Snowflake days 12 & 13
Ugh, I kept waiting for the crossposter to fix itself, but it's been over a day, so I guess it's not going to. Posting manually.
Challenge #12: In your own space, tell us who you would recast in a film, tv series or webseries, or maybe someone voicing a cartoon or videogame. Or who would you cast to play a character in a book, comic or maybe even your own fiction!
Oh man, I am very, very bad at fancasting, partly because I just don't consume very much live action media (or even things with voice actors), partly because I'm generally bad at faces and thus fail to recognize actors I know in roles where I don't expect them, unless they have extremely unique features (like, I'm generally pretty good at recognizing Benedict Cumberbatch and, like, Peter Dinklage). But as I was thinking about this, it turned out that I had a bit of blathering in me for this challenge anyway, in a couple of different ways:
1) First, this challenge was actually surprisingly serendipitously timed, because seal_girl and I were just talking about fancasting for my chemistry nonsense (I swear, I will run out of reasons to link to this fic some day XD). Actually, how the whole thing started was commented on the fic with some verbal sketches of the characters, which made me include a wish for art or fancast of the characters in my Snowflake day 4 wishlist, whereupon obliged with a Fluorine fancast idea and also suggested that Professor Buckmisterfullerene should be played by Stephen Fry -- which was clearly the only correct fancast for Professor B. Then seal_girl (the fic's recipient) and I were chatting about it and I brought up the Stephen Fry = Professor C60 idea, and she countered with the AMAZING suggestion that Stephen Fry should play ALL THREE carbon allotrope siblings: like so. Which is obviously the best fancast decision in the history of ever.
2) Second, while I have no fancast ideas of my own, I do really enjoy looking at other people's ideas, and occasionally absorb them as headcanons. For instance, long long ago, in a landcomm far far a way (), before GoT was a twinkle in Benioff & Weiss's eye, there were some really neat fancast/faceclaim ideas for ASOIAF characters. My favorites, which are still my mental images for the characters, are Gabriel Aubry for Jaime Lannister:
(I mean, look at this guy! NCW was a reasonable physical match for Jaime, and a good actor, but just look at this guy!)
And Helen Mirren for Olenna Tyrell:
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(I actually jumped off the show's bandwagon before it got to the Tyrells, so I don't have an opinion on the actual casting of Olenna, but that's my Olenna right there.)
3) Third, speaking of fancasts, I am very amused when professional authors play that game with their characters. Here's Steve Brust having a bit of fun fancasting a Vlad TV show with Whedonverse actors. Some of this is breaking my brain a little bit (Sean Maher is too pretty to be functionally invisible! I don't think I can visualize Felicia Day as fierce enough for Aliera), and some of it I feel close-but-no-cigar about (Gina Torres absolutely needs to be in a Dragaera TV show, but she should be Tazendra, obviously!) Lots of fun discussion in the comments, too. And apparently Felicia Day is a fan!
4) I was thinking that I rarely have objections to actual casting, unless someone has put a more enticing cast in my head first, like the Jaime and Olenna example above -- because I don't often have strong visuals and am thus fairly easy to sell on physical portrayals, unless it's something silly/obvious, like changing someone's hair color for no good reason. But I like dolorosa_12's tweak on the challenge to talk about castings I *particularly* like. Definitely a lot of the LotR movies cast, but especially Ian McKellen as Gandalf, Cate Blanchet as Galadriel, Christopher Lee as Saruman, Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn, and Sean Astin as Sam -- they're all perfect! And I actually also really like Martin Freeman as Bilbo in the Hobbit movies -- in fact, that casting is probably the thing I like best about those films. (I don't hate the Hobbit movies! I actually liked the first one quite a lot and enjoyed the second one and even parts of the third one. But the casting is still better than anything they did with it, IMO.)
But a special note about Ian McKellen because it's not just Gandalf where I thought he was fabulous casting in an adaption. I loved him as Magneto (which, I'm not a comics reader, but was coming to the movies from the standpoint of them being an adaptation of the 80s cartoon), as Richard III, and as an armored polar bear in The Golden Compass (which I generally enjoyed as a movie; I know that's a minority opinion). Now that's impressive range!
5) Speaking of range, though, I have to have a special category here for Stanley Tucci, because some years ago I noticed that pretty much every time I would squint at a secondary character in a movie adaptation who seemed like amazingly perfect casting, and I couldn't recognize them, invariably when I would look them up, it would turn out to be Stanley Tucci playing him. Caesar Flickerman in The Hunger Games movies, Dionysus in the (godawful) Percy Jackson adaptations, the obnoxious lawyer in Big Trouble (which is based on a Dave Barry book) -- he just has so much range, and is uniformly awesome whichever role he is playing, and the only way I can tell it's him is because I think the actor is doing a really amazing job but I don't know who they are XD
Challenge 13: In your own space, share a favorite memory about fandom: the first time you got into fandom, the last time a fanwork touched your heart, wild times with fellow fans (whether on-line or off-line), a lovely comment you’ve received or have left for someone.
There's no way I'm going to be able to confine myself just to one! But I am going to confine myself to fannish memories associated, directly or indirectly, with LJ/DW-style fandom, both because that was the commonality in most of the things that occurred to me, and because earlier this month I got a "virtual gift" from LJ -- it's a thing LJ is doing now, I guess, for your anniversary -- marking 18 years on that site, which also means 18 years in LJ-style fandom, and that's, like, an entire adult...
