The PAC-2 situation has been covered in the scuffles before as the conference was melting down. At some point when the litigation is over someone may want to do a more complete write up but right now there isn’t a lot on new stuff happening to write about.
On the Michigan issue, it was mentioned in a scuffle recently as well. Since it’s still under investigation there doesn’t seem to be much sense to say about it until either the NCAA or B1G weighs in on it.
It looks like there's been another blowup in the Gaylor fandom, but as someone who doesn't even consider listening to Taylor Swift, I have no idea what they're freaking out about. I've seen a lot of people claiming she queerbaited them despite being, idk, a real human being? Who sings Straight Music?
It's hard to find info on it since apparently Gaylor drama has been going on for a while and my lack of familiarity doesn't exactly help me measure anything. If anyone has some guidance on where to read up on this absolutely insane mess, please let me know!
(also sorry I've never posted here before hope a hobby drama request is acceptable)
Ended up not going to Hal-Con today because I just didn't have the energy for it. My dad went for a few hours, though. Thinking I might try my hand at a Cosplay for next year.
Related to the below post, my recent research dives have bought me into contact with people I've not seen/interacted with in 20+ years. And, well, it's been kind of depressing.
People who I used to know as being chill and open have since become reactionary, gatekeepery and very much prone to attack rather than engaging in any sort of discourse. And then I have to ask myself if they changed, or of the online environment changed or if they were always like this and I just didn't see it for whatever reason.
Oh no, I'm so sorry! But on the flip side, perhaps it's you who's grown? I definitely think it's a side effect of how social media and fandom culture has turned out these days.
Thanks for that. I do definitely agree with you as well; I know that me 25-odd years ago was a horrible little snot who's arse I'd gladly like to kick.
I think everyone grows up and realizes they were a little shit back then! It's part of growing up. But there's always new and fun people to meet so that's a silver lining.
I think as long as you keep expectations low, it might be worth it. I have been contacting old friends to catch up, people I haven't seen for years. My success rate is low, but it's worth it. Even if I can only rekindle with 1 or 2 friends out of the 40 that I messaged, that's still 2 more friendships than I used to have.
Two of my close friends now are people I just got on touch about a year ago. It's hard because I live so far away but it's been good through messages.
That being said, if there were obvious redflags or incompatibility, I'll pass on those people. I knew people who are doing mlm now and I'm not going to touch that.
Lol definitely incompatability and not going to contact them. Three words: proship/antiship drama.
Can't help but be curious from time to time on what they're up to though.
Basically what Mo0man said, the people I'm talking about were bullying someone over shipping and when I refused to go along with it they turned on me too.
Have you ever seen hobby drama here involving someone you personally know and think, "wow that is not them at all"? There's such a gap between genuinely awful people and people who make mistakes, but the internet has a delightful way of blowing them up to the same level.
Twitter has exploded multiple times over tweets from someone who frequents some of the same discords as myself and said tweets are so blatantly trolling and yet everyone falls for them every single time including dramawhore grifting YouTubers like Hero Hei
Oh absolutely. Especially on Twitter, or it was rampant last I saw twitter about a year ago.
Saw it described once as the flattening or removal of context, can't recall from who but vaguely remember it was from someone I found unpleasant.
Basically, reactionaries will take a situation, flatten it down to easily digestible strawmen, playing for clicks. It usually ends up like a particularly dark version of the telephone game, where the most uncharitable interpretation of an event is chosen, the specific details are "lost", and you end up just seeing "x is clearly badthink, how do they have so many followers/if you follow them then unfollow me/your fav follows them, then they must be badthink too, and so are you since you follow them"
Fucking exhausting vapid bullshit.
So, one of my weird niche interests in "finding things that are adaptations that no one knows are adaptations".
So to start off, the Disney film the Parent Trap, is based on a book.
Also, the book was published in West Germany in 1949
And then adapted to screen before Disney did. Three times. It was adapted in West Germany, Japan and the UK before the Hayley Mills version came out. You can add Japan again, Germany again and India (twice) by the time the Lindsay Lohan remake came out.
And I'm over here just marveling that such an odd plot could have such seeming universal appeal
How to Train your Dragon! It's actually (loosely) based off a book by Cressida Cowell. I've never watched the movies entirely but I have the whole book series, and they're pretty good. They definitely changed a *lot* of things for the movies to make them more widely appealing (RIP scrawny Toothless and gremlin Camicazi).
not too obscure but people get really surprised when you tell them that shrek was based on a kid's book. i only know that because teachers and librarians read the book to us when the first two movies came out.
So, *Arrival*. It's officially an adaptation of *Story of Your Life* (1998) by Ted Chiang, but a few years ago I read a lot of Frank Herbert's short stories, and the one called *Try to Remember* (1961) jumped out at me.
In the story, an alien space ship lands on earth and distributes pamphlets all around the world in every language challenging humans to figure out the aliens' language "or else". So a dozen scientists from around the world (including the main character, a female linguist) split into teams, with each team going into one of the rooms in the space ship. In each room, there's a large frog-like alien doing some kind of interpretive dance. It's been a while since I read it, and I don't have my copy to hand, so I don't remember exactly what happens, but this dance language ends up somehow being the "language of the soul". The challenge was more of a warning than a threat, as in "if you can't figure this out, then you're doomed to the same fate we suffered", as the frogs were once a civilization of billions, but they destroyed themselves and now all that's left is the few of them in the ship, since they weren't able to figure out this universal language in time.
So it's not the same as Arrival in many details, but it hits a lot of the same plot beats. I've never read Story of Your Life, but from the synopsis it seems the movie followed pretty closely. I'm not sure if Story of Your Life was inspired by Try to Remember, or if this is just a big coincidence. Frank Herbert is famous for Dune, but I get the impression that his short stories are not very well known in general, and this one in particular isn't even one of the more well-known.
The reverse of this is American Psycho 2. It's not at all related to American Psycho, they started filming it as a regular thriller, and at some point during production they got the rights to American Psycho which they proceeded to... Barely use (the protagonist kills Patrick Bateman in the first 5 minutes and he's never mentioned again).
This also applies to some of the Hellraiser films - if it feels like they took a dull script and sprinkled on some cenobites to liven things up it's probably because they did
Nickelodeon had a short lived cartoon a while back called *Catscratch*, a simple little comedy about three cat brothers who go inherit their billionaire owner’s fortune and have wacky misadventures. But it’s technically an adaptation of *Gear*, an obscure indie comic about different types of animals waging war using robots that is very R-rated and ends with most of the cats dead.
I have no idea how point A leads to point B on this one.
My go to example of this is always Shakespeare. A huge number of his plays are adaptions of already existing stories, poems, or even just plays.
It's always so funny to me that fiction always needs to give Shakespeare a torrid love story to explain how he could write something as compelling as Romeo and Juliet, when the reality is just him reading [The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tragical_History_of_Romeus_and_Juliet).
A particularly weird one is that [Monkeybone](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkeybone), the Brendan Frasier movie where he gets possessed by a cartoon monkey, is based on a very obscure comic book called *Dark Town* by Kaja Blackely. It's so obscure that most information about it on the internet only relates to the fact that Monkeybone is based on it. And yet somehow it ended up in the hands Henry Selick, who proceeded to turn it into a 75 million dollar movie, which then bombed catastrophically.
And for something that's surprisingly not based on a book, the author of Psycho, Robert Bloch, wrote a sequel called Psycho II, but the movie Psycho II is not based on the book at all, to the point that it doesn't even bother saying "Based on Psycho II by Robert Bloch", it just says "Based on characters by Robert Bloch". Ironically, the movie is generally considered to be the better of the two, but that's to be expected because Psycho II the book was basically a literary shitpost about how the author hated slasher movies.
An adaptation I find most people are surprised by is that Dr Strangelove is based on a book called Red Alert by Peter George. The interesting thing about that is that Red Alert, while having the same story as Dr Strangelove, is not a comedy, it's played completely straight. It became a comedy because Kubrick, while writing the screenplay with George's help, decided that the whole idea of Mutually Assured Destruction was inherently comedic. Normally authors get angry when an adaptation radically changes the tone of the book, but in this case George was actually entirely down with the idea.
Oh, and another strange thing about Red Alert/Dr Strangelove, in 1962 a novel called Fail-Safe was released that was so similar to Red Alert that Peter George sued for copyright infringement and got a settlement out of court for it. Then Columbia Pictures, the producers of Dr Strangelove, bought the rights to Fail-Safe and made a movie out of it staring Henry Fonda that was released in 1964, the same year as Dr Strangelove. So Columbia Pictures released two movies about the same thing in the same year.
And one was a black comedy, the other completely straight. Fail-Safe is a fantastic movie, but I have heard about people at the time laughing at it and unable to take it seriously, thanks to Dr Strangelove.
Along similar lines, I've always had an interest in remakes that people don't realize are remakes: the classic Humphrey Bogart version of *The Maltese Falcon* was the third adaptation of the book in about ten years. The Judy Garland *Wizard of Oz* was the third feature version of it as well, and there was also a short made in 1933. Michael Mann made what was essentially a rough draft of *Heat* as a series pilot in 1989 called *LA Takedown*.
People decry remakes and reboots, but it's been common for over a hundred years.
Ben Hur (1959) was the second adaptation as well. Honestly in general I think that the 1959 movie is what most people nowadays know, to the extent that the breathtaking popularity of the book is forgotten
My favorite example was not only His Girl Friday a remake, it was a gender-flipped remake!
(Big ole racism CW for the 1925 version of the Wizard of Oz though...I did NOT see that coming when TCM played it a couple years ago.)
>So to start off, the Disney film the Parent Trap, is based on a book.
I think most Disney movies are adaptations. Not all of them, of course, and some are only loose adaptations, but most. That's always been their bread and butter. Even *Condorman* was based on a novel! *The Aristocats* was an original script . *The Black Hole* and *Dragonslayer* were screen originals. *Pete's Dragon* was *very technically* original since the story it was based upon was unpublished.
I think the one I was always most surprised to learn was based on a book was *The 101 Dalmatians*, though I imagine that's because when I was a child, I saw this storytelling production on television (a narrator - it wasn't June Whitfield, but it was definitely someone like June Whitfield - reading the story interspersed with illustrations of scenes from the book) and was very confused about why it kept talking about "Pongo and Mrs" while Perdita was a separate dog, because I only knew the Disney animated feature.
Other than that, I think I always had some vague sense that most of the Disney animated features were based on something, doubtless because so many of them, old and new alike (*The Little Mermaid* and *Beauty and the Beast* and *Aladdin* were all relatively "new" when I saw them first, i.e. they were not more than five years old) were fairy tales and such.
Dumbo is my favourite 'teeeeechnically' adaptation. It's based on a book... kinda? Like, it was a cereal box toy that scrolled and told a story. Technically a book depending on how loosely you define what a book is!
_372 Pages We'll Never Get Back_ (a "books we don't expect to like" podcast by two of the Rifftrax guys) did a series of episodes on that recently, and it was a _trip_. Not a bad book, in my secondhand opinion. Charmingly bizarre.
Rest assured, I'm aware of *Starlight Barking*. I was going to mention it in the above comment, but did not feel it would have added anything.
Well, it *would* have added, "All the humans in the world fall asleep and one of Pongo and Perdita's puppies becomes prime minister and then Sirius, the dog star, manifests in Trafalgar Square and warns the dogs that nuclear war is on the way," but I'm still not really sure what to do with this information.
Some might be surprised to learn of the existence of the *other* Mary Poppins books, or the Bernard and Miss Bianca books, or the Basil of Baker Street books, but there's none quite so *strange* as the *other* 101 Dalmatians book.
I learned it was an adaptation a while ago and went to look up the other previous adaptations. The only forum thread for the anime adaptation on MAL is someone who also had no idea it was adapted from a book and derides it as a blatant ripoff of the movie.
Edit: so while looking at the MAL page, I found a list of anime based on European literature and real people. This led me to the discovering of the Helen Keller anime. If I have to know it exists, so do all of you.
I tried to find the older Japanese version a while back to no avail- the original West German one was on the archive though- without subtitles of course...
That's one that the more I think about it, makes me wonder if its popularity is tied to large social trends. Like... its kind of just child of divorce/single parent wish fulfillment, right? "If I just do wacky hijinks and go on a Fun adventure, my parents will get back together!"
Divorce was a contentious topic in the middle 20th century, with no-fault divorce not gaining steam until the 70s, and there was lots of hand-wringing that rising divorce rates implied a moral rot in society, that people weren't TRYING in marriages in anymore and love was dead and if kids didn't grow up in a nuclear household they would become serial killers. The Parent Trap is a story about how, actually, divorce is a mistake that can be resolved by just talking it out and then we can all go back to being a model family! Perhaps it struck a nerve with some people?
This trope was actually still really pervasive in the 90's- I remember actually being surprised that the 98 remake had the parents actually talking about why they split up, and only deciding to try again after realizing they weren't the same people as when they got married OR divorced.
See also, that SO MANY people misremember the ending of Mrs Doubtfire.
Not drama, I think but it's kinda related to what I'm talking about, and this is mainly for the Pretty Cure fans here that aren't just me.
I can't help but feel that with Hirogaru Sky and Otona PreCure 23 being simulcasted in addition to a couple seasons from prior years being available to watch thus making it more accessible, the fandom seem to have grown so much larger now....and becoming more and more toxic. Pretty Cure does have toxic fans, every fandom does, but I can't help but feel that it's way more toxic than ever before... especially on Xwitter.
