The end of year fandom meme
Dec. 31st, 2024 08:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lizbee1. Your main fandom of the year?
Still Star Trek, my friends. It doesn't deserve my love, but it has it.
2. Your favorite film watched this year?
Dune Part Two. I really appreciated how it delved deep into the stuff that Lynch's film had to skip: Paul's rise as aterrorist freedom fighter, the Bene Gesserit's plans, Jessica's manipulations. It wasn't a perfect film, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.
3. Your favorite book read this year?
I'll get to my annual book post in a few days, but roughly by category:
Contemporary mystery: Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera. The murder of the heroine's best friend is the subject of a true crime podcast, and after all these years, she is still the number one suspect in the eyes of the world.
YA: The Fire Keeper's Daughter by Angeline Boulley. A thriller set in the Indigenous community of Michigan.
Non-Fiction: Flying Blind: The 737-Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robison, Challenger: A true story of heroism and disaster on the edge of space by Adam Higginbotham, and Character Limit: How Elon Musk destroyed Twitter by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac. These books have a lot in common, starting with "actually, this is sort of Ronald Reagan's fault".
4. Your favorite album or song to listen to this year?
The Great Impersonator by Halsey. I was only peripherally aware of Halsey as a performer, but I heard she had an album coming out where she paid tribute to a lot of iconic acts, including PJ Harvey, Tori Amos and Bjork. As someone who was a teenager in the '90s, I was intrigued. I expected a cover album, but instead it's a series of pastiches as Halsey draws on her inspirations as she writes about being treated for leukemia and the possibility of dying young.
Not every homage is effective, but it's overall a really strong album, and it really spoke to me as I dealt with my own health issues.
5. Your favorite TV show of the year?
Star Trek: Prodigy, my beloved. After season 1, I was going around saying it's the objectively best Star Trek since DS9; after season 2, other people were saying it as well. And they were correct. I know it's heavily pushed in fandom as "Star Trek: Janeway" or a sequel to Voyager, and it is that, but I think that does a disservice to a series which very much stands on its own, and understands that obscure references and fan service are meaningless unless you're also telling a good story that's about the new characters.
6. Your favorite online community of the year?
I'm in a Discord community that started as a space for fans of Admiral Cornwell, and now we just mostly hang out and chill.
7. Your best new fandom discovery of the year?
I belatedly learned there's a new TV adaptation of PD James's Adam Dalgliesh mysteries, with three seasons of six episodes each, and I love the choices it makes. The books spanned the 1960s to the early 2000s, but Dalgliesh concentrates the stories in the 1970s, with the crumbling of the social contract and Thatcher slouching towards Downing Street.
I think it's fair -- if not overly generous -- to say that James was a reactionary and rather conservative author, and the TV series makes a lot of choices she would have utterly hated: lots of characters of colour, overt queerness where she used subtext (and a strong air of distaste), emphasis on Dalgliesh as a man who is accepted by establishment figures because he is white and educated, but who holds himself at a distance.
The best choice it makes is casting a mixed race actress as Kate Miskin. Kate is introduced in the later books as a working class cop with a chip on her shoulder about her education, because she feels her schools spent too much time teaching that racism is bad, rather than actually educating her. Obviously this is James's bugbear. When I last reread the books, in the mid-2000s, I was like, "Either Kate is incredibly racist, or she is Black and didn't need to be told that racism is bad." And so I headcanoned her as Black. Clearly the people behind the TV series felt the same way, and the writing is nuanced enough that this doesn't feel like simple colourblind casting with no eye to subtext.
The downside is that now I ship Kate/Dalgliesh, even though the series has made it clear it's not going there in any meaningful way. Such is life.
Bonus entry: Dune: Prophecy. I do not know if it is actually good -- the first act of the first episode is actively bad -- but it spoke to me on a profound level even before a stout, middle-aged woman was Touched By Destiny.
8. Your biggest fandom disappointment of the year?
The fifth and final season of Star Trek: Lower Decks. I very quickly went from "it's a shame Lower Decks was cancelled, but five seasons is a good run" to "Lower Decks should have been cancelled sooner, actually." Season five felt formless and half-baked. Mariner barely had an arc; Tendi was out of character; Rutherford was hardly in it at all. Only Boimler got coherent and consistent character development, and it was predictable at every turn. It was giving burnout in a really sad way. Fortunately the coda to the final episode was so delightful that it almost made up for everything which had gone before, so Lower Decks didn't go out on a wholly sour note for me.
9. Your fandom boyfriend of the year?
If you are in fandom long enough, a Callum Keith Rennie character will be assigned to you.
I know some people were miffed that Discovery introduced a new white man in its final season, gave him a lot of screen time and fans went gaga for it. And I totally get that. I am not proud of who I became when Rayner turned up.
