franzeska

We managed to have Escapade in person this year, after only one year off. I was skeptical, but it seems to have worked out well, and that’s great for me because the things I do for the con are in-person only. Many years, though not this one, I help run a wine tasting. I host a tea party. This time around, the Bobaboard yaoi cheese board made an appearance, and we decorated the room with an Our Flag Means Death theme. And, probably my favorite of all, I run the dance party.

Once upon a time, Escapade was one of the focal points of a certain kind of Media Fandom vidding culture, but that group founded Vividcon and decamped there. Vividcon’s dance party featured some old favorites but was heavy with premieres by attending vidders. It was wonderful in many ways… but I’d also heard about the changes it had wrought on Vividcon’s main premieres show: once there was also a dance party to send vids to, many vidders started saving their heavier work to less popular music for Premieres and sending their joyful, fun vids to the dance party. While the individual vids in Premieres remained strong, the Premieres show as a show suffered. Those of us running the Escapade dance party in the first couple of years chose not to accept new vids for this reason. Escapade was also, by that point, far less vid-focused than it had been, and even asking attendees for requests and suggestions typically only yielded a few ideas.

The result is that I have had almost entirely free rein to create a three-hour mixtape of vids.

The creation of this is one of my favorite parts of the con. It’s more than just recs or even a playlist: for me, it serves the full metaphorical and interpretive functions of a mixtape. I’m saying something with the vids I choose and the order I put them in, and something far, far beyond “this vid is good”. My only limitations are that the vid does need to be danceable and that it has to exist. Somebody somewhere has to have made the building block I want for this larger fanwork.

( Vidshows As Canon Formation, Fandom News, and Identity )

( Vidding Terminology vs. The Peril of Multifandom Vids )

( The Search )

( Play Order )

( This Year's Playlist )

I could say this was my attempt at meta on an underappreciated character and that's why I wanted to vid Wen Ning…

Nah, I just think he's hot.

Wen Ning has this adorable babyface and big eyes. Just my type. And then he got a goth makeover and became a creepy zombie, increasing his hotness by ten thousand times. The Living Dead was everything I wanted except for dubcon possession porn, and it both irritates and cracks me up to see how many people find it OOC and badly made. I agree the colors are an abomination though--but more on that later.

I like Wen Ning the best because 1. He's hot and 2. He's one of the most competent characters and compromises his morals the least. Mianmian might be one up on him given how her story turns out, but in a whole series of craven idiots, I like the suicidally moral characters, especially when they're competent.

And also JC. Because I like his face. (What? I never said my Untamed feels were deep.)

I wanted to make this vid last year, right after Escapade. I spent forever finding a song, and I'm glad I did it then because it was a nightmare. I can find love songs easily, but I don't really care about WN/WWX, nor would most love songs fit that. It's clearly one-sided, but WN is also clearly totally happy to follow him around forever. Happy love songs are out. Pining angst is out.

WN is also motivated by high ideals more than specific family feelings. WQ wants to protect her family. WN wants to repay his debts. WN is a shy doofus on the surface when we first see him, and he acts flustered around most of the older characters, but this is deceptive. I feel like the most revealing scene is when he pops up at Lotus Pier, ready to grab JC and take on his entire clan. In what universe was this a good idea? What is he even doing there? Why did it actually work???

I wanted a song that encapsulated WN's quiet stubbornness. The trouble is that like 99% of popular music is either about romance or about being a confident badass, and most of the confident badass music is "Fuck you, ex boyfriend, I'm stronger now". I did not want an ex boyfriend song. A bunch of other songs are macho, flexing dudes talking about how they'll win the sports competition. Obviously, that was out. There are a very few songs like Try Everything, but they're awfully perky for covering Wen Ning's entire story, including him getting, you know, gruesomely murdered.

I honestly can't remember how I found the song I picked. I was probably listening to Happy Hanukkah on endless repeat and saw it in the Youtube sidebar. (Look, it's a great song for all times of year. Shut up.) Matisyahu has many amazing songs that build and move in ways ideal for vids.

I then sat on this source/song combo for a year because, well, it sure was a year. But when we got close to Escapade, I realized I wanted to finish it for the con.

---

( Clip choices & vidding notes )

The vid:

Watch on Vimeo

True North from Franzeska Dickson on Vimeo.

password = wenning

Just got an email:

"Dear Franzeska,

We are contacting you regarding your participation in Festivids. We're afraid we have decided that, until further notice, you will not be allowed to take part, either by signing up or by submitting treats.

