Fifth December Topic: Nostalgia time!
Dec. 28th, 2014 11:27 pmI stared at my remaining topics and wasn't sure which I felt like talking about, and then I landed on this one because I finally picked a fandom to talk about. ;D I've been struggling with this one ever since ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
carawj requested it because I'm pretty generous in what I define as an active fandom. Like thanks to Tumblr I consider say, Harry Potter, Buffy (ETA: turns out I lied and can't talk about Angel without Buffy), Xena, and Farscape to be fairly active fandoms for me because they come up on my dash a lot, I re-watch eps periodically, I watch vids, I ponder and read meta, so they were all out, and they're some of my oldest fandoms.
I also pondered and rejected Doctor Who because dear show, I feel like I already expend more energy on you and justifying our break-up than is good for me at the mo.
And I regularly re-read say, the Vorkosigan Saga and Robin Hobb, so they're also out.
I briefly considered 'Grey's Anatomy' cuz I had a really fun conversation with someone on twitter about it earlier this evening but maybe another time as this is SO LONG.
Shows I've come to in the last 5 years don't even count as nostalgic yet, so that rules out a LOT. ;)
But! As I mentioned in my entry earlier, I've fallen down a 'Person of Interest'-shaped rabbit-hole, which is ENTIRELY because of Amy Acker, for whom I have a huge thing. And I tend to forget this is the case until I actually see her moving and talking in something? Like stills and even gifsets don't really convey it? But anyway, this has sort of been simmering sincepurplefringe's beautiful Festivid last year, with which I am slightly obsessed, and then I saw isagel's fantastic character study from POI, and like months later, here we are. ;)
The problem here is that prolonged pondering about Amy Acker inevitably leads me back to Angel in the end, and for various reasons, I haven't hung on to Angel over the years the way I have Buffy. But, because of the Amy Acker thing, it has been on my mind lately more than usual.
(Btw, this entry is going to have massive spoilers for all of Buffy and Angel, so if you're in the process of watching those, or plan to watch them some day, look away.) ( Cut for length, but as yet, no spoilers. I'll let you know when I hit those. )
( OK, here be spoilers. )
Like it would be ridiculous and untrue to say I'm not capable of the depth of feeling I had for Buffy and Angel but they're both wrapped around my me-ness and personality in ways it's harder for things to be as I get older, because my personality and sense of self are more formed.
As an aside, they're the first fandoms I shared with Alex. Like we met through mutual friends in Gargoyles fandom, but we were both done with Gargoyles by the time we started hanging out. She's hugely responsible for my Tara love, I didn't like her at first because I missed Oz. (I know, I know.) We used to hotly debate Buffy/Angel vs Cordelia/Angel. She was very sympathetic (and frequently mocking) over my Fred feelings. My LJ still has an Alex-only filter, and if I ever let another living human being on that filter, they would find hundreds of comments, because that's how we used to talk to each other, and lots of them are about our Buffy and Angel re-watches. We didn't simul-watch because time-zones can bite me but we used to watch more or less concurrently a lot.
Heh, she tried to get me to watch Justice League Unlimited because so many Jossverse alums voiced the characters, chiefly Amy Acker as Huntress.
I don't really know how to wrap this one up. I don't even know what it'll be like to read, it's very introspective (navel-gazey ;)) and rather sentimental. Thinking it over I don't think it's age or depth of feeling that's different about how I watch TV, it's critical thinking. When I watch TV or movies or read a book now I can't switch off pondering whether it has passed the Bechdel test yet, where are the queers, where are the PoC, hey, that woman just got put in a fridge*. Etc. And I wouldn't change that even if I could, even though it makes me a killjoy sometimes, but I'm also glad I got to watch Buffy and Angel BEFORE I learned to do that. (Also I think I worked through a lot of my feelings about relating to canons and problematic canons and how to be a fan of problematic things through Buffy and Angel. Like there was a point where it was important to me to like everything about every aspect of the show, so I worked hard to say, love freaking Spike and Riley, and it was freeing to work out that I didn't have to do that.)
Like I often talk about how much I've learnt about feminism and equality and intersectionality from fandom, and it's TRUE. I am not sure I even gave credit to how much that's true until I wrote all this down.
(My god, I am so sorry about how long this one is.)