But Discovery needed him. I know I always rail against fans who can't tell the difference between a found family and a cult, but the Discovery crew are absolutely a cult, and the show really benefited from having a guy walk in and go, "Oh no, all this emotional honesty and openness and mutual respect is freaking me out. Please don't make me open up to you. I will completely support you, but I will be a grumpy bastard while I do it."
And he's a fantastic foil for Michael, given that he's where she was in season 1: demoted, roiling with trauma and anger and desperation to please. I don't precisely ship Michael/Rayner, but I absolutely believe he is in love with her. I feel like if we had gotten a sixth season, we would have gotten a lot more stuff about the Breen, Rayner's trauma, and probably more Primarch Tahal. (Speaking of people I definitely don't ship Rayner with, but actually I do.)
Bonus boyfriend: Chakotay, but only in the Prodigy episodes where he's bearded and has his forearms out.
Look, the animators knew what they were doing. Does he look like Robert Beltran? Uh, no. Do I care? Also no.
I have to give Prodigy props overall for taking Voyager's worst character and making him complex and compelling, but they really missed a trick when they let him shave and put a proper shirt on.
Honorary mentions: Lucanis, Daniel Dae Kim as Fire Lord Ozai.
10. Your fandom girlfriend of the year?
Give it up for Valya and Tula Harkonnen!
Yes, they're running a eugenics cult, they've killed a lot of people, they have lied and manipulated and don't intend to stop until they've engineered themselves a Timothée Chalamet. But have you considered: I love them.
11. Your biggest squee moment of the year?
Rayner takes the chair. Michael Burnham gets her happy ending. The announcement that Tilly will be a recurring character in Starfleet Academy. Wesley Crusher in Prodigy.
12. The most missed of your old fandoms?
Sometimes I look in on Doctor Who and miss feeling excited about it. I assume that day will come again, but these things are cyclical.
13. The fandom you haven't tried yet, but want to?
I bought Fallout 4 for Xbox two years ago, and I still haven't cracked it open!
14. Your biggest fan anticipations for the New Year?
This is going to be my entire personality for the foreseeable future and I will not apologise.
Still Star Trek, my friends. It doesn't deserve my love, but it has it.
2. Your favorite film watched this year?
Dune Part Two. I really appreciated how it delved deep into the stuff that Lynch's film had to skip: Paul's rise as a
3. Your favorite book read this year?
I'll get to my annual book post in a few days, but roughly by category:
Contemporary mystery: Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera. The murder of the heroine's best friend is the subject of a true crime podcast, and after all these years, she is still the number one suspect in the eyes of the world.
YA: The Fire Keeper's Daughter by Angeline Boulley. A thriller set in the Indigenous community of Michigan.
Non-Fiction: Flying Blind: The 737-Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robison, Challenger: A true story of heroism and disaster on the edge of space by Adam Higginbotham, and Character Limit: How Elon Musk destroyed Twitter by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac. These books have a lot in common, starting with "actually, this is sort of Ronald Reagan's fault".
4. Your favorite album or song to listen to this year?
The Great Impersonator by Halsey. I was only peripherally aware of Halsey as a performer, but I heard she had an album coming out where she paid tribute to a lot of iconic acts, including PJ Harvey, Tori Amos and Bjork. As someone who was a teenager in the '90s, I was intrigued. I expected a cover album, but instead it's a series of pastiches as Halsey draws on her inspirations as she writes about being treated for leukemia and the possibility of dying young.
Not every homage is effective, but it's overall a really strong album, and it really spoke to me as I dealt with my own health issues.
5. Your favorite TV show of the year?
Star Trek: Prodigy, my beloved. After season 1, I was going around saying it's the objectively best Star Trek since DS9; after season 2, other people were saying it as well. And they were correct. I know it's heavily pushed in fandom as "Star Trek: Janeway" or a sequel to Voyager, and it is that, but I think that does a disservice to a series which very much stands on its own, and understands that obscure references and fan service are meaningless unless you're also telling a good story that's about the new characters.
6. Your favorite online community of the year?
I'm in a Discord community that started as a space for fans of Admiral Cornwell, and now we just mostly hang out and chill.
7. Your best new fandom discovery of the year?
I belatedly learned there's a new TV adaptation of PD James's Adam Dalgliesh mysteries, with three seasons of six episodes each, and I love the choices it makes. The books spanned the 1960s to the early 2000s, but Dalgliesh concentrates the stories in the 1970s, with the crumbling of the social contract and Thatcher slouching towards Downing Street.
I think it's fair -- if not overly generous -- to say that James was a reactionary and rather conservative author, and the TV series makes a lot of choices she would have utterly hated: lots of characters of colour, overt queerness where she used subtext (and a strong air of distaste), emphasis on Dalgliesh as a man who is accepted by establishment figures because he is white and educated, but who holds himself at a distance.
