end of the year fannish meme
Your main fandom of the year?
Probably Person of Interest, though I'm still very multifannish (and also, see below for my reservations).
Your favorite film watched this year?
Pride, which is funny and powerful and heartwarming in a completely unsentimental way.
Your favorite book read this year?
Nonfiction: Adam Hochschild's To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1914, which is about the British anti-war movement during the First World War. Runner up is Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which I will confess I didn't finish and which I certainly didn't enjoy, but which is tremendously informative and important.
Fiction: This one's tougher, because often my main criterion for fiction is "are there queer men in it?" and this means I select and enjoy books based on factors other than, strictly speaking, quality of writing. I'll say Fairs's Point, the latest installment of Melissa Scott's Points series, which I just finished and am very enthusiastic about. It's a return to form after Point of Knives, which I didn't love, and in fact it feels like something of a breakthrough. Character development and relationship development didn't feel shortchanged in favor of plot in this one, a common flaw in Scott's earlier novels, but the plot was still engaging and the worldbuilding, Scott's great strength, was an intriguing as ever.
Your favorite album or song to listen to this year?
It's far from new, but I did a lot of re-listening to Thomas Dolby's The Golden Age of Wireless and grew obsessed with "Cloudburst At Shingle Street," to the point where I requested fic about it for Yuletide and got two great stories!
Your favorite TV show of the year?
I fell intensely in love with Person of Interest early this year and devoured the first two seasons, which I still think are brilliant. S3 started out weak but recovered a little before halfway through and finished very strongly. S4 . . . well, more on that in a bit.
POI still has to rank as my overall favorite, but I want to throw in a word for a show that, unlike POI, didn't eventually disappoint me: Grantchester, the BBC series about a Cambridgeshire vicar and amateur detective. The mystery plots are silly but the characterization and acting are great. And it has actual queer characters, including a regular.
Your best new fandom discovery of the year?
Besides POI and Grantchester, The Thrilling Adventure Hour, specifically "Captain Laserbeam" and "The Cross-Time Adventures of Colonel Tick-Tock." Silly fun, with what seems like a developing male/male romance for Captain Laserbeam, and the Colonel apparently having had sexytiems with various men across history.
Your biggest fandom disappointment of the year?
S4 of POI. The show lost the last of its good writers over the hiatus, and there've only been a couple of episodes I've liked at all so far. All the interesting new storytelling opportunities created by the end of S3 have been wasted, and the characters seem to have been replaced by robots who can reproduce a few of the originals' quirks but have no depth and no real feelings for each other.
Your fandom boyfriend of the year?
Despite everything, Harold Finch. I love a repressed, lonely, conscience-stricken genius.
Amusingly, the runner-up is also called Finch: Leonard Finch from Grantchester, who is gay and feminine and overintellectual and shy, but also kind and moral and occasionally very wise, and whom the show treats with great empathy and never mocks.
Your fandom girlfriend of the year?
Root and Shaw, who are each other's girlfriends and not mine (and canon needs to stop hinting and futzing around and make it textual, damn it). They're two deeply flawed people who, together, are starting to be redeemed, and I love that dynamic.
Your biggest squee moment of the year?
Either the "Harold turns up in Italy to find John" (and subsequent suit fittings and John being Harold's date to the museum bash) thing in S3 POI, or the unexpected appearance of two famous characters, who shall remain nameless, in Melissa Scott and Amy Griswold's Death at the Dionysus Club.
The most missed of your old fandoms?
Maybe due South? I don't miss the fandom itself so much, but I've been intermittently longing to rewatch the (Kowalski seasons of) the show.
The fandom you haven't tried yet, but want to?
I dunno. Rec me something?
One thing I am definitely planning to try is "Sparks Nevada: Marshall on Mars" from The Thrilling Adventure Hour. I'm approaching it with some doubts, because I'm not a particular fan of western tropes and apparently this serial is also much more het-dominated than the other TAH things I've liked, but people say it's good.
Crossposted at Dreamwidth (
comments); you can comment here or there.
