This morning, I had to be here at 8 am to sign for a breakfast at a meeting I wasn't going to be attending. In the end, I did get a bagel for lunch and one for dinner, so I guess it worked out, but I'm tired. Cutting an hour off my sleep is never pleasant, and I can't go to bed early tonight as I have to bake mini cheesecakes for our office holiday potluck tomorrow.
My life is the hardest. Sigh.
The Flash: The Man in the Yellow Suit
SO MANY WEST-ALLEN FAMILY FEELS. CENTRAL CITY NEEDS THE FLASH BUT JOE WEST NEEDS BARRY ALLEN. I DRAW A MILLION SPARKLY HEARTS AROUND THEM. (Seriously, Jesse L. Martin is a gift and they better not kill him off! I am not even joking.) Also, Henry Allen telling Barry he needs to live his life, not just spend all his time trying to get justice/vengeance on the dude who killed his mother (the titular man in the yellow suit, for those of you joining our story in progress). BARRY HAS TWO DADS. I would have said three, including Wells, but who the hell knows what HE'S up to, and whether it's good or bad for Barry.
I feel like the reveal that he has the yellow suit, the tachyon thingy, the vibrato, some super-healing, and a FLASH RING doesn't bode well for him being a good guy, but there are so many possibilities in play, because why DIDN'T Reverse Flash kill Eddie? Is he him from the near (or far?) future? I don't know enough about Flash (or any of the various Reverse Flashes, Hunter Zolomon or other various time traveling DC villians) to make an educated guess, but I am enjoying some of the speculation I've seen about who is who and what-all is going on. (I don't actually believe Wells is Barry from the future because the Flash in that future headline is definitely our Barry, though I suppose that could change, too. The future is changeable, after all. Because I've seen theories that this is the darkest timeline - that originally, Barry became a hero without his mother being killed and his father being framed for it, and he's come back to try and fix it (i.e., Barry is the other speedster the night Nora Allen got killed, which I already thought was true anyway), and therefore Wells is future!Barry from that other timeline, and that's why he doesn't know some stuff about how it works out for Barry in this timeline. But time travel makes my head hurt, so really, anything could happen! He could have an evil hand! Wait, no. Wrong franchise.
Meanwhile, Firestorm! I did not know he could fly! Also, wow, was that Ollie's terrible flashback wig dyed dark? Other than the terrible hobo wig (maybe he's been hanging out at the dumpster with Bucky? I smell a crossover and it smells BAD), I thought the effects both on Firestorm and on the speedster fight were pretty excellent for television. I can't wait until SpyDaddy shows up to make things even weirder. (Oh, for a musical episode of this show!)
Of course, no effects can make up for not having feels, and this episode had a TON of FEELS. Sadly, Iris's Barry feels are purely platonic - AS THEY SHOULD BE FOR HER STEP-BROTHER - but I guess now the seed is planted yada yada. I mean, I thought Barry should have kept his mouth shut, but the way he told her how he felt put no burden on her, and while it made things at the end a little weird, he's not being a Nice Guy about it now, so I'm willing to roll with it. now if he could just tell her the OTHER secret, I'd be much happier about their relationship, however it plays out.
It's a tie for me for best new show this season, between this and Jane the Virgin, and I think I'm more emotionally attached to The Flash, though I think technically JtV is better written. Who'da thunk that about two shows on the CW back in September?
Last night, I also watched the Umbara/General Krell arc of Clone Wars.
As soon as Krell showed up, I was like, man, this guy is totally getting fragged, because 1. I have seen war movies/tv shows before, and 2. what an asshole. I did like seeing how it took Rex longer to get to that point than Fives, and how Hardcase just wanted to shoot stuff and get an adrenaline rush, and saving fellow soldiers from this butcher was lower down on his list, and how Dogma was not on board AT ALL until the very end (and even then it kinda broke him). This episode paid off a lot of character work they've done with clones like Rex and Cody and Fives, and it made me sad to think of what will happen to the clones in the future, where they'll get an order they should disobey but can't.
