brightknightie | '22 Snowflake Challenge #1: Fandoms

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'22 Snowflake Challenge #1: Fandoms

> "In your own space, update your fandom information!"

I choose to take this prompt as an invitation to chatter at great length about miscellaneous things I like. :-)

As you're here, you likely already know that the fandoms I most actively write, request, and interact with are Forever Knight (1992-1996), Highlander (1992-1998), Dungeons & Dragons (1983-1985) (the cartoon), Battlestar Galactica (1978-1979) (the original), and (hope springs eternal) Young Blades (2005). You probably also know that I fell hard for Pokemon GO and wandered out from it into the wide (oh! so wide) Pokemon universe.

Beyond those dearest fandoms, I don't much write or read fanfic for other things that I watch and read, and so I don't often mention those other things here. They do exist...

Of TV shows currently still in production, I'm following The Equalizer on CBS, everything Marvel on Disney+, and most (most) things Masterpiece on PBS. (I'm especially looking forward to the return of Vienna Blood next weekend, and then Endeavour and Miss Scarlet and "The Duke" later this year.) I keep meaning to try Superman and Lois on the CW. I haven't yet returned to Star Trek: Discovery after its second season; I'm greatly looking forward to more Star Trek: Picard, though. I fell off Doctor Who during the Twelfth Doctor (not his fault; it was The Impossible Girl Who Would Not Leave), but keep meaning to pick up again somehow (I loved the 1st-7th Doctors in reruns on PBS; pity that I let myself fall away).

I don't have Netflix, HBO Max, AppleTV, or Hulu. So. Some stuff I'd really like to see, but I don't want to add a whole extra streaming subscription service. Of course, that was my position on Disney+ right up until WandaVision premiered, since when it has been, "Take my money!"

Of TV shows out of production, like almost all of us, I'm sure, I invested some serious love into Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel the Series in my time, though "my time" was late to the party, discovering their early seasons in syndicated reruns (back when syndicated reruns were a thing) while they were grinding out their later seasons with everyone else; I caught up just in time for the decline and fall. DS9 is still my personal favorite Trek, though TNG and TOS are easier for rewatching. The original CBS Beauty and the Beast is eternally a treasure. Forever was truly outstanding and should have run for years. Quantum Leap. Moonlighting. Doctor Quinn: Medicine Woman. Ballykissangel. Monarch of the Glen.

Thundaar the Barbarian. Darkwing Duck!

Robotech. Captain Harlock. Sailor Moon. Rurouni Kenshin! (Yes, that's right, I did say Robotech. Purists are welcome to their Japanese originals! But I love the American pastiche that meant a lot to me when I needed it to.)

Zorro, in all media, all generations, all productions. Ditto The Scarlet Pimpernel. Ditto, though with some caveats, The Three Musketeers.

Hanna-Barbara holiday specials.

I'm not kidding when I offer "most long-nineteenth-century" English-language literature for crossovers in fests, though "most" is, yes, overambitious, and you can totally trip me up. But! Golden age of the novel. My corner of academia (though I didn't stay in academia). Best books read in '21? Both by Wilkie Collins (how did I read only his short stories this long? never mind, such delight!).

Some of you know that I am a life-long comic book fan, and irrevocably a Marvel girl going back to the summer that Marvel ran Marvel Saga ("Continuity R Us") directly opposite DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths ("Nothing You Think You Know Is Safe"). Talk about counter-programming. Pre-adolescent me learned where her valuable quarters seemed safer. Even well before that, the Scarlet Witch had been my favorite superhero since I first read Marvel Team-up Annual #5. (Oh, yes, the scene when she tells Vision that it's sweet that he wants to help, but this is a magic-y thing, so he should just go back to the theater and enjoy the rest of the movie they were watching while she saves the world; still, just in case, if she's not back by morning, do grab the other Avengers and come running. ♥) Also Shadowcat, Magik, Mirage, Firestar, Captain America, and Doctor Strange (Wanda often guest-stars in Strange's books, if you didn't know). I also have dearly, dearly, original-Starblaze-editions-on-my-shelf loved Elfquest in my time, but that time is not right now.

