show me that you have no regard for your readers’ well-founded advice, and I will never have a reason to think well of you or what you’re writing.  Furthermore, I couldn’t stand to see Hermann suffer, and, worse than that, I couldn’t stand to see real people I care about suffer.  People can love DCWT all they want, but this fic has some seriously messed-up social history that ended up on my doorstep solely because the creepy elementals person, whoever they were, decided I should be bugged and bugged to read because I was another high-profile-ish writer in the fandom.  Or maybe that wasn’t the reason.  I will never know the reason, given DCWT vanished from AO3 sometime between 2014 and now, and CWR and elementals likewise fell off the radar.

One thing I can tell you, though: the more trauma people set before me, the more determined I was to keep adding to Anthology.  For every reader that seemed rabidly in love with DCWT, there was one or more hurt by it.  Upset people I love, whether intentionally or not, and I will do my utmost for them.

In some ways, I must partly thank that situation for the sheer determination that permitted me to develop Anthology to the extent of what it became.  My CoT series in Good Omens fandom was nowhere near as long then as it is now, and I had never written something as sustained and involved as Antho in my life.  It was the strangest two years (2013-2015) of my online existence, but I learned just how much writing I can get done when it feels necessary.  Pacific Rim fandom is singlehandedly responsible for the largest group of people that I have ever bonded and stayed in contact with (yes, even more than Good Omens fandom, at this point).  Oh, the stories I could tell you from the experience that was Shatterdome ATL 2015.  It was wonderful.

(So, you know, I guess the lesson here is: don’t assume that everyone will love a thing just because it’s popular.  YMMV has never been a sounder clause.  I’ve never told this story in its entirety in post format, although heaven knows a number of people have heard it verbally by now.  Life in fandom is sometimes really freaking bizarre, and this situation is the weirdest I have to offer.)

[drhermannhottlieb]

HELLO FRIENDS, I bring you RECEIPTS on the CWR/“Elementals” fuckery that @irisbleufic​ brilliantly blew open in this post (🔥🔥🔥!!) after being asked why Designations Congruent With Things didn’t make it onto their fic rec list (???). It’s a pointed critique for which this is only a supplement, so please go there first to get peppered with the full backstory, as John Mulaney would say.

My past self had the foresight to screencap this baffling exchange in the AO3 comments between a poster trying (for the third time, apparently) to give some reasoned feedback, CWR not having it, and CWR sorry, “Elementals” 🙄pretending to be peacekeeper. 

Speaks for itself, and perfectly encapsulates why the DCWT cult is one that many of us take care to distance ourselves from.

[drhermannhottlieb]

So Pacific Rim Uprising

Aka that film I’ve been dreading they were gonna make for 5 years

Summary of my thoughts: ugh

SPOILERS

What I liked:

damn it but Hermann was great. Like DAMN. calling the shots like a boss and no one was like “lmao who tf is this guy”

I don’t think the scene where he has these giant gloves on and is deep in kaiju goop makes any sense in relation to his character but it was super cute

HE HAS A MISSION. FINALLY.

those eyelashes (ETA: I guess this doesn’t really count as a plus for the movie because it’s just his face but they were a highlight)

ETA: while we’re at it, his face

They really went all out on the grandpa wardrobe and I’m into it

not sure how I feel about his calling Newton “Newt” as his refusal to do so was one of his defining character traits but ok

Also he was SUPER sassy, even more so than in PR1 at times, eg “I do have PPDC clearance and everyone here is a LEETLE BUSY!!11”

yeah all of this list is probably gonna be Hermann what a surprise

Yo he had so much screen time!

that one time he had glasses and it wasn’t THE glasses but they were adorable

Also he named the kaiju good job kiddo

all right did I actually like anything else

Their acknowledgement that Jake and Mako were troubled siblings + that family pic. Idk it still seems kind of disrespectful to crowbar in rando son because Stacker didn’t seem to have thoughts for him at all in the first film but whatever

Mako was gr8 by the way, nice to see you bb (AT FIRST)

Newt’s outfit on the rooftop scene; this may seem like a minor thing to mention but I don’t have a lot of good things to say about their treatment of Newt

