Links and Updates

Some interesting announcements and creative decisions have made waves in fandom these past few weeks, from yet another disappointing ending to a long-running show, to a pretty incredible choice from Warner Brothers about how they’re going to handle their delayed slate of films in the coming year…

It’s official – with no end in sight to coronavirus restrictions, Warner Brothers is releasing Wonder Woman this month on HBO Max. It’s a bummer for those who wanted to see it on the big screen (I feel especially bad for Patty Jenkins) but… well, if you live in New Zealand it’s not going to be a problem. I don’t mean to gloat, but that’s my mother’s Christmas present sorted out.

My major worry is that when it inevitably doesn’t make the billions of dollars that the studio would have otherwise raked in, they won’t bother greenlighting a third instalment. Amidst the array of cancellations that have been brought on by the pandemic, it’s clearly women-led stories that have taken the brunt of the culling. I don’t want to be too cynical, but maybe this movie’s inevitable underperformance will be their excuse to pull the plug.

Anyways, here’s the extended trailer:

Edit: since writing this post up, there’s been word that WB will be releasing ALL their upcoming films to HBO Max, including Dune and Suicide Squad (the two I’m most interested in). That’s… certainly a choice, and though it makes me feel better about Wonder Woman, I imagine a lot of executives are holding their breaths right now. This is big.  

Here’s another movie I’m looking forward to for the exact opposite reasons. The long-awaited Chaos Walking, based on the trilogy by Patrick Ness which I will absolutely get around to reading any day now, is finally on the horizon – though I suspect that details of the behind-the-scenes drama will be infinitely more interesting than the film itself.

Though first announced in 2016, a couple of years ago it was described as “unreleasable”, and the synopsis sounds way too high concept to translate easily into a visual medium. And yet they’ve already spent over one hundred million making it. I honestly can’t wait to watch what will almost certainly be an absolute car-crash – and with two such popular young actors as the leads? That’s CRAZY!

You guys… what if Kelly Marie Tran ends up having a better career than Daisy Ridley? I’m not saying that to be a dick, as Ridley’s performance was perhaps the only saving grace of the sequel trilogy and I like her a lot… but her post-Star Wars projects haven’t been very good, and Tran is about to be a Disney Princess (plus she was fantastic in Monsterland). I just… after everything that Star Wars put them through, wouldn’t it be nuts if that happened?

This has been out for a while now, but in case you haven’t seen it, this is a short promo (like an unaired test pilot) for what the Buffy the Vampire Slayer cartoon would have look like had it ever gone into production.

Aw man, I want this so much. Obviously it’s pretty corny and simplistic (it really just exists to get across the idea of what such a show would have been like) but it does demonstrate the one great advantage of an animated series: no budget restrictions. I mean that in the sense that a giant dragon would have cost thousands and thousands of dollars to render in live action, whereas in animation it doesn’t cost any more or less than a scene of the gang just hanging around in the library.

And boy do I miss these guys. Buffy, Willow and Xander were a staple part of my adolescence, and reliving the glory years of the show at Sunnydale High would have been a blast (according to reports it was meant to be set during season one of the show, and though that inexplicably means that Dawn would have been a part of the storylines – even though she didn’t technically exist at that point – we would have been blissfully free of Spike).

How difficult could it possibly be to get this off the ground? And you could even bring all the cast back to reprise their roles (it’s been twenty years, but surely their voices still sound the same). And let's be honest, most of them don’t seem to be doing much these days…

Though I’ve sworn off Star Wars for the foreseeable future, I still can’t help but keep my eye on the material (and those cute Baby Yoda gifs). Which means I’m all caught up with the jeans guy that managed to slip into the shot of The Mandalorian (the fake toy mock-up made me laugh – scroll down) the insane price that Disney is charging for some blue macaroons (I know they’re difficult to make, but geez!), and the sight of Rosario Dawson as live-action Ahsoka (I’ll admit, I felt chills. I’m definitely tempted to watch that episode for her sake, though I’m holding off for now).

This synopsis also caught my eye in regards to the Lego Christmas Special:

Finn being trained as a Jedi by Rey?? It’s already better than anything in the sequel trilogy. And I know that the Lego films are formally categorized as “broad strokes canon”, but it warms my heart to know that these two are forging a new path for the Jedi Order… perhaps one day when the disappointment and drama dies down, we’ll get to see this development in some other, more official capacity.

Neil Gaiman’s The Sleeper and the Spindle is going to be released as a radio play on Boxing Day, starring the [not enough effusive adjectives to describe her] Gwendoline Christie. Penelope Wilton,  Ralph Ineson and Gaiman himself are also involved… and I’m already imagining myself relaxing on the day, listening to this under the Christmas tree lights, scarfing down my inevitable box of chocolates.

The existence of some fandom-based things takes you totally by surprise, and such is the case with Ready Steady Worm!, a board game based on the talking worm from Labyrinth:

I mean… sure? He’s one of the film’s most charming characters, a quintessential example of a One Scene Wonder, and thirty-four years after the film’s release… there’s a board game. I’d love to know the thought-process behind the creation of this game, and I’d also really really love to play it.

***

So um… did you hear about the end of Supernatural? I honestly don’t have the strength to type it all out, because this is a show that aired for fifteen seasons, and ran the full gamut of baffling fandom behaviour (I think these guys invented the whole “wives are beards and children are fake and the studio is forcing them to live a lie” controversy that still gets ascribed to various actors and their co-stars to this day).