MCU-wise, of course I love it in general and many things in particular! My opinions seem not to match prevailing tastes, which is fine. Truly! It just makes me want to not talk about some stuff in public. Some of us have been devastated by John Byrnes's stint on the West Coast Avengers since the '80s, and we must deal as we can. What a horrible mess he made, all because he didn't understand the metaphor... I was cowering, waiting for WandaVision to smite me with the burden of what Byrne did, and then it didn't, it evaded his mistakes so beautifully, moving from Englehart around Byrne as if it did understand, and I was so grateful... and now we're heading into Multiverse of Madness and I don't even know whether to dare hope we can dodge again... This is perhaps what happens when you love a superheroine long enough; you end up in constant fear of fridging (psychological in Marvel, physical in DC). Or maybe it's only me.

I was very wary of Loki's Sylvie at first in part because I am old-school and don't like that Amora is gone, and in part because we didn't know where her story was going. But now I love her. And I am nursing a theory that Sylvie Was Right. We shall see.

I don't read much MU or MCU fanfic. I suppose it's because I'm nowhere near finishing reading all the canon...? That would also explain why I don't read much Trek fanfic.

My official favorite movies are Dead Poets Society, The Muppet Movie, Miracle on 34th Street (the original), While You Were Sleeping, Beauty and the Beast (animated!), and Star Wars (the original). What I usually break out to watch when I'm sick or terribly sad, though, are the AMC Pride & Prejudice mini-series or Amazing Grace (2006 William Wilberforce biopic).

Calvin & Hobbes.

The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet & series. Finn Family Moomintroll & series. Alanna: The First Adventure & series.

While of course I enjoy Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga very, very, very much -- Memory is my favorite! -- I actually enjoy her The World Of The Five Gods even more, in some ways that particularly click for me. I reread all of the Penric & Desdemona stories last year. Also The Hallowed Hunt.

Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe stories. Louise Penny's Armand Gamache stories.

And many more. :-)

How about you? Do you enjoy any of these?

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Yes, Forever should have lasted Forever. I read a good fic for it recently, though couldn't say more than that, alas, as I'm a bit scattered at present.

Which Collins? I can't imagine starting with his short stories, but (almost) any Collins is good Collins.

In '21, I read both The Moonstone and The Woman in White for the first time. Both delighted me no end. I'll surely read them both again someday.

Before, well, I'd first encountered Collins via a short story in a class, and then kept bumping into short stories in anthologies over the years, and, for whatever reason, probably the little biographical info I'd picked up (and the opinions that rode with it?), I just never tried his novels.

Now, the challenge is picking the next novel to read, and The Internet is being discouraging about all Collins's other novels. You know better than The Internet! Which would you recommend?

I love learning all this about you! You have such great and varied interests!

Thank you! :-)

Ah, so when Forever Knight was airing, I was but a wee teen... =P
I think I would have loved that show if it had ever aired over here. I mean, I would have taped it (have my grandma tape it cause we didn't actually have a videorecorder) or stayed home for it if I could.

My mom watched Doctor Quinn: Medicine Woman and we followed along. We were raised on limited TV-time so we had to be creative sometimes to get more time alotted.

Buffy and Angel both -- our best friends are also Buffy and Angel fans so this one time we actually played a scene from one of the Angel episodes for fun. Everyone had their part to play. I was Angel because I happened to have a black jacket like he had, and I still remember my line too: "How about you both bite me."

Watched Zorro with my limited TV-time and then proceeded to reenact the heroic fighting scenes outside. =D

Thank you for sharing that we have these story references at least somewhat in common! Fun!