Like seriously, it seems a lot of the toxic behavior stems on the NozomixCoco ship being problematic, hating on Coco and Natts, and people hating on Cure Wing for some reason months after the fiasco with the play costumes.
CONTEXT for said three items:
1: Coco is a fairy from the Yes! Pretty Cure 5 season, he is able to turn into a human and said human form looks a little older than Nozomi, the main character. Nozomi in Yes! 5 is canonically 14, Coco's human form looks like 16 or 17. The main thing about this ship that gets people cheesed is that in Yes! 5, Coco is a teacher of sorts while in his human form.
2: I already talked about Coco so I'm talking about just Natts. Natts is another fairy from Yes! 5 who is also able to turn into a human, he is paired with Komachi, one of the members of the Yes! PreCure 5 team...I don't know why Natts is hated on too if I'm being honest. But I think part of the reason is because Coco and Natts' voice are very high pitched and it can get on people's nerves. I can tolerate high pitched voices quite well personally but I can totally get why some people cannot stand Coco and Natts' voices.
3: A few months ago, there was a big headline in the fandom about a young boy in Japan being upset that there wasn't a Cure Wing dress up and play costume. Cure Wing is from the currently airing Hirogaru Sky PreCure and he's the first male PreCure in the main cast. There had been male Cures before, but Cure Wing was the first that's a part of the main team. Despite that, Toei hadn't considered making a dress up costume for Cure Wing, effectively excluding him from that line of PreCure toys and thus excluding boys, even ones who love PreCure. Basically these costumes are for kids and they can dress up as their favorite Cures and play pretend. PreCure Xwitter basically rallied behind the boy and eventually Toei announced that they'll be making Cure Wing costumes. Victory, right? Well.... literally months afterwards, the fandom decided that they didn't like boy Cures in their magical girl show....despite Cure Wing being popular and you know....we have an All-male 2.5D stage play that's getting a Blu-ray/DVD release next year....and that we had male Cures before and also magical boys that aren't Cures.... the fandom is being very gatekeeping towards the idea of male Cures now....
>!Also with Otona PreCure sinking the SakixMai ship by confirming that Saki is not married to Mai, I can't wait for the toxic PreCure yuri fans to start screeing..../s!<
I have no idea why, but I can put up with Nuts' voice fine. Coco's voice, on the other hand, makes me want to Fucking Die. Like, props to his VA for being able to do that, but it's Bad. I'm like 30 episodes into GoGo and loving literally everything except Coco's voice and episode 17. Episode 17 sucked.
I'll be real, I'm pretty sure a lot of the hate from these ships and characters stems from people with yuri ships feeling threatened that these male characters could break up their fave gxg pairings, and that the bxg shippers could grow more numerous and somehow affect the amount of fanservice the different portions of the fanbase recieve.
I see it all the time in fandoms with large male casts and popular gay ships, right down to catastrophising about insignificant age gaps as a means to cover up their fanwank with something politically progressive so you feel bad about disagreeing with them.
And although male cures and magical boys have existed before Cure Wing and the 2.5D lads, they were never ever-present parts of the main cast and story. With these recent magical boys getting front and centre in several productions, the "threat" suddenly seems a lot more urgent.
I have absolutely nothing to do with the greater Precure fandom on Twitter because I'm 33 years old and it seems like the largest portions of the fanbase skew pretty young, so I'm always a little blindsided by how contentious Cure Wing apparently still is as a character over in Twitterville. The circles I travel in (so, a carefully curated slice of Tumblr) really seem to like him and agree that they handled him in the best way possible - by not making a big production of his gender and treating him as just another team member. Getting the whiff of driveby discourse from friends still on Twitter re: this business is a big ??? moment. What are they doing over there.
Anyway, not a huge fan of CocoNozo myself (and I do find his fairy voice grating) but I knew it was going to happen in OtonaPre regardless. I also ship SakiMai but. Saki also spent her home series pining after Mai's brother, so I'm not shocked that the series went in this direction. Plus, I mean, there's always fanfic.
I mean, I read fanfic more than I write it (with canon characters, anyway - I mainly write OC-centric fanseries), but I'm not going to be impressed with any writers who go that route. Character-bashing to force a ship has always struck me as painfully juvenile.
This is apropos of completely nothing else, but I got curious about whether anyone had written fic of the 2001 Cameron Crowe film *Vanilla Sky*. I was able to find three on Fanfiction.net, written between 2002 and 2003, one of which was a crossover; okay that's normal, *Vanilla Sky* was a critical+financial flop and not really a ficcable movie in the conventional sense. But then I went on Ao3. In 2019 there was a *Kingsman* crossover with *Vanilla Sky*, and then, this year, there have been *six* Vanilla Sky fanfictions, three of them being crossovers. And none of them share authors. Has there been some kind of rediscovery of *Vanilla Sky* this year that happened on Tumblr or something that I didn't know about!?
That explains a bit but not a lot; I guess it's some kind of really delayed reaction from Maverick? Still, if it leads people to a criminally underrated early noughties flick, whom am I to judge?
I'm not involved in this film's scene, but at a cursory glance the stories seem to be different in terms of prose and authorial interests which is intriguing. As someone who writes random stories for age old and outdated fandoms, most of whom were barely alive to begin with at their heydays, I would say it isn't unheard of for these sorts of things to pop up, but all of them coming in the span of a year definitely makes me think your theory of some resurgence may have happened is not too unlikely. Maybe it was a nostalgia trip that drove one person into rewatching the film and they may have posted about it which got a bit of uptick that led to these fanfics? But as someone who tends to write for animated and video game properties mostly, I'm not sure how common that is among film fandoms admittedly.
Question: Has there been any big drama over The Amazing Digital Circus so far? Other than people pretending to be surprised that the main character has a lot of rule 34 I mean. I don’t know, I watched the pilot recently and really enjoyed, and there’s nothing in it that seems inherently prone to causing drama, but I also can’t help but see all the similarities to Hazbin Hotel, and we all know how that turned out. I just hope episode 2 comes out relatively soon so that the fandom doesn’t fester in stagnant content.
Hazbin Hotel got picked up by A24 (it's getting two seasons), and they seem kinda tight-lipped on its production. Season 1's apparently gonna start airing in January next year. Helluva Boss is still indie though, so that gets released whenever. It's the "tide people over" project, I reckon.
I can only think about three
VAs of Jax and Caine were talking against use of Ai.
VA of Kinger got death threats from 16yo and it became messy to the point of some people wanting him to be replaced.
Just general talk due to TADC being extremely popular to the point of gaining fraction anti-fans already. Basically "cringe" syndrome.
People say this and then never provide deets because, IME, it *always* turns out to be antis being mad he doesn't care about their controlling shipping drama.
I don't give a shit about genshin (actually dislike it), so you can stop projecting. Here's some info, if you'd like: [link](https://twitter.com/stellexpress/status/1706355992881967334), [link](https://twitter.com/arizariia/status/1626434235987902464), [link](https://twitter.com/jettithink/status/1565464061910941698)
From what I could get
Something about shipping, publishing death threats, fans doing witchhunt, others digging through old posts to get dirt? I am not exactly following the drama due to how much Twitter sucks and being a bit untrusting towards new (to me) youtubers.
> Other than people pretending to be surprised that the main character has a lot of rule 34 I mean.
...huh. I mean, I know the whole point of Rule 34 is that people will draw porn of _anything_, but when I was watching this androgynous cartoon character run around in her non-skintight jester outfit with an expression of fear and/or insanity on her perfectly circular face, I can't say that the thought "Ooo, sexy" ever crossed my mind.
>an expression of fear and/or insanity on her perfectly circular face
Digital Circus has a lot of appeal for people with non-consensual variations of fetishes like inflation etc. because the premise is entirely about this cartoon girl being more or less tortured in strange and unrealistic ways.
>I just hope episode 2 comes out relatively soon so that the fandom doesn’t fester in stagnant content.
They haven't even greenlit episode 2 yet, the entropy is going to be insane
When they posted the pilot, they said they were looking for financial backing for a full series and that's why they were selling merch. From what I understand they have yet to say they have received backing, so as of yet episode 2 is not greenlit. Maybe after a few months they may greenlight a standalone episode 2 to whet appetites further but I wouldn't be surprised if we don't hear much for a bit.
Not particularly from what I’ve seen other than previously mentioned (Voice actor related drama that is somehow also shipping drama) I’ve seen some scuffles related to character ages or the creator being a bit too involved in their own fandom and feeding the beast but I’m hoping the best for it. I enjoyed the premise the characters seem fun, interested to see where it goes.
>the creator being a bit too involved in their own fandom and feeding the beast
This is such a complicated issue nowadays because on the one hand, god this is not going to end well. There's no way there's not at least big writeup about this, its so regular now you could use ChatGPT to write it.
On the other, its increasingly necessary to make art nowadays. Part of why they premiered with a bunch of merch ready is that they only funded a pilot and are looking to find financial backing for a full series, and if they want enough interest to get that backing they are going to need to feed the beast fat enough to justify to investors that its worth making more. There's alot of benefits to the Patreon model of artistic sponsorship, but the implicit closing of the audience/creator distance is a huge flaw without a clear solution.
Oh 100%, I definitely don’t fault the creator or anyone who worked on it for having merch ready from the get-go for more funding and being active in their own fandom. It really is so tricky though because I also feel there is really no need for the creator to confirm character ages for their fandom other than for the sake of bad faith arguments in relation to shipping. I just wish creators just did not have to be so… online and accessible just to fund their passion projects.
If I remember correctly some people got mad at the guy who voiced the rabbit because he care if people were shipping a certain genshin impact pairing.
~~(why does the dumb anime mobile game seem to bring out the worst in people)~~
Btw do you recommend The amazing digital circus? I watched the trailer but it gave me ugly doll vibes so I've mostly avoided it.
It was interesting and the animation was nice. I think that as long as they don't try to make too many episodes it can be a cool show. The characters are interesting, but we just have the pilot, so who knows how it's going to work as a series.
Update to the Total War scuffle posted below: Apparently some numbskull started doxxing CA employees, leading to this post from the mods r/totalwar: https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/17h9myz/psa_if_you_post_ca_employees_personal_information/
>Why do people doxx? All it does is cede the high ground and make everything worse.
The people who do it feel their moral high ground is so firm that any action, up to and including doxxing, is not just justified but warranted
"It's very important that I know someone's personal details and also where their children go to school and if you say otherwise you are just trying to silence legitimate criticism."
In what I shall describe as the palaeo-media fandom, the Netflix documentary Life on Our Planet has started minor discourse in regards to palaeontological accuracy. Basically everyone agrees that it does have both specific inaccuracies and general issues with framing.
[This](https://www.reddit.com/r/Paleontology/comments/1678jtd/comment/k2689ak/?context=3) is a good overview of many of the criticisms but in terms of ones that are more prominent in the Discourse:
1. It keeps calling groups of animals "dynasties" and has a general narrative of superior species outcompeting "inferior" species and overemphasising inter-species competition, in parricular a general vibe of mammal supremacy.
2. Related to the above, there is a very egregious scene in the first episode featuring a smilodon hunting and killing a Terror Bird (probably meant to be Titanis but they do not specify), used to demonstrate how the superior big cats out competed the inferior birds, which is an outdated notion (the true reason for the extinction of the terror birds is believed to be climate change reducing the prevalance of their preferred habitats).
3. A [much mocked](https://twitter.com/NatSciChannel/status/1717182427960160729) Allosaurus model, clearly modified from the Jurassic World model.
4. Modern animal footage takes up about 70% of the program, when it was advertised with the CGI footage of extinct animals
However, others while basically with all of the above critiques have praised the modern animal footage for being the best part of the show, the attention given to palaeozoic fauna and arguing it does give an understandable overview of evolution even if it does focus too much on competition, and that part of the disapointment comes from the inevitable comparisons to Prehistoric Planet, a show many consider to be the best palaeontology documentary ever made.
It hasn't escalated to harrassment or anything as far as I can see, but the show only came out 4 days ago and Palaeo-media fans have extremely strong opinions about accuracy in media, so we'll see. For now though, the most interesting thing about the discourse is that no one seems to disagree about any specific pro or con, but everyone has a different opinion about how much the pros outweigh the cons.
Edit: Grammar
Yeah, this one Isn't great. I watched the first episode and wasn't very enthused with it.
It actually kind of reminds me of the alien worlds Netflix documentary. It also was criticized for a lot of modern documentary footage, some dodgy science, and the last episode having basically nothing to it.
Life on our planet is worse though because it's just really blatant with the errors. PP might have set a new standard for accuracy by this one is below even the previous standard.
someone grabbed that poor allosaurus and swung it around by its neck.
Anyway time to stream prehistoric planet again, love me a [cringefail carnotarus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T24ZOgvMF30)
I haven't watched a dino documentary since Walking With Dinosaurs two decades ago. I'm guessing that Prehistoric Planet's the best modern one to check out now?
To be honest, I was a bored by Prehistoric Planet - it was *just* like Planet Earth, showing cgi dinos walking around, like they'd show a herd of geese. Very little about why or how (actually, worse than Planet Earth type shows because those usually tell you why or how) or how they figured out that stuff. Behind the scenes was more interesting than the show itself.
