@brendaonao3 / brendaonao3.tumblr.com
In which Jake makes another bet with Mav and Rooster, and gets in way over his head - and also gets the happiness he never thought he deserved.
Thank you Paddington!! ❤️❤️❤️❤️
Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
popular culture used to be very much about eroticism. rockstars used to be on stage in sequins and thongs and thigh high boots playing guitars like they were masturbating. girls used to wear velvet mini dresses and no bras and red-brick-brown lipstick and mascara on their bottom lashes. people used to have body hair on television and in the movies. people used to be sweaty. people used to touch each other over denim and under cotton. foreplay used to be staring at someone over the rim of a glass across a bar across a park across a dinner table. people used to want. i think we’ve lost something
Not to be rude but you think our current pop culture ISNT sexualized enough? All we have is sexual content and it’s not even quality. Just because it’s not the exact aesthetic of eroticism that you prefer doesn’t mean that something is “lost”, it’s just done differently
there’s a difference between eroticism and sexualization ☝️🤓 we have too much sexualization and not enough eroticism. eroticism is suggestive, not overtly sexual. i know you don’t realize this but you’re actually kind of agreeing with me. we have too much low quality over sexualized content with no meat or context or purpose. everybody needs to put their clothes back on and start staring at each other from across crowded rooms NOW! 🫵
I think one of the big strengths of fanfiction as a medium is that it can, on average, assume the reader has a way higher degree of familiarity with canon than like…canon can. If you’re in the Star Wars AO3 tag you probably like Star Wars enough to remember more things about it than the average Star Wars-enjoying-ten-year-old. Which makes it way easier for fanwriter a to get to the juicy stuff and really engage with the worldbuilding or minor characters without having to spell out like. Who Wedge Antilles is for everyone who forgot or never noticed him in the first place. You could write a book about Wedge in the old EU because EU readers could also be assumed to be serious fans, but you can’t make a new canon Disney+ show about him. Those cost money to make and are intended for a broader audience.
And all this means that like. A good fic writer can and often will surpass canon when it comes to like. Thematic resonance and stuff, because they can really dig into something. Star Trek 2009 gave Kirk a new, more generic tragic backstory because it couldn’t expect the average moviegoer to be familiar with Kirk’s old, way more interesting tragic backstory. (Frankly, I’m not sure jj abrams knew about TOS Kirk’s backstory) whereas I have read a LOT of well-written, interesting, deeply resonant fanfic examinations of Tarsus IV, and what it means for Kirk’s character that he’s a genocide survivor. Star Trek 2009 answers the question “why did Kirk cheat on the kobayashi maru?” With “‘cause his dad crashed a spaceship when he was a baby.” A close examination of TOS canon implies the answer is “because he lived through a real-life Kobayashi that did have a win option, but which wasn’t taken.” BUT—and this is significant—even the TOS canon movies can’t really assume knowledge of the full TOS tv show, so that implication is never examined or made explicit. Instead it’s fanfic (and maybe spin off novels? Idk I’ve only read 2 trek books, if there’s one out there that covers this that would be really cool) where we get dives into that thread, where Kirk gets a commendation for original thinking because he can look a testing board in the eye and say “I’ve seen what happens when someone is entrenched in this kind of thinking, and I cannot let it happen to me. I understand the lesson, but it’s not hypothetical anymore and it never will be. I did what I had to do.” And that’s interesting! That’s meaningful! That can’t happen in a summer blockbuster. But it can happen in fic, easily, and that’s a strength of fic, I think.
I hope you don't mind me adding to this very good post, but in general i think the financial supremecy of movies and (more recently) tv has lead a lot of people to assume that the best stories can be interchanged between mediums. That every book can be adapted into a movie, every light novel into an anime, every movie into a video game etc etc
and that's the same attitude that underlies all the 'the goal of fanfic is to file of the serial numbers and publish it' or 'fanfic isn't real writing because real writing is novels and fanfic is usually structurally so different from a novel' type of takes come from.
this assumption that the medium is largely coincidental to the story being told
when that's just not true.
the very best adaptations always change things, because mediums are not interchangeable, and they fundamentally shape the stories told in them.
there are things you can do in fanfic that are simply not possible in a traditional novel, because you're starting from that possition of love and knowledge, and because you aren't bound by the need to be canon compliant, so you can ask questions like 'if these characters met in other lives, under different circumstances, what would they be like? how different would they be? how much of what makes them them is tied to the circumstances they found themselves in?' or 'what was it like to not be the heroes, to not be actively involved in the cool exciting bits? what was it like to be a minor character, left behind to deal with the consequences' because your audience is already invested, they'll show up for questions like that in a way a movie or novel or tv audience wouldn't.
there are things you can do in a podcast or radio play that are not possible in visual mediums like film or tv, because you're relying on the audiences imagination. there's a reason the best radio comedy tends to be surreal, and the best podcasts tend to be horror, those are both genres that thrive when the audience's imagination is allowed to fill in blanks.
there are things you can do on TV that are not possible in a novel or a movie. the way WandaVision completely changed its visual style with each episode is something that would not work in any other genre, but it's essential to the story. TV usually exists in very defined seasons, but cannot traditionally be consumed all in one go, which is not true of almost any other medium, and that dictates a specific type of pacing. combine that with the fact that it's a visual medium, and you get something like the overarching stories of the 9th Doctor's season of Doctor Who. No other medium could have delivered the resolution to that storyline as effectively.
