More Taskmaster, and some meme answers
I'm continuing to mainline Taskmaster, to the exclusion of any other entertainment content. (I think I've figured out my sudden narrative allergy -- it's because all of the stressful things at work involve crafting a narrative out of a bunch of data and figuring out how it all goes together, so I think the fiction-synthesizing part of my brain and Sudoku-solving part of my brain are just burnt out. That's... interesting.)
Anyway, I'm proceeding watching in a very strange order, as having completed series 6 and 5, I've receded further into the past with:
Series 4 - spoilers!
I guess this was another nice mix of competitors, as I liked all of them, and felt like most of them brought something different to the mix, so it never got same-y.
I came into the show with Joe as my favorite, having watched some clips where he was particularly memorable -- the beautiful cake destruction (which he turned into a fireworks display) and the painting-while-smiling one (where eveyone had to paint, but Joe also had to smile). Joe continued to hit the sweet spot for me of being funny during his tasks, and being funny in the studio (I think he had the most moments where he was intentionally funny (to me) in talking back to Greg or responding to something done by another contestant, just, like, on-the-spot funny), and also a generally clever/competent approach to a wide variety of tasks -- it didn't always work out, but it was usually fun to watch. I also just liked his ridiculous coat, and his drawl, and his kissing the portrait running gag.
My other favorite was probably Hugh, in an underdog sort of way -- I thought that Greg was extra-mean to him, and judging him down on any subjective tasks. I mean, like, it's all good fun, but it made me want to root for Hugh. Especially when I was genuinely impressed by his lateral thinking in many of the tasks, like being the only one to go for a non-diaphragm-related noise in the "make the longest noise" live task, cutting through the bunting to make the hopping easier, and even some of the tasks where Greg ruled that it was a disallowed strategy (like shaking things out of the sleeping bag). I was also damn impressed he was able to do the thing with the pummel horse at any age, let alone in his 50s, or stuff like lifting Alex during their dance. Like, Hugh is probably the least funny person I've seen on this show so far, but there's something to the deadpan, taciturn way he goes about the absurd tasks, with the occasional odd smile as he says stuff like, "I'm going to need lots of knives" that I find perversely kind of charming. And I really enjoyed the way he and Mel worked together in the team tasks (more on that in a little bit) -- they seemed to have an actual lovely dynamic, maybe thanks to being people who had known each other at university.
Mel herself was just adorable -- she seemed to appreciate every task that was thrown at her, and just be bubbly about everything, and it was very cute. The camel through the gap thing was brilliant, of course, and I found I usually enjoyed all her takes on a challenge, whether they were successful (throwing the mannekin into a moving car, making the pommel horse disappear), or not so much (the exotic sandwich). Also, her being most proud of her show guinea pigs, and getting all excited about playing dress-up with raw wool -- adorable! Therefore, I appreciated both the positivity compilation and the solo tasks designed to test it; man, that positivity stretched far!
Noel Fielding was actually the only person whose name I recognized going into the show, but still on a very surface level -- I've never watched his comedy or anything, I just know the name and had seen pictures of him because qwentoozla is a fan. (Actually, it appears I probably did see his voice work in Disenchantment, but had no idea it was him. So, comes out to the same thing, really.) He was less funny to me than Joe (intentionally) or Mel (mostly just on account of being adorably excited about tasks), but I enjoyed looking at his outfits (as Greg said during the camouflage task, everything in the caravan does look like something Noel would wear XD) and pretty grey eyes and, like, general languor. That said, his take on the "exotic sandwich" was definitely one of the highlights of this series.
