#analyzing fandom spaces

[biglesbiansim]

Smth I think about on a regular basis is how when Teruko snapped it was mostly “oh no what a bitch” but when DAVID snapped it was “omg he’s so hot”. I don’t understand the dr fandom’s—or any fandom’s, really—tendency to flock to terrible men and ignore or belittle beautifully written women when they’re shoved right into ur face 💀 and the way that Teruko and David are literally the same character (Teruko’s a little smarter though) or just—have a lot parallels to each other is crazy to me. Drdt dev is an amazing writer and I’m supes excited to see what they do with their characters!!

[maidenvault]

Not “Only my reading of canon is correct” or “Interpretations are subjective and all valid” but a secret third thing, “More than one interpretation can be valid but there’s a reason your English teacher had you cite quotes and examples in your papers, you have to have a strong argument that your interpretation is actually supported by the text or it is just wrong and I’m fine with telling you it’s wrong, actually.”

[scribz-ag24]

Future trio for character bingo (you knew this was coming lol)

hehe of course. ive marked "i have many headcanons" bc i guess by drawing them so much i am technically making headcanons, tho the word is pretty vague imo.

grovyle the guy ever. deservedly popular within fandom and people who vaguely remember playing eotd when rhey were 6. probably best character in the entire franchise. what could i even say. i cant believe people dislike him just bc hes well liked and arguably popular for pmd cast standards.

dusknoir, who should be tied with grovyle for my fav character, except he could be slightly more favoured bc i dont think ive ever felt so passionate about characterization until i saw certain popular headcanons for this guy. Still, i adore and have obsessed over every dialogue he has in the game, what else could i say that isnt patently clear in my fanart and ramblings. Def one of my fixations at the moment and top contender for the Best PMD character ranking. who doesn't love a well done twist villain/antagonist who will do whatever it takes to survive and perfectly contrasts our morally grey lizard hero.

celebi, the most girly girl that ever girled just so the writers could add romance. I cant believe she made me have a character arc where i first couldnt stand her and then ended up loving her thanks to cool fanon content and my belief in fighting the toxic misogynistic 2010s fujoshi that lives within all of us. it took a while for her to grow on me but now shes def part of the trio of all time. its a shame shes still vastly underdeveloped compared to the other two, so its a good thing they have each other to become more interesting through their interactions!

[kagiura-akira]

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Atp I'm not worried about ME seeing spoilers or my mutuals for the most part bc I know we've seen the same TLs but there are still people posting untagged pages with reckless abandon and idk man I have uncomfy feelings about those people

[flying-fangirls]

it's heartening seeing your thoughts on Malevolent bc I do agree with you that there's a risk to speaking openly with even mild criticism bc people will suddenly make it their business to get in up your face about it and it's often over topics that aren't even speculative but instead simply pointing out canon events and narrative choices in the show itself.

Thank you! <3 It's such a strange thing to worry about too, because I can spend hours of my day having critical conversations in class over stories that everyone has wildly different interpretations on, and it's still a supportive/productive conversation. But then online, you can make one observation that isn't blindly positive, and some people will take it like some grand personal attack/moral condemnation. I've made a ton of positive critical posts on Malevolent, and people really like those, but the not wholly-positive ones get significantly less enthusiasm (which is fine! idrc since I'm going to make them no matter what lol, it's just very telling)

It really feels like-- when it's online-- people forget how to just... have a conversation, and listen to someone else's ideas and respond in kind. Idk, all it really takes is a willingness to listen and understand. Nuance and conversation is possible if we choose to make it, y'know?

[vampirismadvocate]

sometimes I worry my haha funny fandom posts/interests come off as me not critically engaging with media/lacking media literacy, when for me fandom is an indulgence that doesn’t necessarily need to be academic.

I still love analyzing these books/movies/shows in a more “serious” way, but sometimes I just wanna see my blorbos kiss.

[cannimumsable]

The pattern is that people straight up do not read™. or they read a 3-5 tweet summary of what happened and treat it as if they did. or because shonen expectations based on "the classics" is bullshit and significantly rotted people's brains when deciding wether an ending is good or not.

Which could be nothing right

yeahhh. i will forever regret reading the last chapter through leaks because it was a dreadful experience, and watching everyone ever shit on it for like a week after genuinely made me want to just get off the internet forever or something because i felt like an idiot for liking the ending (all this is my fault for getting too invested in both tumblr and mha etc etc).

