![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
five things?
1. I am going to the beach! For a week! Starting Sunday! I plan to relax, a lot.
2. I posted on![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fictional_fans asking for comfort-fic recs to preload my phone with, if anyone wants to jump it.
3. I started watching the Chinese Guardian TV show because fic for it came up on Pinboard fandom-popular and it's free with subs on youtube and I figure, given the inevitable ongoing decline of the West, I should get a head start on Chinese fandoms.
It is... kind of amazing? In that it reminds me so much of the shows that were popular when I first got into fandom, trope-y and fun and not super interested in being good for the sake of good and characters that are compelling with out being deep, and also super-slashy without feeling queerbaity? I want some super-deep meta about, like, how Chinese media can still get that feel where most newer Western/Japanese media can't, and what that means, especially in terms of Western slash fans picking up on it, but I don't want to write it.
I also really, really want the Rivers of London crossover, but that is a different level of want.
4. It occurred to me the other day, while trying to write fanfic, that I have a probably somewhat excessive number of pairings where "and they solved a Millennium Problem together!" is a signifier for a romantic happy ending? Meanwhile I can't even get anyone to help me get through the third level of Euclidea on my phone. :P
5. I am still messing around in the con.txt discord! So far it is slow enough that it's not eating my life. Hopefully it does not become to slow to live. It is very useful for saying the sort of things that I would otherwise feel like I had to save for con.txt, so I guess that's good?
It's super-weird that Discord has become this popular without having the ability to do *hyperlinks*, though. O.o
2. I posted on
fictional_fans asking for comfort-fic recs to preload my phone with, if anyone wants to jump it.3. I started watching the Chinese Guardian TV show because fic for it came up on Pinboard fandom-popular and it's free with subs on youtube and I figure, given the inevitable ongoing decline of the West, I should get a head start on Chinese fandoms.
It is... kind of amazing? In that it reminds me so much of the shows that were popular when I first got into fandom, trope-y and fun and not super interested in being good for the sake of good and characters that are compelling with out being deep, and also super-slashy without feeling queerbaity? I want some super-deep meta about, like, how Chinese media can still get that feel where most newer Western/Japanese media can't, and what that means, especially in terms of Western slash fans picking up on it, but I don't want to write it.
I also really, really want the Rivers of London crossover, but that is a different level of want.
4. It occurred to me the other day, while trying to write fanfic, that I have a probably somewhat excessive number of pairings where "and they solved a Millennium Problem together!" is a signifier for a romantic happy ending? Meanwhile I can't even get anyone to help me get through the third level of Euclidea on my phone. :P
5. I am still messing around in the con.txt discord! So far it is slow enough that it's not eating my life. Hopefully it does not become to slow to live. It is very useful for saying the sort of things that I would otherwise feel like I had to save for con.txt, so I guess that's good?
It's super-weird that Discord has become this popular without having the ability to do *hyperlinks*, though. O.o
no subject
?? You can certainly link to websites within Discord. Or did you mean something else?
no subject
no subject
no subject
On tropey ridiculous Chinese fandoms, I have my foray into M/M webnovels post, but as with most rare books, the fandoms for those would be microscopic without making major fetch happen. Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation is becoming big, but I'm reasonably sure most of that is the donghua (anime) adaptation, which I coincidentally hate for the way they have severely misunderstood the main character. (GDC itself isn't the ridiculously tropey type, and is more intriguing and actually-deep, no matter how much the donghua wants to be a generic shōnen thing.) (Also, the tag wrangler on AO3 has synned the donghua tag I tried to make into the novel tag, which is 100% the wrong decision and I hate it.)
I think most of Discord's popularity is just people gravitating more and more away from text platforms and stuff that could by any chance be used as "serious" things. First to Tumblr, with it's effort-free likes and reblogs and design that's only good for pictures, if even that, and now Discord, which is even more off-the-cuff, and has image embedding and custom emojis. I feel like people just want high-bandwidth things, and more and more of them, and pretty moving pictures, and Discord has gone into that slot, especially as it's private by nature, rather than Tumblr's 100% public all the time thing.
(I've achieved those insights based mostly on the observation of my server's userbase. It's a place to discuss Mo Xiang Tong Xiu's works, ie the aforementioned Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, plus The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System and Heaven Official's Blessing, plus adaptations thereof. Invite link for the curious.)
no subject
There was a lot of discussion at con.txt, though, about how there hasn't been a live-action-TV megafandom-that-ate-slash-fandom, really, since the first season of BBC Sherlock, and that was four con.txts ago. (GoT probably counts as a newer TV megafandom, but it's not particularly slash-focused.)
The discussion tended to circle around, a), Western/American TV is becoming overall better, writing-wise, and also more focused on season-long arcs than one shots, which both leaves less incentive to write fic and fewer gaps in which to do it without jossing; b) fandom- and TV- are overall more fractured, it's hard to get a critical mass in one place; and c) Western TV tends to either go Full Gay or go Offensively Queerbaity these days, both of which are less likely to lead to huge slash shipping fandoms (even SPN had its fanfic heyday before the queerbaiting got really thick.)
