shadowscast | Entries tagged with meta

I got talking with

yourlibrarian today about the hugeness of Star Wars, Star Trek and Marvel, and I decided it might be fun to make a post about my own relationship with each of them. All of them are fandoms that I'd say I'm into; I've seen quite a lot of the source material for each of them, but I haven't seen all of any of them and I doubt I ever will (since they're so huge)! Mostly this will just be a list of what I've seen, but I'm throwing in some personal anecdotes too. :D

Star Wars ( Read more... )

Star Trek ( Read more... )

Marvel Cinematic Universe ( Read more... )

And what about you, if you feel like sharing? How many of these things have you seen, and how have they been woven into the fabric of your life?

I decided to write a little Umbrella Academy meta.

( Spoilers for both seasons behind the cut! )

I've just posted versions of my two recent little Umbrella Academy meta posts to AO3.

I figured I might as well keep up the spirit of

yourlibrarian's March Meta Madness challenge, even if March is long gone!

If I can manage to get a little discussion going with strangers on the internet, that would be good fun.

(I think that most of the fannish Umbrella Academy discussion is on places like tumblr. But, ack. I just can't.)

So hey! A short little bit of speculation under the cut; spoilers for The Umbrella Academy season one (specifically S1 E9).

( Read more... )

Mr. Shadowscast and I were talking about The Umbrella Academy over dinner last night, and he posed an interesting question: is the narrator a character?

( Spoilers for season 1 and I guess the first 30 seconds of season 2 )

I've just started a Sense8 rewatch with

the_shoshanna (in which we watch separately but simultaneously in our own homes while voice-chatting on Zoom—you know, like all the cool kids these days). So far we've just watched the first episode, but I'm really looking forward to continuing. We have each already seen the whole series, so we can do full spoiler discussion mode, which is a lot of fun.

( Speaking of which: spoilers behind the cut! )

The one technical difficulty that I had was that the audio from the Zoom session was coming in a bit softer than the audio from the show, so I had a little trouble hearing

the_shoshanna—if I turned up my system volume enough that I could hear her easily, the show was too loud. But immediately after we finished I did a little research and discovered that (unsurprisingly) it's possible to separately adjust the volume of different apps. (I mean, I figured it would be, I just didn't know how—it wasn't something that I'd ever needed to do before!) So I'm all set for next time! :)

Well, now that my school has been shut down for the next two weeks, I guess I have time to write about what I loved about the book Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell!

( Read more... )

I'm participating in

yourlibrarian's March Meta Matters challenge:

marchmetamatterschallenge. It's a pretty appealing concept: a fest where I get credit for just re-posting to AO3 things that I've already written!

For my first entry, I decided to upload a post I made about 6 months ago about why writing fanfic is fun (for me). It seemed like a nice way to start!

Here are some notes about my initial process:

I created a new pseud at AO3 so that my fic and my meta would be easily sortable from each other.

The meta was originally a DreamWidth post, and it opened with a chatty introduction where I talked about (writing-related) stuff going on in my life. When I uploaded the post to AO3, I cut out the introduction.

I snagged my original pseudo-html from the post by clicking on "edit entry" at the bottom of my original entry, and then doing ctrl-a, ctrl-c in the text box. When I ctrl-v pasted it into the AO3 posting form, I combed through and removed any DreamWidth specific code. (In particular, I removed the cut tags, and a username reference; in the AO3 version of the post, I changed the username to just "a friend".)

Here's the post at AO3!
Five reasons that writing fanfic is fun (for me)

yourlibrarian mentioned Star Trek tie-in novels in a post today. The reference had to do with the gender split of the writers and the way it's been changing over time, if you're interested in going and checking out her post, but it incidentally got me thinking about my own relationship with tie-in novels.

When I was a teenager, I read quite a few Star Trek tie-in novels. I enjoyed them. But then I discovered fanfic when I was 21-ish, and I pretty much stopped reading official tie-in novels after that (even though I hardly ever read Star Trek fics, oddly enough). And I think I've read literally two Buffy tie-in novels, ever (Pretty Maids All in a Row by Christopher Golden, which somebody gave me as a gift; and a French translation of Halloween Rain by Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder, which I read for the French practice).