At least there wasn’t any no homo although they fuckin faked us out for like 20 minutes with Alice (May have said “WHO THE FUCK IS ALICE” in theatre sotto voce)

Unless I missed it they didn’t use that fucking horrible WAR READY song from the trailers

TROLOLOLOLOLO scene, bet this is gonna be divisive in reaction posts but I was INTO IT

What I didn’t like:

Oh god making that above list exhausted me and idk if I can itemize anymore

It was such a disappointment guys

I mean I expected that but hoped for better

I saw the first film like 7 times in the theatre because it was captivating, the world building was rich, the music was compelling, it made my heart warm. This film, while not necessarily outright disrespecting the original, failed to reignite that tenderness. It was so superficial. I tried to like it; I wished it could. But I felt so empty (nb aside from Hermann scenes, God bless Burn Gorman).

Notably, EXCUSE THEM THE FUCK UP but why did Mako have to die? It’s not as though her death was a prerequisite to passing on the information that allowed the plot to progress, and it didn’t really spur on or motivate anyone anyway.

I really get madder the more I think about this, like she was the main character in the first film and a fantastic WOC that a fucking test of strength of women in movies was based on, and they discarded her.

So I love a good callback, and normally in my fave fandoms I’d look on this kind of thing with nostalgia and defend it against haters, but the extent to which the EXACT same tropes/scenes were used was jarring. Can’t remember them all but the extended voiceover at the beginning, and Amara’s first Drift with Jake when she relived the trauma of her parents’ death, and the expositional “LET’S NAME ALL THE JAEGERS” were particularly obvious

Not to mention HOW THE FUCK DID THEY LEAVE NEWT IN THAT STATE AT THE END

so obviously I knew Newt was gonna be the villain, they’ve been hinting at it for years and there was that one trailer where they were like “ONE OF US did this”

But while I don’t necessarily disagree with his villainhood in and of itself, the lack of any kind of resolution in the likely hope of setting up a third film felt unsatisfying and cheap

All right I’m running out of phone charge but ugh

oh also they SPELLED HERMANN’S NAME WRONG IN THE CREDITS (not when crediting Burn but when crediting his stand in)

And Charlie was credited as Dr. Newt(on?) Geiszler but Burn as Hermann Gottlieb sans title. GIVE THE MAN HIS DUE

I tried to like it, guys; I didn’t go in hoping it would suck. But when you’re sitting expressionless in the theatre not enjoying a playground you used to love, it’s just demoralizing. I feel like Nabokov calling the 1962 film of Lolita “the swerves of a scenic drive as felt by the horizontal passenger of an ambulance”.

[drhermannhottlieb]

can’t focus on a thing

gotta bounce The Leg

[drhermannhottlieb]

Fam, I have a love/hate relationship with those Hermann and Newton clips that have surfaced because it’s obvious they are being set up for another round of “close friendship but obviously nothing more”. In a podcast published today, Steven S. DeKnight called them “best friends”, which, I mean, MAYBE, but ????

So today I went on Twitter and saw this:

As another poster noted, his use of “at least overtly” hinted to me that he may at least be SUBvertly championing something that may not have appeared in the text itself.

Because I care Too Much, I followed up:

tl;dr — Newton and Hermann (I mean, who else are we talking about) obviously won’t be PPDC’s favorite queer couple this round (and not just because Newt jumped ship to the private sector), but the director seems at least cursorily on board, so all we have to do is pray that studio execs/China/global destruction don’t get in the way of pushing this narrative should they go forward.

Post-script: (from before LASIK when I had baller Herm-inspired prescription glasses)

[drhermannhottlieb]

THIS IS MY VIDEO 🙌🏼🙌🏼 I GOT IN LINE AT 4 AM TO GET THIS SEAT FOR YOU ALL

Shout out to @bobsessive sitting next to me laughing her head off ❤️

Charlie Day made a surprise video appearance and maaaaay or may not have sung a song about Newt and Hermann loving each other. I’m crying I’m so excited about this movie. Between this and that trailer… Idk if my heart could take any more lmao.