We may share that Zorro experience a bit. When I was about 7, my family got cable, and the Disney Channel was showing Disney's vintage black-and-white Zorro series. I "spent" all my allotted TV time on its episodes in those days. :-)

We actually have a lot of overlap in fandoms enjoyed, of these listed! Something for me to remember in the future, for my not so nefarious purpose of returning joy to other creators.

I've observed a little of that overlap, from time to time. :-)

That's a very kind intention; it's very good of you to think of it, all around!

I actually did not know you were involved in some of our shared interests, particularly the old-school Marvel comics one! *fistbump of solidarity* I fell in love with Marvel comics in the mid-80s, long before it was cool. The other one that really jumped out at me is Robotech and Captain Harlock; man, that takes me back. I was going to ask how you found them, but then I realized that if you were still in Alaska at the time - I'm not sure how the timing works out for that - there is a possibility that you discovered them the same way I did, on the long-vanished Anchorage UHF cartoon channel from the 80s.

Yay, loving Marvel before Marvel was cool! :-D

And yes, it's highly likely that we watched the same '80s cartoon television! :-D

My family reluctantly pulled up stakes at the end of the '80s. I don't know if you were positioned to observe or remember, but there was a terrible recession in our boom/bust state economy at that time. In my Anchorage suburban neighborhood, it seemed like half of all the houses stood empty, and I remember the grown-ups saying that folks had defaulted on their mortgages and fled to the Lower 48 because there were no jobs and no money. In our case, in addition, the city wanted to Eminent Domain our house to widen a road, and after fighting for a few years, my dad sold our house to the city (I understand that they never widened the road per the original plan, and that our house stands To This Day).

As I remember it, while Harlock came into my life with that UHF channel, Robotech actually preceded it on local TV by a couple of years. I discovered Robotech in an unstable Saturday-afternoon timeslot on one of the regular VHF channels and fell utterly in love with its continuity (not yet knowing the term "continuity") and had to chase it around timeslots as they showed movies and other things (thus learning how to read the weekly TV schedule booklet from the Sunday newspaper). Then they moved it to Sunday mornings at, as I recall, 5am! I got permission to get up that early and watch it if I kept the TV volume So Very Low that no one else in the house would hear. I had a precious, precious notebook where I recorded the title and number of each episode for references, and I had some audio cassettes on which I recorded full episodes (and also individual Minmei and Lancer songs, of course).

Then the UHF channel came along with things like the Robotech: The Sentinels movie. And Harlock.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to chatter about this, and thank you very much for sharing that we have this in common! That's delightful!

I subscribed to you for the Forever Knight and Highlander stuff, but I also like old-school anime and Bujold's stuff! I'm more familiar with the Vorkosigan books, but I have read the first few books in the Five Gods' series--I haven't caught up with Penric, though, and I haven't been up-to-date with either series in a long time. I should dig out my books and do a reread.

Bujold is always highly readable!

FWIW ... please forgive the ramble, if you're not in the mood! :-) ... Bujold pivoted a bit from the first three novels (especially the first two) in the World Of The Five Gods when she invented Penric's branch. Not only is his niche hundreds of years before the first two novels and hundreds of years after the third, she seems to have actively wanted a protagonist she could deploy repeatedly, yet in complete-unto-themselves stories of varied lengths (so far: many short stories, several novellas, one full novel), which readers could enjoy without knowing anything of the other stories. Penric, like later Miles, becomes someone whom his authorities can send willy-nilly into weird and challenging situations to sort them out. But where Miles usually faces political and military situations, Penric faces anything that can go wrong -- including social, health, and metaphysical questions that never found a place in the Vorkosigan books.

Huh, that's good to know! I haven't had a chance to really check them out, thanks for the head's up!

And yes, Bujold is eminently readable and re-readable! I should dig out my Vorkosigan books, I've been meaning to do a crossover with them eventually....

Thank you for posting this! It was an interesting read.

Forever Knight was the first fandom I actively participated in, and the first one I wrote for, although I didn't get involved until I was in university, a couple of years after it finished airing.