So I found it really interesting that Guardian, feels a lot more to me like the old slash fandoms like Stargate or Highlander or Sentinel or DS than anything that's come out on U.S. TV in, really, about ten years. It's probably at least partly because Full Gay and Queerbaity are not really options for Chinese TV yet. (And I wonder if their viewership is less fractured, too? I know it first came out on a web channel, but I don't know how China's wide media choices are compared to the US and England's.)
I'm just wondering why Discord when IRC and Slack (and even, like, Skype and Hangouts, which were competing for awhile) are still options. It seems like Discord has more disadvantages than IRC and none of the advantages, except being slightly more user-friendly (and having the voice/video/livestream options, but fandom doesn't seem to use those much.)
no subject
As a books-or-bust fan, I'm not up with the current or past live action TV megafandoms, but based on what I've seen on FFA and other places, maybe there's a small demographic shift? Slash fandom qua slash fandom seems to have splintered to a few places, but Voltron seems to be going pretty strong, drawing from cartoon fandom, but AFAIK it's mostly slash, it's just the fanbase that's not the heir to the prior slash fandom. The newest Final Fantasy game has a similar thing going on in that it's a slash megafandom, but the fanbase draws heavily from places other than slash fandom. (Note that I'm talking at least 50% out of my ass here.)
Based on conversations with actual Chinese people, apparently the stuff unable to be shown on Chinese TV is ridiculously specific, so as long as they cut off before the two guys' lips meet and never comment on why they're sleeping in the same bed, the censors won't put a stop to it. (The list of things forbidden in Chinese broadcast media is hilariously like a hypothetical "Xi Jinping's fic exchange DNW list".) The censorship is tightest on TV (and movies?), less so on cartoons/donghua, and no-one really cares about webnovels. Tradpub novels get some additional requirements, ie no smut scenes, but they can just sell in Taiwan to subvert that. I think the options a random Chinese person might have to watch on a given night are less than that of a random American, due to the Great Firewall, but that's mostly just a feeling rather than rigorously researched. I'm not that optimistic about Chinese TV taking off as a slash megafandom, since a large amount of Americans seem to be ludicrously opposed to anything that has subtitles. I'd love to be proved wrong, though!
Users hate text and text-based interfaces and love pretty pictures. IRC doesn't have native emoji image video epilepsy-inducing capability, so it's terribly unhip. (Trust me, I'd much rather be moderating a text-only IRC channel or three, but no-one wants one, sigh.) I don't know about Slack, but AFAIK it's mostly used by devs? Basically, people like shiny new things and also sparkles, and Discord provides.
no subject
I actually started playing with written Chinese for Star Wars fandom, but then Guardians came up, and it has both English and Chinese subtitles, which is really good for me.
Yeah, there's always been an anime/cartoons/gaming/-ish track of slash fandom (and a music rpf one) running sort of parallel-and-crossing with the media fandom track that traces itself straight back to SW and S&H in the early 70s. They seem to still be going fine - although still leaning heavily eastward, YoI, Voltron, and KPop are three of the biggest fandoms right now. But "tv-and-movies" fandom has been sort of wandering in the wilderness for awhile now, and I do think a lot of it is how Western Media itself has been changing - not necessarily for the worse, but in a way that makes it cry out less for slash fic.
The Chinese rules actually sound a lot like what the 70s-90s US TV was working with! You can hint as heavily as you want, right up to sharing a bed, as long as you never say anything outright. As opposed to now, where you can say or do basically anything, as long as you either make it super-clear the character is STILL STRAIGHT or you're willing to turn them into a Gay Character who never gets to have their intense same-sex emotional relationship centered in the story the way slash ships often were. (I'm not even saying that's objectively worse! Just, worse for slashers.)
I don't know about it being a slash megafandom but it might be able to manage NPT! Especially since it's freely available on US youtube; access issues are often what seems to stop tv fandoms at a certain point these days - so little of the silly genre stuff is easily available unless you want to shell out for premium subscription services.
no subject
no subject
It is, believe it or not, slashier than that description makes it sound.
The department also has various other interesting side characters, including the second-in-command who is a cat who can turn into a dude wearing overalls, and the obligatory gadget guy, and a snake-woman secretary.
Also there is a Mysterious Hooded Figure who the chief flirts with A LOT, and a shrouded-in-darkness Xiangqi-player who is presumably plot relevant? I am only about a tenth of the way in.
Everybody is extremely hot, and yet I can tell all of them apart first try, which is not an experience I generally have with Western TV.
The episode A-Plots, so far, have all involved really intense platonic/familial relationships between two female characters (one was granddaughter/grandma, one was mentor/student) which is a trend I can get behind.
no subject
If you like original fic, I can totally recommend the Outlands series. https://archiveofourown.org/series/801024
no subject
no subject
no subject
I mean, the 70s -90s were also worse periods to be living as any kind of sexual minority in the US as well, which did help shape the content...I do think it's possible to have satisfying depictions for slash fandom which are also Full Gay while keeping the subtextual nature of what's happening *between the characters*.