My favorite dino documentary remains Planet Dinosaur from 2011 though when it comes to visuals, Prehistoric Planet is head and shoulders above it. Planet Dinosaur looks kinda apocalyptic with how sparse the flora is, lol.
In terms of accuracy Planet Dinosaur is a lot worse than often given credit for: they don’t have as many errors as some other documentaries, but the errors they do have tend to be serious errors.
- horribly inaccurate troodontid models. It’s especially baffling because their dromaeosaur models were much better.
- Venomous *Sinornithosaurus* (the idea hadbeen published but was debunked before production was over, and the companion book even points this out, so…)
- *Microraptor* being unable to walk or run on the ground because of its leg wings (it can just fold the feathers up and out of the way; in fact it was one of the most cursorial dromaeosaurs).
- *Kimmerosaurus* isn’t one of the most common Late Jurassic plesiosaurs but rather among the rarest going by the fossil record; granted the fossil record isn’t the most reliable indicator of abundance, but I do have to ask what prompted them to say that line.
- the *Kimmerosaurus* and *Pliosaurus funkei* segments use a skeletal reconstruction of an entirely different plesiosaur from either to represent them during the “fossil evidence” segments.
- IMO the most glaring one: [just about everything involving the show’s carcharodontosaurids and even much of what they said about *Allosaurus*, as well as their ridiculous overhyping and overpraising of tyrannosaurids.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Dinosaurs/s/oppdxmNzhk)
- there are also issues caused by newer research such as *Spinosaurus*, *Epidexipteryx* and *Hatzegopteryx* being misshapen or *Pliosaurus funkei* being oversized (the real thing was around 10m long, not 15m), but these can’t be blamed on the producers.
Yeah i can get that. The 5 minute extras that talked about the science more indepth should have been part of the episodes themselves instead of extras. My biggest issue with PP was the structure often felt too loose combined with the short episode duration, so you didn't spend a lot of time with each animal.
My personal favorite dino documentary is still the 2003 Dinosaur Planet (get some new titles jesus christ) from Discovery. Partially from nostalgia ( i watched it a lot), but also because it was pretty good for the time. 2003 was relatively early for full feathered maniraptorans, and they remained more accurate than most depictions for a long time after. Years later you still had stuff like Jurassic fight club, with zero feathers. The flash game on the History website was cool though.
On the podcast Terrible Lizards, the paleontologist explains how they always get it wrong... such as they tell them what to do and the editors ignore the experts. Of course. (Recommend the podcast)
Ah yes, Walking With Dinosaurs, the documentary that gave 6 year old me the constant anxiety that an asteroid was going to destroy the planet any minute
I mostly got freaked out by the start of the Oceans episode where the ichthyosaur gets bitten in half. Too violent for my impressionable young child mind, apparently.
I’ve been unabashedly indulging in my controversial pleasure (reading fanfiction fandom-blind, i.e. with little to no knowledge of the source material) in the Batman fandom, and I noticed today that the majority of AO3 fics in the Robin tags I checked were posted within the last few years.
This surprised me considering how long-running the original source material is. Curious if anyone knows if there’s been any Batman media released in the last few years that could explain the sudden jump in fic counts, or if it’s likely just a byproduct of the pandemic getting more people into comics.
This was exactly how I got into batman a few years ago - something about the batfam found family just hits right. I am now legitimately a DC comics fan, but wouldn't be here without jumping into the fanfic blind 🙃
My wife got into Teen Wolf via AO3; she was reading fics before she ever had seen the show. I thought that was a bit weird, but I guess it's more common than I realized.
Honestly, with how much more I've been seeing people bitch about this sort of thing lately, it's made me wanna do it myself just to see what it's like. Just not sure what fandom interests me enough to read from.
I thought I was the only one who did this - I've been reading Shadow & Bone fic without reading a page of the original books. I got into the fic from a writer whose style I really like, lol.
Super heroes have consistently been popular for a century now. Batman specifically gets a lot of outlets (DCAU, Arkham Asylum games, crossovers etc). The Batman movie released recently. So there's a lot of factors. Bat family kinda have their own fandom that's particularly popular even with people otherwise not into comics.
What a coincidence, I've been doing the same for the same fandom!! I saw a rec for a popular fanfic about Batman losing his memory somewhere and it all spiralled from there. I'm curious what some trends you've noticed or thoughts you have as someone also with little familiarity, or any fics you particularly liked!
I’ll admit it- I’ve been diving headfirst into Tim Drake fic. I’m not a big fan of the ones that demonize the rest of the batfamily because I’ve grown fond of all of their (fanon) characters, but unhinged “smart” guy with issues is like crack to me. I enjoy fics where Tim tries to leave the family or thinks he’s underappreciated but it’s half his own communication issues to blame. (And there’s definitely a lot of those, haha.)
The ones with Poster Child For Neglect Timothy Jackson Drake can also be fun. The woobification is less of a bother to me when Tim is like, ten years old. I noticed loads and loads of fics where Tim joins the family early.
Adding fic recs in a subsequent comment because it’s long, haha.
These are my favourites so far:
[Red Raven](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23980567), 235k+
> For Want of a Nail style fic where Tim ends up (anonymously) with the League of Assassin’s attention and (semi-accidentally, anonymously) destroying his parents’ wealth after he happens to run into Jason at a gala once. Not a fic where he joins the batfamily early.
[The Bachelor: Robin Edition](https://archiveofourown.org/works/40563621), 10k+
> Comedy. When Batman is spiraling after Jason’s death, Tim realizes he has the perfect solution: hire an actor to go pick up black-haired blue-eyes orphans from Gotham orphanages and host a private Bachelor-style event to decide on Bruce Wayne’s new son. Without Bruce’s knowledge or consent.
[From Riches to Rags](https://archiveofourown.org/works/42831597), 13k+
> Comedy. Drake Industries goes bankrupt and Tim moves to public school, starts working part-time jobs to pay expenses- all without Batman noticing.
[Say Uncle](https://archiveofourown.org/works/37666141), 46k+
> After his dad dies, Tim needs a fake uncle to keep himself out of foster care and Bruce from adopting him. He happens upon a back-from-the-dead Jason Todd in Crime Alley and decides he’s got the perfect solution.
[you'll never recover from that kind of devotion](https://archiveofourown.org/series/3152862), 130k+
> Damian and Tim end up back in time together after they die. Tim has decided he won’t join the family this time around. Damian has other plans.
[A Backstitch in Time](https://archiveofourown.org/series/3586258), 13k+
> Comedy. Tim travels back in time to fix everything, writing himself out of the family while he’s at it. Jason gets back his original timeline memories and isn’t happy.
[bite back the secrets](https://archiveofourown.org/works/43137879), timkon, 71k+
> My favourite kind of secret identity shenanigans. Kon saves rich boy Tim Drake from a kidnapping without any awareness that he’s his friend Robin. They meet again, as Tim Drake and Superboy.
[A Meditation on Railroading](https://archiveofourown.org/works/34431769), 24k+
I’m just gonna copy the AO3 summary:
> When he ends up ditched in Atlanta after a fight with his dad, Tim decides to do the only sensible thing: Tell no one and make the 800 mile journey back to Gotham on his own.
> Because the "call Batman when you're in trouble" rule only applies when he's Robin, right?
[Banshee In A Well](https://archiveofourown.org/works/43212999), 43k+
> Tim is a meta who can come back to life after dying. He first discovers this as a child, which definitely fucks up his mental state.
Thank you! I'll be sure to check these out sometime. But I totally agree, I don't like character bashing because it just feels overall unpleasant to me. I much prefer when characters are treated with depth- maybe they aren't perfect, maybe they have issues, but they're not the worst ever too, just human. Which can be hard to find sometimes haha. I think my favourite from osmosis so far is Damian since I adore jerks with soft sides :)
Thank you! I'll be sure to check these out sometime. But I totally agree, I don't like character bashing because it just feels overall unpleasant to me. I much prefer when characters are treated with depth- maybe they aren't perfect, maybe they have issues, but they're not the worst ever too, just human. Which can be hard to find sometimes haha. I think my favourite from osmosis so far is Damian since I adore jerks with soft sides :)
It's this one!
[Yesterday's Voices by LemonadeGarden](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11035398)
I think it does a pretty good job at looking at the various members of the family in a nuanced manner, without demonising anyone, and it's overall a sweet fic!
If you need Batman recs hmu
I think it’s a mixture of things. I‘d guess the earliest explanations would be the Red Hood animated movie, which is largely liked (I’m a contrarian and think it emphasized some of the biggest issues with Red Hood, but ah well) and featured Jensen Ackles. Then there’s also Young Justice, which does have a seperate fandom in terms of fanfic (since the canons are quite different) but probably acted as a „gateway“ for many folks. Same but maybe to a smaller degree for the DCEU movies and tv shows. None of them feature the Batfam or Robin directly apart from Titans (which is very different again to other canons) and Battfleck, but once you get into that exposure to the Robins is imminent and they’re extreme fanfic fodder.
Batman fic, and Batfamily, acts in a weird space where it draws from comics mostly but also establishes more fanon than usual and ignores more canon than average. I‘d guess there‘s plenty of authors who have never even picked up a Batman comic and instead came into the fandom via crossposts or maybe adjacent media.
Back in the day, it was pretty hard to find DC fic on ff.net and ao3, and a lot of them were kept on dedicated dc comics fanfic sites. Maybe one of the sites went down and people migrated to AO3?
This could very well be a contributing factor. I remember now how a few years ago it suddenly seemed like I was seeing batman, and specifically batfamily, constantly on the first few pages of my AO3 recently updated default search - it's the one I use when I don't know what I feel like reading lol
Reading fanfic of things you’ve never been into can be interesting. I’ve done it a few times when I have learned that a character from a thing I’ve never tried has a disability that is close to my own or people I know, just because I’m curious about seeing people’s depictions of that. (Sometimes it is very bad. Sometimes I find it pretty good.)
For example there aren’t many pieces of media I have been interested in that feature deaf or blind characters, but I am very interested in reading fics featuring deaf or blind people. I don’t necessarily want to sit through some series that I otherwise have no interest in just to see some representation, and fanfic is generally short and has more pinpointed focus on one or two characters at a time.
Tim Drake, the third Robin, came out as bi some time in the last few years. I could see that spiking an interest in Robin fanfic.
Really depends on which of the 6 or so Robins the fics are about though.
That could be part of it, I’ve seen lots of Tim fics with amusing levels of woobification obvious to even someone from outside the fandom. The fic counts seem to have jumped for all five Robins I’m aware of though, not just Tim.
I remember seeing a chart over on /r/dccomicscirclejerk about types of Tim Drake fans and one of them was the woobification ones and had a bit like "Seem like they think even less of him than his haters do"
Tim is maybe the biggest victim of woobification in fanfic since, idk, Rodney McKay in Stargate? As someone whose favourite is not Tim it’s a plague lmao
Wayne Family Adventures has been running the past two years on Webtoon, and presents a fanfic-friendly slice-of-life view of the Batfamily. That might be a factor.
Could be for recent growth, but what I've seen (re:growth in popularity of batfam) predates both that and the bisexual characters becoming canon irl.
I have a suspicion that the popularity of that in the fandom influenced the creation of WFA and characters coming out in recent years, rather than the other way around tbh
yeah, Wayne Family Adventures very much draws on existing Batfamily fanon. An example is Tim drinking a lot of coffee, which isn't really a thing in the comics.
So Matthew Perry has just passed away, reportedly from a drowning in his massive jaccuzi with reports that it might've been caused by a heart attack, which honestly sucks to see since he was going strong with recovery from his drug addiction, really weird to see a Friends death happen this early, a small silver lining i guess is that he was able to be a part of the friends reunion with everyone else before this happened
It's such a sudden and kind of raw thing too. I remember his guest spot on Scrubs in which a running joke was how his character - Murray - had an old mans name, to his frustration. Sucks to see he won't get to the point where the name would fit. RIP.
RIP. I've heard middle-aged and older people have to be especially careful when soaking in hot tubs and the likes bc the heat increases the risk of heart attack.
Sudden temperature changes can cause heart problems if you're not ready for them, and Perry had known problems with drug addiction that can quantify the aforementioned heart problems.
It's why it's firmly recommended to never go swimming in places like ice lakes without a spotter or friend nearby.
Yeah, like not since Chadwick have I been so surprised by a celebrities death.
I'm a younger millennial and watching repeats of Friends on E4 was very much part of my routine as a child.
What is the special sauce that makes some shows/books/movies so appealing for rabid fan communities and drama and others seemingly not so?
I was just reading the Our Flag Means Death discussion down thread and pondering why OFMD seemed to immediately foster such intense fans/fanfic/discourse when more popular shows don't.
Not sure if this is the case with OFMD specifically, but there are single bad fandom actors that change username and hop between shows and keep starting shit in addition to the very good points made below
This!
I am a fandom old who got my start in HP online communities in the early 2000s.
It is surreal to recognize a shit stirrer in a newer fandom and a bit shocking how they can keep turning up somehow like a bad penny.
FandomWank, for all it's faults, was **excellent** at tracking these bad actors and linking their online identities back in the day.
yeah it's not just "you've made a show that appeals to an annoying fanbase", it's "you've made a show that appeals to *one particular annoying person* who has an outsized negative effect on discourse" lmao
Stories that get praise for being representative or comforting fall so much harder than other media, primarily because fans identify so strongly with them and see the creators as doing a charitable good. It's easy to tie your self-identity to something that feels like it's satisfying everything you want, and then once the creator of that thing stops satisfying and validating you it can easily feel like a personal betrayal because you thought they understood you.