We know this news must be unwelcome. To provide some context for this decision, we have had a number of reports that participants and potential participants in Festivids feel uncomfortable or unsafe in an exchange with you, due to your conduct in other fannish spaces. After reviewing these reports, we have come to the conclusion that this is the right decision for the exchange.

Llin and odessie"


To be honest, I was kind of wondering if I had time this year, but I guess I don't have to worry about that now.

I intended to do a general decluttering of my person and social media presence along with the house, etc. etc. Needless to say, I'm a few months behind on all of my to do lists... But the garden looks great!

Earlier, I tried to deal with an overdue thing, and Chrome wouldn't let me into my google drive or into individual files stored there. It's apparently a Chrome error. (Google, what?) So this is the incentive I finally needed to switch everything over to Firefox. It's a little ironic considering I'm still logging into gmail and google drive constantly. Firefox + DuckDuckGo for me from now on. I was nearly off of Tumblr, but like always, activity picked up and then I had things to respond to again. But if I'm doing a spring cleaning of my online life, maybe it's time to make an effort at DW too.

---

Today, I went around and took pics of all of the places books are hiding in my house, or at least all of the places that aren't some bags that are still in my car, two months after my move.

( I own too many books )

I am pleased to announce the opening of our Area 52 links list on AO3.

These 11,977 bookmarks represent every fic on Area 52, minus three not archived by the wayback machine.

Filter by bookmarker's tags for the maximum amount of Area 52 metadata, including episode tags.

Thank you to ViddersAdmin for automating much of this work and to the other fans who helped me with data entry and general support.

I'm still not done with my Escapade con report, nor have I posted my 3 vids. Doh!

I've been trying to archive at least one major meta tumblr post on AO3 per day for the March Meta Matters challenge.

I am currently in the process of moving from L.A. back to the Bay Area.


And I've been working on a plan to save Area 52!

It took a bit of browsing on various eras of the wayback copies, but I put together a list of author URLs. Vidderkidder kindly wrote a macro to scrape them for fic data. We are now filling in things the script choked on, finding AO3 tag equivalents, and looking for author contact info.

When we're done with this phase, we will make an AO3 bookmark collection with all twelve thousand-odd fics bookmarked and tagged.

In the meantime, to browse fic or to help out, check out our spreadsheet.

Xcziel made us a Discord for both this project and Stargate fandom in general.

This is my year of dark, fucked-up requests! Give me your gleefully messed-up kink and your emo melodrama on the way to a happy(ish) ending. Give me all of the Very Bad People doing Very Bad Things to each other and finding they enjoy it more than they ought.

I ship all of the sets of characters I’ve requested.

AO3 name = franzeska

( General likes )
( DNWs )
( Always Crashing in the Same Car )
( The Two Faces of January )
( Sicario )
( Mindhunter )
( Framed )
( The Foundling )

Bandits (2001) [SAFETY] I ship it! This is such a cute movie and so conventional… except for the canon OT3. I'd love a straightforward shipper vid of these three and/or a pimp vid showing off the general bank robber shenanigans. You are, of course, welcome to imply it's more of a triangle than the V canon suggests.

Wiseguy (TV) So many feeeeelings. For this source, I ship Vinnie/Sonny, Vinnie/Roger somewhat, and absolutely Roger/that madam from the freaky Twin Peaks ripoff arc late in the series. I love Frank, but I find him cosplaying with Roger much more entertaining than anything with him and Vinnie. (Though I wouldn't say no to a post-series Frank-rescues-Vinnie vid, hard though that would be to construct.)

I would adore a straightforward Vinnie/Sonny slash vid to music I can dance to.

A vid about the WTF Twin Peaks-ish part would be fun.

I love Roger and his angst in the second arc. I love how Vinnie slowly realizes he isn't evil, then thinks he has a second chance to get things right, only for Roger to die tragically just like Sonny. Oh no. The angst… OH WAIT.

One of my favorite things about Wiseguy is how Sonny is theoretically a bad guy, but he's kind of a marshmallow, and this is what leads to his downfall. Roger, meanwhile, is a dick. Once he realizes that he's going to still be in trouble and Vinnie is going to fall on his sword for no reason, Roger calmly plans his "death"... And sets Vinnie up to witness it and feel horrifically guilty that he wasn't a few minutes earlier and that he didn't shake the cops. Except that was the plan all along. Roger, you dick!