One of my earliest moments of joy in the particular way that LJ/DW fandom brings me joy was a conversation with that spanned, like, a hundred comments and several posts across *counts* 12 days back in 2005, which started with Sherlock Holmes and meandered acriss House and got into progressively longer comments about our shared love of Monday Begins on Saturday and a particular ship therein, with the discussion maxing out LJ comment length and having to be split into parts -- which emerged as my favorite way to talk about fannish things, and which would grow an entire terminology in talking with other fannish friends willing to follow me on these kinds of rambles, people like tabacoychanel and lunasariel and : "herding teal deer", "comment hydras", "precipitating the treads". By this point I do feel like most of my fannish friends interaction has moved off into more real-time spaces like WhatsApp and Zoom -- I mean, that's where I talk to the three aforementioned teal deer-tolerant friends currently, for example -- but when I find people I can still teal deer fannishly with in LJ/DW comment form (*waves at sysann and scytale), it's such a wonderful feeling. And the awesome thing about this form of fandom chatter is that it stays there, linkable and indexed by tags. Sometimes I'll go looking for book write-ups I did 10-15 years ago to refresh my memory, and will come across discussion in the comments of the books or the memes and/or life stuff that came up in the discussion of the books/memes, and it's like being able to look into a Pensieve and see everything there, preserved, and access that fandom glow again.
The next "fandom glow" moment that I want to bask in -- I wrote them down in the order they occurred to me, then rearranged them so they were kind of chronological, although there's definitely overlap as many of these are longer-term experiences rather than individual instants -- was my first experience of fannish chat. A RL friend had tried to get me to use ICQ way bak when it was still a h@xx0rz thing or watever, and I just didn't see the point, so I'd never been to a chat room or otherwise participated in chat, even when my friends were having fun in them talking about music or running social experiments or whatever people did in chatrooms back in the late 90s/2000s. Then I joined a sorting/landcomm, , and suddenly found myself surrounded by people who were not only really amazing fannish creators for ASOIAF, but just all-around amazing people, with so many cool backstories and jobs and aspirations and skills collectively between them. My natural tendency is to lurk in public spaces in fandom (though I've gotten a lot better about this, largely thanks to , in fact), but this crowd was so great that I actually made posts in the community and competed in the contests ("tourneys"), and even became a mod. And also, when someone came up with the idea of having a chat one weekend, I figured out how to use the chatroom software and joined in, and had SO MUCH FUN! This was my first experience with real time fannish interaction online, and it just had such an amazing energy/vibe, that after however many hours I spent hanging out with these people -- and I'd pretty much hang out there whenever I could be around the computer, so as not to miss out on any of the fun -- I'd leave with a kind of giddy, high feeling from all the inside jokes and general awesomeness. These chats became a tradition especially around the "Tourney of the Hand" -- short periods where we would be running like 20 different small contests concurrently -- and everybody in chat was punch-drunk, the regular members from trying to enter as many contests as possible in the limited time, the mods from cheering on their houses in the competition and fielding questions/tallying up the points on the contests, and in my case also spamming the general comm with statistics about how many contest entries there had been, contests with the most entries, participants who had entered the most contests, etc. -- this was definitely the busiest and most intense time for both. (Sadly, I can't link to any of the comm stuff even, because it was all community-locked, but for the significant number of ex-WS folks on my flist - remember all the fun we had? Also, I came cross amazing linked headlines like "GRRM's publisher confirms no TWOW in 2015", which gave me a good laugh.) Anyway, so, the chats were great, and I have some icons with inside jokes from there to prove it still -- in fact, I'm pretty sure that my first attempt at icon making, Simpsons/ASOIAF icons, were the result of one of those early chats. Less tangibly, a lot of great friendships started or were cemented in those chats.
was a pivotal thing in fandom for me in general. It wasn't the first time I met an online fannish friend in person (that was aome back in 2007, and it's been so lovely to be able to keep that tradition going as our children aged from preschoolers to college students), but it was the first time I found myself part of a community of fans who crossed over between online and RL relationshps. One of the very first Snowflake posts I ever wrote, back in 2014, was about WesteroSorting, and I'm not going to rehash all that, but one of the kind of amazing things is that as of 2014 I had met up in person with 8 people whom I met through , and by now at least one more (lyssa027), and a couple more through the magic of Zoom, and I hope that this list will continue to grow, as there are still WS-ites on my flists whom I haven't met but would absolutely love to some day ♥ Not to mention stuff like the amazing , who may not actively be on LJ anymore but whose transcendent cookies have become a staple of our holiday season. Anyway, it was this vibe of fandom-as community, which I fully felt with for the first time, that encouraged me to take the next step and... actually attend a fan convention.
I had previously considered this several times -- when Azkatraz was happening in my backyard in 2009 (also, lol, whoa, I was not expecting to see Lev Grossman's name in that byline XD), and then there was a Bay Area con that Steve Brust was going to be at -- googling suggests it would've been Convolution 2012 -- and I waffled and waffled and ultimately decided that I was just not a "fandom in large groups in RL spaces" person. But then 2018's WorlcCon was in San Jose, and by then I'd been reading enticing con reports and Hugo reading reports from ambyr (who is one of those folks I met through ), and when I waffled about it somewhat more publicly, I had flisters who answered my con questions and reassured me about the experience and gave practical advice, and shared that she was going to be also attending that Worldcon with her mother, and that got me to take the plunge and actually buy an attending membership.