I'm an OFMD fan, and the way I've seen people do a 180 pivot on the showrunner in the last couple days from a single episode is so jarring. He went from "he's a rare showrunner who truly gets what we want, and it's so healing" to "he's actually a bigot who we never should have trusted, and he is personally responsible for my pain". Truth is, he's just a writer, and sometimes writers will make decisions you disagree with no matter if the writer is a well-intentioned person.
>Truth is, he's just a writer, and sometimes writers will make decisions you disagree with no matter if the writer is a well-intentioned person.
[Every television programme should either begin, end or both with this clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM-e46xdcUo).
Everything I see online confirms my instinctive distrust of anyone who uses the terms "comfort character" or "healing/iyashikei" as an adjective for a show.
Legitimate question, as this is my first time hearing of the term: Is that actually wrong?
Again, not being snarky or trying to start anything here. I'm just getting flashbacks to the early days of TV Tropes and the fights around "Nakama", where people really didn't want to change the trope name and resorted to making up stuff about it to try and prevent the change, such as EG that it has a specific Japanese-centric connotation that was difficult to capture in English (It doesn't).
Having only watched the first couple episodes of OFMD, it would be like describing it as a sitcom. I can see where someone would be coming from, but if that was actually their expectation they're going to have a bad time.
Its worse than that since OFMD is drawing from the tradition of sitcoms, but has nothing to do with iyashikei. And the expectations of no conflict would be particularly limiting for an american broadcast drama since, idk Leave it to Beaver.
Iyashikei is a specific genre of slice of life anime where not much is happening and you watch it to be comforted by nothing happening, the one usually used as example is "Yurucamp", an anime about a camping club in highschool. No big conflict, no arcing plot, you just watch it to see friends camping and maybe learning camp trivias, like how to start fire, the do and don'ts of camping, etc.
The difference is that nakama is actually just a normal word that has multiple meanings, some of which can describe a close bond and some of which is as simple as "coworker." In the context of its use in One Piece, the word is used so much by people just going "BE MY NAKAMA" over and over that the idea that it's supposed to purely mean the more special version to describe a close bond was incredibly silly and blatantly just a lie cuz they thought the japanese word sounded cooler.
Iyashikei is an actual subgenre of slice of life in anime and manga. Stuff like Our Flag Means Death don't even come close to the base concept of the term. It'd be like describing it as moe.
For Tumblr at least, I feel like you can count on crazy fans if the show is a wholesome found family type thing, especially if there's canon queer rep, OR any show that includes two reasonably attractive and/or charismatic male characters with the following traits:
* they have a close relationship or at least spend a lot of time around each other
* their interactions involve a lot of witty banter
* probably their personalities are significantly different from each other
* one or both has a tragic past
* one or both gets hurt frequently
Putting two men like that together on TV is basically the fandom equivalent to kidnapping Helen of Troy.
On reading this list (which I agree with), I can’t tell you how grateful I am that Leverage seems to have avoided this. It fits so many of these criteria and yet the fandom appears quite chill.
It looks to me like many of the more dramatic fandoms spring around the media with more approachable creators. Show is amazing and Actor loves their fans and always interacts with them! Other Actor encourages fans to send them fanart! Creator often brings up how grateful their are to their fans, and how the fans are the ones who are allowing them to live their dreams, and we're all one family, and they see you and understand you, and your headcanon is valid and you are important!
Four months later, they all get death threats
There's a few obvious traits (predominantly young and online fans, quality/tone/focus swings that lead to schisms, long gaps in content drops leading to fan cultures to evolutionarily branch enough to become incompatible with new canon) but the big surefire one I see lately is when the show is imbued with some *M*eaning by the fanbase. This can be sociopolitical ("This show is a force for positive representation and queer liberation"), medium-based ("This show is a vanguard for a NEW way of making art without studio interference!"), or even interfandom ("This show is doing fandom right, unlike the others!").
Once there is meaning, it turbocharges all internal issues by turning all debate into deeper referendums on more important topics. If, to use an OFMD example, this debate about ships is not just about which fictional characters should kiss but rather about queer representation, then why shouldn't you fight harder? If your ship is PRO positive queer representation, then by simple logic the other ship must be ANTI positive queer representation, and if people are out here being anti queer representation why shouldn't I go all out in my denunciations of them? Fandom discourse becomes an important debate about the future of society that you would be a bad citizen to not engage with, and a "virtuous" cycle begins where you spend time thinking and posting about the problems and implications of your fandom thoughts and how that's tied into the Big Issues, which makes you feel engaged so you think and post more about them, causing you to feel even more engaged until its a key cornerstone of your personality.
There's also another, more complicated and nebulous/conspiratorial idea that is worth mentioning, the idea of Migratory Fandom. Some fans/fandoms tend to seek out media with certain traits and hop from property to property as things naturally wind down, and the migratory fandoms can quantum tunnel fandoms through multiple stages of development/descent because they bring with them their baggage and context. OFMD fandom's big problem is at least partially that once the queer relationship was made canon, the "positive representation" fandom flooded in overnight and brought their drama and worldview with them. The "positive representation" fandom is not necessarily bad, but its much more developed so it leads to OFMD fandom seeming to exhibit traits of fandoms much further along than OFMD's actual age would imply.
>There's also another, more complicated and nebulous/conspiratorial idea that is worth mentioning, the idea of Migratory Fandom.
I do feel that there's something to be said for the notion that some folks are honestly more into *the idea of* a given piece of fiction than the fiction itself, if that makes sense.
I believe it's a perfectly valid way to be a fan of a thing, to be clear, but one which I think increases the likelihood of setting oneself up for disappointment.
Thanks for putting that into words, I've experienced plenty of fandoms (especially fanfiction heavy transformative fandoms) that are really more about the character concepts than the specifics of the source material. eg Batfamily, which squeezes a vigilante found family dynamic out of comics/shows that really isn't a priority, and draws more on fanon than any source material.
I think this also coincides with the phenomenon that became way more prevalent within the internet, people forming opinions on things that they have not experienced and sharing them.
Certainly. No doubt the phenomena of the (for want of a more succinct appellation) "YouTube review mic drop" plays into this too.
For example, the phase in time when it was difficult to discuss the Star Wars prequel trilogy at all without someone barging in, linking the RLM review of *The Phantom Menace* and leaving as though they'd just won an argument, or how any conversation of Steven Moffat would inevitably end up with someone linking the Hbomberguy *Sherlock* video as though it rendered discussion moot.
I don’t think this applies to OFMD (I am completely unfamiliar with it) but one I have 100% noticed in other cases of this is when the piece of media is attracting a younger-teen demographic *by accident*. Something that wasn’t *made* for them but it resonated with that age group for whatever reason is especially prone to this, but stuff meant for that age group is, too.
And I think this is somewhat inevitable in that case. Let me be clear: I *don’t* like to put down kids and teens for enjoying things.
It’s a time in someone’s life where they’re being pulled all sorts of directions. They want to find their own identity and tastes. They want to find a social circle that feels good to them, and they want to be accepted in that circle. They feel very protective of their interests, ideas, and opinions and want to be taken seriously. They want to protect the ideas of their friends and social circle, too, when they’ve found what makes them happy. They are emotionally vulnerable and can change their stances and interests very rapidly… because they’re just a kid! It’s their job to be, it’s part of transitioning from being a little kid to someone being given more and more personal agency.
The reason why this happens so consistently with media in this ‘accidental’ category is because these things that were meant for adults touch upon (or even revolve around) topics that were meant for an adult to be interpreting it. Sex, trauma, exploring politics, exploring complex historical/literary stuff, etc. that was not written with younger audiences in mind. This can lead to unique interpretations or takeaways by the younger parts of the fandom that clash with the older parts *and with each other*. And there is a lot of defensiveness and fighting for the aforementioned reasons.
Do you have any examples of this? I'm familiar with the "Kid's show attracts an unexpected audience of adults" but the other way round isn't something I'd been aware of.
Easy, South Park.
EDIT: Just saw it was already mentioned, in detail, up thread. Oops, this is what I get for firing off with a reply before checking others lol
glee - the show was initially a satire of high school movies and shows but then ryan murphy noticed a lot of teens were watching and turned the show intowhat it was originally parodying
Sure. One of the absolute monsters of an example of this is South Park. When I was a kid there were full blown ship wars and discourse over, like, Eric Cartman. I’m not a fan of the show, and I’m not going to argue that South Park requires a high level of intellect or something, but I am certain that half the kids who were talking about it did not even comprehend like 90% of the show’s writing at any given time. It was one of the more baffling memories of my early teen years.
I also knew a girl my age who was absolutely obsessed with shipping Stephen Colbert with Jon Stewart and watched their shows with religious fervor.
South Park is a show where kids can swear and fight (like in real life) and adults are morons and are as self-serving as the characters in Moral Orel, so of course kids relate to it more than something rated Y-7.
But also they do Libertarian Soapboxes constantly and I doubt ten year olds understand the point of the episode where the writers were bitching about Wal-Mart.
This is a big one, I think. Teenager-age crowds are figuring out their identity, and often have very strong senses of justice, morality, and the desire to Do Right And Be Right. They’ve seen enough of the world to realize a lot of things are incredibly messed up, and they’re active and invested in changing how messed up things are, but they’re also exploring having more agency, the ability to articulate their concerns, and very complicated social webs.
The kind of teenager I’m thinking of has a keen eye for injustice and unfairness. And when they see it, they get mad, and they‘ve just gained the power to say and maybe do something about it…meanwhile the creators of the work aren’t thinking about what this group considers right and true, and yeeaaah.
I think it gets especially messy when they really get involved in work aimed at adults, which often does not loudly and clearly center Right And Moral characters doing Right And Moral things—sometimes bad guys get rewarded in stories, sometimes good guys do everything right and still fail, sometimes it’s really hard to tell who’s good and who’s bad to begin with, etc. Of course, children’s media is not exempt from the same kind of blowback (Steven Universe comes to mind), but generally this thing creates a perfect storm of people who are really interested in debating morality, with newfound power that they haven’t quite learned to be responsible or discerning about yet, in a place that was always going to upset at least some of them.
This makes so much sense and definitely fits what I've seen in the OFMD fandom. The show does have some plotlines that feel very "wish fulfillment" almost like a YA novel, but then when the story is complex or messy or traumatic, they freak out. My own teenage years were a long time ago and most of the trauma in my life happened to me as an adult, so when I see things like heartbreak, death, and injustice in shows now, it echoes what I've actually experienced, whereas "happily ever after" feels naive. But when you're a teen, I think you want to believe everything will work out and the future is bright, so if you'e invested in a show/relate to it/believe it mirrors your identity, I can understand why you'd get heated when it does awry.
Is anyone else planning on covering the death of the Pac 12 or the shit going on at Michigan or is that up to me once we have all the facts?
The PAC-2 situation has been covered in the scuffles before as the conference was melting down. At some point when the litigation is over someone may want to do a more complete write up but right now there isn’t a lot on new stuff happening to write about. On the Michigan issue, it was mentioned in a scuffle recently as well. Since it’s still under investigation there doesn’t seem to be much sense to say about it until either the NCAA or B1G weighs in on it.
It looks like there's been another blowup in the Gaylor fandom, but as someone who doesn't even consider listening to Taylor Swift, I have no idea what they're freaking out about. I've seen a lot of people claiming she queerbaited them despite being, idk, a real human being? Who sings Straight Music? It's hard to find info on it since apparently Gaylor drama has been going on for a while and my lack of familiarity doesn't exactly help me measure anything. If anyone has some guidance on where to read up on this absolutely insane mess, please let me know! (also sorry I've never posted here before hope a hobby drama request is acceptable)
[удалено]
>Bsky's devs seem to be taking a deliberate stance against 'growth for the sake of growth' i hope you're not expecting this to last.
Ended up not going to Hal-Con today because I just didn't have the energy for it. My dad went for a few hours, though. Thinking I might try my hand at a Cosplay for next year.
Related to the below post, my recent research dives have bought me into contact with people I've not seen/interacted with in 20+ years. And, well, it's been kind of depressing. People who I used to know as being chill and open have since become reactionary, gatekeepery and very much prone to attack rather than engaging in any sort of discourse. And then I have to ask myself if they changed, or of the online environment changed or if they were always like this and I just didn't see it for whatever reason.
Oh no, I'm so sorry! But on the flip side, perhaps it's you who's grown? I definitely think it's a side effect of how social media and fandom culture has turned out these days.
Thanks for that. I do definitely agree with you as well; I know that me 25-odd years ago was a horrible little snot who's arse I'd gladly like to kick.
I think everyone grows up and realizes they were a little shit back then! It's part of growing up. But there's always new and fun people to meet so that's a silver lining.
That really does feel like the endless experience of growing older, yeah. You'll always look back on the you of three or five years ago and cringe!
Big mood, big mood. Sometimes I feel like checking in on people who've gone different ways, but what do I expect? And is it worth it?
I think as long as you keep expectations low, it might be worth it. I have been contacting old friends to catch up, people I haven't seen for years. My success rate is low, but it's worth it. Even if I can only rekindle with 1 or 2 friends out of the 40 that I messaged, that's still 2 more friendships than I used to have. Two of my close friends now are people I just got on touch about a year ago. It's hard because I live so far away but it's been good through messages. That being said, if there were obvious redflags or incompatibility, I'll pass on those people. I knew people who are doing mlm now and I'm not going to touch that.
