september's coming soon

E: Have you added anything stupid/cracky/hilarious to your fandom, if so, what?

I wrote a couple of Pokémpolis-ish episode summaries for "Pokemon Digimon United", one of the old-school web shrines. It was ish because PDU had a very kid-friendly profile, and Pokémopolis... yeah. So minus the sex jokes, but still with a lot of pretty cynical comedy.

Except for that... I mean, I must have at some point during the last twenty years? But I can't recall any that stand out.

C: A ship you have never liked and probably never will.

Subaru/Seishirou. It's one thing that "grown man flirting with sixteen year old boy who is clearly uncomfortable about it" is fifty degrees of skeevy. It's another that said grown man is a sociopath who appointed said sixteen year old as his romantic interest when said sixteen year old was like nine, and also doesn't remember it, or that it happened with the other party cradling the body of some girl he just killed.

The problem isn't that Subaru falls in love with the persona Seishirou projects in Tokyo Babylon. That tragedy is a quintessential part of the story, and I love it for what it is there. But I'll never, ever, want the two of them to be together, and it pisses me off that X seemingly tried to establish them as some kind of star-crossed romance. We've seen their AU versions in Tsubasa, and Seishirou was still an evil stalker and Subaru Sumeragi deserves so, so, so much better.

I took it from kalloway so that maybe I'll post more.

A: Ships that you currently like a lot. (They don’t have to be OTPs because not everyone has OTPs.) Friendships, pairings, threesomes, etc. are allowed.

Marinette Dupain-Cheng/Adrien Agreste in all its variations, but since the fandom seriously has wank about this, my ranking goes

1. Ladrien
2. Ladynoir
3. Adrienette
4. Marichat

(yes, I'm the person who thinks marichat is by far the dullest take on it and who adores ladrien in all its impossible, infatuated dysfunction. so edgy)

I won't bore you with all the reasons I like this stupid ship enough to write 2500 words of defensive meta about it, but suffice it to say that I love it like I haven't loved a ship in years.

I'm also still into Shion/Nezumi, though the NO. 6 fandom is pretty quiet these days. What can I say? Five thousand reunion fic is not enough to quell my need for seeing those two having a happy ending. I need an icon.

Honorary mention: Yuuram, which I'd read the hell out of if the fandom wasn't dead.


( the rest )

The upside: the anti-congestant pills are doing their job well enough that I now have occasional flashes of, you know, my sense of smell.

The downside: I'm moderately lactose intolerant and let's just say that along with my sense of smell now comes a degree of flatulence.

I'm not an objective critic here. My tendency for obsessing with fictional works slightly preceeded my entering fandom, and it was absolutely a THING before I found the TRHQ2 forums the autumn of the year of our lord 2000.

Because that summer, I attended some municipality-run class on making websites, and I made my very first one about the amazing Sunset Beach. And one afternoon, I had my dad videotape a film from the telly becaues I'd miss it because of said class, and also because I knew I knew I KNEW that I had to see it.



It's probably the most-watched VHS tape I've ever owned. I remember being vaguely confused by the lack of story, but who cares, becaues I was absolutely in love with the music, the dances, the costumes. I was fifteen. I still know the names of probably some 2/3 of all the named cats, even the ones without songs. I've seen a tour production live, I've bough the West End OST, and no derr was I going to see this film.

TL;DR IT IS AMAZING AND I LOVED IT.

For a bit more objectivity: My standard of measurement between an "okay" film and a GREAT film is whether or not I find myself checking the time at any point in it. Depending on genre, a further indication is going to be wether or not I catch myself grinning like an idiot at any point in it.

"La La Land" had my actively regretting the money I paid for the tickets, and that was nominated for bloody Best Picture. But Cats? Oh, Cats had no less than three "oh wow I'm really grinning like an idiot here" moments. And I'm totally going to see it again on Tuesday.

I haven't been reading a lot of the bad reviews this film has gotten, because I was going to see it anyway and I was more than willing to forgive it A LOT. I didn't have a lot of expectations, because adapting "Cats" as a feature film faces two fundamental problems that I did not see how they could overcome:

1. This show is about SHOW, not story. It has like three minutes of plot that's so pitiful that you just wonder why they even bothered in the first place. The theatre audience clearly embraced the musical for what it was (furries singing and dancing), but to court the mainstream film audience, you'll need a mainstream film. And "Cats" just... can't be that.

2. I've long suspected that my love of the theatre is connected to my love of animation. Where mainstream film is mimetic, both the theatre stage and the animated film KNOWS that they'll always be unrealistic, and so they embrace it. They get to exaggarate and blatantly disregard reality and to use symbolism and visual metaphors for carrying their themes, and that's why I love them both. This is why I'll always mentally pat you on the head for insisting that Harry Potter and the Cursed Child sucks because it read like fanfic. Oh sweaty, it might have, but it was a story that wasn't made to be READ in the first place, and I trust that the people giving the play all the awards know more about theatre than your average Harry Potter fan does. (also, you can wrestle Scorpio Malfoy out of my cold, dead hands) "Cats" obviously depends on the same suspension of reality: These aren't cats, they are people in unconvincing cat costumes singing and dancing on two legs. You can sell it on stage, or the film-of-the-stage, as the case might be. You could've sold it as animation, but animated cats would lose 50% of the appeal of the show - the dancing. It is exceedingly difficult to sell it as something working as live action film, so I can only admire the fact that they had the balls to even try.