The person I haven't talked about yet is Lolly, and I don't know that I have anything in particular to say about her. She was also very cute when things went her way, and generally charming throughout
The team tasks were the particular standouts in this series for me. In the flour task, I had the same idea Joe ended up implementing, i.e. flour "snowballs", which worked really well and which Greg called brilliant. I wasn't sure if clumped flour would be counted as "loose" -- at some point it's, you know, dough and not flour -- but since that was apparently OK, hey. (I also had the same idea as he (and Noel) in the egg-to-cup task (bread mitt), even assuming the 1 min penalty -- it's only one thing, and it's definitely the securest/fastest -- which was interesting, as it was the first time that the same idea occurred to me as to one of the contestants. Maybe it's just that I'm osmosing the spirit of the show as time goes on XD). But the standout task for me was the team task where each member of the team had a different task -- the way Mel and Hugh worked seamless together, and he even helped out with the cling-wrapping, while "the kids" were completely at odds and getting in each other's way the entire time. I think that sequence of Lolly and Joe lugging the table back and forth and actively destroying each other's progress was the thing I laughed hardest at in the show to date. (I think this failure gets me more than any other disastrous result because it is so PREVENTABLE XD)
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So, last post, I invited friends new and old to ask me a question or several to get to know me. Here's the part of the answers I'm comfortable posting unlocked (with the locked ones to come in a little while):
seal_girl asked:
What rubbish superpower would you have?
So I actually googled "crappy superpower" to see what my options were, which led me to this list. I was reading through it and increasingly coming to the conclusion that it wasn't going to be useful, when I got to "Supernatural Fruit Empowerment". Sounds like what it actually means is that you get a power-up from magical fruit. But the way I read it intially was that you have the power to animate fruit, and I was like, you know what, that gives me an idea!
Because actually, when the rodents were younger, L declared that my superpower was making things sound like they were alive and cute. This was after I decided that a particularly stubborn tapioca pearl in my boba drink had distinguished itself with enough tenacity that it deserved a name (we called him Bob), but she was also drawing on an example from a breakfast in Portugal when I picked up a mini Danish with raisins from the breakfast bar, turned it so that the raisins looked like eyes in a slightly alien face, and said I was going to call it Smiley. Smiley went to Prague with us, wrapped in a napkin in my pocket, because I couldn't bear to just throw him in the trash. At one point I even dared L to give me anything she wanted and I would anthropomorfise it on demand; she picked up a slice of salami, which I immediately named Sally.
Anyway, so, clearly, if I were to have an ACTUAL rubbish superpower, it would be the ability to bring food to life. And not in a helpful way; these things would be autonomous critters with about the mental capacity of a bug or a hamster, I bet, and they would just skitter around uselessly, and I'd end up feeling responsible for them. Total rubbish!
What's your favourite part of the LotR? The bit you would open the book just to reread because you wanted to?
There were three that immediately jumped to mind, though I'm not sure I could rationally pick a favorite, either between them or overall:
1) The part where the Fellowship is trying to make their way through Caradhras and get caught up in the snow, because it's such a great Fellowship moment: Boromir and Aragorn making a path for the Hobbits through the snow and carrying them (Boromir is my favorite character, and I think Caradhras was probably the part where that became the case), Legolas running lightly over the snow while making a joke (which I assume all the members of the Fellowship who can't as easily manage the same feat -- but especially Gimli -- do not at all appreciate), Gimli extremely dubious about being there in the first place, Gandalf being his cranky self when people want him to just magic away their problems, the Hobbits bearing up under the extreme conditions as best they can but without complaint. It's a passage really rich with character and ensemble dynamics, and I've always loved it. And rereading it knowing that they will make it OK through this hardship but that this will force them to turn towards Moria, and everything that happens there, gives this scene even more power. I think this was the part of the book I was most eager to get to when I was reading LotR to L (my daughter), and I have a very clear memory of reading it to her for the very first time (from the Russian edition I have, which was my first exposure to the book as well), and since then this passage has picked up even more significance for me.
2) The scene in front of the Gates of Moria -- the Watcher in the Water, which so neatly foreshadows the creepiness within, losing Bill the Pony(especially since I now know he made it through safely), the description of the Gates and the inscription on them, and all the history it implies -- one of the reasons I have the Gates of Moria as my most often used LotR icon is that they capture a lot of what I love about this setting very succinctly: the grandeur of bygone days that you can still wonder at, the glimpse of the individual in the vast history ("I, Narvi, made them. Celebrimbor of Hollin drew these signs"), the changes with the passage of time (the contrast between the present attitude between the Elves and Dwarves and what is impied by the inscription) -- and of course the "speak friend and enter" riddle, which I love so much, because Gandalf can't figure it out for so long (and snaps at Pippin while he's at it), and then justifies himself for being slow -- so relatable! Actually all of Moria is my favorite part of LotR, so maybe I should've just picked that, but it's a pretty big chunk, and if going for something more manageable, the scene by the gates works pretty well for me. It's got the grandeur of Moria, and the danger, and the characters being both great and vulnerable, which is everything I love about the larger section.