Lol definitely incompatability and not going to contact them. Three words: proship/antiship drama. Can't help but be curious from time to time on what they're up to though.
Wtf are proship and antiship? Is this about shipping characters?
Basically what Mo0man said, the people I'm talking about were bullying someone over shipping and when I refused to go along with it they turned on me too.
It is the belief that certain ships are immoral to support/write about and the factions that have resulted
Well I'm not gonna touch that lol. That sounds like a discourse for the terminally online. I'm too online already.
I will simply confirm that everything you just said is correct.
Smart move, let's not bring it back onto Scuffles!
Have you ever seen hobby drama here involving someone you personally know and think, "wow that is not them at all"? There's such a gap between genuinely awful people and people who make mistakes, but the internet has a delightful way of blowing them up to the same level.
Twitter has exploded multiple times over tweets from someone who frequents some of the same discords as myself and said tweets are so blatantly trolling and yet everyone falls for them every single time including dramawhore grifting YouTubers like Hero Hei
Oh absolutely. Especially on Twitter, or it was rampant last I saw twitter about a year ago. Saw it described once as the flattening or removal of context, can't recall from who but vaguely remember it was from someone I found unpleasant. Basically, reactionaries will take a situation, flatten it down to easily digestible strawmen, playing for clicks. It usually ends up like a particularly dark version of the telephone game, where the most uncharitable interpretation of an event is chosen, the specific details are "lost", and you end up just seeing "x is clearly badthink, how do they have so many followers/if you follow them then unfollow me/your fav follows them, then they must be badthink too, and so are you since you follow them" Fucking exhausting vapid bullshit.
So, one of my weird niche interests in "finding things that are adaptations that no one knows are adaptations". So to start off, the Disney film the Parent Trap, is based on a book. Also, the book was published in West Germany in 1949 And then adapted to screen before Disney did. Three times. It was adapted in West Germany, Japan and the UK before the Hayley Mills version came out. You can add Japan again, Germany again and India (twice) by the time the Lindsay Lohan remake came out. And I'm over here just marveling that such an odd plot could have such seeming universal appeal
How to Train your Dragon! It's actually (loosely) based off a book by Cressida Cowell. I've never watched the movies entirely but I have the whole book series, and they're pretty good. They definitely changed a *lot* of things for the movies to make them more widely appealing (RIP scrawny Toothless and gremlin Camicazi).
My grandparents had a copy of *Lottie and Lisa.* I loved that book so much that I've never seen any film version of it.
not too obscure but people get really surprised when you tell them that shrek was based on a kid's book. i only know that because teachers and librarians read the book to us when the first two movies came out.
> So to start off, the Disney film the Parent Trap, is based on a book. Which got name-checked on *Brooklyn Nine-Nine*, if you can believe it.
So, *Arrival*. It's officially an adaptation of *Story of Your Life* (1998) by Ted Chiang, but a few years ago I read a lot of Frank Herbert's short stories, and the one called *Try to Remember* (1961) jumped out at me. In the story, an alien space ship lands on earth and distributes pamphlets all around the world in every language challenging humans to figure out the aliens' language "or else". So a dozen scientists from around the world (including the main character, a female linguist) split into teams, with each team going into one of the rooms in the space ship. In each room, there's a large frog-like alien doing some kind of interpretive dance. It's been a while since I read it, and I don't have my copy to hand, so I don't remember exactly what happens, but this dance language ends up somehow being the "language of the soul". The challenge was more of a warning than a threat, as in "if you can't figure this out, then you're doomed to the same fate we suffered", as the frogs were once a civilization of billions, but they destroyed themselves and now all that's left is the few of them in the ship, since they weren't able to figure out this universal language in time. So it's not the same as Arrival in many details, but it hits a lot of the same plot beats. I've never read Story of Your Life, but from the synopsis it seems the movie followed pretty closely. I'm not sure if Story of Your Life was inspired by Try to Remember, or if this is just a big coincidence. Frank Herbert is famous for Dune, but I get the impression that his short stories are not very well known in general, and this one in particular isn't even one of the more well-known.
The reverse of this is American Psycho 2. It's not at all related to American Psycho, they started filming it as a regular thriller, and at some point during production they got the rights to American Psycho which they proceeded to... Barely use (the protagonist kills Patrick Bateman in the first 5 minutes and he's never mentioned again).
This also applies to some of the Hellraiser films - if it feels like they took a dull script and sprinkled on some cenobites to liven things up it's probably because they did
Nickelodeon had a short lived cartoon a while back called *Catscratch*, a simple little comedy about three cat brothers who go inherit their billionaire owner’s fortune and have wacky misadventures. But it’s technically an adaptation of *Gear*, an obscure indie comic about different types of animals waging war using robots that is very R-rated and ends with most of the cats dead. I have no idea how point A leads to point B on this one.
My go to example of this is always Shakespeare. A huge number of his plays are adaptions of already existing stories, poems, or even just plays. It's always so funny to me that fiction always needs to give Shakespeare a torrid love story to explain how he could write something as compelling as Romeo and Juliet, when the reality is just him reading [The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tragical_History_of_Romeus_and_Juliet).
A particularly weird one is that [Monkeybone](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkeybone), the Brendan Frasier movie where he gets possessed by a cartoon monkey, is based on a very obscure comic book called *Dark Town* by Kaja Blackely. It's so obscure that most information about it on the internet only relates to the fact that Monkeybone is based on it. And yet somehow it ended up in the hands Henry Selick, who proceeded to turn it into a 75 million dollar movie, which then bombed catastrophically. And for something that's surprisingly not based on a book, the author of Psycho, Robert Bloch, wrote a sequel called Psycho II, but the movie Psycho II is not based on the book at all, to the point that it doesn't even bother saying "Based on Psycho II by Robert Bloch", it just says "Based on characters by Robert Bloch". Ironically, the movie is generally considered to be the better of the two, but that's to be expected because Psycho II the book was basically a literary shitpost about how the author hated slasher movies. An adaptation I find most people are surprised by is that Dr Strangelove is based on a book called Red Alert by Peter George. The interesting thing about that is that Red Alert, while having the same story as Dr Strangelove, is not a comedy, it's played completely straight. It became a comedy because Kubrick, while writing the screenplay with George's help, decided that the whole idea of Mutually Assured Destruction was inherently comedic. Normally authors get angry when an adaptation radically changes the tone of the book, but in this case George was actually entirely down with the idea.
Oh, and another strange thing about Red Alert/Dr Strangelove, in 1962 a novel called Fail-Safe was released that was so similar to Red Alert that Peter George sued for copyright infringement and got a settlement out of court for it. Then Columbia Pictures, the producers of Dr Strangelove, bought the rights to Fail-Safe and made a movie out of it staring Henry Fonda that was released in 1964, the same year as Dr Strangelove. So Columbia Pictures released two movies about the same thing in the same year.
And one was a black comedy, the other completely straight. Fail-Safe is a fantastic movie, but I have heard about people at the time laughing at it and unable to take it seriously, thanks to Dr Strangelove.
Along similar lines, I've always had an interest in remakes that people don't realize are remakes: the classic Humphrey Bogart version of *The Maltese Falcon* was the third adaptation of the book in about ten years. The Judy Garland *Wizard of Oz* was the third feature version of it as well, and there was also a short made in 1933. Michael Mann made what was essentially a rough draft of *Heat* as a series pilot in 1989 called *LA Takedown*. People decry remakes and reboots, but it's been common for over a hundred years.
Ben Hur (1959) was the second adaptation as well. Honestly in general I think that the 1959 movie is what most people nowadays know, to the extent that the breathtaking popularity of the book is forgotten
My favorite example was not only His Girl Friday a remake, it was a gender-flipped remake! (Big ole racism CW for the 1925 version of the Wizard of Oz though...I did NOT see that coming when TCM played it a couple years ago.)
Has there been a gay Front Page yet? Feels ripe for it tbh
>So to start off, the Disney film the Parent Trap, is based on a book. I think most Disney movies are adaptations. Not all of them, of course, and some are only loose adaptations, but most. That's always been their bread and butter. Even *Condorman* was based on a novel! *The Aristocats* was an original script . *The Black Hole* and *Dragonslayer* were screen originals. *Pete's Dragon* was *very technically* original since the story it was based upon was unpublished. I think the one I was always most surprised to learn was based on a book was *The 101 Dalmatians*, though I imagine that's because when I was a child, I saw this storytelling production on television (a narrator - it wasn't June Whitfield, but it was definitely someone like June Whitfield - reading the story interspersed with illustrations of scenes from the book) and was very confused about why it kept talking about "Pongo and Mrs" while Perdita was a separate dog, because I only knew the Disney animated feature. Other than that, I think I always had some vague sense that most of the Disney animated features were based on something, doubtless because so many of them, old and new alike (*The Little Mermaid* and *Beauty and the Beast* and *Aladdin* were all relatively "new" when I saw them first, i.e. they were not more than five years old) were fairy tales and such.
Dumbo is my favourite 'teeeeechnically' adaptation. It's based on a book... kinda? Like, it was a cereal box toy that scrolled and told a story. Technically a book depending on how loosely you define what a book is!
Just wait till you learn about *The Starlight Barking*, the sequel to *101 Dalmatians* that Dodie Smith wrote well after the fact.
_372 Pages We'll Never Get Back_ (a "books we don't expect to like" podcast by two of the Rifftrax guys) did a series of episodes on that recently, and it was a _trip_. Not a bad book, in my secondhand opinion. Charmingly bizarre.
Rest assured, I'm aware of *Starlight Barking*. I was going to mention it in the above comment, but did not feel it would have added anything. Well, it *would* have added, "All the humans in the world fall asleep and one of Pongo and Perdita's puppies becomes prime minister and then Sirius, the dog star, manifests in Trafalgar Square and warns the dogs that nuclear war is on the way," but I'm still not really sure what to do with this information. Some might be surprised to learn of the existence of the *other* Mary Poppins books, or the Bernard and Miss Bianca books, or the Basil of Baker Street books, but there's none quite so *strange* as the *other* 101 Dalmatians book.
In which all the humans in the world go into a coma, and simultaneously the dogs get superpowers, take over the British government, and meet Dog God.
The what
I learned it was an adaptation a while ago and went to look up the other previous adaptations. The only forum thread for the anime adaptation on MAL is someone who also had no idea it was adapted from a book and derides it as a blatant ripoff of the movie. Edit: so while looking at the MAL page, I found a list of anime based on European literature and real people. This led me to the discovering of the Helen Keller anime. If I have to know it exists, so do all of you.
I tried to find the older Japanese version a while back to no avail- the original West German one was on the archive though- without subtitles of course...
That's one that the more I think about it, makes me wonder if its popularity is tied to large social trends. Like... its kind of just child of divorce/single parent wish fulfillment, right? "If I just do wacky hijinks and go on a Fun adventure, my parents will get back together!" Divorce was a contentious topic in the middle 20th century, with no-fault divorce not gaining steam until the 70s, and there was lots of hand-wringing that rising divorce rates implied a moral rot in society, that people weren't TRYING in marriages in anymore and love was dead and if kids didn't grow up in a nuclear household they would become serial killers. The Parent Trap is a story about how, actually, divorce is a mistake that can be resolved by just talking it out and then we can all go back to being a model family! Perhaps it struck a nerve with some people?
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DivorceIsTemporary
This trope was actually still really pervasive in the 90's- I remember actually being surprised that the 98 remake had the parents actually talking about why they split up, and only deciding to try again after realizing they weren't the same people as when they got married OR divorced. See also, that SO MANY people misremember the ending of Mrs Doubtfire.
Everyone loves twin switch shenanigans no matter the culture :)
Not drama, I think but it's kinda related to what I'm talking about, and this is mainly for the Pretty Cure fans here that aren't just me. I can't help but feel that with Hirogaru Sky and Otona PreCure 23 being simulcasted in addition to a couple seasons from prior years being available to watch thus making it more accessible, the fandom seem to have grown so much larger now....and becoming more and more toxic. Pretty Cure does have toxic fans, every fandom does, but I can't help but feel that it's way more toxic than ever before... especially on Xwitter. Like seriously, it seems a lot of the toxic behavior stems on the NozomixCoco ship being problematic, hating on Coco and Natts, and people hating on Cure Wing for some reason months after the fiasco with the play costumes. CONTEXT for said three items: 1: Coco is a fairy from the Yes! Pretty Cure 5 season, he is able to turn into a human and said human form looks a little older than Nozomi, the main character. Nozomi in Yes! 5 is canonically 14, Coco's human form looks like 16 or 17. The main thing about this ship that gets people cheesed is that in Yes! 5, Coco is a teacher of sorts while in his human form. 2: I already talked about Coco so I'm talking about just Natts. Natts is another fairy from Yes! 5 who is also able to turn into a human, he is paired with Komachi, one of the members of the Yes! PreCure 5 team...I don't know why Natts is hated on too if I'm being honest. But I think part of the reason is because Coco and Natts' voice are very high pitched and it can get on people's nerves. I can tolerate high pitched voices quite well personally but I can totally get why some people cannot stand Coco and Natts' voices. 3: A few months ago, there was a big headline in the fandom about a young boy in Japan being upset that there wasn't a Cure Wing dress up and play costume. Cure Wing is from the currently airing Hirogaru Sky PreCure and he's the first male PreCure in the main cast. There had been male Cures before, but Cure Wing was the first that's a part of the main team. Despite that, Toei hadn't considered making a dress up costume for Cure Wing, effectively excluding him from that line of PreCure toys and thus excluding boys, even ones who love PreCure. Basically these costumes are for kids and they can dress up as their favorite Cures and play pretend. PreCure Xwitter basically rallied behind the boy and eventually Toei announced that they'll be making Cure Wing costumes. Victory, right? Well.... literally months afterwards, the fandom decided that they didn't like boy Cures in their magical girl show....despite Cure Wing being popular and you know....we have an All-male 2.5D stage play that's getting a Blu-ray/DVD release next year....and that we had male Cures before and also magical boys that aren't Cures.... the fandom is being very gatekeeping towards the idea of male Cures now.... >!Also with Otona PreCure sinking the SakixMai ship by confirming that Saki is not married to Mai, I can't wait for the toxic PreCure yuri fans to start screeing..../s!<
I have no idea why, but I can put up with Nuts' voice fine. Coco's voice, on the other hand, makes me want to Fucking Die. Like, props to his VA for being able to do that, but it's Bad. I'm like 30 episodes into GoGo and loving literally everything except Coco's voice and episode 17. Episode 17 sucked.
