Links and Updates

 Holy shit, that was one heck of a weekend. How we feeling guys?

Trump has been ousted, Biden and Harris won the day, Giuliani led a press conference in a parking lot due to a screwup in the booking, a serious fistfight broke out at my library (not politically related, but still extremely violent and upsetting), Putin was falsely rumoured to be resigning… and apparently Dean and Castiel from Supernatural are canon now? Only for one half of that ship to die immediately afterwards? Which still managed to start trending on Twitter in the midst of the election chaos?

This probably summed it up as well as anything can:

It’s a lot to process: I’ve been high on serotonin for the past twenty-four hours, blaring NSYNC’s Bye Bye Bye on the headphones, and scrolling through the thousands of memes that have flooded the various internet dashboards. Saturday I came home still reluctant to call the race due to my deeply superstitious fear of jinxing things; now it’s Sunday night and I’m just relaxing.

Here’s some fandom related news, since technically that’s what this blog is meant to be about…

The first trailer for Raya and the Last Dragon dropped, and there’s a lot going on.

You don’t need me to tell you that it vibes very strongly with Avatar: The Last Airbender, and though there’s certainly some weight to the backlash-backlash that argues this is because it’s based on Asian culture and therefore inevitably contains aesthetic similarities to the Nickelodeon cartoon, it’s still just a little unfortunate that they chose to dress her in blue, with small side-pigtails. I mean, that’s Katara’s iconic look!

That aside, this looks great: a sort-of Tomb Raider/Avatar mash-up, with the promise of a dragon still to come. Kelly Marie Tran certainly deserves the honour of being our next Disney Princess, and I continue to be fascinated by the ongoing evolution of that particular brand (assuming Raya is going to be part of the line-up, though I’m not sure why she wouldn’t be – it’s no longer a requisite to actually be a princess).

Like Moana and Merida before her, Raya is clearly going to be an Action Girl, with an emphasis on combat skills not seen since Mulan – but more interestingly, it seems like there’s going to be a significant time-skip at some point in the film. She’s much older in the desert scenes than in the underground catacomb scenes, most obviously regarding the size difference of her obligatory animal sidekick that seem to exist mainly to sell plushies and make us go “aww”. 

Disney has also announced it’s moving forward on that long-rumoured Willow series. Um… okay? Willow was a staple part of my childhood, so it’s not like I’m unhappy at this news (especially since Warwick Davis is involved) but it’s difficult to imagine what this is going to look like. The baby that served as the crux of the original film is in her mid-thirties by now, and there’s no way they’re going to get Val Kilmer or Joanne Whalley back again.

Chris Claremont’s follow-up trilogy of novels are widely derided as terrible, so I think the only real way they could do is to make it an animated series, with Warwick voicing the character of Willow (or maybe doing some live-action work in prologues/epilogues to each episode before it switches to animation). We’ll just have to wait upon events…

Speaking of eighties cult classics making a comeback, we’ve also got our first look at conceptual art from the Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai cartoon. They are going the sensible route of making it animated, not to mention placing it in an Asian setting – which certainly goes a long way towards rectifying the now-cringy Magical Asian stereotype from the film’s opening. And hey, if Baby Yoda has taught us anything, there’s still a demand for cute/ugly alien creatures.

(Sidenote: all these eighties throwbacks are doing my head in, especially as there’s only one that truly deserves an update. I am of course talking about Ladyhawke. C’mon, that one is ripe for a remake! Leave Labyrinth alone).

Still more talk on a Wicked film, and again – just make it animated! That way you could have Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth easily voice the characters, and capture the magic of Oz without making it an ugly CGI slugfest. There’s some stunningly gorgeous (and semi-official) concept art out there, and half the songs have already been storyboarded by YouTube artists.

The most recent The Crown trailer is fascinating for its emphasis on the triumvirate of women that will make up its season: Elizabeth II, Margaret Thatcher and Diana Spencer.

It’ll be tough watching Gillian Anderson, an actress I love so much, in the role of a truly loathsome person, but it looks like she’s going to nail Thatcher’s distinctive speech patterns and affectations, while Emma Corrin (who I last saw getting fridged on Pennyworth) is eerily good at capturing Diana’s distinctive head bob – though I’ll never be a fan of that awful shaggy haircut. What were the seventies thinking?

That season four will be woman-centric is a big plus in my book, though I’ll always be frustrated that they skipped Princess Anne’s kidnapping attempt. She’s the only one in the family worth a damn!