Probably Person of Interest, though I'm still very multifannish (and also, see below for my reservations).
Your favorite film watched this year?
Pride, which is funny and powerful and heartwarming in a completely unsentimental way.
Your favorite book read this year?
Nonfiction: Adam Hochschild's To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1914, which is about the British anti-war movement during the First World War. Runner up is Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which I will confess I didn't finish and which I certainly didn't enjoy, but which is tremendously informative and important.
Fiction: This one's tougher, because often my main criterion for fiction is "are there queer men in it?" and this means I select and enjoy books based on factors other than, strictly speaking, quality of writing. I'll say Fairs's Point, the latest installment of Melissa Scott's Points series, which I just finished and am very enthusiastic about. It's a return to form after Point of Knives, which I didn't love, and in fact it feels like something of a breakthrough. Character development and relationship development didn't feel shortchanged in favor of plot in this one, a common flaw in Scott's earlier novels, but the plot was still engaging and the worldbuilding, Scott's great strength, was an intriguing as ever.
Your favorite album or song to listen to this year?
It's far from new, but I did a lot of re-listening to Thomas Dolby's The Golden Age of Wireless and grew obsessed with "Cloudburst At Shingle Street," to the point where I requested fic about it for Yuletide and got two great stories!
Your favorite TV show of the year?
I fell intensely in love with Person of Interest early this year and devoured the first two seasons, which I still think are brilliant. S3 started out weak but recovered a little before halfway through and finished very strongly. S4 . . . well, more on that in a bit.
POI still has to rank as my overall favorite, but I want to throw in a word for a show that, unlike POI, didn't eventually disappoint me: Grantchester, the BBC series about a Cambridgeshire vicar and amateur detective. The mystery plots are silly but the characterization and acting are great. And it has actual queer characters, including a regular.
Your best new fandom discovery of the year?
Besides POI and Grantchester, The Thrilling Adventure Hour, specifically "Captain Laserbeam" and "The Cross-Time Adventures of Colonel Tick-Tock." Silly fun, with what seems like a developing male/male romance for Captain Laserbeam, and the Colonel apparently having had sexytiems with various men across history.
Your biggest fandom disappointment of the year?
S4 of POI. The show lost the last of its good writers over the hiatus, and there've only been a couple of episodes I've liked at all so far. All the interesting new storytelling opportunities created by the end of S3 have been wasted, and the characters seem to have been replaced by robots who can reproduce a few of the originals' quirks but have no depth and no real feelings for each other.
Your fandom boyfriend of the year?
Despite everything, Harold Finch. I love a repressed, lonely, conscience-stricken genius.
Amusingly, the runner-up is also called Finch: Leonard Finch from Grantchester, who is gay and feminine and overintellectual and shy, but also kind and moral and occasionally very wise, and whom the show treats with great empathy and never mocks.
Your fandom girlfriend of the year?
Root and Shaw, who are each other's girlfriends and not mine (and canon needs to stop hinting and futzing around and make it textual, damn it). They're two deeply flawed people who, together, are starting to be redeemed, and I love that dynamic.
Your biggest squee moment of the year?
Either the "Harold turns up in Italy to find John" (and subsequent suit fittings and John being Harold's date to the museum bash) thing in S3 POI, or the unexpected appearance of two famous characters, who shall remain nameless, in Melissa Scott and Amy Griswold's Death at the Dionysus Club.
The most missed of your old fandoms?
Maybe due South? I don't miss the fandom itself so much, but I've been intermittently longing to rewatch the (Kowalski seasons of) the show.
The fandom you haven't tried yet, but want to?
I dunno. Rec me something?
One thing I am definitely planning to try is "Sparks Nevada: Marshall on Mars" from The Thrilling Adventure Hour. I'm approaching it with some doubts, because I'm not a particular fan of western tropes and apparently this serial is also much more het-dominated than the other TAH things I've liked, but people say it's good.
Crossposted at Dreamwidth (
comments); you can comment here or there.