I also have fond memories of Ruroni Kenshin from that era. It was a staple of my university's anime club showings, and my favourite of the shows we watched.

Forever absolutely should have run longer.

I've really only read Bujold's Vorkosigan books. I should check out some of her other works.

I'm glad and grateful to get to share Forever Knight with you!

I think I had to have known that you were familiar with Rurouni Kenshin, because you recommended the "Swordsman" crossover with HL, but I actually hadn't processed that it ranked among your favorites in any genre -- I may have thought you ran across the story for other reasons! I read all the RK manga (translated) and watched all the animae (subtitled). Such a fantastic fusion of historical fiction, genre adventure, and the pervasive social/emotional strains of a society coming out of such a warring period.

Thinking about it makes me want to revisit it, wondering, sadly, whether those themes of strain are more relevant to our society today, though we are now in the middle, not come out the other side...

Edited (Bad HTML tag! Sorry!) 2022-01-08 20:25 (UTC)

Regarding Bujold's non-Vorkosigan works:

I hugely enjoy her "The World Of The Five Gods" fantasies. They span hundreds of years, from pseudo-medieval to pseudo-renaissance, and from pseudo-Italy to pseudo-India to pseudo-Scotland, with pseudo-Arabia and pseudo-Nordics on the side. I wish it were practical to offer to loan them to you. :-) If you'd like to start them, and would like, I can chatter at you about in which order you might best like to read them. Some things have changed in her approach to this universe since the first-published novel, which was quite some time ago now.

Her standalone The Spirit Ring was her first published novel, I believe. I own a hardback and have read it three times, though not recently. Renaissance-y.
Sci-Fi/Fantasy fandom as a whole seems to have pronounced a decided thumbs-down on her "Sharing Knife" fantasy-romances (mainly I understand because of issues with homosexuality in an invented culture), but I understand that it went over better with some romance audiences? Anyway, I read the first one when it first came out and felt great anticipation of where the stories might go... and they never went anywhere, it seemed to me, never filled in the social backstory or opened a future. They're the only Bujold books I've never re-read and which I didn't keep after buying the first two (and read the second two from the library only). They're sort of post-apocalypse Old West.

Vienna Blood: I saw the first two episodes of the first season and actually liked it. But I somehow didn't catch the third episode and missed everything else from then on. Still I find it worthy to catch up with should it be rerun.

Superman and Lois: I liked the premise, although at some point it turned too weird for my taste. I was never a fan of parallel universes, so that kind of dulled the show for me. Still, looking forward to season 2.

Star Trek: Discovery: When it started I was very enthusiastic because of Jason Isaac whom I enjoy seeing. But I never connected with the rest of the show and gave up after 2 or 3 episodes.

Star Trek: Picard: Yes, I definitely look forward to season 2, although I didn't like how season 1 ended.

Forever: I agree! Pity they got only 1 season. How lucky we are that we got 3 of FK!!!

Zorro: I loved the Duncan Regehr series and also Guy Williams. And Tyrone Power, of course.

I wish you very good luck catching up on Vienna Blood if the opportunity comes! I enjoyed the history and mystery of the first season very much. The second season will start here tomorrow night.

The Vienna Blood seasons have been surprisingly short to me. Instead of 13-22 episodes like most US seasons, or 6-10 like most UK seasons, each season so far is merely 3 episodes. Even though the episodes are 90 minutes long, and thus 1.5 times the typical drama episode, it feels like ... a light serving. :-)

It's similar to Sherlock, which also had three 90-minute episodes per season.

The second Vienna Blood season aired here already in October. I'll have to check if it's still available for streaming.

A puzzling thing about Zorro is that while so many movies, television series, comic books, and other adaptations are easily available, the original (antique) short stories are hard to find. I have an ebook that collects many of them, but I've so far been unable to find a hardback collection. It greatly surprised me that no publisher has released one.