All the "it's rushed" and pacing complaints barely matter to me at this point because you just cannot feel the pacing of something correctly when you're reading it exclusively through leaks. you can't absorb info like that. And don't get me started on the number of complaints and criticisms I've seen of the last chapter that are just provably bullshit (I saw someone say Izuku didn't get a statue lmao. yes he did, you just read the fucking leaks and watched twitter drama unfold instead of reading the actual chapter i fear).

[sadiecoocoo]

So I just thought abt this… I only started watching Rick and Morty abt a month ago, and I got to see the release of imo one of the best seasons (fear no mort gave me the Morty content I needed to not immediately cross this season off the list)… and I am so happy that I got to witness the fandom and be apart of it while big things were happening in the show! RnM will definitely be a hyperfixation that will stay a while (*^‿^*)

[bandsanitizer]

okay so… do I ever jump into writing kpop rpf 😭 bc the ideas are THERE I just… yeaaaaaaaaah that’s a scary hill to climb. truly cannot believe middle school/high school me used to just write fics for whatever fandom I felt like with little concern for other people’s opinions on my characterization, etc. and maybe it’s being older and understanding writing differently or just operating in a different space, but sometimes there’s a lot of anxiety with posting fic that I never had before 🤔

[galacticlamps]

actually ascension needs its own post since that's the one with the most details to speculate over and im starved for soho talk so i will talk to myself if need be

First the cover again, because I kinda can't get over it:

my only thing is that I had been hoping we might get Lizbeth on a cover again since she's never been on one of the boxsets before, despite being the 2nd person credited on all 4 of them (even if that's just alphabetical, still, she's the only one of the four main characters who never makes the cover)

But letting that go...

I know we already kinda knew the brief for this one but damn I didn't expect it to go quite this hard. Maybe that's just because the Parasite & Ashenden covers were (comparatively) similarish to each other and I was so pleased with Unbegotten's, and then got so used to it as the placeholder for Ascension while they kept postponing it, I wasn't expecting anything this colorful or detailed or with what I can't help but register as Fun New Outfits even though these are still like, pretty damn basic as far as costumes go. Still, it's a different vibe from everyone in suits and trenchcoats on every cover, technically. (Oh the woes of being an audio fan such that two characters owning sweaters actually does qualify as new information)

On top of just being visually delightful though, I know we knew religion was gonna be a fairly big part of this one, but I didn't actually expect to get quite this much of it - though I'm glad of it for a number of reasons. The BF twitter already made the ineffable joke so I don't have to, but also yeah I did very much spend all of season 2 episode 4 of good omens half convinced Samuel Barnett & Dervla Kirwan were about to pop up around any given corner (if you will go around being gay supernatural and horrible at your messy bureaucratic jobs in midcentury soho then I'm sorry, this is where my brain's gonna go) - so, fuel to that fire. But in terms of actual important things, at least one of my Soho wishes looks to be being granted because we have a Rev Edward Folgate on the cast list, which must mean we're finally meeting Norton's father, even if his mother & brother don't appear (which they could, technically, I've definitely seen BF not list all the doublings on their cast tabs before). Religion, domesticity, and the nuclear family are all things that absolutely fascinate me when it comes to Norton's character, so getting any amount of story involving his father & his church is something I've been actively hoping for for a long time now.

(I will say I'm a tiny bit bummed Saffron Coomber isn't on the cast list to play Mia again, but I kinda figured she wasn't going to be since Greg Austin's Armitage, who's making his first recurring appearance after originating in Unbegotten, was listed ever since the boxset was announced - presumably if she was also returning, that would've been handled in the same way. But since Unbegotten ended with Lizbeth and Mia going on a date, I still held out hope. Who knows though, maybe things did go well for them and Lizbeth just has a better work/life balance than Norton so she can date someone without them getting dragged into every scifi plot. I know that's not a very common accomplishment for any Torchwood agent, but a gal can hope)

At this point I know I'm completely in the realm of speculation & even wishful thinking, but I'm really really hoping we get some more clues as to Norton's overall timeline in this one, and I have a feeling that even if there's nothing as direct as dates given, the events of a plot like this one are going to heavily influence my personal interpretation of it.