3)
Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?
It's just such a beautiful, haunting moment, and I find it immediately transporting. When I was in high school, which was the peak of my Tolkien One True Canon-ness, I used to keep a copy of The Two Towers in my locker, which was on the third (top) floor, in the most remote/deserted part of the school, and I'd get there early and sit on the floor underneath my locked and just read LotR a couple of paragraphs at a time, and even just reading the first line would make me really feel the wistfulness for this splendid past.
I guess if I had to pick a single thing, I'd go with "Moria", but the complement of these three moments feels much more right.
corvidology asked: Oldest fandom, newest fandom and how do you feel about shipping (fandom not tonnage)?
Oldest fandom: This one's easy! Lord of the Rings. I've been a fan of The Hobbit since I was... not sure, probably 9 or so? And a fan of LotR since I was 13, so at this point over three decades of being a fan of Middle-Earth. There were definitely things I liked earlier than that, even things I liked obsessively, but LotR was the first fandom I got a friend into so I'd have someone to talk with about it, and the first thing where I met strangers and bonded with them specifically because of our shared love of the books, and the first fandom I followed onto the internet. I've written about LotR as my formative fandom, my One True Canon, before, here, and it remains the perennial and most fundamental fandom of my heart. I'm pretty sure even the corrupting power of the One Ring couldn't change that fact at this point :)
Newest fandom:
It can be so hard to say where the line between "thing I like" is vs something that is truly a "fandom". Like, I've been watching Taskmaster a couple of hours a day, and talking about it with people, and I watched some vids, but I definitely don't feel like I'm in Taskmaster fandom. And I've been discussing Encanto meta for over a month, and the last fanwork I made (a couple of icons for Snowflake) was for Encanto, but I don't feel like I'm in Encanto fandom either.
I think maybe fandom, for me, explicitly means, "I'm going to go out and specifically look for people who are also fans of this thing, and I'm going to want to establish a lasting relationship with them -- not just a passing chat in comments, but actually friend them -- because they are a fan of this thing I'm also a fan of". By that rather more rigorous metric, I believe my newest fandom would have to be Terra Ignota. Which I've been a fan of since 2018, so it's really not that new, but there you go.
Thoughts on shipping:
Pro! In the sense that I don't understand people who make a big deal out of shipping certain things, or not shipping certain things, or whatever weird purity culture thing appears to have sprung up in fandom while I wasn't looking. In philosophical terms, I am very live-and-let-live, regardless of my personal feelings on a particular ship.
My formative fandom days, when it comes to shipping, were Harry Potter fandom, where you could find a ship for anything, and I read a fair bit of pretty dark stuff just out of curiosity, and there didn't seem to be any moral value attached to it back then. The next big thing for me was ASOIAF fandom, where my experience of it was interesting in a couple of different ways, viz a viz shipping, because I strongly disliked two of the most popular ships in the fandom space I was in at the time (Sansa/Sandor and Rhaegar/Lyanna -- I just want and checked the art-comm tags to make sure I wasn't imagining this, and the SanSan tag had 111 uses to Jaime/Brienne's 35, while Rhaegar/Lyanna was pretty much tied with J/B (I'm using J/B as the benchmark because it is currently the most popular ASOIAF ship on AO3). So, yeah, two ships I personally did not like were quite popular in the community where I was spending the bulk of my fannish time, and also, as a mod, I needed to interact with those fanworks in at least a limited way (fanworks earned points that the most assessed based on length/complexity, were entered into contests, etc.) -- and most importantly, I was constantly interacting with the fans of those ships, since we were a small, close-knit comm. All this was an excellent way to internalize the point that I did not need to personally enjoy a ship to be able to appreciate the artistic value of something, and I definitely did not need to share shipping preferences with fellow fans in order to love spending time with them and appreciate their insights. And I did come to appreciate certain characters and ships more after exposure to fanworks and meta (Jaime/Brienne was actually one of them, as was Robb/Theon), even if SanSan and Rhaegar/Lyanna were not among them.
