wanderings

I'm doing a second half of March meme! It is begun! glitteryv prompted me with "Unexpected fandom or piece of media you hadn't expected to enjoy" for today.

...so this is the least joyful answer I could possibly give, but: Men's Hockey RPF. It is the answer that latched onto something in my brain and refused to let go.

I grew up with ambient hockey culture all around me and did not get into hockey until I was older. There were a couple things behind that: I didn't grow up in a house that watched or played hockey and Don Cherry was a feature of every televised hockey game available to me. (Don Cherry is an obnoxious pundit employed by the CBC. He does commentary between periods.) I didn't successfully watch men's hockey - outside of international competitions watched socially - until streaming games became a thing and muting and avoiding Don Cherry was an option, and even then, it was a struggle. Getting into men's hockey involved a lot of processing how toxic masculinity manifests in Canadian culture and the way in which NHL culture utterly fails to protect the health of its players.

I'd watched The Sheldon Kennedy Story before I ever saw an NHL game in full. When I tried to look that film up right now with "abused Canadian hockey player film" I found two other more recent films instead. The extent to which men's hockey culture has been and continues to be a cesspool of terrribleness almost defies description.

But I got into Men's Hockey RPF anyway! People were writing wonderful tropey fiction and it was a delight. Hearing rural Canadian accents on television giving meaningless robotic sound bites was charming. It was fun to watch a play-off game and hear my neighbours cheering for one side or another. It was neat to feel a part of the mainstream culture.

I got real good at compartmentalising for a while and I had a great time. And then sexual assault allegations against a star player surfaced and it got harder to ignore the toxicity, so I stopped reading fic about that team, and the reports kept coming and spread to other teams and I stopped reading fic about NHL hockey at all. I don't read fic about NHL hockey anymore. For a while I still had a few players that were my favourites, that I held some distant affection for, like an old friend that you don't talk to anymore and you know is going through some stuff, but who you hope pulls through okay.

No more. This has been a year for hockey in Canada. Some organisations have been called on their bullshit and desperately mobilized to avoid having to do shit about their problems. It has been high level, there have been funding withdrawals. (I fully expect nothing to come of this, because I think that everything that is wrong with men's hockey is so deeply embedded in the culture as to be almost impossible to get out. It is a thing that is happening now, though, and a good thing. Maybe the bar will get moved a bit.)

This past year in the lead up to the anniversary of the École Polytechnique massacre one of those players I was attached to posted their support of a gun lobby organisation that had recently used "Poly" as a promo code. The team's response was that the player didn't know about the massacre. The player did know and he apologised, and that's, you know, good, but I no longer give a shit about any of them. I can't. All of the positive feelings I've had about men's hockey and players have been burnt out of me by the unrelenting dumpster fire that is every competitive level of the sport in this country.

It's changed my relationship with RPF. There's always been compartmentalising and an awareness of the separations between people, their public personas, and fannish characterisation. Engaging with RPF has felt increasingly like playing some kind of racist rapist roulette, though. They're not tidy fandoms - the borders are nebulous, the canon never finishes, and narrative arcs are largely constructed in post. Finding meaning or satisfaction in RPF is challenging. The canon is real, and you have to live with it on some level. That's a lot, and it can make escapism challenging.

I loved Hockey RPF. Being in that fandom was an unexpected delight for a while, but the amount of work needed to get into it was a warning sign, and not one I'm likely to ignore again anytime soon.

calvinahobbes and I decided to watch Fried Green Tomatoes the first week in February and then I kind of watched a bunch more films that feature queer women - I go through phases with media. (It's a thing.) I started writing this post after watching Jenny's Wedding and not really having the reaction I was expecting.