And I had such a blast! This was my initial breathless post, but it's followed by five more f-locked ones which catalogue the joy of discovering that, actually, I can very much be a "fandom in large groups in RL spaces" person, as long as I don't try to do it for too long. There are individual highlights in that post -- holding up Ada Palmer's signing line and her secret spoiler reading, getting to meet Ursula Vernon and two thirds of the Serpents, all the fun panels, being there live when N.K.Jemisin won her hat trick Hugo and one of my favorite series ever picked up the inaugural Best Series award -- but also, as I look back on that amazing weekend, a lot of the glow is from much smaller moments and interactions with strangers: striking up a chat with a teenage girl cosplaying as Translator Zeiat in the Ann Leckie autograph line, a guy from the preceding kaffeeklatsch stopping to admire my Babylon 5 T-shirt (a gift from a fannish RL friend in the 90s) and having a brief chat about how much we both love the show and him saying that Ivanova is his favorite character because his wife is also a Russian Jew, random conversations about favorite books and what we've been reading lately with people waiting in line or sharing a lunch table just because that's where the open space was. Just this really great feeling of fannish giddiness and good-will and shared love of things that, to be honest, I had not expected to find outside of the format of LJ/DW.
That Worldcon 2018 had another very important effect besides making me realize I could actually enjoy fan conventions: it was the genesis of Best Chat, because and I, and lunasariel, who joined us for a day, needed a way to coordinate meeting up and such, and , who was on a different continent and couldn't attend, wanted to be able to experience Worldcon vicariously through us, and so created a WhatsApp chat for us to do so. This means Best Chat has been going since August 15, 2018 -- almost three and a half years. We did liveblog Worldcon panels at K/each other, but of course it has been so much more. We liveblogged books and TV shows at each other, too, brainstormed writing, requested and received career advice, and talked about so many things, both ridiculous and profound. I have a lot of "fandom glow" memories that are, like, me alone at a dark train station at 5 a.m. -- but chatting with K (on European time) about fun things, or me in Japan on a business trip and having Best Chat there to keep me company when everyone in my home time zone was asleep, or just stopping while running errands or peeking away in the middle of a boring meeting to trash-talk a bad book or brainstorm a Yuletide fic, or play a game of "describe a book in emoji". And then March 2020 came, and all of our outside-the-house lives shrank to nothingness, and a couple of weeks into this K had the brilliant idea to take Best Chat to Zoom -- I thought it was a couple of months, but looks like mid-April we had already had our second Zoom Best Chat, so nope, K moved fast! -- which means that in just a couple of months we will have been having weekly Zoom dates for two years running now! o.O The nature of these has become more chaotic as things opened up and travel and social things outside the house resumed, and Zoom Best Chat has grown to include lunasariel and now tabacoychanel and appearances from visitors and family members and pets -- but at it's core it's basically still a microcosm of the best in LJ/DW -- that mix of fannish delight and getting to know the real person and their life -- which I've never found another fannish space outside of LJ/DW to be able to equal.
I don't know that they were explicitly connected, but as I started looking at the timing, I also saw that that right around the time of Best Chat inception we transitioned to "betaing as a team sport", which has also been a source of much fun and fannish glow over the last three years. See, had introduced me to beta-ing via Google Docs earlier than that, and we even had some fun exchanging chatter in the margins when we could see that both of us were in the doc at the same time. But a couple of things happened in 2018 Yuletide season: I wrote my first Yuletide story (a treat for a flister) under the encouragement of my daughter and K was writing in a fandom I was also familiar with (not for the first or last time, but it made a difference), and we ended up with the other members of Best Chat beta-ing our stories in tag-team mode, commenting on each other's comments, disputing or expanding each other's suggestions, and also just descending into chatter. And this was so much more fun than solitary beta! I like betaing to begin with, but this really added a fun "group project" aspect to it, and I found myself laughing a lot scrolling at those "via Google Docs" comments I received, and saved some of the margin commentary because it was just too good to let go of even after I had served its purpose. Since then we have basically never looked back, and this tag-team beta tradition is one of the things I most look forward to in December. We've expanded the use of this technique to things beyond Yuletide or fanfiction -- at this point we've also tag-teamed an original short story, an original novella, and, most amazingly, horse poetry translations -- each time with the addition of more betas and friends. The most "fandom glow" experience version of this, though, was working on my Monday Begins on Saturday fic -- K having freshly consumed the canon, lunasariel and experiencing the canon for the first time (I left them highlighted passages so they could avoid spoilers for the book), and me getting giddy and punch-drunk and coining the word "commandant" after Cyan de-comma-ed one of my more convoluted sentences (in my defense, this was after the novella, in which I had reached "FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NO MORE COMMAS" levels of copy-editing). I guess I find that this tag-teaming approach to betaing takes the most solitary part of fannish interaction -- especially for a fest which does not provide instant gratification because there's a week between when stories are posted and when they are revealed -- and still gives it that sense of communal giddiness.
