Nostalgia and the opposite of same

[selenak]

You know, sometimes I wonder whether the worst thing that can happen to a morally ambiguous character is to be adopted by much of fandom as a woobie. Sure, it means there's a lot of fanfic and meta out there, but the whitewashing out of everything that made the character ambiguos to begin with is beyond belief, not to mention that it more often than not comes with a healthy dose of bashing other (in two third of all cases female) characters. I was recently reminded of this again when reading this excellent Lily defense post. (If you thought Voldemort was the Big Bad of Harry Potter fandom, you thought wrongly. Clearly, it's Lily Potter, née Evans, who managed this in her very few limited flashback appearances by virtue of having said no to the woobie.) While we're talking Harry Potter, I also stumbled across this this collection of links on how Remus Lupin is really a pedophile, cannibal and rapist. (In other quarters of fandom, Remus is actually a woobie himself, but in competition with Snape, he apparantly loses in woobiedom. I mean, I'd have thought that of all the Marauders, Remus would be the one not being blamed For Being Mean To Snape, but nooo...)

Meanwhile,
crossoverman reminds us it's been twenty years since Twin Peaks was first broadcast by a lovely celebration post. (My own commemoration post from a few years back when I had just finished rewatching via dvd is here.) Twin Peaks influenced so much tv afterwards, and while not an wildly active fandom, it still inspires fannish creativity, such as the excellent Yuletide fanfics, and vids, most recently Ordinary Girl, a beautiful and disturbing vid about Laura Palmer.