I also saw Deadpool opening weekend here, and I do not think I have ever been made so happy by a cartoon boner in my life; boners for everyone is pretty unambiguous. I feel it might actually be less ambiguous than a scene containing something along the lines of "Hello, my name is Wade Wilson and I am pansexual," because I feel like there is a strong desire within certain subsets of the comic book community to erase that sexuality, and that while someone might go "Ha, ha, what a funny word, 'pansexual', what a kidder, that Deadpool," that is basically the audience who's gonna get the message about his sexuality in the film's ending. So: yay, cartoon hammering home the queerness, and yay representation. ♥ The film lived up to expectations for me, going beyond in some ways, and was enjoyable if not a favourite.

The F/F films I watched in February were kind of hit or miss.

Fried Green Tomatoes 1991, USA (English) - "A housewife who is unhappy with her life befriends an old lady in a nursing home and is enthralled by the tales she tells of people she used to know."
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Jenny's Wedding 2015, USA (English) - "Jenny Farrell has led an openly gay life - except with her conventional family. When she finally decides to start a family and marry the woman they thought was just her roommate, the small, safe world the Farrells inhabited changes forever. They are left with a simple and difficult choice - either change with it or drown."
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I Can't Think Straight 2008, UK (English) - "A 2008 romance film adapted from a same name novel about a London-based Jordanian of Palestinian descent, Tala, who is preparing for an elaborate wedding. A turn of events causes her to have an affair and subsequently fall in love with another woman, Leyla, a British Indian."
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The Perfect Family 2011, USA (English) - "A devoutly Catholic wife and mother has been nominated for one of the church's top awards. She then goes about trying to prove she has the 'perfect' family, refusing to accept them for who they are."
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The Baby Formula 2008, Canada (English) - "Two adventurous women in love are desperate to have their own biological child. They take a chance on an experimental scientific process and make sperm from their own stem cells. Pregnant with humor and unexpected twists, their journey ultimately confirms that all life is a gift and all families are crazy."
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Bessie 2015, USA (English) - "The story of legendary blues performer, Bessie Smith, who rose to fame during the 1920s and '30s."
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Vic + Flo ont vu un ours 2013, Canada (French) - "Vic + [Flo] Saw a Bear is a darkly mysterious tale of [two lesbian] ex-cons, Victoria and Florence, trying to make a new life in the backwoods of Quebec. Seeking peace and [quiet], the [couple slowly] begin to feel under siege[...]"
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Show Me Love 1998, Sweden/Denmark (Swedish) - "Two teenage girls in small-town Sweden. Elin is beautiful, popular, and bored with life. Agnes is friendless, sad, and secretly in love with Elin."
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glitteryv prompted me with that, and that book is Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone for me.

Someone gave it to me as a present, and I was so offended to have been given the best selling children's book. Had they thought through this gift at all? Seriously, did they just think, this is popular, kiki_eng likes to read, let's get her this children's book. Done.

They gave me the best selling children's book. I was so offended. I was a young adult, and what was this book doing anyway, making the protagonist a wizard, had they not read The Enchanted Forest Chronicles? Didn't they know wizards were evil? Apparently not.

I didn't read it. It sat on my shelf, and sat, and sat.

...and then I read it, and I loved it, completely against my will. ...and I read it again, and again. I read the other books.

All of my family did. We shared copies. It was a whole thing. I remember going into the kitchen late one night for a drink of water or something and someone had left a book on the counter for the night; I ended up hunched over the counter, reading for who knows how long, sucked in.

Eventually I read Harry Potter fanfiction, and I read a lot of it. There was this thing called Fiction Alley, and I made an account there, and I became "kiki-eng". I reread Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone again, and I took notes. I got a livejournal account and I wrote a lot of drabbles about Remus and Sirius - characters I met in a book series I hadn't wanted anything to do with.

I don't think I've ever been more wrong about how I'd react to a book.

readbystarlight asked: "What do you consider your gateway fandoms?"

I didn't start with one fandom, like a fair number of people seem to do; I started multi-fannish, looking for fic with fantasy and sci-fi canons. The ones that pulled me more into the community were Harry Potter and Stargate: Atlantis.