So Best Chat has been used for virtual Worldcon-ing, fannish and RL chatting, sharing Zoom links, tag-team beta coordination, but I would be remiss if I did not mention one more wondrous use case in which we were able to employ it: In the spring of 2019 flew to the West Coast from Europe and she and drove down to visit me in an epic Pacific Roadtrip 2k19, which culminated in several hangouts of the three of us plus lunasariel, who lives near enough that she can drop by for dinner occasionally. It was really amazing, because K and I had met several times before (she has stayed with us previously, and we went to visit her), and Cyan and I had met before, during conferences/college visits and at Worldcon of course, and Cyan and Rose had met before Worldcon, because Rose attended grad school in Cyan's city before moving back to the Bay Area, and Rose and K had met before during K's previous visit to California, and Rose and I had hung out a bunch, and Rose, Cyan and I all spent time at Worldcon together, but this was the first time all four of us were in the same place at the same time, and it was magical! There was a late dinner at a favorite Thai place where we were just continuously beaming at each other, and dinner at a local pub I've taken to calling " West" because I've met up with so many WS folks there, and a Middle Eastern feast back at our house with Rose's fiance, and lunch at my favorite Japanese place where I snapped a cryptid-style photo of K glowing while talking about Captive Prince fic, which is still one of the most treasured images on my phone XD
I've rambled really far afield, as I'm wont to do, but I think that's because this question, and reading people's answers to this challenge -- which have all been super lovely! -- made me reflect that what I love about fandom, what makes me happy about fandom are not the "point" highs, but the webs of connection, fandom comms leading to personal connection, leading to a micro-fandom community living in my pocket, leading to in-person hangouts and real-time chat across contintents, leading to fannish friends who watched my kids grow up and whose personal milestones I'm privileged to celebrate with them -- the whole glorious mess of it suffused in "fandom glow".
*
Oh, right, there was another Friday Five I meant to do and then lost track of:
1. What is the first TV show you remember watching?
In Soviet Russia TV watches you, TV shows didn't really work the same way as they did in the 80s in the US, in that there were no continuous-story type shows, either for kids or for grownups: You had your things that were basically miniseries, including when it came to cartoons. The one with the most episodes that was the most like a series that I could think of when I was brainstorming favorite TV shows for this meme was Nu, pogodi!, wich was up to 16 episodes by the time I left the USSR. So I feel like watching these kinds of shows wasn't really like watching a TV show in the sense I understand that term today. The kind of TV shows that did have many, many episodes were the ones where you had a framing story that was different each time (I think...), but the framing story just was used to introduce unrelated shorts, either singly or in compilation, like Spokojnoj nochi, malyshi (bedtime cartoon) and Yeralash (comedy/skit show for kids). I remember "Yeralash" as being a weekly thing, and "Spokojnoj nochi, malyshi" was daily, and pitched younger, so I'm pretty sure "Spokojnoj nochi, malyshi" would've been the first TV show I watched. And I think I probably watched it every day -- definitely a lot of memories associated with that.
2. What is the first “grown up” TV show you watched?
Good question... I'm sure I caught some "grown up" miniseries type things in the USSR, or at least miniseries that were not specificially for kids. But I think the first show that was a TV show in the "continuously running story of many episodes" sense would've been the infusion of telenovelas that started arriving in the USSR in the late 80s. The first one I remember -- because it was a cultural phenomenon -- was Escrava Isaura -- although it looks like that only got 15 episodes in the USSR format, so hm, does that even count?
I guess I need to look at US shows after all, then... Does The Simpsons count as "grown up" enough? It's prime time, so it does, right? I started watching that when I was probably 13-14? I think my English and American cultural literacy wouldn't have been up to being able to appreciate it before then, and it took me a while to get over the "ugly" art.
If The Simpsons don't count, than I think my first grown-up TV show would've been Babylon 5. I started watching it in 1995 (when I was 16-17), and not long after that I got into Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, too, but I'm pretty sure I did not start with season 1, so that would have to have been later.
As you can see, I was not much of a TV watcher, and once I came to the US, there were so many kid and YA shows for me to catch up on that I didn't have any reason to dip into grown-up TV for a while.
3. What is the first TV show you watched from the start to finish when it aired live (i.e., not via reruns)?
You know what, I'm not sure I have ever watched a TV show from start to finish as it aired live, at least not until, like, WandaVision last year XD There are definitely seasons of The Simpsons and House M.D. and Babylon 5 and so on that I watched as they aired, but this was emphatically not true of the shows' entire run, and I can't think of any shows for which it would be true. Even with streaming, and definitely before then, it would usually take me a season or more to "discover" a show before I would start following it, and many other shows I just caught entirely in reruns or only watched casually if I happened to click past them on TV.
So, yeah, WandaVision, I guess? And even that only defined as "watched that week's episode before the next week's episode was released" -- I did stay up to watch it as it dropped most of the weeks, but not in all cases, I think.
4. What is the oldest TV show you’ve watched?
I caught some episodes of old shows on Nick at Nite. I think the only ones I would've actually watched complete episodes of were alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-65), Bewitched (1964-72). I might have caught an episode of I Love Lucy or Lassie or Mister Ed here and there, too.
The oldest TV show that I intentionally watched multiple episodes of, rather than just passively not changing the channel, would be The Munsters and The Addams Family (both 1964)
Oh, but looks like Looney Tunes go back to the 30s, so if I watched some of those oldest episodes (no idea if I have or not), then probably Looney Tunes. Looking at the Wikepedia page, it seems likely that I would've caught some episodes from the early color cartoons in the 1936-44 era, which would make it older than the others.
5. What is one TV show you will stop and watch if you come across it on TV, even though you've seen every episode at least 20 times?
The Simpsons! Not only does it have great rewatch value but often I end up catching jokes that I didn't realize were there the previous 20 times I watched it :P -- because I've learned an additional bit of history/trivia, or watched/read something new and can now appreciate the allusion, etc.