I guess the other thing about shipping, in a general sense, is that it's a fun part of fandom for me, but definitely not necessary to my fannish enjoyment of something. I've seen these deeply polarized views on anon comms -- apparently genuinely held? -- where some people are only interested in gen and feel left out by fandom's focus on shipping, and for other people, if there's no shipping happening in a fic then the fic has no point, and they are looking to get into a fandom only if it has a particular shippy dynamic, and I find the latter view baffling and the former view sad. There are fandoms I love where I'm pretty much not interested in shipping -- LotR and Babylon 5 are two big examples, where even the canonical ships leave me cold. There are fandoms where I'll almost exclusively read shippy fic, but those tend to be fandoms that I'm only narrowly/shallowly invested in, like the MCU -- I get plenty of gen content in canon, it's essentially piped into my eyeballs every couple of months; if I go looking for more in fandom, it's generally something very specific that canon isn't giving me. But in most of my serious emotional investmend fandoms (which tend to be most of them), I'm interested in the full range of content along the gen-to-shippy continuum.
Oh, and ship wars! I don't understand ship wars, like, at all. I've never been tempted to join one side or the other, even when I was in fandom with ongoing ones, like Harry/Hermione vs Ron/Hermione -- I liked Ron/Hermione, and Harry/Ron, and OT3, and I had friends from, I think, all of the camps, and really I was fine with all of it, except for the Ron bashing that tended to be an unfortunate side effect of a lot of the Harmony fics and meta (since Ron was by far my favorite character of the three of them).
OK, so this was some fairly generic rambling about shipping as a fannish concept. When it comes to personal shipping preferences, I've noticed that I tend to be a multi-shipper where my ships of interest unfold around a central character who is my One True Character in the fandom (OTCs are much more common for me than genuine OTPs). One good example of this (for the four of you who know the canon, anyway) is Morrolan e'Drien in the Dragaera books; I do have an OTP-level ship involving him (Vlad/Morrolan), but I also have serveral other ships I'm intrigued by (Morrolan/Tazendra, Morrolan/Zerika and associated OT3, and am very open to other possibilities -- almost all of them, actually, with just a couple of exceptions). Similarly, in the MCU I tend to mostly read Tony/Steve, but less because I'm a Tony/Steve OTP-er and more because that's the bulk of Tony-centric fic; I do like Tony/Steve a lot, but I also enjoy Tony/Bruce, Tony/Peter Parker, the occasional Tony/Loki, and would cheerfully try most Tony combinations, probably. And in something like Firefly, I am very fond of the canonical Zoe/Wash ship, but when it comes to anything beyond that, it's basically Jayne/anyone-except River -- right after I watched Firefly, I went on a Jayne/Mal binge, but I also really enjoy Jayne/Kaylee, and the idea of Jayne/Zoe (post-movie), and have had fun with Jayne/Simon fics (they're not my two favorite characters for nothing).
I have just a couple of ships where I do ship JUST the OTP together and am not really interested in seeing those characters with other people in a shippy sense. One is Sam Vimes/Sybil Ramkin, but to be perfectly honest, I'm actually not all the interested in reading non-gen fic about Sam/Sybil either -- the canonical level of shippiness is all I really want for this canon. The other is Aral/Cordelia, which is an interesting one, because spoilers for the Vorkosigan Saga! we do get a canonical expansion to the relationship, and I didn't hate that or anything -- I liked Jole just fine in GJatRQ -- but I am just completely uninterested in it from either direction, even though Aral and Cordelia are both characters I love very much, certainly enough to spawn off interest in other relationships in my usual way of doing shipping. But they are just so perfect for each other, that relationship just... clicks into place, and I feel no need to explore anything beyond that. (I do enjoy the occasional look at Aral/Ges, but I enjoy that in a darkfic more than shippy fic way, and the thing that makes it palatable is knowing that Aral gets a happy ending with the OTP. I would definitely not enjoy Aral/Ges in an AU where Aral/Cordelia was not at least something I could imagine it leading up to.)