The best choice it makes is casting a mixed race actress as Kate Miskin. Kate is introduced in the later books as a working class cop with a chip on her shoulder about her education, because she feels her schools spent too much time teaching that racism is bad, rather than actually educating her. Obviously this is James's bugbear. When I last reread the books, in the mid-2000s, I was like, "Either Kate is incredibly racist, or she is Black and didn't need to be told that racism is bad." And so I headcanoned her as Black. Clearly the people behind the TV series felt the same way, and the writing is nuanced enough that this doesn't feel like simple colourblind casting with no eye to subtext.
The downside is that now I ship Kate/Dalgliesh, even though the series has made it clear it's not going there in any meaningful way. Such is life.
Bonus entry: Dune: Prophecy. I do not know if it is actually good -- the first act of the first episode is actively bad -- but it spoke to me on a profound level even before a stout, middle-aged woman was Touched By Destiny.
8. Your biggest fandom disappointment of the year?
The fifth and final season of Star Trek: Lower Decks. I very quickly went from "it's a shame Lower Decks was cancelled, but five seasons is a good run" to "Lower Decks should have been cancelled sooner, actually." Season five felt formless and half-baked. Mariner barely had an arc; Tendi was out of character; Rutherford was hardly in it at all. Only Boimler got coherent and consistent character development, and it was predictable at every turn. It was giving burnout in a really sad way. Fortunately the coda to the final episode was so delightful that it almost made up for everything which had gone before, so Lower Decks didn't go out on a wholly sour note for me.
9. Your fandom boyfriend of the year?
If you are in fandom long enough, a Callum Keith Rennie character will be assigned to you.
I know some people were miffed that Discovery introduced a new white man in its final season, gave him a lot of screen time and fans went gaga for it. And I totally get that. I am not proud of who I became when Rayner turned up.
But Discovery needed him. I know I always rail against fans who can't tell the difference between a found family and a cult, but the Discovery crew are absolutely a cult, and the show really benefited from having a guy walk in and go, "Oh no, all this emotional honesty and openness and mutual respect is freaking me out. Please don't make me open up to you. I will completely support you, but I will be a grumpy bastard while I do it."
And he's a fantastic foil for Michael, given that he's where she was in season 1: demoted, roiling with trauma and anger and desperation to please. I don't precisely ship Michael/Rayner, but I absolutely believe he is in love with her. I feel like if we had gotten a sixth season, we would have gotten a lot more stuff about the Breen, Rayner's trauma, and probably more Primarch Tahal. (Speaking of people I definitely don't ship Rayner with, but actually I do.)
Bonus boyfriend: Chakotay, but only in the Prodigy episodes where he's bearded and has his forearms out.
Look, the animators knew what they were doing. Does he look like Robert Beltran? Uh, no. Do I care? Also no.
I have to give Prodigy props overall for taking Voyager's worst character and making him complex and compelling, but they really missed a trick when they let him shave and put a proper shirt on.
Honorary mentions: Lucanis, Daniel Dae Kim as Fire Lord Ozai.
10. Your fandom girlfriend of the year?
Give it up for Valya and Tula Harkonnen!
Yes, they're running a eugenics cult, they've killed a lot of people, they have lied and manipulated and don't intend to stop until they've engineered themselves a Timothée Chalamet. But have you considered: I love them.
11. Your biggest squee moment of the year?
Rayner takes the chair. Michael Burnham gets her happy ending. The announcement that Tilly will be a recurring character in Starfleet Academy. Wesley Crusher in Prodigy.
12. The most missed of your old fandoms?
Sometimes I look in on Doctor Who and miss feeling excited about it. I assume that day will come again, but these things are cyclical.
13. The fandom you haven't tried yet, but want to?
I bought Fallout 4 for Xbox two years ago, and I still haven't cracked it open!
14. Your biggest fan anticipations for the New Year?
This is going to be my entire personality for the foreseeable future and I will not apologise.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-30 11:39 pm (UTC)Fact.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-31 12:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-31 01:05 am (UTC)I mean, I assumed it would be when Amie recommended it, but Amie's taste and mine are often adjacent rather than coinciding, so I couldn't be certain.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-31 04:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-31 04:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-31 12:22 pm (UTC)Lower Decks, unfortunately, goes on the pile of shows that one balance shouldn't have been given a final season to bow out. That last two parter was a banger though.
I am so unbelievably hyped for the Section 31 movie...get in my eyeballs, movie!
no subject
Date: 2024-12-31 05:09 pm (UTC)VALYA AND TULA omg I loved them. Wound up hating what the show chose to be, aka Yet Another Honky Messiah, but the BG bits were so good.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-03 11:09 am (UTC)Oh I like that! Clever approach.
no subject
Date: 2025-01-19 08:47 am (UTC)Hahah, my thoughts exactly!