Challenge #12: In your own space, tell us who you would recast in a film, tv series or webseries, or maybe someone voicing a cartoon or videogame. Or who would you cast to play a character in a book, comic or maybe even your own fiction!
Oh man, I am very, very bad at fancasting, partly because I just don't consume very much live action media (or even things with voice actors), partly because I'm generally bad at faces and thus fail to recognize actors I know in roles where I don't expect them, unless they have extremely unique features (like, I'm generally pretty good at recognizing Benedict Cumberbatch and, like, Peter Dinklage). But as I was thinking about this, it turned out that I had a bit of blathering in me for this challenge anyway, in a couple of different ways:
1) First, this challenge was actually surprisingly serendipitously timed, because seal_girl and I were just talking about fancasting for my chemistry nonsense (I swear, I will run out of reasons to link to this fic some day XD). Actually, how the whole thing started was commented on the fic with some verbal sketches of the characters, which made me include a wish for art or fancast of the characters in my Snowflake day 4 wishlist, whereupon obliged with a Fluorine fancast idea and also suggested that Professor Buckmisterfullerene should be played by Stephen Fry -- which was clearly the only correct fancast for Professor B. Then seal_girl (the fic's recipient) and I were chatting about it and I brought up the Stephen Fry = Professor C60 idea, and she countered with the AMAZING suggestion that Stephen Fry should play ALL THREE carbon allotrope siblings: like so. Which is obviously the best fancast decision in the history of ever.
2) Second, while I have no fancast ideas of my own, I do really enjoy looking at other people's ideas, and occasionally absorb them as headcanons. For instance, long long ago, in a landcomm far far a way (), before GoT was a twinkle in Benioff & Weiss's eye, there were some really neat fancast/faceclaim ideas for ASOIAF characters. My favorites, which are still my mental images for the characters, are Gabriel Aubry for Jaime Lannister:
(I mean, look at this guy! NCW was a reasonable physical match for Jaime, and a good actor, but just look at this guy!)
And Helen Mirren for Olenna Tyrell:
(I actually jumped off the show's bandwagon before it got to the Tyrells, so I don't have an opinion on the actual casting of Olenna, but that's my Olenna right there.)
3) Third, speaking of fancasts, I am very amused when professional authors play that game with their characters. Here's Steve Brust having a bit of fun fancasting a Vlad TV show with Whedonverse actors. Some of this is breaking my brain a little bit (Sean Maher is too pretty to be functionally invisible! I don't think I can visualize Felicia Day as fierce enough for Aliera), and some of it I feel close-but-no-cigar about (Gina Torres absolutely needs to be in a Dragaera TV show, but she should be Tazendra, obviously!) Lots of fun discussion in the comments, too. And apparently Felicia Day is a fan!
4) I was thinking that I rarely have objections to actual casting, unless someone has put a more enticing cast in my head first, like the Jaime and Olenna example above -- because I don't often have strong visuals and am thus fairly easy to sell on physical portrayals, unless it's something silly/obvious, like changing someone's hair color for no good reason. But I like dolorosa_12's tweak on the challenge to talk about castings I *particularly* like. Definitely a lot of the LotR movies cast, but especially Ian McKellen as Gandalf, Cate Blanchet as Galadriel, Christopher Lee as Saruman, Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn, and Sean Astin as Sam -- they're all perfect! And I actually also really like Martin Freeman as Bilbo in the Hobbit movies -- in fact, that casting is probably the thing I like best about those films. (I don't hate the Hobbit movies! I actually liked the first one quite a lot and enjoyed the second one and even parts of the third one. But the casting is still better than anything they did with it, IMO.)
But a special note about Ian McKellen because it's not just Gandalf where I thought he was fabulous casting in an adaption. I loved him as Magneto (which, I'm not a comics reader, but was coming to the movies from the standpoint of them being an adaptation of the 80s cartoon), as Richard III, and as an armored polar bear in The Golden Compass (which I generally enjoyed as a movie; I know that's a minority opinion). Now that's impressive range!
5) Speaking of range, though, I have to have a special category here for Stanley Tucci, because some years ago I noticed that pretty much every time I would squint at a secondary character in a movie adaptation who seemed like amazingly perfect casting, and I couldn't recognize them, invariably when I would look them up, it would turn out to be Stanley Tucci playing him. Caesar Flickerman in The Hunger Games movies, Dionysus in the (godawful) Percy Jackson adaptations, the obnoxious lawyer in Big Trouble (which is based on a Dave Barry book) -- he just has so much range, and is uniformly awesome whichever role he is playing, and the only way I can tell it's him is because I think the actor is doing a really amazing job but I don't know who they are XD
Challenge 13: In your own space, share a favorite memory about fandom: the first time you got into fandom, the last time a fanwork touched your heart, wild times with fellow fans (whether on-line or off-line), a lovely comment you’ve received or have left for someone.
There's no way I'm going to be able to confine myself just to one! But I am going to confine myself to fannish memories associated, directly or indirectly, with LJ/DW-style fandom, both because that was the commonality in most of the things that occurred to me, and because earlier this month I got a "virtual gift" from LJ -- it's a thing LJ is doing now, I guess, for your anniversary -- marking 18 years on that site, which also means 18 years in LJ-style fandom, and that's, like, an entire adult...