(More questions are welcome, fannish or RL!)
Anyway, I'm proceeding watching in a very strange order, as having completed series 6 and 5, I've receded further into the past with:
Series 4 - spoilers!
I guess this was another nice mix of competitors, as I liked all of them, and felt like most of them brought something different to the mix, so it never got same-y.
I came into the show with Joe as my favorite, having watched some clips where he was particularly memorable -- the beautiful cake destruction (which he turned into a fireworks display) and the painting-while-smiling one (where eveyone had to paint, but Joe also had to smile). Joe continued to hit the sweet spot for me of being funny during his tasks, and being funny in the studio (I think he had the most moments where he was intentionally funny (to me) in talking back to Greg or responding to something done by another contestant, just, like, on-the-spot funny), and also a generally clever/competent approach to a wide variety of tasks -- it didn't always work out, but it was usually fun to watch. I also just liked his ridiculous coat, and his drawl, and his kissing the portrait running gag.
My other favorite was probably Hugh, in an underdog sort of way -- I thought that Greg was extra-mean to him, and judging him down on any subjective tasks. I mean, like, it's all good fun, but it made me want to root for Hugh. Especially when I was genuinely impressed by his lateral thinking in many of the tasks, like being the only one to go for a non-diaphragm-related noise in the "make the longest noise" live task, cutting through the bunting to make the hopping easier, and even some of the tasks where Greg ruled that it was a disallowed strategy (like shaking things out of the sleeping bag). I was also damn impressed he was able to do the thing with the pummel horse at any age, let alone in his 50s, or stuff like lifting Alex during their dance. Like, Hugh is probably the least funny person I've seen on this show so far, but there's something to the deadpan, taciturn way he goes about the absurd tasks, with the occasional odd smile as he says stuff like, "I'm going to need lots of knives" that I find perversely kind of charming. And I really enjoyed the way he and Mel worked together in the team tasks (more on that in a little bit) -- they seemed to have an actual lovely dynamic, maybe thanks to being people who had known each other at university.
Mel herself was just adorable -- she seemed to appreciate every task that was thrown at her, and just be bubbly about everything, and it was very cute. The camel through the gap thing was brilliant, of course, and I found I usually enjoyed all her takes on a challenge, whether they were successful (throwing the mannekin into a moving car, making the pommel horse disappear), or not so much (the exotic sandwich). Also, her being most proud of her show guinea pigs, and getting all excited about playing dress-up with raw wool -- adorable! Therefore, I appreciated both the positivity compilation and the solo tasks designed to test it; man, that positivity stretched far!
Noel Fielding was actually the only person whose name I recognized going into the show, but still on a very surface level -- I've never watched his comedy or anything, I just know the name and had seen pictures of him because qwentoozla is a fan. (Actually, it appears I probably did see his voice work in Disenchantment, but had no idea it was him. So, comes out to the same thing, really.) He was less funny to me than Joe (intentionally) or Mel (mostly just on account of being adorably excited about tasks), but I enjoyed looking at his outfits (as Greg said during the camouflage task, everything in the caravan does look like something Noel would wear XD) and pretty grey eyes and, like, general languor. That said, his take on the "exotic sandwich" was definitely one of the highlights of this series.
The person I haven't talked about yet is Lolly, and I don't know that I have anything in particular to say about her. She was also very cute when things went her way, and generally charming throughout
The team tasks were the particular standouts in this series for me. In the flour task, I had the same idea Joe ended up implementing, i.e. flour "snowballs", which worked really well and which Greg called brilliant. I wasn't sure if clumped flour would be counted as "loose" -- at some point it's, you know, dough and not flour -- but since that was apparently OK, hey. (I also had the same idea as he (and Noel) in the egg-to-cup task (bread mitt), even assuming the 1 min penalty -- it's only one thing, and it's definitely the securest/fastest -- which was interesting, as it was the first time that the same idea occurred to me as to one of the contestants. Maybe it's just that I'm osmosing the spirit of the show as time goes on XD). But the standout task for me was the team task where each member of the team had a different task -- the way Mel and Hugh worked seamless together, and he even helped out with the cling-wrapping, while "the kids" were completely at odds and getting in each other's way the entire time. I think that sequence of Lolly and Joe lugging the table back and forth and actively destroying each other's progress was the thing I laughed hardest at in the show to date. (I think this failure gets me more than any other disastrous result because it is so PREVENTABLE XD)
*
So, last post, I invited friends new and old to ask me a question or several to get to know me. Here's the part of the answers I'm comfortable posting unlocked (with the locked ones to come in a little while):
seal_girl asked:
What rubbish superpower would you have?