I adore how Roger just shows up, late in the series, to fill in for Vinnie. I love Frank's dry reaction to finding out that not only is Roger not dead, but Vinnie has been in contact with him this whole time. And then Roger makes Frank cosplay for great justice. Because he doesn't give a fuck about the law, only about resolving the situation… Or maybe he just likes to watch Frank suffer. Like I said: a dick.

Wild Wild West (TV) I ship Jim/Artie and also Jim/endless bondage devices of 60s TV.

What I'd really love for this fandom would be a vid celebrating the kinkiness of the 60s that I can put in the Escapade dance party next year. There are some great WWW vids out there, but they're not very danceable.

WWW is a goldmine of iddy tropes that deserve to be showed off… Especially because so much of the good stuff is hampered in canon by surprise racism in between the fun parts. Gah!

It might also be fun to do a WWW TV + WWW movie vid that shows where the movie got its ideas from. I thought the movie was unfairly maligned by tv fans. Will Smith was terrible casting, but only because Jim West has the most legendary bubble butt in 60s TV. Smith's ass is not nearly round enough. This is, sadly, not why people objected. Having a black secret serviceman is apparently "unrealistic"... for a source where they tried to recruit Sammy Davis Jr. in an episode.

And, yes, you are welcome to make an episode vid or a side character vid. I love Loveless and his henchpeople. Sammy Davis Jr.'s character was interesting. There are a ton of entertaining female characters from the usual aging dominatrixes of 60s TV to Artie's improbable old "school friend" who is like two decades too young for that.

Velvet Goldmine (1998) [SAFETY] As a teenager, I loved the glittery rockstars and was sad they broke up. As an adult, I have a lot of appreciation for Toni Collette's character and the "sequel". For those of you not familiar, it consists of this twitter exchange:

nataliefisher
Aug 29, 2015
mcgregor_ewan do you think Curt Wild lived happily ever with Arthur after the end scene of VG? No pressure but my happiness depends on it.

Ewan McGregor
mcgregor_ewan
Yes they did. They live in North London. They run a recording studio. Sober. Kids. All good.

If you're up for extreme external source CR, I've always wanted someone to do a vid of that.

I also noticed, last Escapade dance party, that there are barely any extant VG vids online that are to dance music. And most of the vids that are out there are in tiny, low-quality formats that fail to show off the visuals. HOW CAN THIS BE?! Please fix this! With all the gold lamé and feathers you can!

The Pillow Book (1996) [SAFETY] Remember back in the 90s when fandom had its Ewan McGregor phase? Remember that movie where he was naked for half of it, then skinned, and had his organs thrown out with the pig offal? What do you mean 'no'?

When I rewatched this a few years ago, I was struck by how much of an interminable, onanistic art film it really is. At 16, I liked to make all my friends watch it and thought of it as a normal movie. Huh.

I'd love a lighter vid that celebrates all of the nudity and fucking or the female author and her male muses. I'd love a darker vid about her rivalry with the publisher who was blackmailing her father into sex. Hell, I'd love a vid of all of the cool book-making montages. This film is so damn gorgeous.

Tesis | Thesis (1996) [SAFETY] I love Tesis for featuring a female protagonist who's a total pervert. I love how clear the film is that she's a hypocrite and a weirdo, even if she'd like to pretend she's nice and normal. I adore that we only get one cheesecake scene, and it's Chema in the shower. You can totally tell this was filmed by a gay guy.

I'd like a vid that explores female voyeurism, Chema as damsel in distress, and the attraction to violence.

Cruising (1980) [SAFETY] I first saw Cruising a couple of years ago, decades after it came out and was branded as homophobic. I'm on the director's side on this one: I too think the movie was judged unfairly. (Though I also think he was an idiot for thinking there was any chance it wouldn't be back then.)

What fascinates me about Cruising is how the lead is clearly drawn to sex and violence while projecting all over everyone else. I would love a vid that plays with the multiple killers. This is such a meta movie, right down to the girlfriend trying on the outfit at the end. (Karen Allen has commented that she never again agreed to a project where she couldn't see the entire script. Heh.)

Un couteau dans le coeur (2018) [SAFETY] This is the spiritual--even queerer--heir to Cruising. I love its colorful pastiche of gialli and 70s porn. I love how batshit crazy the lead is. I of course love her weird art film porn where she's the killer. I love that that's not where the filmmaker went in the end.