One of my earliest moments of joy in the particular way that LJ/DW fandom brings me joy was a conversation with that spanned, like, a hundred comments and several posts across *counts* 12 days back in 2005, which started with Sherlock Holmes and meandered acriss House and got into progressively longer comments about our shared love of Monday Begins on Saturday and a particular ship therein, with the discussion maxing out LJ comment length and having to be split into parts -- which emerged as my favorite way to talk about fannish things, and which would grow an entire terminology in talking with other fannish friends willing to follow me on these kinds of rambles, people like tabacoychanel and lunasariel and : "herding teal deer", "comment hydras", "precipitating the treads". By this point I do feel like most of my fannish friends interaction has moved off into more real-time spaces like WhatsApp and Zoom -- I mean, that's where I talk to the three aforementioned teal deer-tolerant friends currently, for example -- but when I find people I can still teal deer fannishly with in LJ/DW comment form (*waves at sysann and scytale), it's such a wonderful feeling. And the awesome thing about this form of fandom chatter is that it stays there, linkable and indexed by tags. Sometimes I'll go looking for book write-ups I did 10-15 years ago to refresh my memory, and will come across discussion in the comments of the books or the memes and/or life stuff that came up in the discussion of the books/memes, and it's like being able to look into a Pensieve and see everything there, preserved, and access that fandom glow again.
The next "fandom glow" moment that I want to bask in -- I wrote them down in the order they occurred to me, then rearranged them so they were kind of chronological, although there's definitely overlap as many of these are longer-term experiences rather than individual instants -- was my first experience of fannish chat. A RL friend had tried to get me to use ICQ way bak when it was still a h@xx0rz thing or watever, and I just didn't see the point, so I'd never been to a chat room or otherwise participated in chat, even when my friends were having fun in them talking about music or running social experiments or whatever people did in chatrooms back in the late 90s/2000s. Then I joined a sorting/landcomm, , and suddenly found myself surrounded by people who were not only really amazing fannish creators for ASOIAF, but just all-around amazing people, with so many cool backstories and jobs and aspirations and skills collectively between them. My natural tendency is to lurk in public spaces in fandom (though I've gotten a lot better about this, largely thanks to , in fact), but this crowd was so great that I actually made posts in the community and competed in the contests ("tourneys"), and even became a mod. And also, when someone came up with the idea of having a chat one weekend, I figured out how to use the chatroom software and joined in, and had SO MUCH FUN! This was my first experience with real time fannish interaction online, and it just had such an amazing energy/vibe, that after however many hours I spent hanging out with these people -- and I'd pretty much hang out there whenever I could be around the computer, so as not to miss out on any of the fun -- I'd leave with a kind of giddy, high feeling from all the inside jokes and general awesomeness. These chats became a tradition especially around the "Tourney of the Hand" -- short periods where we would be running like 20 different small contests concurrently -- and everybody in chat was punch-drunk, the regular members from trying to enter as many contests as possible in the limited time, the mods from cheering on their houses in the competition and fielding questions/tallying up the points on the contests, and in my case also spamming the general comm with statistics about how many contest entries there had been, contests with the most entries, participants who had entered the most contests, etc. -- this was definitely the busiest and most intense time for both. (Sadly, I can't link to any of the comm stuff even, because it was all community-locked, but for the significant number of ex-WS folks on my flist - remember all the fun we had? Also, I came cross amazing linked headlines like "GRRM's publisher confirms no TWOW in 2015", which gave me a good laugh.) Anyway, so, the chats were great, and I have some icons with inside jokes from there to prove it still -- in fact, I'm pretty sure that my first attempt at icon making, Simpsons/ASOIAF icons, were the result of one of those early chats. Less tangibly, a lot of great friendships started or were cemented in those chats.
was a pivotal thing in fandom for me in general. It wasn't the first time I met an online fannish friend in person (that was aome back in 2007, and it's been so lovely to be able to keep that tradition going as our children aged from preschoolers to college students), but it was the first time I found myself part of a community of fans who crossed over between online and RL relationshps. One of the very first Snowflake posts I ever wrote, back in 2014, was about WesteroSorting, and I'm not going to rehash all that, but one of the kind of amazing things is that as of 2014 I had met up in person with 8 people whom I met through , and by now at least one more (lyssa027), and a couple more through the magic of Zoom, and I hope that this list will continue to grow, as there are still WS-ites on my flists whom I haven't met but would absolutely love to some day ♥ Not to mention stuff like the amazing , who may not actively be on LJ anymore but whose transcendent cookies have become a staple of our holiday season. Anyway, it was this vibe of fandom-as community, which I fully felt with for the first time, that encouraged me to take the next step and... actually attend a fan convention.
I had previously considered this several times -- when Azkatraz was happening in my backyard in 2009 (also, lol, whoa, I was not expecting to see Lev Grossman's name in that byline XD), and then there was a Bay Area con that Steve Brust was going to be at -- googling suggests it would've been Convolution 2012 -- and I waffled and waffled and ultimately decided that I was just not a "fandom in large groups in RL spaces" person. But then 2018's WorlcCon was in San Jose, and by then I'd been reading enticing con reports and Hugo reading reports from ambyr (who is one of those folks I met through ), and when I waffled about it somewhat more publicly, I had flisters who answered my con questions and reassured me about the experience and gave practical advice, and shared that she was going to be also attending that Worldcon with her mother, and that got me to take the plunge and actually buy an attending membership.