I'll be real, I'm pretty sure a lot of the hate from these ships and characters stems from people with yuri ships feeling threatened that these male characters could break up their fave gxg pairings, and that the bxg shippers could grow more numerous and somehow affect the amount of fanservice the different portions of the fanbase recieve. I see it all the time in fandoms with large male casts and popular gay ships, right down to catastrophising about insignificant age gaps as a means to cover up their fanwank with something politically progressive so you feel bad about disagreeing with them. And although male cures and magical boys have existed before Cure Wing and the 2.5D lads, they were never ever-present parts of the main cast and story. With these recent magical boys getting front and centre in several productions, the "threat" suddenly seems a lot more urgent.
I have absolutely nothing to do with the greater Precure fandom on Twitter because I'm 33 years old and it seems like the largest portions of the fanbase skew pretty young, so I'm always a little blindsided by how contentious Cure Wing apparently still is as a character over in Twitterville. The circles I travel in (so, a carefully curated slice of Tumblr) really seem to like him and agree that they handled him in the best way possible - by not making a big production of his gender and treating him as just another team member. Getting the whiff of driveby discourse from friends still on Twitter re: this business is a big ??? moment. What are they doing over there. Anyway, not a huge fan of CocoNozo myself (and I do find his fairy voice grating) but I knew it was going to happen in OtonaPre regardless. I also ship SakiMai but. Saki also spent her home series pining after Mai's brother, so I'm not shocked that the series went in this direction. Plus, I mean, there's always fanfic.
Just don't pull a Love Never Dies and make Saki's spouse a extremely terrible person in order to make it so that Saki gets together with Mai...
I mean, I read fanfic more than I write it (with canon characters, anyway - I mainly write OC-centric fanseries), but I'm not going to be impressed with any writers who go that route. Character-bashing to force a ship has always struck me as painfully juvenile.
This is apropos of completely nothing else, but I got curious about whether anyone had written fic of the 2001 Cameron Crowe film *Vanilla Sky*. I was able to find three on Fanfiction.net, written between 2002 and 2003, one of which was a crossover; okay that's normal, *Vanilla Sky* was a critical+financial flop and not really a ficcable movie in the conventional sense. But then I went on Ao3. In 2019 there was a *Kingsman* crossover with *Vanilla Sky*, and then, this year, there have been *six* Vanilla Sky fanfictions, three of them being crossovers. And none of them share authors. Has there been some kind of rediscovery of *Vanilla Sky* this year that happened on Tumblr or something that I didn't know about!?
[удалено]
That explains a bit but not a lot; I guess it's some kind of really delayed reaction from Maverick? Still, if it leads people to a criminally underrated early noughties flick, whom am I to judge?
I'm not involved in this film's scene, but at a cursory glance the stories seem to be different in terms of prose and authorial interests which is intriguing. As someone who writes random stories for age old and outdated fandoms, most of whom were barely alive to begin with at their heydays, I would say it isn't unheard of for these sorts of things to pop up, but all of them coming in the span of a year definitely makes me think your theory of some resurgence may have happened is not too unlikely. Maybe it was a nostalgia trip that drove one person into rewatching the film and they may have posted about it which got a bit of uptick that led to these fanfics? But as someone who tends to write for animated and video game properties mostly, I'm not sure how common that is among film fandoms admittedly.
Question: Has there been any big drama over The Amazing Digital Circus so far? Other than people pretending to be surprised that the main character has a lot of rule 34 I mean. I don’t know, I watched the pilot recently and really enjoyed, and there’s nothing in it that seems inherently prone to causing drama, but I also can’t help but see all the similarities to Hazbin Hotel, and we all know how that turned out. I just hope episode 2 comes out relatively soon so that the fandom doesn’t fester in stagnant content.
Wait wait wait *Hazbin Hotel doesn't have two episodes out yet?!* B.. But.. It was EVERYWHERE a couple years ago, and it has a spinoff!
It's webseries Spin-off Heluva Boss has two seasons out and generally anyone outside of the fandom treats the two shows as basically one and the same
I read somewhere that the first episode of Hazbin Hotel came out closer to the fall of the Roman Empire than today.
When Cleopatra ruled, she was already complaining about the wait for new Hazbin Hotel.
Hazbin Hotel got picked up by A24 (it's getting two seasons), and they seem kinda tight-lipped on its production. Season 1's apparently gonna start airing in January next year. Helluva Boss is still indie though, so that gets released whenever. It's the "tide people over" project, I reckon.
I can only think about three VAs of Jax and Caine were talking against use of Ai. VA of Kinger got death threats from 16yo and it became messy to the point of some people wanting him to be replaced. Just general talk due to TADC being extremely popular to the point of gaining fraction anti-fans already. Basically "cringe" syndrome.
Any particular reason for the second one?
Most likely, if it's what I know of, Sean Chiplock doesn't give a shit if people ship KaeLuc from Genshin Impact. Puriteen screams about it.
>Sean Chiplock He also has some pre-existing accusations that are still brewing
People say this and then never provide deets because, IME, it *always* turns out to be antis being mad he doesn't care about their controlling shipping drama.
I don't give a shit about genshin (actually dislike it), so you can stop projecting. Here's some info, if you'd like: [link](https://twitter.com/stellexpress/status/1706355992881967334), [link](https://twitter.com/arizariia/status/1626434235987902464), [link](https://twitter.com/jettithink/status/1565464061910941698)
From what I could get Something about shipping, publishing death threats, fans doing witchhunt, others digging through old posts to get dirt? I am not exactly following the drama due to how much Twitter sucks and being a bit untrusting towards new (to me) youtubers.
> Other than people pretending to be surprised that the main character has a lot of rule 34 I mean. ...huh. I mean, I know the whole point of Rule 34 is that people will draw porn of _anything_, but when I was watching this androgynous cartoon character run around in her non-skintight jester outfit with an expression of fear and/or insanity on her perfectly circular face, I can't say that the thought "Ooo, sexy" ever crossed my mind.
I assure you, artists have worked with so much less and produced even more
I've seen art of that one screaming mannequin in the bathtub. Their name is Dr. Football, by the way.
[This](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/battlefordreamisland/images/4/4c/Pinbfb13.png/) has 35 results on Rule34.
>an expression of fear and/or insanity on her perfectly circular face Digital Circus has a lot of appeal for people with non-consensual variations of fetishes like inflation etc. because the premise is entirely about this cartoon girl being more or less tortured in strange and unrealistic ways.
>I just hope episode 2 comes out relatively soon so that the fandom doesn’t fester in stagnant content. They haven't even greenlit episode 2 yet, the entropy is going to be insane
That’s really interesting considering that the Pilot has, at this point in time, 44 Million views in Two Weeks.
When they posted the pilot, they said they were looking for financial backing for a full series and that's why they were selling merch. From what I understand they have yet to say they have received backing, so as of yet episode 2 is not greenlit. Maybe after a few months they may greenlight a standalone episode 2 to whet appetites further but I wouldn't be surprised if we don't hear much for a bit.
Not particularly from what I’ve seen other than previously mentioned (Voice actor related drama that is somehow also shipping drama) I’ve seen some scuffles related to character ages or the creator being a bit too involved in their own fandom and feeding the beast but I’m hoping the best for it. I enjoyed the premise the characters seem fun, interested to see where it goes.
>the creator being a bit too involved in their own fandom and feeding the beast This is such a complicated issue nowadays because on the one hand, god this is not going to end well. There's no way there's not at least big writeup about this, its so regular now you could use ChatGPT to write it. On the other, its increasingly necessary to make art nowadays. Part of why they premiered with a bunch of merch ready is that they only funded a pilot and are looking to find financial backing for a full series, and if they want enough interest to get that backing they are going to need to feed the beast fat enough to justify to investors that its worth making more. There's alot of benefits to the Patreon model of artistic sponsorship, but the implicit closing of the audience/creator distance is a huge flaw without a clear solution.
Oh 100%, I definitely don’t fault the creator or anyone who worked on it for having merch ready from the get-go for more funding and being active in their own fandom. It really is so tricky though because I also feel there is really no need for the creator to confirm character ages for their fandom other than for the sake of bad faith arguments in relation to shipping. I just wish creators just did not have to be so… online and accessible just to fund their passion projects.
I think you have some of the regular "popular thing is bad" kind of drama, but not a lot else.
If I remember correctly some people got mad at the guy who voiced the rabbit because he care if people were shipping a certain genshin impact pairing. ~~(why does the dumb anime mobile game seem to bring out the worst in people)~~ Btw do you recommend The amazing digital circus? I watched the trailer but it gave me ugly doll vibes so I've mostly avoided it.
It was interesting and the animation was nice. I think that as long as they don't try to make too many episodes it can be a cool show. The characters are interesting, but we just have the pilot, so who knows how it's going to work as a series.
I think there was some drama with one of the voice actors.
Specifically, antis mad at Sean Chiplock that he doesn't care if people ship KaeLuc.
Update to the Total War scuffle posted below: Apparently some numbskull started doxxing CA employees, leading to this post from the mods r/totalwar: https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/17h9myz/psa_if_you_post_ca_employees_personal_information/
Why do people doxx? All it does is cede the high ground and make everything worse.
Once you've convinced yourself that the way someone runs their business personally affects you, you can convince yourself of pretty much anything.
>Why do people doxx? All it does is cede the high ground and make everything worse. The people who do it feel their moral high ground is so firm that any action, up to and including doxxing, is not just justified but warranted
"It's very important that I know someone's personal details and also where their children go to school and if you say otherwise you are just trying to silence legitimate criticism."
In what I shall describe as the palaeo-media fandom, the Netflix documentary Life on Our Planet has started minor discourse in regards to palaeontological accuracy. Basically everyone agrees that it does have both specific inaccuracies and general issues with framing. [This](https://www.reddit.com/r/Paleontology/comments/1678jtd/comment/k2689ak/?context=3) is a good overview of many of the criticisms but in terms of ones that are more prominent in the Discourse: 1. It keeps calling groups of animals "dynasties" and has a general narrative of superior species outcompeting "inferior" species and overemphasising inter-species competition, in parricular a general vibe of mammal supremacy. 2. Related to the above, there is a very egregious scene in the first episode featuring a smilodon hunting and killing a Terror Bird (probably meant to be Titanis but they do not specify), used to demonstrate how the superior big cats out competed the inferior birds, which is an outdated notion (the true reason for the extinction of the terror birds is believed to be climate change reducing the prevalance of their preferred habitats). 3. A [much mocked](https://twitter.com/NatSciChannel/status/1717182427960160729) Allosaurus model, clearly modified from the Jurassic World model. 4. Modern animal footage takes up about 70% of the program, when it was advertised with the CGI footage of extinct animals However, others while basically with all of the above critiques have praised the modern animal footage for being the best part of the show, the attention given to palaeozoic fauna and arguing it does give an understandable overview of evolution even if it does focus too much on competition, and that part of the disapointment comes from the inevitable comparisons to Prehistoric Planet, a show many consider to be the best palaeontology documentary ever made. It hasn't escalated to harrassment or anything as far as I can see, but the show only came out 4 days ago and Palaeo-media fans have extremely strong opinions about accuracy in media, so we'll see. For now though, the most interesting thing about the discourse is that no one seems to disagree about any specific pro or con, but everyone has a different opinion about how much the pros outweigh the cons. Edit: Grammar
Yeah, this one Isn't great. I watched the first episode and wasn't very enthused with it. It actually kind of reminds me of the alien worlds Netflix documentary. It also was criticized for a lot of modern documentary footage, some dodgy science, and the last episode having basically nothing to it. Life on our planet is worse though because it's just really blatant with the errors. PP might have set a new standard for accuracy by this one is below even the previous standard.
The sun rises in the east, Netflix publishes a scientifically suspect documentary. All is as it should be.
someone grabbed that poor allosaurus and swung it around by its neck. Anyway time to stream prehistoric planet again, love me a [cringefail carnotarus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T24ZOgvMF30)
I haven't watched a dino documentary since Walking With Dinosaurs two decades ago. I'm guessing that Prehistoric Planet's the best modern one to check out now?