I do kind of wish Krell had just been an asshole who was racist against clones, instead of turning to the Dark Side and wanting to join Dooku, but I guess Jedi don't allow themselves to think in shades of gray (even though they certainly behave in very shady ways sometimes), so he had to go full-on dark. Especially since it is a kids show, I guess, though it does get pretty dark at times.
I'm not sure how much the show really intends it, but it is a pretty strong critique of how inflexible the Jedi currently are, and how that will contribute mightily to their downfall. I'm also having a lot of (unexpected) sympathy for Anakin, even as he continues to make questionable choices. I'm sure I'll be writing a lot of words about him as my viewing continues. The entire series is on Netflix, so if you can deal with the CGI animation, which I don't love but I've gotten used to, you don't mind knowing the end point (if not how exactly they got there), and you skip the Gungan heavy eps, it's pretty enjoyable. I'm now into season 4.
(I'm kind of amused that my random text post on tumblr about Darth Vader: Romantic Failboat generated like 200 notes. That's the second or third most notes anything I've posted on there has done - the most notes I've ever gotten is for the link to the New Yorker review of Jill Lepore's Wonder Woman bio, and the second most was for the screencap of Hawkgirl comforting Solomon Grundy from JL/JLU. I think before DV:RF rocketed up my personal charts, the next things were the scans of Aunt May meeting Captain America, and the one of Cap and Batman in the Batcave.)
Which leads very nicely into today's December talking meme post:
December 10:
![](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thady wanted me to talk about "your first fandom and did you have a fandom before you went online?"
My first online fandom was Homicide: Life on the Street, for which I joined alt.tv.homicide on Usenet in November 1997, and lurked until February 1998, after which I began posting there somewhat regularly (regularly enough to be voted the Sgt. Sally Rogers of ath at one point, for whatever that's worth). And then after Becoming Part 2 aired, I was like, well, Homicide has a newsgroup, so Buffy must, and then I became a regular poster on alt.tv.buffy-v-slayer (and later, alt.tv.angel) for a couple of years. I met a lot of people there I'm still friendly with today, and I have to say, starting on Usenet was really great for learning how to be a person on the internet etc.
I actually tried my hand at some Angel fanfic (that never got finished) before I fell into the X-Men movieverse fandom in July 2000, and began writing fic regularly. So those are my online fannish beginnings.
I never formally did any kind of fandom offline, but I did write some terrible fanfic over the years, though I didn't know that's what it was called, mostly for LotR and Star Wars. I was 7 when the original Star Wars movie came out, and I saw it four times that summer, which was a HUGE number of times for a 7-year-old, because it meant I had to convince my parents to go three times (the first time I saw it with family friends), but they enjoyed it enough and so did my siblings that they were okay with that.
And then I read the novelizations and I read those Han Solo prequel novels that eventually came out. And Splinter of the Mind's Eye (...which explains a lot, if you think about it *snerk*), and I remember very clearly speculating with my 5th grade friends what exactly Yoda meant when he said "There is another." Most of the boys thought he meant Han Solo, since he was so stoic and brave when he was being frozen, but not me. I knew it was Leia, because she'd heard Luke call for her while he was hanging off that exhaust pipe thingy, and I really, really wanted it to be her, because she is the BEST. I WILL FIGHT YOU IF YOU DON'T LIKE MY PERFECT SPACE PRINCESS. I used to have an icon of her. I should probably get a new one, if I'm going to be talking about it so much, though I admit, my "he said what about his sister?!" icon makes me laugh every time I use it.
So while I never participated in any kind of organized fandom in person at the time, I would say Star Wars, even more than LotR or Trixie Belden, which I was also big into as a pre-teen, was my first real experience with that surge of fannish LOVE and SQUEE. I have never read much in the way of fic (and I've read only a scant handful of the novels), but I still feel that surge of emotion when I hear the music, and watching Clone Wars now and seeing the teaser trailer for the next movie has brought it back.
I hope that answers the question...
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