So I actually googled "crappy superpower" to see what my options were, which led me to this list. I was reading through it and increasingly coming to the conclusion that it wasn't going to be useful, when I got to "Supernatural Fruit Empowerment". Sounds like what it actually means is that you get a power-up from magical fruit. But the way I read it intially was that you have the power to animate fruit, and I was like, you know what, that gives me an idea!
Because actually, when the rodents were younger, L declared that my superpower was making things sound like they were alive and cute. This was after I decided that a particularly stubborn tapioca pearl in my boba drink had distinguished itself with enough tenacity that it deserved a name (we called him Bob), but she was also drawing on an example from a breakfast in Portugal when I picked up a mini Danish with raisins from the breakfast bar, turned it so that the raisins looked like eyes in a slightly alien face, and said I was going to call it Smiley. Smiley went to Prague with us, wrapped in a napkin in my pocket, because I couldn't bear to just throw him in the trash. At one point I even dared L to give me anything she wanted and I would anthropomorfise it on demand; she picked up a slice of salami, which I immediately named Sally.
Anyway, so, clearly, if I were to have an ACTUAL rubbish superpower, it would be the ability to bring food to life. And not in a helpful way; these things would be autonomous critters with about the mental capacity of a bug or a hamster, I bet, and they would just skitter around uselessly, and I'd end up feeling responsible for them. Total rubbish!
What's your favourite part of the LotR? The bit you would open the book just to reread because you wanted to?
There were three that immediately jumped to mind, though I'm not sure I could rationally pick a favorite, either between them or overall:
1) The part where the Fellowship is trying to make their way through Caradhras and get caught up in the snow, because it's such a great Fellowship moment: Boromir and Aragorn making a path for the Hobbits through the snow and carrying them (Boromir is my favorite character, and I think Caradhras was probably the part where that became the case), Legolas running lightly over the snow while making a joke (which I assume all the members of the Fellowship who can't as easily manage the same feat -- but especially Gimli -- do not at all appreciate), Gimli extremely dubious about being there in the first place, Gandalf being his cranky self when people want him to just magic away their problems, the Hobbits bearing up under the extreme conditions as best they can but without complaint. It's a passage really rich with character and ensemble dynamics, and I've always loved it. And rereading it knowing that they will make it OK through this hardship but that this will force them to turn towards Moria, and everything that happens there, gives this scene even more power. I think this was the part of the book I was most eager to get to when I was reading LotR to L (my daughter), and I have a very clear memory of reading it to her for the very first time (from the Russian edition I have, which was my first exposure to the book as well), and since then this passage has picked up even more significance for me.
2) The scene in front of the Gates of Moria -- the Watcher in the Water, which so neatly foreshadows the creepiness within, losing Bill the Pony(especially since I now know he made it through safely), the description of the Gates and the inscription on them, and all the history it implies -- one of the reasons I have the Gates of Moria as my most often used LotR icon is that they capture a lot of what I love about this setting very succinctly: the grandeur of bygone days that you can still wonder at, the glimpse of the individual in the vast history ("I, Narvi, made them. Celebrimbor of Hollin drew these signs"), the changes with the passage of time (the contrast between the present attitude between the Elves and Dwarves and what is impied by the inscription) -- and of course the "speak friend and enter" riddle, which I love so much, because Gandalf can't figure it out for so long (and snaps at Pippin while he's at it), and then justifies himself for being slow -- so relatable! Actually all of Moria is my favorite part of LotR, so maybe I should've just picked that, but it's a pretty big chunk, and if going for something more manageable, the scene by the gates works pretty well for me. It's got the grandeur of Moria, and the danger, and the characters being both great and vulnerable, which is everything I love about the larger section.