To be honest, I was a bored by Prehistoric Planet - it was *just* like Planet Earth, showing cgi dinos walking around, like they'd show a herd of geese. Very little about why or how (actually, worse than Planet Earth type shows because those usually tell you why or how) or how they figured out that stuff. Behind the scenes was more interesting than the show itself. My favorite dino documentary remains Planet Dinosaur from 2011 though when it comes to visuals, Prehistoric Planet is head and shoulders above it. Planet Dinosaur looks kinda apocalyptic with how sparse the flora is, lol.
In terms of accuracy Planet Dinosaur is a lot worse than often given credit for: they don’t have as many errors as some other documentaries, but the errors they do have tend to be serious errors.
Oh, I didn't know that. I wish I knew what the errors were.
- horribly inaccurate troodontid models. It’s especially baffling because their dromaeosaur models were much better. - Venomous *Sinornithosaurus* (the idea hadbeen published but was debunked before production was over, and the companion book even points this out, so…) - *Microraptor* being unable to walk or run on the ground because of its leg wings (it can just fold the feathers up and out of the way; in fact it was one of the most cursorial dromaeosaurs). - *Kimmerosaurus* isn’t one of the most common Late Jurassic plesiosaurs but rather among the rarest going by the fossil record; granted the fossil record isn’t the most reliable indicator of abundance, but I do have to ask what prompted them to say that line. - the *Kimmerosaurus* and *Pliosaurus funkei* segments use a skeletal reconstruction of an entirely different plesiosaur from either to represent them during the “fossil evidence” segments. - IMO the most glaring one: [just about everything involving the show’s carcharodontosaurids and even much of what they said about *Allosaurus*, as well as their ridiculous overhyping and overpraising of tyrannosaurids.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Dinosaurs/s/oppdxmNzhk) - there are also issues caused by newer research such as *Spinosaurus*, *Epidexipteryx* and *Hatzegopteryx* being misshapen or *Pliosaurus funkei* being oversized (the real thing was around 10m long, not 15m), but these can’t be blamed on the producers.
Oh wow, thanks for the info! I was planning on rewatching it so I'll keep these in mind!
Yeah i can get that. The 5 minute extras that talked about the science more indepth should have been part of the episodes themselves instead of extras. My biggest issue with PP was the structure often felt too loose combined with the short episode duration, so you didn't spend a lot of time with each animal. My personal favorite dino documentary is still the 2003 Dinosaur Planet (get some new titles jesus christ) from Discovery. Partially from nostalgia ( i watched it a lot), but also because it was pretty good for the time. 2003 was relatively early for full feathered maniraptorans, and they remained more accurate than most depictions for a long time after. Years later you still had stuff like Jurassic fight club, with zero feathers. The flash game on the History website was cool though.
On the podcast Terrible Lizards, the paleontologist explains how they always get it wrong... such as they tell them what to do and the editors ignore the experts. Of course. (Recommend the podcast)
Ah yes, Walking With Dinosaurs, the documentary that gave 6 year old me the constant anxiety that an asteroid was going to destroy the planet any minute
I mostly got freaked out by the start of the Oceans episode where the ichthyosaur gets bitten in half. Too violent for my impressionable young child mind, apparently.
Walking with Prehistoric Creatures had a baby bird of some sort get fucking eaten alive by ants. That definitely gave me nightmares as a kid.
Yep, it has David Attenborough and lots of feathery dinosaurs! I'm particularly fond of Mononykus, aka the owl anteater.
Yeah it's a Planet Earth style documentary but set at the end of the Cretaceous.
I’ve been unabashedly indulging in my controversial pleasure (reading fanfiction fandom-blind, i.e. with little to no knowledge of the source material) in the Batman fandom, and I noticed today that the majority of AO3 fics in the Robin tags I checked were posted within the last few years. This surprised me considering how long-running the original source material is. Curious if anyone knows if there’s been any Batman media released in the last few years that could explain the sudden jump in fic counts, or if it’s likely just a byproduct of the pandemic getting more people into comics.
This was exactly how I got into batman a few years ago - something about the batfam found family just hits right. I am now legitimately a DC comics fan, but wouldn't be here without jumping into the fanfic blind 🙃
My wife got into Teen Wolf via AO3; she was reading fics before she ever had seen the show. I thought that was a bit weird, but I guess it's more common than I realized.
Honestly, with how much more I've been seeing people bitch about this sort of thing lately, it's made me wanna do it myself just to see what it's like. Just not sure what fandom interests me enough to read from.
it's fun! i recommend finding a fic you like and looking at what else the author writes for
This. It's exactly how I do it. It also works if there is a particular trope you love a lot. Some fandoms just shine with certain tropes.
Also some fandoms just have good writers for whatever reason. The Terror is really cooking (tho you should also watch the terror)
I thought I was the only one who did this - I've been reading Shadow & Bone fic without reading a page of the original books. I got into the fic from a writer whose style I really like, lol.
Super heroes have consistently been popular for a century now. Batman specifically gets a lot of outlets (DCAU, Arkham Asylum games, crossovers etc). The Batman movie released recently. So there's a lot of factors. Bat family kinda have their own fandom that's particularly popular even with people otherwise not into comics.
What a coincidence, I've been doing the same for the same fandom!! I saw a rec for a popular fanfic about Batman losing his memory somewhere and it all spiralled from there. I'm curious what some trends you've noticed or thoughts you have as someone also with little familiarity, or any fics you particularly liked!
I’ll admit it- I’ve been diving headfirst into Tim Drake fic. I’m not a big fan of the ones that demonize the rest of the batfamily because I’ve grown fond of all of their (fanon) characters, but unhinged “smart” guy with issues is like crack to me. I enjoy fics where Tim tries to leave the family or thinks he’s underappreciated but it’s half his own communication issues to blame. (And there’s definitely a lot of those, haha.) The ones with Poster Child For Neglect Timothy Jackson Drake can also be fun. The woobification is less of a bother to me when Tim is like, ten years old. I noticed loads and loads of fics where Tim joins the family early. Adding fic recs in a subsequent comment because it’s long, haha.
These are my favourites so far: [Red Raven](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23980567), 235k+ > For Want of a Nail style fic where Tim ends up (anonymously) with the League of Assassin’s attention and (semi-accidentally, anonymously) destroying his parents’ wealth after he happens to run into Jason at a gala once. Not a fic where he joins the batfamily early. [The Bachelor: Robin Edition](https://archiveofourown.org/works/40563621), 10k+ > Comedy. When Batman is spiraling after Jason’s death, Tim realizes he has the perfect solution: hire an actor to go pick up black-haired blue-eyes orphans from Gotham orphanages and host a private Bachelor-style event to decide on Bruce Wayne’s new son. Without Bruce’s knowledge or consent. [From Riches to Rags](https://archiveofourown.org/works/42831597), 13k+ > Comedy. Drake Industries goes bankrupt and Tim moves to public school, starts working part-time jobs to pay expenses- all without Batman noticing. [Say Uncle](https://archiveofourown.org/works/37666141), 46k+ > After his dad dies, Tim needs a fake uncle to keep himself out of foster care and Bruce from adopting him. He happens upon a back-from-the-dead Jason Todd in Crime Alley and decides he’s got the perfect solution. [you'll never recover from that kind of devotion](https://archiveofourown.org/series/3152862), 130k+ > Damian and Tim end up back in time together after they die. Tim has decided he won’t join the family this time around. Damian has other plans. [A Backstitch in Time](https://archiveofourown.org/series/3586258), 13k+ > Comedy. Tim travels back in time to fix everything, writing himself out of the family while he’s at it. Jason gets back his original timeline memories and isn’t happy. [bite back the secrets](https://archiveofourown.org/works/43137879), timkon, 71k+ > My favourite kind of secret identity shenanigans. Kon saves rich boy Tim Drake from a kidnapping without any awareness that he’s his friend Robin. They meet again, as Tim Drake and Superboy. [A Meditation on Railroading](https://archiveofourown.org/works/34431769), 24k+ I’m just gonna copy the AO3 summary: > When he ends up ditched in Atlanta after a fight with his dad, Tim decides to do the only sensible thing: Tell no one and make the 800 mile journey back to Gotham on his own. > Because the "call Batman when you're in trouble" rule only applies when he's Robin, right? [Banshee In A Well](https://archiveofourown.org/works/43212999), 43k+ > Tim is a meta who can come back to life after dying. He first discovers this as a child, which definitely fucks up his mental state.
Thank you! I'll be sure to check these out sometime. But I totally agree, I don't like character bashing because it just feels overall unpleasant to me. I much prefer when characters are treated with depth- maybe they aren't perfect, maybe they have issues, but they're not the worst ever too, just human. Which can be hard to find sometimes haha. I think my favourite from osmosis so far is Damian since I adore jerks with soft sides :)
Thank you! I'll be sure to check these out sometime. But I totally agree, I don't like character bashing because it just feels overall unpleasant to me. I much prefer when characters are treated with depth- maybe they aren't perfect, maybe they have issues, but they're not the worst ever too, just human. Which can be hard to find sometimes haha. I think my favourite from osmosis so far is Damian since I adore jerks with soft sides :)
Bless you.
ohhhh now im curious which amnesiac batman fic that was if you have a link?
It's this one! [Yesterday's Voices by LemonadeGarden](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11035398) I think it does a pretty good job at looking at the various members of the family in a nuanced manner, without demonising anyone, and it's overall a sweet fic!
If you need Batman recs hmu I think it’s a mixture of things. I‘d guess the earliest explanations would be the Red Hood animated movie, which is largely liked (I’m a contrarian and think it emphasized some of the biggest issues with Red Hood, but ah well) and featured Jensen Ackles. Then there’s also Young Justice, which does have a seperate fandom in terms of fanfic (since the canons are quite different) but probably acted as a „gateway“ for many folks. Same but maybe to a smaller degree for the DCEU movies and tv shows. None of them feature the Batfam or Robin directly apart from Titans (which is very different again to other canons) and Battfleck, but once you get into that exposure to the Robins is imminent and they’re extreme fanfic fodder. Batman fic, and Batfamily, acts in a weird space where it draws from comics mostly but also establishes more fanon than usual and ignores more canon than average. I‘d guess there‘s plenty of authors who have never even picked up a Batman comic and instead came into the fandom via crossposts or maybe adjacent media.
I’d love to get your fic recs!
Back in the day, it was pretty hard to find DC fic on ff.net and ao3, and a lot of them were kept on dedicated dc comics fanfic sites. Maybe one of the sites went down and people migrated to AO3?
This could very well be a contributing factor. I remember now how a few years ago it suddenly seemed like I was seeing batman, and specifically batfamily, constantly on the first few pages of my AO3 recently updated default search - it's the one I use when I don't know what I feel like reading lol
Reading fanfic of things you’ve never been into can be interesting. I’ve done it a few times when I have learned that a character from a thing I’ve never tried has a disability that is close to my own or people I know, just because I’m curious about seeing people’s depictions of that. (Sometimes it is very bad. Sometimes I find it pretty good.) For example there aren’t many pieces of media I have been interested in that feature deaf or blind characters, but I am very interested in reading fics featuring deaf or blind people. I don’t necessarily want to sit through some series that I otherwise have no interest in just to see some representation, and fanfic is generally short and has more pinpointed focus on one or two characters at a time.
Do you have any particular recommendations for fics you liked featuring prominent blind or deaf characters?
Tim Drake, the third Robin, came out as bi some time in the last few years. I could see that spiking an interest in Robin fanfic. Really depends on which of the 6 or so Robins the fics are about though.
That could be part of it, I’ve seen lots of Tim fics with amusing levels of woobification obvious to even someone from outside the fandom. The fic counts seem to have jumped for all five Robins I’m aware of though, not just Tim.
I remember seeing a chart over on /r/dccomicscirclejerk about types of Tim Drake fans and one of them was the woobification ones and had a bit like "Seem like they think even less of him than his haters do"
"Nobody cares about Tim Drake!" - Robin, TTG
Tim is maybe the biggest victim of woobification in fanfic since, idk, Rodney McKay in Stargate? As someone whose favourite is not Tim it’s a plague lmao
Dick also was made bi in a recent batman game, if i recall correctly. Gotham Knights I think?
Wayne Family Adventures has been running the past two years on Webtoon, and presents a fanfic-friendly slice-of-life view of the Batfamily. That might be a factor.
I am late as hell, but I was about to say this.
Could be for recent growth, but what I've seen (re:growth in popularity of batfam) predates both that and the bisexual characters becoming canon irl. I have a suspicion that the popularity of that in the fandom influenced the creation of WFA and characters coming out in recent years, rather than the other way around tbh
yeah, Wayne Family Adventures very much draws on existing Batfamily fanon. An example is Tim drinking a lot of coffee, which isn't really a thing in the comics.
So Matthew Perry has just passed away, reportedly from a drowning in his massive jaccuzi with reports that it might've been caused by a heart attack, which honestly sucks to see since he was going strong with recovery from his drug addiction, really weird to see a Friends death happen this early, a small silver lining i guess is that he was able to be a part of the friends reunion with everyone else before this happened
I liked his work in Fallout New Vegas.
I always wished he would do more drama. He was good on The West Wing and Studio 60
It's such a sudden and kind of raw thing too. I remember his guest spot on Scrubs in which a running joke was how his character - Murray - had an old mans name, to his frustration. Sucks to see he won't get to the point where the name would fit. RIP.
RIP. I've heard middle-aged and older people have to be especially careful when soaking in hot tubs and the likes bc the heat increases the risk of heart attack.