*Not to say every type of media I consume is a paragon of representation or anything, VERY far from it, but part of the automatic process of watching that is critiquing it.
carawj requested it because I'm pretty generous in what I define as an active fandom. Like thanks to Tumblr I consider say, Harry Potter, Buffy (ETA: turns out I lied and can't talk about Angel without Buffy), Xena, and Farscape to be fairly active fandoms for me because they come up on my dash a lot, I re-watch eps periodically, I watch vids, I ponder and read meta, so they were all out, and they're some of my oldest fandoms.I also pondered and rejected Doctor Who because dear show, I feel like I already expend more energy on you and justifying our break-up than is good for me at the mo.
And I regularly re-read say, the Vorkosigan Saga and Robin Hobb, so they're also out.
I briefly considered 'Grey's Anatomy' cuz I had a really fun conversation with someone on twitter about it earlier this evening but maybe another time as this is SO LONG.
Shows I've come to in the last 5 years don't even count as nostalgic yet, so that rules out a LOT. ;)
But! As I mentioned in my entry earlier, I've fallen down a 'Person of Interest'-shaped rabbit-hole, which is ENTIRELY because of Amy Acker, for whom I have a huge thing. And I tend to forget this is the case until I actually see her moving and talking in something? Like stills and even gifsets don't really convey it? But anyway, this has sort of been simmering since
purplefringe's beautiful Festivid last year, with which I am slightly obsessed, and then I saw isagel's fantastic character study from POI, and like months later, here we are. ;)The problem here is that prolonged pondering about Amy Acker inevitably leads me back to Angel in the end, and for various reasons, I haven't hung on to Angel over the years the way I have Buffy. But, because of the Amy Acker thing, it has been on my mind lately more than usual.
(Btw, this entry is going to have massive spoilers for all of Buffy and Angel, so if you're in the process of watching those, or plan to watch them some day, look away.) ( Cut for length, but as yet, no spoilers. I'll let you know when I hit those. )
( OK, here be spoilers. )
Like it would be ridiculous and untrue to say I'm not capable of the depth of feeling I had for Buffy and Angel but they're both wrapped around my me-ness and personality in ways it's harder for things to be as I get older, because my personality and sense of self are more formed.
As an aside, they're the first fandoms I shared with Alex. Like we met through mutual friends in Gargoyles fandom, but we were both done with Gargoyles by the time we started hanging out. She's hugely responsible for my Tara love, I didn't like her at first because I missed Oz. (I know, I know.) We used to hotly debate Buffy/Angel vs Cordelia/Angel. She was very sympathetic (and frequently mocking) over my Fred feelings. My LJ still has an Alex-only filter, and if I ever let another living human being on that filter, they would find hundreds of comments, because that's how we used to talk to each other, and lots of them are about our Buffy and Angel re-watches. We didn't simul-watch because time-zones can bite me but we used to watch more or less concurrently a lot.
Heh, she tried to get me to watch Justice League Unlimited because so many Jossverse alums voiced the characters, chiefly Amy Acker as Huntress.
I don't really know how to wrap this one up. I don't even know what it'll be like to read, it's very introspective (navel-gazey ;)) and rather sentimental. Thinking it over I don't think it's age or depth of feeling that's different about how I watch TV, it's critical thinking. When I watch TV or movies or read a book now I can't switch off pondering whether it has passed the Bechdel test yet, where are the queers, where are the PoC, hey, that woman just got put in a fridge*. Etc. And I wouldn't change that even if I could, even though it makes me a killjoy sometimes, but I'm also glad I got to watch Buffy and Angel BEFORE I learned to do that. (Also I think I worked through a lot of my feelings about relating to canons and problematic canons and how to be a fan of problematic things through Buffy and Angel. Like there was a point where it was important to me to like everything about every aspect of the show, so I worked hard to say, love freaking Spike and Riley, and it was freeing to work out that I didn't have to do that.)
Like I often talk about how much I've learnt about feminism and equality and intersectionality from fandom, and it's TRUE. I am not sure I even gave credit to how much that's true until I wrote all this down.
(My god, I am so sorry about how long this one is.)
*Not to say every type of media I consume is a paragon of representation or anything, VERY far from it, but part of the automatic process of watching that is critiquing it.
