entirely ruined her disposition with books

Since Tumblr seems to be on its way to a slow and agonizing death and I will miss it terribly, I am reminding myself that many a website has gone the way of the dodo and we're all still here, having fun and making art and friends and shitposts.

My own personal Lirazel's Rule of the Internet is: anything you want to last will surely disappear, and everything you most want to disappear will stay findable forever.

Anyway, tell me about a site that has disappeared that you think is a real loss to the either the internet at large or yourself in particular!

Obviously, Livejournal pre-Russian-overlords belongs on this list, as do specific LJ communities that we lost in various strikethroughs (I am ridiculous, so I most sorely feel the loss of the original fandom_wank).

Two sites that I personally don't feel the need to revisit but am sad are no longer out there are Checkmated (a Ron/Hermione archive where you had to apply to get your fic accepted and mine was and I was SO proud) and All About Spike (a Spike from BtVS archive). I know the fic from the latter has been saved on AO3, but it's sad to me that the site itself isn't there! You lose a lot when you can't see the original design/layout/etc.

Now, many sites are available through the Wayback Machine, which is absolutely wonderful, but many people don't know about that, there are broken links for various things, and I'm not convinced that the Internet Archive will be able to continue forever.

A non-exhaustive list of books that no one can seem to visually adapt correctly¹:

+ Dracula. A zillion different movies and TV shows and not ONE of them is a faithful adaption. I deserve Jonathan and his wife Mina and her girlfriend Lucy and Lucy's harem and their Dutch thesis advisor. I deserve paprika and Dracula crawling down the wall like a lizard and all of the nuns giving Jonathan good grades. It does not seem like it would be difficult to do this, and yet it has never once happened.

+ Any Anne book besides Anne of Green Gables. Literally what are the Sullivan sequels? It is so weird that the first sequel decided to adapt Windy Poplars (kind of--where is Little Elizabeth????), objectively one of the worst Anne books, and give her a random love interest. And then the second one just made up the story entirely! It has nothing to do with anything and Gilbert did not fight in WWI, his sons did!!!

And then Anne with an E just started making shit up, which is fine, except it's not what I wanted! Imagine that cast actually doing the canonical story!

The entire Maud Squad is sitting over here begging for a faithful Anne of the Island adaptation and it will never happen. At the very least, someone should give us a good adaptation of Rilla--you'd think that someone up in the Great White North would be interested in adapting the first (and for a long time only) book about the Canadian home front experience during WWI.

+ Mansfield Park. I just haven't ever seen one where I went, "Yes, this gets the book." (Which reminds me: I need to reread this one. It's been years and years.)

+ Wuthering Heights. I suspect this book is unadaptable², I really do. Frankly, I kind of wish people would stop trying to adapt it because I always end up more frustrated than anything.

+ Faulkner. Just...all of it. Stop trying to adapt Faulkner. It's impossible.

Feel free to add on!



¹ By this I mean that there have been at least two attempts to adapt it for either film or television.
² The framing story is so important, but it would be so hard to do it! This is one of those books where perspective is everything.

This post is inspired by a conversation I was having the other day on Mastodon about how I can't just accept soulmate AUs as a fun fantasy thing like, idk, time travel or amnesia fic or something simply because it just reads as too Calvinist to me. I am Team Free Will! I am horrified at the idea of choices being made for me by the universe or God or whatever! I will read a soulmate AU if it's written by a writer I already love, but I am never going to seek it out, and it's always going to be a bit ew to me.

And that is so specific to me! If you have zero Calvinist background--if, say, your background is East Asian and you associate soulmate AUs with, like, red string of fate stuff instead of people being predestined to burn in hell for all eternity--you are going to have a very different reaction to soulmate AUs!

So that got me thinking about other tropes or plotlines that I just can't approach like a normal person because of my own personal baggage.

And here's the ultimate one: what happens to Donna on Doctor Who.

Donna was one of my favorite eras of the show--I found her completely delightful. But I have never been able to rewatch her season or even reblog gifsets on Tumblr because of how upset I was that the Doctor ended up wiping her memories in order to save her life.

