we're all stories in the end

My 2018 was a mixed bag. A significant improvement on the previous two years but that was an extremely low bar. I went to a christening/baby full moon party, a wedding, and a funeral. Things have been going pretty well at work, I started playing D&D and watched a mind-blowing amount of Critical Role. My health got worse, but led me to several diagnoses, which is a help so far. The horrendous political situations at home and abroad drove me to near-paralytic despair more than once, and I don't expect any relief on that front any time soon.

Things I enjoyed this year:

Live Shows
Lady Windermere's Fan
Dry Powder
Hamilton London
Bill Bailey
Taylor Swift
Translations
My Brother, My Brother and Me & The Adventure Zone in Atlanta
Measure for Measure
Critical Role @ MCM

Films
Black Panther
Ocean's 8
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

TV
Doctor Who
The Good Place
She-Ra and the Princesses of Power
Queer Eye
Star Trek: Discovery
Brooklyn Nine-Nine
Sense8 series finale
Star Trek: Voyager with purplefringe
Critical Role

Podcasts
The Good Place: The Podcast
McElroy shows: MBMBaM, TAZ, Wonderful, Sawbones, Til Death Do Us Blart, Positiviteeny

Games
Spider-Man (PS4 2018)
Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Horizon Zero Dawn

Music
Dessa - Chime
The Decemberists - I'll Be Your Girl
Kendrick Lamar et al - Black Panther: The Album
The Hamildrops

Things I Made This Year:

VID: Change of Time (Sarah Connor Chronicles)
VID: Shrimp (Black Panther)
VID: Learn to Let Go (Star Trek: Discovery)
Podfic: Exceeds Expectations (The Adventure Zone)

I'd like to post more and create more this year. I'd really like to be better at replying to comments! But I'm not holding my breath. Still here, still reading, just keeping on keeping on.

Happy new year. <3

There's been a lot of conversation over the past few days in various parts of fandom over this 16k meta (AO3 registered users only) by Franzeska. It's a long, racist piece of nonsense with the summary Bullying and the Co-opting of Social Justice Activism in Fandom: A discussion of bias in fannish meta, m/m vs. other pairings, shipping of POC, vidding characters of color, what it means to ship, and problems in Stormpilot fandom. I don't recommend reading it, but it has sparked some good conversations.

As an aside, reading through the comments on my phone proved to be hazardous as I landed on the kudos button by mistake, which has been quite embarrassing over the last two days. Totally an accident, I do not like that post and I would un-kudos it if I could. /o\

Actually Recommended Reading:
+ rukminipande has a storified series of tweets: Fans Of Colour Are Not To Blame For Fandom's Erasures: A response to That Meta.
+ This tumblr discussion topped and tailed by good commentary from snarlfurillo

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In better news, in spite of his Conservative opponent's bigoted and underhand smear campaign tactics, Sadiq Khan looks set to be London's next mayor. He's a human rights lawyer, the most prominent Muslim politician we've had in the UK to date, and the son of working class Pakistani immigrants. He's a social democrat with policies on affordable housing, air pollution and transport fare freezes. I am hopeful that he can do good things for my city.

+ If you've been meaning to leave trope fest prompts, now is the time! I'll put up a post with all the prompts in the morning and the fest will be open for fills. There are currently over 600 hundred prompts in well over 100 fandoms. \o/

Some other fun things happening at the moment:

+ kink_bingo is hosting a kinkmeme promptfest.

+ torachan is hosting the Transfic Mini fest.

+ companions is hosting a drabble tag for Doctor Who companions.

Via penknife, gateficawards are looking to get in touch with people who have been nominated who they haven't heard from yet. Full list here. People from my flist/rlist whose names I spotted include: ( cut for list )

A rec! Rise and Fall by pocketmouse (Doctor Who, Doctor/Rory, background OT3) is a lovely look at what might happen if the Doctor and Rory were forced to fend for themselves for a while without Amy. It's a fun riff on The Lodger that sees the Doctor being predictably terrible at pretending to be normal, and gives great Rory POV as he tries to make sense of his relationship with the Doctor when Amy's not there. Though, Amy being Amy, her presence is felt throughout the fic even though she has fewer scenes. And basically, if pocketmouse would like to keep writing OT3 fic for me to read forever, that would be fine. *g*

So I was chatting with a friend today about how one of the sad things about the overall lack of femslash in fandom is that you get less femslash with all the awesome fandom tropes that I enjoy - bodyswap, timeloops, third party realises they're made for each other and sneakily gets them together, so on and so forth.