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I tend to forget that I love sci-fi; it wasn't my childhood the way fantasy was and the roots are sort of less deep. I started getting into sci-fi in my early adulthood, which retrospectively feels like a good time for it, because of the exploratory nature of a lot of sci-fi.

The most recent sci-fi thing that I consumed was Star Wars Episode VII and my hands-down favourite thing about that film was BB-8. Yes, I know there are other cool things in that, but BB-8. BB-8! Brave toaster adorable loyal earnest robot having conversations with robots and people and being vulnerable and going questing and following directions. I love the beloved robot and BB-8 is now officially my favourite. Other examples of the trope would be Tony Stark's lab robots as sketched out by fandom, and John Crichton's 1812.

Farscape tends to be the series that I reference as my favourite, because they got so much right in it; it's so many of the things that I want science fiction to be. One of the things that it does, that is almost a nothing thing, but that I like, is with language: give me your alien swear words. I love alien swear words, partially because I can use them in RL without offending anyone, and the meta aspect of that with the show doing the same thing as I am amuses me a little bit, but it's also a tiny part of thinking about language and culture. A Clockwork Orange is really good for that. I'm interested in people exploring culture in science fiction and I like seeing that done through language.

I like myself a dystopia novel. I feel like that's my adolescence right there, but it's also important, I think. Dystopias are important for the ways that they allow us to examine aspects of our own culture. Welcome to Night Vale is fantastic for that and I love it to pieces for how it depicts terrible things in mundane, human, and absurdist ways. I find it incredibly comforting.

I also really like what TV Tropes refers to as the Patrick Stewart Speech for the same reason. I love that speech that embraces both the flaws and possibilities of humanity. I love how The Doctor is so in love with humans, like, he picked a species that wasn't that fantastic, objectively, and just fell in love with them. ...and I love John Crichton's place in Farscape and the episode Crackers Don't Matter where he is the least advanced species on board; I really like that reversal and how it flies in the face of our common conception of our own importance.

The X-Files was kinda good for that, too, like, humanity is facing this overwhelming force, and, within the circle of people in the know Fox Mulder is kind of the shining light. Fox Mulder. The X-Files also has the whole giant conspiracy thing that I am a fan of, like, yes, give me Area 51, give me people in aluminum foil hats with poor hygeine, I would like a traveling mobile home and a bad sweater vest. (I would also like this in conjunction with the Avro Arrow, but that is a side tangent.) That just makes me happy.* The lone gunmen made me happy. Give me your paranoia and possibly some early 90s hacker aesthetic and I am pleased as punch.

*I feel Men In Black was good for this.

Hackers. Hackers was great. Give me your bicycles and skateboards. (Dark Angel) Give me your ridiculous visualisations of computer systems. All of the visualisations of computer systems all of the time. Rogue Computers. (There's a MacGyver episode with that - the 90s were great, and you've got kind of, The Matrix as one of the ultimate evil computer things, spinning out nicely with the evil AI.) Give me your technology aesthetic - the 1980s era TARDIS and Nyssa, fantastic. Give me your painted dragon fruit. I feel like there is, in any respectable alien fruit arrangement, a painted dragon fruit. I want to see the painted dragon fruit still lifes. I want to see how it is all put together. I actually really liked the 2009 Syfy production, Alice for that reason, like, there are all these little tiny universes that we see - Hatter's trading house and the whole resistance in the library and there are all of these different things going on in that world; it's nice.

I like tropes in general, and I find episodic sci-fi can be really good for me for that, because there are trope plot lines or themes that they will tackle. So, like, there's SG-1 and SGA that'll do things and, like, Sliders was great, because every single episode was alternate universe, doppelgangers, and something else. The X-Files had some really slick trope episodes. Sanctuary had a lot of trope episodes, and also Nikola Tesla, Immortal Vampire, for which I may love it forever.

So, yeah, I like tropes in general and serial sci-fi tends to be really good for that. I also just like sci-fi in general; let's explore things and ask questions! It's nice.

(This entry was written for calvinahobbes' prompt for the Second-Half of January meme that I am doing.)