Why? Because at that time my grandmother was dying of Alzheimer's. The idea of wiping someone else's memories, particularly without their consent, even if it was for "their own good" was so horrifying to me that it ruined Donna's run.

I think objectively that was a gross plotline, but I don't think most other people had the intense emotional reaction to it that I did.

But I will never be okay with memory alteration treated as okay. I just won't.

So what's a trope or storyline that you bring baggage to that completely shapes how you see it?

(Obviously the answer is: every trope or storyline because we all bring baggage to everything, but I'm talking specifically about ones that make you a bit of an outlier and that are easy for you to see: "Oh, yeah, that's definitely why I don't [or maybe do?] vibe with that particular story.")

Inspired by me nominating Thelma Ritter for the women's round of Vintage Hotties poll spectacular over on Tumblr dot com (look, if Peter Falk can make it this far, there is no reason Ms. Ritter shouldn't too):

Tell me about an actor--tv, film, stage, whatever--from before, say, 1980 that you really love.

I have a zillion, but today I will focus on Ms. Ritter, Character Actress Extraordinaire.

She was a very small middle-aged lady with a thick Brooklyn accent and she's unforgettable onscreen. If you've ever seen her in anything, you will be absolutely thrilled to see her again. Her first few film roles were so small that they were uncredited--a customer in Miracle on 34th Street, a servant in A Letter to Three Wives--but she made such an impact that Joseph L. Mankiewicz called her up for All About Eve, which I believe was her first credited role...and which got her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. She later got 5 more nominations in that category, but she never won.

She played larger supporting roles in Rear Window and Pillow Talk and The Misfits and How the West Was Won (and nobody asked for my opinion about that movie but the cast is incredible, the score is even better, and it's 10000% Manifest Destiny propaganda. Now you know!). And she's just so good in everything! All the time! I love her!

Having compared her to Falk, it is now the great tragedy of my life that she didn't get to play a schlumpy detective on a beloved TV show for years. She would have knocked it out of the park.


Anyway, tell me about someone you're fond of (thisbluespirit I'm looking at you). You don't have to go into great detail, you can literally just be like, "I really like Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins" or something. I am just feeling the love for classic stars today!

Is there anything you want to finish before the end of the year? A show you want to watch the last episodes of, a book you want to read, a fannish project you want to complete?

I have a WIP I've been working on for months that would be a PERFECT fit for someone's Fandom Tree, and I really want to make myself finish it in time! The problem is that it keeps getting longer and longer and longer....

But I still plan on spending some time this weekend working on it! Fingers crossed!

I'm not talking about nuanced characters with gray morality this time (though I will certainly talk about those sometime!), I'm talking about straight-up villains! People (or other beings) you love to watch being evil!


Here are some that come immediately to mind for me:

+ The Fanged Four from the Buffyverse when they're all evil and before they become those nuanced characters with interesting arcs. I just love watching Spike & Dru in BtVS season 2 or the flashback scenes where they're running around causing havoc in historical locations. Would have watched a Fanged Four spinoff, but alas it never happened!

+ Mrs. Eleanor Iselin from The Manchurian Candidate. Angela Lansbury deserved every award for that role!!!

+ The Borg. Just collectively.

+ Victoria from the Man from UNCLE movie. This one is all style and no substance--we don't actually know her very well--but her style is so good that she deserves a place on the list.

+ Shawn from The Good Place. Maybe this is just because I love Marc Evan Jackson?


Tell me about some of your favorites!

Tell me about a narrative of any kind--TV, movie, book, podcast, whatever--that has a beginning that just grabbed you. Especially if, once you've experienced the whole thing, you appreciate the beginning even more!

Some that I think of:

+ Octavia Butler's Kindred. When I pick up a new book, I like to read the opening matter--dedications, any author's notes, epigraphs the first few lines--as soon as I get it, even if I'm not going to read the book right away. I tried to do that with this book and...it did not work. I read the opening paragraph and I could not stop. I stayed up all night reading that book and it was totally worth it. Epitome of in media res used well!