And I had such a blast! This was my initial breathless post, but it's followed by five more f-locked ones which catalogue the joy of discovering that, actually, I can very much be a "fandom in large groups in RL spaces" person, as long as I don't try to do it for too long. There are individual highlights in that post -- holding up Ada Palmer's signing line and her secret spoiler reading, getting to meet Ursula Vernon and two thirds of the Serpents, all the fun panels, being there live when N.K.Jemisin won her hat trick Hugo and one of my favorite series ever picked up the inaugural Best Series award -- but also, as I look back on that amazing weekend, a lot of the glow is from much smaller moments and interactions with strangers: striking up a chat with a teenage girl cosplaying as Translator Zeiat in the Ann Leckie autograph line, a guy from the preceding kaffeeklatsch stopping to admire my Babylon 5 T-shirt (a gift from a fannish RL friend in the 90s) and having a brief chat about how much we both love the show and him saying that Ivanova is his favorite character because his wife is also a Russian Jew, random conversations about favorite books and what we've been reading lately with people waiting in line or sharing a lunch table just because that's where the open space was. Just this really great feeling of fannish giddiness and good-will and shared love of things that, to be honest, I had not expected to find outside of the format of LJ/DW.
That Worldcon 2018 had another very important effect besides making me realize I could actually enjoy fan conventions: it was the genesis of Best Chat, because and I, and lunasariel, who joined us for a day, needed a way to coordinate meeting up and such, and , who was on a different continent and couldn't attend, wanted to be able to experience Worldcon vicariously through us, and so created a WhatsApp chat for us to do so. This means Best Chat has been going since August 15, 2018 -- almost three and a half years. We did liveblog Worldcon panels at K/each other, but of course it has been so much more. We liveblogged books and TV shows at each other, too, brainstormed writing, requested and received career advice, and talked about so many things, both ridiculous and profound. I have a lot of "fandom glow" memories that are, like, me alone at a dark train station at 5 a.m. -- but chatting with K (on European time) about fun things, or me in Japan on a business trip and having Best Chat there to keep me company when everyone in my home time zone was asleep, or just stopping while running errands or peeking away in the middle of a boring meeting to trash-talk a bad book or brainstorm a Yuletide fic, or play a game of "describe a book in emoji". And then March 2020 came, and all of our outside-the-house lives shrank to nothingness, and a couple of weeks into this K had the brilliant idea to take Best Chat to Zoom -- I thought it was a couple of months, but looks like mid-April we had already had our second Zoom Best Chat, so nope, K moved fast! -- which means that in just a couple of months we will have been having weekly Zoom dates for two years running now! o.O The nature of these has become more chaotic as things opened up and travel and social things outside the house resumed, and Zoom Best Chat has grown to include lunasariel and now tabacoychanel and appearances from visitors and family members and pets -- but at it's core it's basically still a microcosm of the best in LJ/DW -- that mix of fannish delight and getting to know the real person and their life -- which I've never found another fannish space outside of LJ/DW to be able to equal.
I don't know that they were explicitly connected, but as I started looking at the timing, I also saw that that right around the time of Best Chat inception we transitioned to "betaing as a team sport", which has also been a source of much fun and fannish glow over the last three years. See, had introduced me to beta-ing via Google Docs earlier than that, and we even had some fun exchanging chatter in the margins when we could see that both of us were in the doc at the same time. But a couple of things happened in 2018 Yuletide season: I wrote my first Yuletide story (a treat for a flister) under the encouragement of my daughter and K was writing in a fandom I was also familiar with (not for the first or last time, but it made a difference), and we ended up with the other members of Best Chat beta-ing our stories in tag-team mode, commenting on each other's comments, disputing or expanding each other's suggestions, and also just descending into chatter. And this was so much more fun than solitary beta! I like betaing to begin with, but this really added a fun "group project" aspect to it, and I found myself laughing a lot scrolling at those "via Google Docs" comments I received, and saved some of the margin commentary because it was just too good to let go of even after I had served its purpose. Since then we have basically never looked back, and this tag-team beta tradition is one of the things I most look forward to in December. We've expanded the use of this technique to things beyond Yuletide or fanfiction -- at this point we've also tag-teamed an original short story, an original novella, and, most amazingly, horse poetry translations -- each time with the addition of more betas and friends. The most "fandom glow" experience version of this, though, was working on my Monday Begins on Saturday fic -- K having freshly consumed the canon, lunasariel and experiencing the canon for the first time (I left them highlighted passages so they could avoid spoilers for the book), and me getting giddy and punch-drunk and coining the word "commandant" after Cyan de-comma-ed one of my more convoluted sentences (in my defense, this was after the novella, in which I had reached "FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NO MORE COMMAS" levels of copy-editing). I guess I find that this tag-teaming approach to betaing takes the most solitary part of fannish interaction -- especially for a fest which does not provide instant gratification because there's a week between when stories are posted and when they are revealed -- and still gives it that sense of communal giddiness.