To say that life & death are major themes for the soho crew feels wildly reductive, but even by Torchwood's standards and taking into account its origins as a piece of media with Jack Harkness & his newfound immortality at the heart of it, the living/dead status of this bunch has always been fantastically up in the air to me. Obviously Ghost Mission introduced Norton as kind of a ghost before revealing more obvious ghostly characters later on to which the title might have been referring, but his being from the past did beg the question of his survival into Torchwood's present era all the same, which Outbreak later alludes to much more directly, and his habit of showing up via hologram in multiple stories only further obfuscates any certainty we might have about where & when he definitely can be said to be alive and well. Then you've got Lizbeth and Gideon both being effectively 'brought back to life' via paradoxes that prevented them ever having died in the first place. Again, they are very very far from being the only Torcwhood characters this happens to (for a sprawling EU, it's really rather impressive how often & in how many different ways Torchwood as a whole manages to circle back to being about like. chaotic undead queers at the end of every day. though I suppose that consistency is part of why I keep falling in love with its different iterations again and again). That's without even getting into the question of Norton's dubious fate in God Among Us - and I say dubious because I know some people take that to be his ultimate death, but I personally think that reading something as vague as that as having any kind of finality rather goes against the spirit of this whole world/series, not just because I want him to live. (There are obviously other ways to make him survive/reappear, but I don't see this as a River Song scenario where we can safely assume one of his earlier-released adventures had to happen at the end of his personal timeline). But wherever God Among Us falls for him, he does very much meet God in it - or at least, a god, since the sentinel in Unbegotten is also described as a god of sorts, and even if he doesn't ultimately have the status of the god Jacqueline King is playing there, Unbegotten is still full to bursting with ghosts/undead/came back wrong/echo characters to continue underscoring that life/afterlife theme.

So all things considered, even allowing for the fact that we know Norton's twin hobbies are lying about himself and abusing time travel to suit his own ends/ever-shifting alliances, I find it difficult to believe we could get through a whole 6-part boxset about religion & death without something providing some kind of compelling evidence about where this adventure fits in among his other run-ins with apocalypses and gods and ghosts and dead-but-still-here characters/creatures, so I'm very much looking forward to any further exploration on that front.

And lastly, and least intellectually, I really want to know what the hell 20th-century Torchwood's obsession with Reginalds is. Reading through the cast list, I had to do two separate doubletakes over the character 'Sir Reginald Peebles' - firstly, because I had Reginald Rigsby on the brain, this being Soho (and the other Troughton brother being so active on BF's releases for this same month) - and secondly, because reading this in conjunction with the announcement for the July monthly adventure in which the new main Torchwood guy of the 20s is apparently called Sir Reginald Dellafield, there was a brief moment where I took that monthly release to be a tie-in with Ascension. I don't expect it to be, but damn. was it really so popular a name?

anyways, catch me thinking about those stained glass windows for the next couple months I guess (and knowing Torchwood Soho, for a long long time after it comes out as well lol)

[myrmecomorphisme]

Just remembered that when the first season of the Witcher came out some people were overanalyzing the three seconds of Roach bonking her head against Geralt

[driftershunt]

^ excerpt is in relation to tags

Not to start yapping randomly but I think there is something to be said on how certain fandom characterization of Maverick ignores the depth in his character and boils him down to a reckless, chaotic man who is very infantilized despite of him being A Grown Man. And this is largely because people buy Maverick's facade. There was a very good passage in 'Tom Cruise: Anatomy of an Actor' by Amy Nicholson where she talks about how Cruise in 1986 was portraying a man (Maverick) who himself is playing the part of a cocky man. He does not have an abundance of reckless confidence, it's an act, one that unravels when you look at his moments of vulnerability (ex. the nighttime scene with Goose). This facade is also much mellower in Top Gun: Maverick as Mav has aged, so it's actually really interesting how some people tend to lean back on TG86!Maverick's mask when characterizing him. Some things to think about

[calyroco]

It's fucked up that that happened but it also conceptually hilarious. You get outed as frwshly divorced on tumblr of all places. Not even a normal mainstream social media like twitter or insta or facebook. Fucking tumblr

... that actually feels like something that could plausibly happen tbh

[fandomsandfairytales]

I haven't been in multiple fandoms at once in a long time and being so now is pulling me in all different directions XD I'm rereading The Selection series (just finished it actually) in tandem with reading The Lunar Chronicles for the first time, I'm rewatching Longmire with my mom and am still into it, I'm so into Sons of the Star & Annaáuchiwee (it's on the brain very often), I just finished and posted my first Tolkien fanfic and I'm reading Tolkien fanfics I'm subscribed to, and I'm getting drawn back into Greta Van Fleet because they're resuming their tour in a few days and the guitarist just announced that he's forming a band with 3 other guys and that band is going to be opening for GVF. My brain is a very chaotic place right now in terms of fandom. So. Yeah.

[shadowcat222]

Getting anxiety about enjoying my silly little characters

[thebeautifulfantastic]

hot take but maybe we all connect to fictional characters in different ways and that’s why we all have different favorites and maybe we should acknowledge that it's valid