+ Till We Have Faces. “I am old now and have not much to fear from the anger of gods. I have no husband nor child, nor hardly a friend, through whom they can hurt me. My body, this lean carrion that still has to be washed and fed and have clothes hung about it daily with so many changes, they may kill as soon as they please. The succession is provided for.”

+ The Hour. Let's start the first scene of the first episode of this show with Ben Whishaw talking directly to the camera. I never had a chance.

+ It's a cliche for a reason: A Christmas Carol has such a good opening line! Well done, Dickens!

+ Up! The rest of this movie is, imo, just okay, but the opening scene is a montage that lasts several minutes and it leaves me a weeping mess every time. This is kind of a cheat--it's more short-form storytelling than it is an opening tbh.

+ The Prince of Egypt. 'Nuff said.


(Next week is going to be favorite endings, so be thinking about that!)

I need a little lightheartedness in my life right now, so here's a fun topic of discussion:

Tell me about a food you love that most other people find gross. Or that you know is objectively gross, but you love it anyway.

I'm not talking about the kinds of food that traditionally polarize people--cilantro or olives or brussel sprouts or pineapple on pizza or things like that. I'm talking about stuff that is truly niche.

Obviously, this is culturally dependent, so this criteria will work: even if something is widely eaten in another part of the world (like, idk, haggis), will 90%+ of the people in your cultural context say "EWWWW!" if you mention it to them?

For me: banana, peanut butter, and mayonnaise. This tradition on my mom's side of the family really grosses people out, but it's so good! Everyone's fine with the banana and peanut butter, but I am telling you: the mayo makes it. It adds a tangy zip that just elevates the experience!

In fact, this is one of the few ways I will eat bananas that aren't at the perfect stage of ripeness for me. And bananas so rarely are at that perfect stage of ripeness.



(By the way, there's this Instagram account called LandonTalks, and it's this very southern Mississippi guy talking about southern culture and language, and I love it because a) he is the perfect example of that specific kind of very sweet southern guy who everyone from outside the south assumes is gay but actually he isn't [he has a wife, though he could be bi! I do not assume that he's straight!], b) most of the things he says are very true, and c) it's not just white southern culture--most of way he says applies to black southern culture too. It's so hard to find anyone who likes to talk about southern culture in truly not-racist ways! Obviously he exaggerates a lot, but that's the southern way, so I'm not bothered.

ANYWAY! He actually made an entire post about eating leftover cornbread with milk or buttermilk and it delighted me to no end because my family has always done that but I don't know anyone else who does. My mama does it with regular milk, but my granddaddy always did it with buttermilk. Fill up a glass, crumble the leftover cornbread into smaller chunks, eat with spoon.)

This is probably going to be only relevant to those of us who tend to love genre fandoms of the speculative fiction or historical variety, but I want to talk about mundane AU fanfiction--where you take a historical, fantasy, or scifi fandom and plop the characters down in a contemporary setting. You know--the superheroes are now all working at a coffee shop or the royal court is now a high school, that kind of thing.

I am just curious about how people feel about them and what you feel their relationship to canon is.


When I first get into a fandom, I have ZERO interest in reading these kinds of stories. I am there for the fic that explores the world of the text--missing scenes, post-canon, fix-it fics, and especially canon divergence. I will pass mundane AUs by.

Once I've been in the fandom for a long time and read a lot of fic, I sometimes can enjoy mundane AUs. This happened to me with Infinite (where a mundane AU is literally anything where they're not idols) and with The Untamed fandoms. I read quite a bit of Untamed mundane AUs to this day.

And yet...I don't really feel like they're fanfic in the same way that more canon-observant fics are. There are some that do a marvelous job of adapting all the beats of canon--the character dynamics, the plot points--to a different setting. Those are rare and masterful, and I'm impressed by them. But the rest are just...the characters being written about have the character's faces and some of their personality traits, but that's about it.