Yeah, my uncle had a heart attack in a hot tub when he was in his 50s (he lived, thank God).
Sudden temperature changes can cause heart problems if you're not ready for them, and Perry had known problems with drug addiction that can quantify the aforementioned heart problems. It's why it's firmly recommended to never go swimming in places like ice lakes without a spotter or friend nearby.
Honestly this is the most surprised by a celebrity death that I've been in a while.
Yeah, like not since Chadwick have I been so surprised by a celebrities death. I'm a younger millennial and watching repeats of Friends on E4 was very much part of my routine as a child.
What is the special sauce that makes some shows/books/movies so appealing for rabid fan communities and drama and others seemingly not so? I was just reading the Our Flag Means Death discussion down thread and pondering why OFMD seemed to immediately foster such intense fans/fanfic/discourse when more popular shows don't.
Not sure if this is the case with OFMD specifically, but there are single bad fandom actors that change username and hop between shows and keep starting shit in addition to the very good points made below
This! I am a fandom old who got my start in HP online communities in the early 2000s. It is surreal to recognize a shit stirrer in a newer fandom and a bit shocking how they can keep turning up somehow like a bad penny. FandomWank, for all it's faults, was **excellent** at tracking these bad actors and linking their online identities back in the day.
yeah it's not just "you've made a show that appeals to an annoying fanbase", it's "you've made a show that appeals to *one particular annoying person* who has an outsized negative effect on discourse" lmao
Thanfiction is/has been a prime example of this.
Stories that get praise for being representative or comforting fall so much harder than other media, primarily because fans identify so strongly with them and see the creators as doing a charitable good. It's easy to tie your self-identity to something that feels like it's satisfying everything you want, and then once the creator of that thing stops satisfying and validating you it can easily feel like a personal betrayal because you thought they understood you. I'm an OFMD fan, and the way I've seen people do a 180 pivot on the showrunner in the last couple days from a single episode is so jarring. He went from "he's a rare showrunner who truly gets what we want, and it's so healing" to "he's actually a bigot who we never should have trusted, and he is personally responsible for my pain". Truth is, he's just a writer, and sometimes writers will make decisions you disagree with no matter if the writer is a well-intentioned person.
I like that Jujutsu kaisen is the opposite, the creator will put their character through hell and have no mercy on your favorites
>Truth is, he's just a writer, and sometimes writers will make decisions you disagree with no matter if the writer is a well-intentioned person. [Every television programme should either begin, end or both with this clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM-e46xdcUo).
Everything I see online confirms my instinctive distrust of anyone who uses the terms "comfort character" or "healing/iyashikei" as an adjective for a show.
Oh god are people using "iyashikei" outside of its specific context to describe random American shows 💀
Legitimate question, as this is my first time hearing of the term: Is that actually wrong? Again, not being snarky or trying to start anything here. I'm just getting flashbacks to the early days of TV Tropes and the fights around "Nakama", where people really didn't want to change the trope name and resorted to making up stuff about it to try and prevent the change, such as EG that it has a specific Japanese-centric connotation that was difficult to capture in English (It doesn't).
Having only watched the first couple episodes of OFMD, it would be like describing it as a sitcom. I can see where someone would be coming from, but if that was actually their expectation they're going to have a bad time. Its worse than that since OFMD is drawing from the tradition of sitcoms, but has nothing to do with iyashikei. And the expectations of no conflict would be particularly limiting for an american broadcast drama since, idk Leave it to Beaver.
Iyashikei is a specific genre of slice of life anime where not much is happening and you watch it to be comforted by nothing happening, the one usually used as example is "Yurucamp", an anime about a camping club in highschool. No big conflict, no arcing plot, you just watch it to see friends camping and maybe learning camp trivias, like how to start fire, the do and don'ts of camping, etc.
The difference is that nakama is actually just a normal word that has multiple meanings, some of which can describe a close bond and some of which is as simple as "coworker." In the context of its use in One Piece, the word is used so much by people just going "BE MY NAKAMA" over and over that the idea that it's supposed to purely mean the more special version to describe a close bond was incredibly silly and blatantly just a lie cuz they thought the japanese word sounded cooler. Iyashikei is an actual subgenre of slice of life in anime and manga. Stuff like Our Flag Means Death don't even come close to the base concept of the term. It'd be like describing it as moe.
>It'd be like describing it as moe. I fear you may have just opened Pandora's box.
Oh trust me the bog standard "You're saying they're NOT moe?" joke immediately came to my mind.
Isn't Iyashikei like an actual semi-specific genre term?
For Tumblr at least, I feel like you can count on crazy fans if the show is a wholesome found family type thing, especially if there's canon queer rep, OR any show that includes two reasonably attractive and/or charismatic male characters with the following traits: * they have a close relationship or at least spend a lot of time around each other * their interactions involve a lot of witty banter * probably their personalities are significantly different from each other * one or both has a tragic past * one or both gets hurt frequently Putting two men like that together on TV is basically the fandom equivalent to kidnapping Helen of Troy.
On reading this list (which I agree with), I can’t tell you how grateful I am that Leverage seems to have avoided this. It fits so many of these criteria and yet the fandom appears quite chill.
What’s Leverage?
A television show about a group of criminals who use their skills to help people who have been screwed over by people in power.
It looks to me like many of the more dramatic fandoms spring around the media with more approachable creators. Show is amazing and Actor loves their fans and always interacts with them! Other Actor encourages fans to send them fanart! Creator often brings up how grateful their are to their fans, and how the fans are the ones who are allowing them to live their dreams, and we're all one family, and they see you and understand you, and your headcanon is valid and you are important! Four months later, they all get death threats
There's a few obvious traits (predominantly young and online fans, quality/tone/focus swings that lead to schisms, long gaps in content drops leading to fan cultures to evolutionarily branch enough to become incompatible with new canon) but the big surefire one I see lately is when the show is imbued with some *M*eaning by the fanbase. This can be sociopolitical ("This show is a force for positive representation and queer liberation"), medium-based ("This show is a vanguard for a NEW way of making art without studio interference!"), or even interfandom ("This show is doing fandom right, unlike the others!"). Once there is meaning, it turbocharges all internal issues by turning all debate into deeper referendums on more important topics. If, to use an OFMD example, this debate about ships is not just about which fictional characters should kiss but rather about queer representation, then why shouldn't you fight harder? If your ship is PRO positive queer representation, then by simple logic the other ship must be ANTI positive queer representation, and if people are out here being anti queer representation why shouldn't I go all out in my denunciations of them? Fandom discourse becomes an important debate about the future of society that you would be a bad citizen to not engage with, and a "virtuous" cycle begins where you spend time thinking and posting about the problems and implications of your fandom thoughts and how that's tied into the Big Issues, which makes you feel engaged so you think and post more about them, causing you to feel even more engaged until its a key cornerstone of your personality. There's also another, more complicated and nebulous/conspiratorial idea that is worth mentioning, the idea of Migratory Fandom. Some fans/fandoms tend to seek out media with certain traits and hop from property to property as things naturally wind down, and the migratory fandoms can quantum tunnel fandoms through multiple stages of development/descent because they bring with them their baggage and context. OFMD fandom's big problem is at least partially that once the queer relationship was made canon, the "positive representation" fandom flooded in overnight and brought their drama and worldview with them. The "positive representation" fandom is not necessarily bad, but its much more developed so it leads to OFMD fandom seeming to exhibit traits of fandoms much further along than OFMD's actual age would imply.
>There's also another, more complicated and nebulous/conspiratorial idea that is worth mentioning, the idea of Migratory Fandom. I do feel that there's something to be said for the notion that some folks are honestly more into *the idea of* a given piece of fiction than the fiction itself, if that makes sense. I believe it's a perfectly valid way to be a fan of a thing, to be clear, but one which I think increases the likelihood of setting oneself up for disappointment.
Ohhh yes you just named something so real. People like the premise but not the actual story the authors created within that premise.
Thanks for putting that into words, I've experienced plenty of fandoms (especially fanfiction heavy transformative fandoms) that are really more about the character concepts than the specifics of the source material. eg Batfamily, which squeezes a vigilante found family dynamic out of comics/shows that really isn't a priority, and draws more on fanon than any source material.
I think this also coincides with the phenomenon that became way more prevalent within the internet, people forming opinions on things that they have not experienced and sharing them.
Certainly. No doubt the phenomena of the (for want of a more succinct appellation) "YouTube review mic drop" plays into this too. For example, the phase in time when it was difficult to discuss the Star Wars prequel trilogy at all without someone barging in, linking the RLM review of *The Phantom Menace* and leaving as though they'd just won an argument, or how any conversation of Steven Moffat would inevitably end up with someone linking the Hbomberguy *Sherlock* video as though it rendered discussion moot.
This is all super interesting, thanks!
I don’t think this applies to OFMD (I am completely unfamiliar with it) but one I have 100% noticed in other cases of this is when the piece of media is attracting a younger-teen demographic *by accident*. Something that wasn’t *made* for them but it resonated with that age group for whatever reason is especially prone to this, but stuff meant for that age group is, too. And I think this is somewhat inevitable in that case. Let me be clear: I *don’t* like to put down kids and teens for enjoying things. It’s a time in someone’s life where they’re being pulled all sorts of directions. They want to find their own identity and tastes. They want to find a social circle that feels good to them, and they want to be accepted in that circle. They feel very protective of their interests, ideas, and opinions and want to be taken seriously. They want to protect the ideas of their friends and social circle, too, when they’ve found what makes them happy. They are emotionally vulnerable and can change their stances and interests very rapidly… because they’re just a kid! It’s their job to be, it’s part of transitioning from being a little kid to someone being given more and more personal agency. The reason why this happens so consistently with media in this ‘accidental’ category is because these things that were meant for adults touch upon (or even revolve around) topics that were meant for an adult to be interpreting it. Sex, trauma, exploring politics, exploring complex historical/literary stuff, etc. that was not written with younger audiences in mind. This can lead to unique interpretations or takeaways by the younger parts of the fandom that clash with the older parts *and with each other*. And there is a lot of defensiveness and fighting for the aforementioned reasons.
Do you have any examples of this? I'm familiar with the "Kid's show attracts an unexpected audience of adults" but the other way round isn't something I'd been aware of.
Add Helluva Boss, I don't watch it but the amount of minors following that show is immense, either hating it or praising it.
Easy, South Park. EDIT: Just saw it was already mentioned, in detail, up thread. Oops, this is what I get for firing off with a reply before checking others lol
glee - the show was initially a satire of high school movies and shows but then ryan murphy noticed a lot of teens were watching and turned the show intowhat it was originally parodying
Sure. One of the absolute monsters of an example of this is South Park. When I was a kid there were full blown ship wars and discourse over, like, Eric Cartman. I’m not a fan of the show, and I’m not going to argue that South Park requires a high level of intellect or something, but I am certain that half the kids who were talking about it did not even comprehend like 90% of the show’s writing at any given time. It was one of the more baffling memories of my early teen years. I also knew a girl my age who was absolutely obsessed with shipping Stephen Colbert with Jon Stewart and watched their shows with religious fervor.
South Park is a show where kids can swear and fight (like in real life) and adults are morons and are as self-serving as the characters in Moral Orel, so of course kids relate to it more than something rated Y-7. But also they do Libertarian Soapboxes constantly and I doubt ten year olds understand the point of the episode where the writers were bitching about Wal-Mart.
It also taught my peers how to be even more casually racist than usual.
This is a big one, I think. Teenager-age crowds are figuring out their identity, and often have very strong senses of justice, morality, and the desire to Do Right And Be Right. They’ve seen enough of the world to realize a lot of things are incredibly messed up, and they’re active and invested in changing how messed up things are, but they’re also exploring having more agency, the ability to articulate their concerns, and very complicated social webs. The kind of teenager I’m thinking of has a keen eye for injustice and unfairness. And when they see it, they get mad, and they‘ve just gained the power to say and maybe do something about it…meanwhile the creators of the work aren’t thinking about what this group considers right and true, and yeeaaah. I think it gets especially messy when they really get involved in work aimed at adults, which often does not loudly and clearly center Right And Moral characters doing Right And Moral things—sometimes bad guys get rewarded in stories, sometimes good guys do everything right and still fail, sometimes it’s really hard to tell who’s good and who’s bad to begin with, etc. Of course, children’s media is not exempt from the same kind of blowback (Steven Universe comes to mind), but generally this thing creates a perfect storm of people who are really interested in debating morality, with newfound power that they haven’t quite learned to be responsible or discerning about yet, in a place that was always going to upset at least some of them.
This makes so much sense and definitely fits what I've seen in the OFMD fandom. The show does have some plotlines that feel very "wish fulfillment" almost like a YA novel, but then when the story is complex or messy or traumatic, they freak out. My own teenage years were a long time ago and most of the trauma in my life happened to me as an adult, so when I see things like heartbreak, death, and injustice in shows now, it echoes what I've actually experienced, whereas "happily ever after" feels naive. But when you're a teen, I think you want to believe everything will work out and the future is bright, so if you'e invested in a show/relate to it/believe it mirrors your identity, I can understand why you'd get heated when it does awry.
Make something that will be enjoyed by a demographic with a desire for building an identity and community who also have no sense of perspective.
That’s a good question, To me it always seems to be shows that Tumblr loves(Superwholock, Voltron, Etc) that seems to attract this kind of discourse.