In many ways this felt like the end of an era for a certain subset of fandom. Approximately ten years ago, slash was massive; practically THE reason why anyone was in fandom. Johnlock, Merthur, Sterek, Wincest, Destial, Spirk, those two guys from Inception… if two white guys occasionally touched each other, the internet would throw itself into hysterics. There are obviously still remnants of this today, such as Kylux from Star Wars and Stucky from Marvel and Klance from Voltron – but can we honestly say it’s as crazy or pervasive as it used to be?

(Okay we can definitely say it’s just as crazy considering a Klance shipper once posted confidential images to Twitter after a tour of the animation studio, declaring that they wouldn’t be taken down until Klance was made canon. But it’s not as all-encompassing as it used to be, and neither is it solely about whiteness or maleness anymore).

Back in the day slash's popularity was a little bewildering if it wasn’t your thing, and the added racism and misogyny was as exhausting as it was horrible. Supernatural in particular was notorious for this, and after watching the first season years ago, I decided not to proceed simply because I knew this was one of the earliest examples of storylines being written (or unwritten) to satiate the demands of fandom.

And this fandom hated women, from the female characters to the real-life women who had the temerity to actually marry the male leads and (gasp) have children with them. Women-on-women misogyny is utterly grotesque to me, and though I’ve certainly disliked female characters in the past (oh Kate, will I ever not grind my teeth when I think of you?) the sheer vitriol that some women manage to spew about other women will always catch me off-guard.

Yet in recent years, there’s been a seismic shift in fandom politics. Is there still an ugly underbelly of racism and misogyny? Of course. You only have to watch the last Star Wars movie and the way it obediently capitulated to the loudest fandom demands to see that. But slash ships don’t really dominate fandom the way they used to, and though that also might have something to do with better on-screen representation for gay relationships anyway (there’s no need to campaign for something that already exists), I’m sure it also has to do with the pushback from those that pointed out frequently and consistently, for the past decade or so, the ill-treatment of Black or female (and often Black female) characters.

People passionately defended Uhura and Guinevere and John Boyega and Tyler Posey, pointing out the double-standards and hypocrisy that these characters/actors had to face, and though we’re still a long way from fandom egalitarianism … some of it sunk in. Not all at once and not altogether, but you have to admit at the very least that the landscape of fandom looks much different from what it did back in the early noughts.

Where was I going with all this?

The interesting thing about Supernatural is that it was THERE for this cultural shift. It lived through it. And during the show’s latter years, there was eventually some pushback against its dire treatment of female characters and people of colour. (I can only imagine the writers’ confusion at this about-face). Though it was too little, too late in many respects, it was still a fascinating arc for fandom to go though. Here’s a quick rundown of the whole thing.

But I’m sure you’ve all heard about what happened in the last handful of episodes, in which Castiel confesses his love for Dean before he’s sent to turbo hell for reasons I’m still not that clear on, only for the remaining two episodes to… not resolve this at all. Castiel doesn’t appear in the finale and beyond establishing that he got out of hell, nothing more is done with his confession of love.

I can understand the frustration, as from a storytelling perspective they really did drop the ball on a significant plot-point that felt really important at the time. I have at least one long-time fandom mutual that’s venting on Tumblr, which is something I’ll always defend as being normal and healthy. Being aggravated with something you can’t control and getting it out of your system is the other big reason that fandom exists.

But – as I’ve mentioned on this blog a couple of times before – fandom is not what it used to be. We live in an age of the conspiracy theory, and though Supernatural hasn’t gotten quite as bonkers as “they filmed a secret fourth episode that will make my ship canon”, there’s certainly some compelling evidence of shenanigans in the writing/editing rooms: a strangely edited confession scene, the lack of Castiel in the finale despite reports that the actor was on set, the fact the episode was shorter than usual, odd tweets and comments from the cast, and of course – the Latin American dub of the episode having Dean say: “me too” to Cas’s declaration of love. Supposedly.

Whatever the truth is, there’s clearly enough material for shippers to concoct a scenario in which a more ship-friendly conclusion (that is, Dean reciprocating his feelings for Cas) was shot, or at least planned on. This is of course where the healthy venting turns into questionable theory-spreading, complete with Twitter movements tagged with: “they silenced you” and acting like this is a homophobic coverup by the network, because… you know. Fandom. When you don’t get what you want, it becomes part of a grander narrative of persecution and conspiracies and social justice and holding actors hostage.

And yet, I get it. For all the importance in reminding yourself it’s just fiction, it’s so easy to get caught up in the excitement of a story, especially in a communal on-line space. I’ve been there, from the days of BBC’s Robin Hood to last year’s Star Wars – and the let-down hurts every time. As Anne Shirley once said:

“When I think something nice is going to happen I seem to fly right up on the wings of anticipation; and then the first thing I realize is I drop down to earth with a thud. But really, Marilla, the flying part is glorious as long as it lasts...it's like soaring through a sunset. I think it almost pays for the thud.”

For a lot of people, the thud is not worth the soar, and yet… I fondly recall my time in the Robin Hood fandom and the fantastic people that I met there. I still remember walking out of The Force Awakens, feeling exuberant with the possibilities that lay before me. I can enjoy watching the first three seasons of Merlin without letting the nastiness of the fandom impinge on them.

And even with the glut of popular television shows that have ended badly in recent years – Supernatural, Game of Thrones, How I Met Your Mother, Voltron: Legendary Defender, The 100, and of course old favourites Dexter, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, True Blood – I’d like to think that fans will eventually learn to appreciate the enjoyment those stories provided and the inspiration they sparked, as opposed to the disappointment their respective finales delivered.

Maybe. If not, then maintaining those healthy boundaries between our emotions and the fiction we consume is a lesson that we all have to collectively keep learning, over and over again.