Obviously, this is all a spectrum. But there are some that venture so far from canon that I feel like I'm reading an original work of fiction. And I can enjoy some of those, even love them, but I don't love them as fanfiction, I love them as original fiction.

It's interesting to think about how far it has to diverge from canon to not be fanfiction to me. I was reading a Wangxian fic this week that had the same kind of mundane AU plot I'd read before, but this one immediately went to the "this is not fanfiction" realm for me because Wei Wuxian was a lot older than Lan Wangji, and that changed the dynamic between them enough that I didn't even think they were the same characters anymore. I really liked the fic! It was well written and I liked the characters being written about. But I kept going, "This is not actually Wangxian fic."

So for me the spectrum goes:

canon-adherent (either a missing scene or pre- or post-canon fic)
|
|
| A
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pivot moment divergence (where just one or two things change, and we explore what repercussions that has)
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| B
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complete plot divergence (where we're still in the same world and operating by the rules of canon, but the plot is completely different than canon)
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| C
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setting tweaks (say, you add daemons or the characters are suddenly royalty or they have some kind of magical powers they don't have in canon, but it's still loosely recognizable as the same world
|
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| D
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setting-change AUs (where we're in a completely different setting but you're still trying to translate as much of canon as possible, trying to hit the same beats and get the characterization and relationships just right
|
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| E
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setting and plot change AUs (where the characters are clearly inspired by their canon personalities, but they're operating under such different conditions that the relationship is becoming tenuous
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| F
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this isn't even fanfic anymore (you've crossed a line--probably a subjective one--wherein the reader is like, "Okay, this essentially has nothing to do with canon other than me picturing the same faces and bodies" but it may be a good enough story to stand on its own)
|
|
| G

As a writer, I stay pretty firmly in the A and B areas about 90% of the time, though sometimes I will venture out into C and every once in a while I will do a full-on E re-write. But even when I completely change the setting, I never make them truly mundane where they're just normal people living contemporary lives; I write, like, a Star Trek AU or something dystopian/post-apocalyptic. I have zero desire to write about any character I love having a normal life if that's not the kind of fandom they originate in. I actually don't understand the appeal of E-G kinds of stories as a writer; I would just write original fic instead. But they are very popular so clearly other people feel differently.

As a reader, I stay with A-B and a little bit of C for most fandoms. It's only in fandoms where I've read a ton of fic that I'm willing to venture further out into the other letters.


What about y'all? What do you prefer to read or write? Or is my spectrum just completely wrong and not the way you think of fic at all?

It is still decidedly summer here, but I am dreaming of the day the heat breaks and fall finally arrives.

In honor of that, tell me about your favorite autumnal media! It doesn't have to be set in fall or explicitly talk about it--anything that gives you autumnal ~vibes~ will do.


For instance, both Pamela Dean's Tam Lin and Anne of the Island take place over the course of several years and so visit all the seasons, but I associate both of them strongly with autumn, perhaps because they're both school-focused. Anne of the Island is, imo, by far the most autumnal of the Anne books. The high school books in the Betsy-Tacy series cover each one academic year, but I also associate them with fall.

Same with my favorite Tana French novel, The Likeness. I think it's actually set during winter? But it feels autumnal to me, perhaps because of its academic associations. Same with Possession, which, when I think about it, has a lot of summer-set scenes, but I still think of it fallishly.

There is really nothing autumnal about Loreena McKennitt's The Book of Secrets, and yet I find myself wanting to listen to it during the fall. Maybe "The Highwayman" feels very fall-forward to me? I don't know!

It's really hard to think of movies that are strongly seasonal that aren't either winter (Little Women (1994), Shop Around the Corner, While You Were Sleeping, Fargo) or summer (Picnic at Hanging Rock, Almost Famous, To Kill a Mockingbird, A Room with a View). I can think of one spring-coded film (The Secret Garden) but I'm coming up short on others.



Anyway, I would love to hear about what media you revisit when the summer ends!