Gee, says I, there should be a fest or something for that.

Then, says my friend, go make something.

So! Informal polling of the masses, some questions:

1. Would you be interested in such a thing? Should it be just femslash or also female friendships?

2. What format would you like? A community with prompt claiming, a post on my journal for comments with prompts and fanwork responses kink-meme style, something else? I am definitely thinking all fandoms, all kinds of fanworks, for maximum enjoyment. And, ngl, anything that is relatively low-maintenance for me, as I want this to exist but also am busy with other things I need to finish up.

3. And, most importantly, gimme your favourite fandom tropes! What would you like to see for Amy&River, Cara&Kahlan, Toph&Katara, Gwen&Morgana or whoever.

eta: oops, accidentally 3am, should probably go to bed. Carry on, will plan some more in the morning!

eta2: update here.

I made some tallies on the characters over at f_march_madness the other day, looking at the gender and race of the characters chosen to represent the 64 fandoms present in the original polls.

( this is how it broke down, and where it's at now )

+ Julie Bindel brings the transphobic fail once again. This link comes with a blood pressure warning, for it is full of offensive vitriol. Get off my team, Bindel, you make us look awful!

+ Via the New York Times, not all groups have felt the recession equally. It's US stats, but i suspect relevant across other countries too. In any case, illuminating and rather dismal.

+ Disability and Asexuality by kaz on FWD/Forward, a really great new-ish feminist disability blog. Highly recommended reading.

+ Also on FWD, avendya posts To Whom It May Concern.

+ ressie_noldo writes on the monstrous other; for the asian women blog carnival.

+ Lastly and unrelatedly, who_daily and torchwood_three are looking for new newsletter editors. I'm stepping down from my position as a back-up editor due to time constraints, but I do recommend it unreservedly to anyone who likes being part of the cogs and gears of fandom - things are quiet at the moment, too, so it's a good time to step in and get to grips with things.

I think we can sum up my state of mind over the last two days (namely feverish and furious refreshing of flist and Twitter) by saying that I just popped over to who_anon for kicks. Um. Anyway, they were talking about the companion in the latest episode, and blah blah blah -- my favourite was the cries of 'elitism!', what? -- but I got to wondering about the most popular one-off companions (for a generous value of companion that includes Elton and Sally), and companions generally. Thus: poll! I'd imagine we can assume spoilers for 'Planet of the Dead' in the comments.

( who's your favourite? )

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This post on Dreamwidth. Fyi: you can vote over there with OpenID if you so wish, and I'll be interested to see how the results turn out!

There are myths that get perpetrated by society at large, I think, about social justice and equality and who and what and how we're allowed to care. We should stand in our own corners and keep ourselves to ourselves and fight for our own causes alone, and ultimately, we're fighting for legal rights and legal protection and as long as that's been achieved then that's fine, we're done here. In this latest long, painful round of RaceFail, I've seen those sorts of ideas crop up an awful lot - ideas that the conversations at hand aren't important or aren't my problem.

Wait, what is RaceFail? I hear you cry. Because not everyone catches everything that happens on the internet, and fair enough. Quick recap time!

In terms of what actually happened to prompt this particular round of both conversations about race and also Epic Fail, I'd suggest reading some or all of the following: super short summary, longer summary, timeline of events, further reading, and a summary of summaries.

Things to bear in mind: this isn't grudgewank or an instance where there are 'good points on both sides' -- some people said some wrong-headed, ignorant and pain-inducing things and it's prompted a lot of response both from people calling them out on it and also discussions about race-related topics from cultural appropriation and problematic representations in sci-fi/fantasy to the silencing of non-white authors to safe spaces in fandom, online and off, and the frequent and horrible lack of them.