One of the things that interests me most about this one is that the (gay) director chose a female lead--and also that she is apparently inspired by some actual lesbian who produced gay male porn in the 70s. This director constantly plays with the boundaries of identity and queerness in a way that a lot of gay art doesn't.

---

You are welcome to make a vid that makes heavy use of external source and/or that crosses over some of these canons. I prefer it if that kind of vid has some big meta point to make rather than being purely about visual spectacle.

There are some pretty obvious meta places you could go with sex+violence or the role of women in several of these. The giallo roots of Un couteau dans le coeur. Female voyeurs as fangirl. Yadda yadda.

I also love the sort of CR that's just about using footage of an actor from another, similar, role.

I like music with a beat. I've been listening to Mika on constant repeat. I find Bronski Beat underused. But if you wanted to go in a totally different direction and vid Classical, that's fine too.

The only music I really don't like is noodling singer-songwriter stuff with a breathy voice. Country pop with a stronger voice is fine (e.g. If I Die Young by The Band Perry). I like a singer who can really belt it out.

Help me with a research project! I'm looking into the history of the term 'queerbaiting' in its modern usage (TPTB luring us in with subtext and not delivering text).

'Queer-bait' and 'queer bait' were used in the 70s in a 'race-baiting' kind of sense. That's not what I'm looking for.

I've searched tumblr tags that are still searchable, DW and LJ search, google, twitter, etc. What I need now is for people to search their own email or their own blog archives if you've got such a thing: places that are not indexed by google and are not accessible to me. This includes tumblr if it's not something that would show up in the tag (i.e. someone has tagged another person's post this way and/or the person or post would be excluded from search results).

I'm looking for any uses of 'queerbait' or 'bait' in the modern kind of context. Here's the timeline so far:

May 2012 - 'Queerbaiting' is everywhere, probably because of Teen Wolf
March/April 2012 - I can find a couple of uses. They're so casual, it seems like people are already familiar with the term.
January 2, 2012 - The earliest extant use in the tumblr tag (used about Johnlock in the modern way)

I haven't found even a whiff of it in 2010 or 2011 so far. By mid 2012, it was common.

Can anyone find me another example that predates ~March 20, 2012.

( Some examples of metadata )

What's the point of all these examples?

Simply put, straightness is the unmarked default. It's unmarked in the sense that people don't notice it.

It's also unmarked in the sense that people literally don't label it.

When everything is straight, no metadata about straightness is necessary. "Romance" means straight romance. "Science Fiction" means science fiction about straight characters. Art that focuses on romance may need to be distinguished from art that doesn't, but art with incidental straightness is just art. Incidental queerness is inconceivable.

I used to say that AO3 has a lot of slash because other sites were hostile and AO3 was founded by people who like slash who have friends who like slash. I still think that's true, but I would go farther:

AO3's site design where m/m, m/f, f/f, and "gen" are not only equal categories but top-level categories is one that would only have come from people who prefer queer content. It is also a design that will disproportionately subconsciously attract fans of queer content.

AO3's site design implies that "gen" is no more central, default, or accessible than m/m and f/f. It also implies that "gen" means "not het" and that het is a distinct thing that should be marked--either so it can be found or so it can be avoided.

To me, this is so logical that it's hard to even contemplate. This is the fabric of my fandom reality.

On Reddit and places like that, fans complain that AO3 feels off to them. There's too much shipping. There's too much m/m. But I think it's more than the sheer quantity of material they don't like that's throwing them: it's the blatant assumptions in the design about what is the default.

Every time I see one of those tumblr posts about "Why so much slash?" or "AO3 means everyone is a fetishizing yaoi fangirl", I think about this. It's not just that AO3 has more slash than FFN and other places for historical reasons: It's also that metadata that exposes ship type is a direct product of catering to queer content.

Any place where it's easy to answer the question "How much het is there?" is a place full of people who might want to filter it out.

So fandom stats will always show "Too Much Slash! OMG!" because the vast majority of people doing fandom stats are only going to pull from easily-accessible data, and easily accessible data will always be skewed towards non-straight things.

(AO3 seems to have a higher percentage of femslash than FFN does, interestingly, despite the percentage being low both places, though the prevalence of marking background ships on AO3 could be affecting that.)