This trailer for Shona Rhimes’s new Netflix series burst out of nowhere, but certainly looks like a more salacious take on Jane Austen. Apparently it’s based on a pre-existing novel, but Rhimes’s return to a colourful period drama makes me wonder if she’s still pissed (as I am) that Still Star-Crossed was canned so quickly. Looks like fun:

Genndy Tartakovsky has a new animated show coming out called Unicorn: Warriors Eternal which sounds truly bonkers but also kinda awesome. According to the press release, it revolves around a “team of ancient heroes protecting the world from an ominous force. Throughout history, unicorns have symbolized the virtuous, appearing to ensure that goodness reigns. When the reawakening of our heroes comes too early, they find themselves in the bodies of teenagers. Damaged as a result, their memories of who they are and the history of the unicorn over the centuries have been lost, with some of their magical abilities weakened and fragmented. Not only do they have to protect the world against the prevailing darkness, they have to do it while navigating the unexpected laughs and humour that come with teen angst and emotions.”

Finally, there’s another trailer for Wolfwalkers. I have been waiting for this movie since it was first announced in 2017 and – I won’t lie – legitimately teared up when I watched this. As a species we’re not totally screwed, because something this beautiful exists in the world:

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Going back to politics for a second; it’s worth mentioning that the entire country of New Zealand was highly bemused to have made it onto Fox News – apparently because we’ve throwing people with Covid-19 into quarantine camps and that “twenty-five deaths is an astonishingly low number to give up your personal freedom for.”

I mean… where to even start unpacking this? With the blatant falsehood that we have quarantine camps set up at the border (we don’t, returning NZ citizens simply stay in a four-or-five-star hotel for a set period of time, and after being tested negative are free to go about their business) or the simple fact that we only had twenty-five deaths BECAUSE we all went into voluntary lockdown so as to prevent the further spread of the disease? No personal freedoms were sacrificed, and to say “only twenty-five deaths” is as insensitive as it is stupid. Aren’t these guys meant to be the “all lives matter” crowd?

Seriously, we all know that Fox News is full of shit, but it’s still extremely disconcerting to witness the audacity with which lies are spewed forth about your own day-to-day reality. But as a commentator in the local paper said: it’s not really about us. We successfully beat Covid by putting lives before profit and working together as a team. This is clearly something that horrifies the good folks at Fox, and so our country has to be twisted into something it isn’t in order to hold it up as a strawman to scare Republican voters.

But hey, that’s their problem. What I’m really intrigued by (and you knew this was coming) was how much this whole damn election resembled fandom – exacerbated by the Destiel thing. Before you jump down my throat, I KNOW that internet fandom is not remotely on the same level of importance as international politics, but it’s the similarity in tactics and reactions that’s so fascinating.

Doesn’t this whole thing strike you as comparable to how shipping wars go down? The hysterical build-up, the obsession with being canon, the demand for validation, conspiracy theories, the desperate denial when things don’t go your way, and the familiar post-disappointment tactic of insisting that if what you campaigned for doesn’t materialize, it’s because the creators and/or opponents are truly monstrous people out to get you.

One day I’m going to write an in-depth post about the psychology behind fandom drama (I say that as a person totally unqualified in the field of psychology) but while you’re waiting, here’s some pristine fandom wank that’s materialized since my last Links and Updates post:

A detailed and fun breakdown of the whole Johnlock Conspiracy, which was somehow even more bizarre than I initially realized – and I went in knowing that these people brainwashed themselves into believing there would be a secret fourth episode.

i09 asks if Destiel is really canon. (The article is called “That’s Bait”, so no).

This super-interesting post on the similarities between the Zuko/Katara, Rey/Kylo and Caroline/Klaus ships – or more accurately, how fandom projected completely fabricated tropes onto these three ships, distorting them to fit identical templates that have more resemblance to each other than to anything that actually exists in canon. It’s genuinely fascinating, and I’m definitely going to be drawing on it when positing my own theories on why this happens…

A Tumblr post that captures someone’s raw hatred of Frozen’s Olaf, which is topped only by the most Tumblr-esque response imaginable…

Finally… it’s difficult to really explain this one, so perhaps it’s best if you just check it out yourself. It involves Lindsay Ellis, wolf-porn, fan-fiction, lawsuits, the New York Times, non-con, plagiarism, DMCA takedowns, Bane, and several very confused lawyers. There is a sequel.

Hey, at least I know what the Omegaverse is now – and so must you. It’s time.

A palette cleanser: Why Are Fandoms So Toxic. It’s more upbeat than it sounds.