Fannish options & enthusiasms | March 2025

[brightknightie]

Here are some recent fannish things I've happened to see and would like to share!

Spotlight: Captain America: Brave New World
I saw Captain America: Brave New World in a theater on opening night, and...
While the acting is great, the special effects seamless, and it's overall a fine popcorn flick for kids and non-fans... I personally felt disappointed. The story, in my opinion, is smudged all over with the painfully obvious fingerprints of the known multiple rewrites and assumed executive notes. For the first third, I kept feeling, over and over, that it was now! now! on the verge of getting where I wanted it to go; by the second half, I realized it never would. I wanted theme and character! I love Sam as Cap! Yet while the pieces were there, they'd been pulled apart and jumbled around so many times that they no longer connected.

All the MCU "world level" projects for some time have suffered from real-world events mirroring their plots and inflicting hasty post-production rewrites. This one came through much better than the story mess that was the re-shot Secret Invasion (after 2/24/22), but not as well as the revised story of Falcon and the Winter Soldier (after March '20), in my opinion.

There are literally toys in Happy Meals of characters who don't appear in the movie. So we know how late they were re-re-inventing this story. I wonder what tale they intended this movie to tell before 10/07/23, and also between then and 11/05/24.

If real life is going to keep imitating world-level MCU projects... maybe we should skip Thunderbolts and go directly to the parallel-reality utopia of Fantastic Four: First Steps as soon as possible? Just a thought.

Ficathons, fests & communities

• Create & engage
  • fkficfest, the annual FK ficathon, has prompt nominations 3/08-3/14, with voting 3/15-3/21.
  • marchmetamatterschallenge is an annual March-long project to preserve fannish non-fiction of all kinds (not just essays).
  • womansplace is a March-long call for fanwork meta and recommendations celebrating characters who identify as or align with women.
  • bethefirst, the annual challenge to write the first fanfiction on the AO3 for a fandom, has no sign-up deadline this year. Stories come due 4/20.
  • hurtcomfortex, the annual exchange for hurt/comfort stories, has sign-ups 3/01-3/16.
  • unsent_letters_exchange, the epistolary fanfic exchange, has sign-ups through 3/08.
  • trope_of_the_month's March theme is [not yet posted].
  • allbingo's March theme is "Tolkien."
  • pinchhits is a forum for pinch-hits in fannish exchanges. For example, fffx is still seeking a pinch hitter.
  • whenisitdue lists many more events than I note here!
• Enjoy & share
  • fancake (themed fanfic recs); March theme: "non-sexual intimacy"
  • gensplosion (gen fanfic recs)
  • het_reccers (m/f fanfic recs)
  • fanart_recs (fanart recs)
  • recthething (fanwork recs)

Sidelight: Pokémon GO's rumored sale
I still play rather a lot of Pokémon GO. PvP has been my niche; I ran local meet-ups for Silph Road tournaments before Niantic started Go Battle League and the pandemic came. That said, I don't know whether or not I will stop playing if Niantic succeeds in selling its games division, as is currently rumored, to a subsidiary of a company known for aggressive micro-transactions and funded by Saudi Arabia's government. I am thinking about it. If this potential sale is news to you and you play, check out this concise, pointed article from The Verge.

(FYI, we can move our GO Pokémon into Pokémon Home, owned by The Pokémon Company, not Niantic, if we want to "take them with us" for future use in other Pokémon games while leaving GO.)

Comments

[senmut]

I left Pokemon Go when it turned out they sold the virtual mapping we had done to military use.

[brightknightie]

May I ask, do you happen to remember -- in general; I'm not asking for a URL -- where you learned that information? I never did learn what they were going to do with the scans, so I never did any of the scanning tasks, pending learning that.

(Of course I did know that they were selling the foot-traffic data. I believe that the info from their first game, Ingress, was an original basis of walking paths in Google Maps.)

[senmut]

Before the announcement of selling their game division, there were various sites indicating Niantic had sold the geo-data to a military. I saw it on both bsky and tumblr, and it looked legitimate enough that I decided I didn't want to be complicit.

The current sale news, however, is making it very hard to back-search the older information. Which, I admit, could have been speculative, but at the time, it looked real enough.

[havocthecat]

Fuck. It is news to me. Thank you. I might just have to take my many, many Pokemon with me into Home if that's the case. Once I figure out how.

from GO to Home

[brightknightie]

FWIW, in case you, or me, or anyone else reading this later want handy links for how to transfer to Pokémon Home from Pokémon GO:

• The Pokémon Company's help article


• Niantic's help article


I did a few transfers back when that was the way to get Meltan boxes, but it's been a very long time, and I was transferring random Pokémon that I would otherwise have sent to the Professor, not those that I have some emotional attachment to.

(IIRC, all IVs re-roll on transfer, if only because the mainline games have a different IV system than GO. Not all GO Pokémon, at this time, can be moved from Home to existing mainline games, though they can all move from GO to Home, and the new battle game just announced this week does specifically advertise itself as receiving from GO. Finally, there is no reverse -- it's a one-way trip out of GO into the mainline ecosystem, whether through Home or through the Let's Go games.)