3)
Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?
It's just such a beautiful, haunting moment, and I find it immediately transporting. When I was in high school, which was the peak of my Tolkien One True Canon-ness, I used to keep a copy of The Two Towers in my locker, which was on the third (top) floor, in the most remote/deserted part of the school, and I'd get there early and sit on the floor underneath my locked and just read LotR a couple of paragraphs at a time, and even just reading the first line would make me really feel the wistfulness for this splendid past.
I guess if I had to pick a single thing, I'd go with "Moria", but the complement of these three moments feels much more right.
corvidology asked: Oldest fandom, newest fandom and how do you feel about shipping (fandom not tonnage)?
Oldest fandom: This one's easy! Lord of the Rings. I've been a fan of The Hobbit since I was... not sure, probably 9 or so? And a fan of LotR since I was 13, so at this point over three decades of being a fan of Middle-Earth. There were definitely things I liked earlier than that, even things I liked obsessively, but LotR was the first fandom I got a friend into so I'd have someone to talk with about it, and the first thing where I met strangers and bonded with them specifically because of our shared love of the books, and the first fandom I followed onto the internet. I've written about LotR as my formative fandom, my One True Canon, before, here, and it remains the perennial and most fundamental fandom of my heart. I'm pretty sure even the corrupting power of the One Ring couldn't change that fact at this point :)
Newest fandom:
It can be so hard to say where the line between "thing I like" is vs something that is truly a "fandom". Like, I've been watching Taskmaster a couple of hours a day, and talking about it with people, and I watched some vids, but I definitely don't feel like I'm in Taskmaster fandom. And I've been discussing Encanto meta for over a month, and the last fanwork I made (a couple of icons for Snowflake) was for Encanto, but I don't feel like I'm in Encanto fandom either.
I think maybe fandom, for me, explicitly means, "I'm going to go out and specifically look for people who are also fans of this thing, and I'm going to want to establish a lasting relationship with them -- not just a passing chat in comments, but actually friend them -- because they are a fan of this thing I'm also a fan of". By that rather more rigorous metric, I believe my newest fandom would have to be Terra Ignota. Which I've been a fan of since 2018, so it's really not that new, but there you go.
Thoughts on shipping:
Pro! In the sense that I don't understand people who make a big deal out of shipping certain things, or not shipping certain things, or whatever weird purity culture thing appears to have sprung up in fandom while I wasn't looking. In philosophical terms, I am very live-and-let-live, regardless of my personal feelings on a particular ship.
My formative fandom days, when it comes to shipping, were Harry Potter fandom, where you could find a ship for anything, and I read a fair bit of pretty dark stuff just out of curiosity, and there didn't seem to be any moral value attached to it back then. The next big thing for me was ASOIAF fandom, where my experience of it was interesting in a couple of different ways, viz a viz shipping, because I strongly disliked two of the most popular ships in the fandom space I was in at the time (Sansa/Sandor and Rhaegar/Lyanna -- I just want and checked the art-comm tags to make sure I wasn't imagining this, and the SanSan tag had 111 uses to Jaime/Brienne's 35, while Rhaegar/Lyanna was pretty much tied with J/B (I'm using J/B as the benchmark because it is currently the most popular ASOIAF ship on AO3). So, yeah, two ships I personally did not like were quite popular in the community where I was spending the bulk of my fannish time, and also, as a mod, I needed to interact with those fanworks in at least a limited way (fanworks earned points that the most assessed based on length/complexity, were entered into contests, etc.) -- and most importantly, I was constantly interacting with the fans of those ships, since we were a small, close-knit comm. All this was an excellent way to internalize the point that I did not need to personally enjoy a ship to be able to appreciate the artistic value of something, and I definitely did not need to share shipping preferences with fellow fans in order to love spending time with them and appreciate their insights. And I did come to appreciate certain characters and ships more after exposure to fanworks and meta (Jaime/Brienne was actually one of them, as was Robb/Theon), even if SanSan and Rhaegar/Lyanna were not among them.