So, why did I decide that I liked fanfic so much better than tie-in novels? I mean, tie-in novels are novel-length, curated, nicely copy-edited, and generally of a fairly high quality of writing—which are all things that I like! Sure, fanfic is free and tie-in novels potentially aren't, but that's not a big deal; I do have a good job, and anyway it's easy to get books cheap at second-hand shops or book sales or yard sales, or free at the library.

No, the real reason that I turned towards fanfic and away from tie-in novels is, frankly, a bit quirky and weird.

Let's start with the idea of canon: canon is the stuff that really, actually happened to the characters. (For Star Trek, admittedly, canon is a concept without well-defined edges; is the animated series canon? Are the video games? The Short Treks webisodes? etc. But anyway, the live-action shows and the movies are canon for sure. Let's assume for now that canon is a thing that exists.)

Now, the thing about the Star Trek tie-in novels (many of which I read and enjoyed as a teenager, I will remind you!) is that I always understood them to be taking place within the canonical universe, in an officially-sanctioned way. That was the real Captain Picard beaming down to that planet and having that adventure—yep, the same guy who was going to be onscreen next week trapped in a turbolift.

So the books were in the official universe ... but nothing that happened in the books could affect the official universe. While they were living in the books, the characters could refer to events that had happened in the TV show, but never vice versa. And at the end of each book, the characters all had to be right back where they'd started, so that they could return to the TV show without a hair out of place.

So after a while it felt to me like nothing that happened in the books mattered. The things that happened in them didn't really happen, so what was the point?

But how is that different from fanfic, you might ask?

Well, here's how I see it: Official tie-in novels take place within the official canonical universe, and so they have to tread lightly and can't really affect anything. But every fanfic splits off into its own brand new divergent-timeline universe. (Like the JJ Abrams Star Trek films!) And in these new universes, everything is real, actions have consequences, and anything can happen!

In fic, characters can grow and change. And sure, whatever happens only matters for the space of that one fic, and when I'm done reading the fic I need to reset everybody back to canonical values before starting to read a different fic—but that fic-universe exists, those versions of the characters exist, and the experiences that they had matter.

Is that super weird? Does anybody else's brain work like mine does?

So, as previously mentioned in this space: I didn't write anything for nearly five years, and then I wrote 300K words of Once a Thief fic in a white heat over the course of five months. And then I got to the end of the story that I wanted to tell (for now?), and now I'm sitting here looking around and wondering ... what next?

I mean, the world's my oyster. I have a computer, fingers, and a brain. All I need to do is start wiggling my fingers over the keyboard again and I could be writing anything.

There is a certain temptation to try throwing a bit of time and energy into writing something original. (I don't love the term "original" fiction, used in contrast to "fanfic," by the way—does anybody know of a term that feels less loaded?) Way back before I discovered fanfic, I did write original stories, and that was fun too. I might try it again someday. But original fiction has one huge disadvantage (seen as an advantage by many!) which is that it is, in principal, publishable. So even if I started out saying "Oh gosh, I'm just going to write this for fun, and maybe show it to my husband and my three closest friends and then stick it in a drawer," I know myself well enough to admit that there's a very good chance that I would quickly start to wonder if I could produce something that I could sell. Because, validation, right? And fame, fortune! (Ha.) But then writing stops being a fun hobby, and starts being work. And I already have a full-time job that I love, so I don't want more work—I just want a fun hobby!

So anyway, right now I want to reflect on some of the things that make writing fanfic, specifically, fun. ( Read more... )

I was thinking about the quality of "slashiness," today. Not for the first time! But in particular, I was musing about how I might explain the slashiness of the Once A Thief pilot to someone who was not familiar with the concept. (This was some advance-planning musing rather than entirely-hypothetical musing; an acquaintance has expressed interest in maybe watching some of the series so that she can read my fanfic, because she's curious about fanfic, never having read any before!)

( So then I started thinking about framing it in terms of the 'meet cute'. )

Here's a happy thing that's happening in my life right now: I'm doing two parallel Once a Thief rewatches, with two local friends who are also fannish. Yesterday, for the first time, scheduling and our places in the respective rewatches allowed all three of us to get together in my living room to watch episodes 14 - 16. It was delightful!