So Best Chat has been used for virtual Worldcon-ing, fannish and RL chatting, sharing Zoom links, tag-team beta coordination, but I would be remiss if I did not mention one more wondrous use case in which we were able to employ it: In the spring of 2019 flew to the West Coast from Europe and she and drove down to visit me in an epic Pacific Roadtrip 2k19, which culminated in several hangouts of the three of us plus lunasariel, who lives near enough that she can drop by for dinner occasionally. It was really amazing, because K and I had met several times before (she has stayed with us previously, and we went to visit her), and Cyan and I had met before, during conferences/college visits and at Worldcon of course, and Cyan and Rose had met before Worldcon, because Rose attended grad school in Cyan's city before moving back to the Bay Area, and Rose and K had met before during K's previous visit to California, and Rose and I had hung out a bunch, and Rose, Cyan and I all spent time at Worldcon together, but this was the first time all four of us were in the same place at the same time, and it was magical! There was a late dinner at a favorite Thai place where we were just continuously beaming at each other, and dinner at a local pub I've taken to calling " West" because I've met up with so many WS folks there, and a Middle Eastern feast back at our house with Rose's fiance, and lunch at my favorite Japanese place where I snapped a cryptid-style photo of K glowing while talking about Captive Prince fic, which is still one of the most treasured images on my phone XD
I've rambled really far afield, as I'm wont to do, but I think that's because this question, and reading people's answers to this challenge -- which have all been super lovely! -- made me reflect that what I love about fandom, what makes me happy about fandom are not the "point" highs, but the webs of connection, fandom comms leading to personal connection, leading to a micro-fandom community living in my pocket, leading to in-person hangouts and real-time chat across contintents, leading to fannish friends who watched my kids grow up and whose personal milestones I'm privileged to celebrate with them -- the whole glorious mess of it suffused in "fandom glow".
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Oh, right, there was another Friday Five I meant to do and then lost track of:
1. What is the first TV show you remember watching?
In Soviet Russia TV watches you, TV shows didn't really work the same way as they did in the 80s in the US, in that there were no continuous-story type shows, either for kids or for grownups: You had your things that were basically miniseries, including when it came to cartoons. The one with the most episodes that was the most like a series that I could think of when I was brainstorming favorite TV shows for this meme was Nu, pogodi!, wich was up to 16 episodes by the time I left the USSR. So I feel like watching these kinds of shows wasn't really like watching a TV show in the sense I understand that term today. The kind of TV shows that did have many, many episodes were the ones where you had a framing story that was different each time (I think...), but the framing story just was used to introduce unrelated shorts, either singly or in compilation, like Spokojnoj nochi, malyshi (bedtime cartoon) and Yeralash (comedy/skit show for kids). I remember "Yeralash" as being a weekly thing, and "Spokojnoj nochi, malyshi" was daily, and pitched younger, so I'm pretty sure "Spokojnoj nochi, malyshi" would've been the first TV show I watched. And I think I probably watched it every day -- definitely a lot of memories associated with that.
2. What is the first “grown up” TV show you watched?
Good question... I'm sure I caught some "grown up" miniseries type things in the USSR, or at least miniseries that were not specificially for kids. But I think the first show that was a TV show in the "continuously running story of many episodes" sense would've been the infusion of telenovelas that started arriving in the USSR in the late 80s. The first one I remember -- because it was a cultural phenomenon -- was Escrava Isaura -- although it looks like that only got 15 episodes in the USSR format, so hm, does that even count?
I guess I need to look at US shows after all, then... Does The Simpsons count as "grown up" enough? It's prime time, so it does, right? I started watching that when I was probably 13-14? I think my English and American cultural literacy wouldn't have been up to being able to appreciate it before then, and it took me a while to get over the "ugly" art.
If The Simpsons don't count, than I think my first grown-up TV show would've been Babylon 5. I started watching it in 1995 (when I was 16-17), and not long after that I got into Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, too, but I'm pretty sure I did not start with season 1, so that would have to have been later.
As you can see, I was not much of a TV watcher, and once I came to the US, there were so many kid and YA shows for me to catch up on that I didn't have any reason to dip into grown-up TV for a while.
3. What is the first TV show you watched from the start to finish when it aired live (i.e., not via reruns)?
You know what, I'm not sure I have ever watched a TV show from start to finish as it aired live, at least not until, like, WandaVision last year XD There are definitely seasons of The Simpsons and House M.D. and Babylon 5 and so on that I watched as they aired, but this was emphatically not true of the shows' entire run, and I can't think of any shows for which it would be true. Even with streaming, and definitely before then, it would usually take me a season or more to "discover" a show before I would start following it, and many other shows I just caught entirely in reruns or only watched casually if I happened to click past them on TV.
So, yeah, WandaVision, I guess? And even that only defined as "watched that week's episode before the next week's episode was released" -- I did stay up to watch it as it dropped most of the weeks, but not in all cases, I think.
4. What is the oldest TV show you’ve watched?
I caught some episodes of old shows on Nick at Nite. I think the only ones I would've actually watched complete episodes of were alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-65), Bewitched (1964-72). I might have caught an episode of I Love Lucy or Lassie or Mister Ed here and there, too.
The oldest TV show that I intentionally watched multiple episodes of, rather than just passively not changing the channel, would be The Munsters and The Addams Family (both 1964)
Oh, but looks like Looney Tunes go back to the 30s, so if I watched some of those oldest episodes (no idea if I have or not), then probably Looney Tunes. Looking at the Wikepedia page, it seems likely that I would've caught some episodes from the early color cartoons in the 1936-44 era, which would make it older than the others.
5. What is one TV show you will stop and watch if you come across it on TV, even though you've seen every episode at least 20 times?
The Simpsons! Not only does it have great rewatch value but often I end up catching jokes that I didn't realize were there the previous 20 times I watched it :P -- because I've learned an additional bit of history/trivia, or watched/read something new and can now appreciate the allusion, etc.