I guess the other thing about shipping, in a general sense, is that it's a fun part of fandom for me, but definitely not necessary to my fannish enjoyment of something. I've seen these deeply polarized views on anon comms -- apparently genuinely held? -- where some people are only interested in gen and feel left out by fandom's focus on shipping, and for other people, if there's no shipping happening in a fic then the fic has no point, and they are looking to get into a fandom only if it has a particular shippy dynamic, and I find the latter view baffling and the former view sad. There are fandoms I love where I'm pretty much not interested in shipping -- LotR and Babylon 5 are two big examples, where even the canonical ships leave me cold. There are fandoms where I'll almost exclusively read shippy fic, but those tend to be fandoms that I'm only narrowly/shallowly invested in, like the MCU -- I get plenty of gen content in canon, it's essentially piped into my eyeballs every couple of months; if I go looking for more in fandom, it's generally something very specific that canon isn't giving me. But in most of my serious emotional investmend fandoms (which tend to be most of them), I'm interested in the full range of content along the gen-to-shippy continuum.
Oh, and ship wars! I don't understand ship wars, like, at all. I've never been tempted to join one side or the other, even when I was in fandom with ongoing ones, like Harry/Hermione vs Ron/Hermione -- I liked Ron/Hermione, and Harry/Ron, and OT3, and I had friends from, I think, all of the camps, and really I was fine with all of it, except for the Ron bashing that tended to be an unfortunate side effect of a lot of the Harmony fics and meta (since Ron was by far my favorite character of the three of them).
OK, so this was some fairly generic rambling about shipping as a fannish concept. When it comes to personal shipping preferences, I've noticed that I tend to be a multi-shipper where my ships of interest unfold around a central character who is my One True Character in the fandom (OTCs are much more common for me than genuine OTPs). One good example of this (for the four of you who know the canon, anyway) is Morrolan e'Drien in the Dragaera books; I do have an OTP-level ship involving him (Vlad/Morrolan), but I also have serveral other ships I'm intrigued by (Morrolan/Tazendra, Morrolan/Zerika and associated OT3, and am very open to other possibilities -- almost all of them, actually, with just a couple of exceptions). Similarly, in the MCU I tend to mostly read Tony/Steve, but less because I'm a Tony/Steve OTP-er and more because that's the bulk of Tony-centric fic; I do like Tony/Steve a lot, but I also enjoy Tony/Bruce, Tony/Peter Parker, the occasional Tony/Loki, and would cheerfully try most Tony combinations, probably. And in something like Firefly, I am very fond of the canonical Zoe/Wash ship, but when it comes to anything beyond that, it's basically Jayne/anyone-except River -- right after I watched Firefly, I went on a Jayne/Mal binge, but I also really enjoy Jayne/Kaylee, and the idea of Jayne/Zoe (post-movie), and have had fun with Jayne/Simon fics (they're not my two favorite characters for nothing).
I have just a couple of ships where I do ship JUST the OTP together and am not really interested in seeing those characters with other people in a shippy sense. One is Sam Vimes/Sybil Ramkin, but to be perfectly honest, I'm actually not all the interested in reading non-gen fic about Sam/Sybil either -- the canonical level of shippiness is all I really want for this canon. The other is Aral/Cordelia, which is an interesting one, because spoilers for the Vorkosigan Saga! we do get a canonical expansion to the relationship, and I didn't hate that or anything -- I liked Jole just fine in GJatRQ -- but I am just completely uninterested in it from either direction, even though Aral and Cordelia are both characters I love very much, certainly enough to spawn off interest in other relationships in my usual way of doing shipping. But they are just so perfect for each other, that relationship just... clicks into place, and I feel no need to explore anything beyond that. (I do enjoy the occasional look at Aral/Ges, but I enjoy that in a darkfic more than shippy fic way, and the thing that makes it palatable is knowing that Aral gets a happy ending with the OTP. I would definitely not enjoy Aral/Ges in an AU where Aral/Cordelia was not at least something I could imagine it leading up to.)
(More questions are welcome, fannish or RL!)