I am so very happy and fortunate that when my brain decided it was time to get re-obsessed by a two-decades-old TV show (with no active fandom), two of my friends were up for coming along for the ride.

Anyway, during the rewatch I have (naturally) been having various thoughts about the show. I think I'll post some! Perhaps another day, I will post some more. Who knows? Whatever seems like fun at the time.

( Cut for spoilers or for general lack of interest in Once A Thief, whichever applies! Also cut for discussion of sexual harassment, abuse of power, and problematic consent. )

I've just binge-watched all 5 seasons of Bojack Horseman on Netflix, and I have a thing or two to say. Cutting for spoilers....

( Spoilers! )

So, having come out as asexual in my previous post, I want to talk about the experience of putting an explicitly asexual character in my fic for the first time.

But actually before that, I think I need to talk a little bit about the experience of writing fics about sexual characters, as an asexual writer. ( Read more... )

(Four and a half years of nothing, and then two posts in two days! Wild.)

I have some more thoughts to share about Endgame, just for fun. These are not deep thoughts. I want to talk about some stories Endgame didn't tell, or more specifically: times when I thought I saw where the story was going, but I was wrong!

( Spoilers! )

What about you? Did you make some wrong guesses that you'd like to share? :-D

Hello, world! I haven't posted in a long, long time. But I think I will today!

I saw Marvel's Endgame last week, and I have some thoughts about it.

( Spoilers! )

Last night my in-laws were visiting, and they very kindly looked after the offspring so that my husband and I could go see Guardians of the Galaxy (second time seeing it for each of us, but first time seeing it together).

Anyway, it was fun, and Rocket and Groot still stole the show the second time around, but what I want to post about is the awesome and CLEARLY DEFINITELY TRUE hypothesis that Mr. Shadowscast and I came up with afterwards.

( Regarding the identity of Peter Quill's biological father... )

Today, gloriously, I had much of an afternoon and evening free, and I decided to spend it writing fic.

I wrote 2700 words of a Once A Thief fic. (Mac/Vic/Li Ann threesome, if you're wondering. Shaping up to be long and plotty and angsty, in the way my fics tend to.)

It was very satisfying. Once A Thief was my first fandom, the one I imprinted on. (See this post for details.) As a fandom, though, it is utterly, totally dead. Rigor mortis set in many years ago. So, supposing I finish this fic, it's not entirely clear that anyone but me will want to read it.

The way I'm feeling now, though, is that I'll finish it anyway. (We'll see how it goes, as my time and energy wax and wane!)

Hm. I guess I'm just posting to say: I think I have now clearly established that I write for an audience of me. When there turn out to be other people who want to read my work too, that's a super extra ice cream bonus!

PS: If by some weird chance anybody sees this post who would be interested in the story, do let me know! It would be encouraging.

PPS: People following my story Gently Down the Stream, do not fear. The last chapters are complete, and will be posted on schedule next Friday.

I've been watching WALL-E a lot lately (because my toddler likes it). I got to thinking about the many parallels between WALL-E and Battlestar Galactica. It amused me, so I drew up a list.

( Cut for spoilers for both WALL-E and BSG. )

For a slightly different take on it all: I checked out AO3 and was delighted to find a gorgeous little WALL-E/BSG crossover fic! Merry-Go-Round by Nope.

Hey, so, quite recently, I finished an epic rewatch of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel: the Series. I use the word "epic" because I was doing this rewatch with a friend, and it took us five years to complete. (It didn't help that during that time, he moved to Seattle for a year and I had a baby and, well, life sure does get in the way of TV-watching sometimes, doesn't it?)

Anyway, it was a lot of fun! But after rewatching AtS in particular, I've found that there are a few plot points that are bugging me. And tonight, I feel like sharing, so I will describe them at length! (Um, this is my first meta in oh my goodness a long time. Please be gentle?)

1) ( The Shanshu Prophecy )

2) ( The Apocalypse )

3) ( The Perfect Happiness )

4) ( Those damn Cyborg Ninjas )