Video games can force the audience to consider their own part in events. No movie could do what Spec Ops did, when it gives you a button prompt to commit a war crime, and then turns around and asks you why? why did you do that? was it too easy? do you think it felt like this when the US government committed the exact same war crime within living memory? Was it easy then too? A novel or a movie could show you walker doing this terrible thing, but it could never convey the point with the same effective simplicity, and it could never make you the audience feel culpable. only the author is responsible for the actions of the characters in a novel, but in a game, it's the audience who bears that responsibility, and that allows for moral questions other mediums struggle to effectively convey.
Comics can tell stories that take three decades and ten different writers to tell. Movies can use silence more effectively than any other medium because cinemas give you a captive audience and close-ups means you can reliably assume they can see everything that's happening (unlike theatre, which can use silence, but can't assume everyone has a good view). Theatre provides real time audience interactivity and a very special and unique kind of suspension of disbelief. Professional wrestling can tell ongoing stories in real time over years or decades, and walk the line between fiction and reality. Novels can immerse you more fully in one person's view of the world than any other medium (which also allows for information to be hidden from the reader without it feeling cheap the way it can when a movie does the same thing). Live oral storytelling allows the story to be adapted on the fly to fit audience reactions, allows for infinite variations of the same story, because no two tellings will ever be identical.
Fanfic isn't a genre, not really. Fanfic has genres, but it isn't a genre in and of itself. Fanfic is a medium, and like all mediums, it offers storytelling tools that are unique to it, that it does better than any other medium. and as OP pointed out, one of the big ones is that it can assume both familiarity and love from the audience to the characters depicted. We can stray far further afield from where we started in fanfic than the original creator ever could, because our anchors are not the narrative, but the characters.
#the lack of financial considerations and having to pander to studio restrictions is also a HUGE factor #the fact is that good writers have to write badly all the time #for TV and movies and comics and anything else that has to succeed commercially #or even be authorized for airing in some cases #fanfic writers can literally just write what makes sense #doesn't always mean they WILL lol #but at its best fanfiction is free expression in a way no commercialized medium can be #and that frees them to write characters with more depth and consistency than they'll ever get in canon
I’m just imagining telepaths trying to read any of the Bats’ minds and being like, AHA, we’ll go for Nightwing, he seems like the nice one, this’ll be easy, a total cakewalk–oh, fuck, WHO TURNED OUT THE LIGHTS IN THIS DUDE’S MIND, WHY ARE THERE BATS SCREECHING IN THE BACKGROUND, WHY DO I FEEL LIKE A SUPERSPY IS ABOUT TO STAB ME IN THE NECK WITH A PARING KNIFE!? All while Dick Grayson is just like :D :D :D right at your face and you legitimately can’t tell if he’s not even trying to be dangerous, he’s just Like That, or if he’s actively deceiving you and YOU DON’T KNOW WHICH WOULD BE WORSE. Never forget Dick Grayson is a Bat, no matter how nice he is, THAT MAN IS A BAT AND HE WILL STAB YOU IN THE KIDNEY IF HE THINKS HE NEEDS TO.
Tags via @cephalog0d absolutely sent me:
I'm only saying this for your sake, but objectively, it's not a smart idea to bring politics into normal hobbies. You might lose supporters of your blog just because of your political stance, and that would be terrible since you're so amazing!! It's only a suggestion, but I really reccomend not bringing politics into anything.
Till tender is far too fierce for us, winter is almost here for us.
Or: two boys from Brooklyn and how they gave up their personhood. But before they were tools belonging to sprawling superpowers, they belonged to eachother.
Happy 10 years to CA:TWS
Oh my god!! A new fabulous Stucky vid in the year of our lord 2024!!!!
Falling asleep above the covers
if you're gonna get into star trek you gotta understand that YES when it works it's some of the best anything ever put to television. but you gotta understand. it absolutely does not always work. you cannot truly love star trek unless you accept the fact that while more than half of the episodes are good, a not-insignificant portion of trek episodes -- especially from the most widely-beloved classic series -- are actually dogshit and terrible. and I would recommend that you love those episodes too
The one regret I have about all the movies that I’ve directed is the amount of time it’s taken me away from my kids. I love making art. I loved making The Town. But I was away from my kids for long periods of time. There’s little chunks that I missed, and that doesn’t feel good. And I think part of what’s great about this Artists Equity job, part of why I love it, is because I’m in LA. When we’re done at 2:30, I’m going to go, and I’ll be home at 3:45 when my kids get off the bus. And I’m able to construct a life that does that. And that means more to me than any of it. That makes me happier. ( Ben Affleck, 2025 )
NEW DARKSTAR MAV PIC... i feel like i just got on the head with a hammer
i’m going to hold your hands when i say this and i am only going to be kind about it once: ai does not belong in fandom spaces, ever. not in writing, not in art, not in video, not at all. it does not matter how bad you want to see your favourite characters kiss, or how much you need a bit of help finishing a chapter, or whatever.
make friends with artists. commission somebody. learn to draw yourself. ask for a beta read. try a writing partnership. fandom spaces are communities, so engage with them! it is about the journey and the fact that we all love something enough to create and build together about that thing.
spending 30 seconds to kill a tree and get an AI to push out some soulless empty piece of “content” is antithetical to the entire point of being engaged with fandom, and if you’ve taken to doing this you should really reconsider if you belong in these spaces with the rest of us.
"I'm Reese, Sergeant Techcom, DN38416...assigned to protect you." - Kyle Reese