As the reception of the trailer made clear, the last problem was the BIG one, since it became a meme in the bad way and probably most people less sentimentally hooked on the musical and/or less nerdy about non-mimetic narrative devices than me probably weren't inclined to ever give it the chance in the first place.

What truly surprised me was that the film in fact overcomes both these complaints, to a degree. The plot is still paper-thin, but expanded upon enough to give us somewhat of a narrative: Meet Victoria, who as the story starts is dumped by her owner in what turns out to be the Jellicles' territory. The run-up to the Jellicle Ball is given a twin motive: Introduce Victoria to the Jellicle cats as she observes the cats campaigning to be chosen for a new life, while Macavity lurks in the shadows (for a reason, not just be a troll! omg) The rest of it is pretty much singing and dancing, becaues that's what this is about.

My one criticism of the film would be the visual designs, but not what everyone else is complaining about. I didn't have any uncanny valley moments with neither the faces nor the two-legged dancing, but I did take a bit of issue with how the chorus cats were all a pretty uniform mass here. On stage, they're all distinct and infamously, a lot of them are named. In the film, I honestly don't know if it was Bombalurina and Demeter which sang "Grizabella", because they all looked the sodding same. The furry faces and the human dancing? Psh, I'd forgotten about them two minutes in.

( More commentary, likely presuming you know at least the stage musical but honestly how can you spoil something that doesn't have a story )

If you asked me about the one show I did not expect to be sitting down to watch at 3 PM, it'd be some TV-quality CGI monster-of-the-week about a couple of sixteen year olds in some goddamn love triangle with themselves, but here we are.

As a rule of thumb, I don't like CG animation. As a rule of thumb, I don't like shows with running subplots about teenagers with dumb love problems. As a rule of thumb, monster-of-the-week has got to serve up something a a bit more than "good guys always win with the same three transformation sequences", but here we are, apparently.

I don't watch enough cartoons to really speak of whether or not Miraculous: Ladybug and Chat Noir is unique except for its setting (Paris). Where it's super formulaic in episode structure, it's at least fairly creative in its once-an-episode brainwashed supervillains and their superpowers which Ladybug and Chat Noir have to battle inevitably defeat. It's so dumb, and yet I love it enough to be watching the goddamn re-runs.

I mean, I've watched maybe five or six episodes in total, but believe you me, I'm enjoying this dumb CG cartoon about two sixteen year old superheroes in a love triangle with themselves way more than I've enjoyed any of the proper adult series I've tried watching in the few weeks since getting HBO on cable.

I'm trying to log into my del.icio.us account, old enough to be registered to my old fandom e-mail, and which I had a password reset for in April 2008.

I'm currently feeling old, and also trying to imagine what the hell kind of passwords I would've been using eleven years ago, because of course the site is so wrecked that error messages are all over it now and current password reset isn't working.

Years of battle have ended, as I discoverd that the weird flat triangle thingie coming with my sewing machine was in fact the cleverly camouflaged screwdriver for adjusting the thread tension on the bobbin.

For years, that sewing machine has been collecting dust in a wardrobe, waiting for the day it's less than three hours away from a repairman. For years, it's been occasionally taken out just to establish that yup, thread tension still fucked up and since nothing helps with the wheel, it's gotta be the lower thread.

Years of messed up stitching, of not getting to repair things or only repairing them at my mum's, of the quiet annoyance of a broken tool that I might've used more often if it just wasn't broken, and I was ten minutes away from resigning and planning a new trip to the shop that very strongly hinted that laymen shouldn't be diagnosing their own machines and when was it last on a service and who told you it was the lower thread -

and it was a two-second adjustment, and it runs like a wonder.

If you wonder: This week's project is to repurpose a washed-out duvet cover into reusable pantyliners. And part of the reason not going to the shop was the price I paid for a pair of fabric scissors and snap-on buttons, while listening to the owner repairing someone else's machine and lecturing an audience about letting other people borrow your sewing machines. Sure, the problem isn't that the machines are thrash, it's just that the mechanics are too sensitive to strange people's aura, I guess.

The upside: Moving my dining suddenly gave me a lot more living room space

The downside: The ceiling-hung lamp needs to be moved with it, which means I'll have to remove the cord encasing glued to the ceiling, remove all the places the cord has been pinned to the wall, and drill a new hole into cement so that I can hang it up again

1. Here's one for minimalism: I just realised that part of the reason why my bujo doesn't work is because using colour/glitter/what have you is way too distracting, and that a simple black fineliner + my highlighters is a way better solution.

2. Uploading icons from a decade+ ago might not make me post more but I need a Mika Seguchi in my life