Also, my god, all of this has happened before and it will happen again! rydra_wong's linkspams are all tagged Great Cultural Appropriation Debate of Doom '09 because this is pretty much an annual ritual, and it's always unnecessarily painful and full of derailment, defensiveness and white privilege, because apparently this is the only way we can talk about this. Because this is what it takes for us white fans to listen, to allow our squee to be harshed, and because it is this level of fuckwittery that prompts non-white fans and their allies to decide that their urge to speak out and say things that really shouldn't have to be said in the first place is greater than their desire not to be flamed, not to be insulted and falsely accused of all manner of ills, not to have their offline identities outed -- that's not a trade-off anyone should have to make.

And it sucks. It sucks that I have gained an enormous amount of education from this, because I am benefiting from the pain of fellow fans, because it took something like this to prompt me to be more pro-active in my education, and that's a big failing and a big exercise of privilege on my own part.

That being said, an awful lot of good things have come out of this. There have been countless intelligent, moving, thought-provoking posts on all manner of topics from all manner of perspectives - endless, almost. Then there's projects like the Asian Women Blog Carnival I've linked to previously, verb_noire and The Remyth Project and 50books_poc and 12films_poc.

A smattering of posts I've personally come across and found particularly useful/helpful/interesting:

deepad : Reappropriating my man
thingswithwings on privilege and the burden of proof
eruthros on safe spaces
inalasahl on tone
hesychasm : brown person representin' with authoritah
coffeeandink : When I say that you have said or done something that was racist, I do NOT necessarily mean that...
stoneself on privilege
fox1013 on invisible pants
zvi_likes_tv on how not to post, and also links

And as for more general 'educating yourself' resources -- goodness knows this has made me realise I'm still more clueless in more areas than I'd like to be:

sparkymonster's delicious links for clueless white people
mystickeeper's Racism 101 Primer
racism_101 - new and in response to the current round of Racefail, it's designed as a space for well-meaning but clueless white people, and it's got a good amount of crossover with debunkingwhite where the conversation tends to be both more politically topical and more clued-in.

I think the reasons that we, as white fans, should be reading about this comes in two strands. One: well, this is about our fandom and our genres and the ways in which they're failing people in our community, and we should be so, so much better about not letting that happen. Two: there are a bunch of pretty self-interested reasons why making sure I'm educated in these issues will help me. If I act like a wilfully ignorant jerk I know I'll lose friends, and rightly so. If I refuse to engage in racial critiques of my shows because hey, I, in all my white liberal authority, didn't think that was racist, then that removes all of my right to talk about the problematic gender and sexuality issues in the same shows. If I write stories that thoughtlessly appropriate other histories or exoticise or Other or otherwise commit racefail, I will lose readers and my stories will be worse for it. Knowing more about more things is always a good, beneficial thing to do.

So, read a few links. Maybe not the ones I've picked, maybe things you've seen elsewhere or things you've had bookmarked from previous rounds or things you stumble upon in the coming weeks, but however you do it I think you'll find it engaging, illuminating and important.

One final link, because it hit me right in the guts. yuki_onna's captured something I've believed in very strongly for a long time and haven't had the words to express properly. Let Me Tell You A Story.

first thing!

torchwood_house is running a vid awards ceremony to coincide with the Oscars (it is called, of course, the Jacks), and you can go have a look at all vids that have been recced so far on the community and vote for your favourites in various categories. It's over here at twh_votes, and there are some very excellent works there. (Also a couple of mine, but this is not a 'go vote for me' post.)

Speaking of torchwood_house, I'll now be reccing there from time to time, which should be fun. I have started out my career with out_there's Underwear Not Required (Bra Optional), which is -- well, it's really awesome genderfuck porn, is what it is. I have a big list of fic and vids to get through, and shall work out some method of cross-pollination in due course.

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second thing!

rivrea and sundayave gave me five things they associate with me for me to talk about. ( rivrea asked - Sheffield, vidding, femslash, Doctor Who companions, Avendya )

( sundayave asked - the Marauders, Radiohead, presenting a radio show, travelling, writing )

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eta: third thing! The Torchwood Europop band I mentioned the other day now has a tour poster and album cover, because prettyquotable is wicked awesome. Hahaha, it is amazing.