Perhaps the next time a movie comes!

I always thought the book by Johnston McCully was the original. Ist there earlier material?

Yes, Johnston McCully invented Zorro; that's correct!

I should not have used the word "antique." Sorry. I meant only "early twentieth century" and "not adapted."

McCully wrote many stories of Zorro, not only the novel The Curse of Capistrano (1919), which is the basis for most Zorro adaptations.

Those other stories are increasingly hard to find today.

In addition to the novel, he wrote 3 novellas -- The Further Adventures of Zorro (1922), Zorro Rides Again (1931), and The Sign of Zorro (1941) -- and 55 (!!!) assorted Zorro short stories published throughout that era (as well as other stories set in that same Old California setting but which did not star Zorro). These stories were published in cheap "pulp" magazines, and -- surprisingly to me -- not collected into books.

Interesting! I remember the old black and white 6-part series "Zorro rides again" which I also have on DVD.

We share a fandom in Forever Knight, as you know. And Highlander, which you might not know.

My original, deepest, and most long-cherished fandom was Star Trek. However, I haven’t watched anything after the closing of Voyager, Enterprise, and DS-9.

I loved Babylon 5 and will re-watch the DVD’s while folding laundry.

And of course there’s Doctor Who, which I’ve followed since Tom Baker (MY Doctor!) in the original series. My favorite companion, even considering the newer series, is Adric, who no one remembers. I need to catch up on the latest Doctor, though. I like her, but not the writing or the stories so much that I’ve seen so far. Same problem with most of the Peter Capaldi series.

You introduced me to Forever (thanks!), which should have had more seasons, as everyone here agrees! And I think you introduced me to Nero Wolfe as well, but I’m not sure of the recollection.

Calvin & Hobbes! And also for me, the Far Side. And Dilbert.

I’m actually surprised we don’t share more interests. My others include Sherlock (including the original Sherlock Holmes stories), Criminal Minds, the Witcher, Stranger Things (until it got cringy adolescent), Supernatural (the first 8 seasons), and Kindred: the Embraced. Also the Queen’s Gambit.

Lord of the Rings, both books and movies. Likewise, the Hobbit.

Ian Fleming’s James Bond books and short stories. And all of the movies.

Dune. The first book only, and the most recent movie.

Monty Python.

C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series.

Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. And all 3 movies.

The Die Hard series of movies. Yes, it’s a Christmas movie!

Now that I think about it, there are more book series and authors that I follow passionately than movies or TV series, though they frequently overlap. I am a fan of Stephen King’s early writings, an intermittent fan of Dean Koontz, and a passionate fan of Umberto Eco, P. D. James and O. Henry.

I’m always in the market for a new book or author to discover. All recommendations welcome!

Edited 2022-01-10 22:33 (UTC)

Thank you for sharing!

My best friend loves Adric; she will be delighted to hear that someone else out there does, too! I must admit that I barely remember him. The Seventh Doctor was my Doctor, until the Eleventh came along and, to my astonishment -- "Who is this child playing the Doctor?" -- budged him down to second place.

I've read Tolkien and Lewis, of course! But I'm not a fan, as such, merely a respectful reader.

My brother and father love Bond in all his incarnations. I remember the whole family watching the movies in summertimes when TBS showed them wall to wall for weeks.

You should talk to Malinaldarose about your shared fondness for action movies like Die Hard! I know that the original Die Hard is a very good and sophisticated tale under the violence, with subtle acting and directing, and I admire that very much, yet the genre in general isn't for me, personally.

Skieswideopen loves Criminal Minds, if I remember correctly!

I've been repeatedly told to try Babylon 5. One of these days! When it was first airing, it was scheduled opposite Deep Space 9 in my area, so that first premiere night when I had to choose, I chose DS9, and so it was for all the years after.

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'22 Snowflake Challenge #1: Fandoms

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Bujold's non-Vorkosigan works

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