I love good guys

I recently replaced my TV (luckily, before tariff announcements). My prior TV was a decade and a half old. Its replacement, a Roku-brand TV, is fully 55" corner to corner and still blowing my mind when I rewatch familiar media on it. For example, rewatching first-season Forever Knight on the much bigger screen, I constantly see props, sets, and expressions more clearly than ever before. Mostly, it's just increased clarity/visibility from sheer size and from fiddling for optimal settings to make the old footage look its best on screens it was never meant for (so far, for '90s shows, I recommend "Movie" for DVDs and "Auto-detect" for streaming). But occasionally I see things I genuinely never knew were there.

For example, rewatching "Dark Knight" (German DVD*), I saw for the first time that Nick's TV stand is on a very low, wooden, wheeled platform, a rough hand-truck seemingly left over from when the warehouse was in use as a warehouse. And on Alyce's desk, next to her apple, which I've always seen, is a modest bran muffin that I didn't recall (FK Alyce's snacks contrast with NK Alyce's ice cream and chips; I do prefer NK's Alyce in every way, as I prefer FK's Janette in every way). In the Raven, I saw clearly for the first time the little flashlights the patrons shine on themselves and each other; before, I'd seen only the lights, not the devices. Most arrestingly, I saw, for what felt like the first time, that when Schanke and Nick go up the staircase to stop the crazed shooter in the apartment building in the Chinese neighborhood, and Schanke says, "It's just a little plasma, Knight; don't get all worked up" -- a line I believe is straight from the original Nick Knight script, where this scene happens in a health club and is pretty different -- they are not stepping around only blood on the stairs, but around a young woman's dead body. "Just a little plasma?" I know Schanke means, "Keep moving, Knight; we can't afford to get distracted now [with bonus vampire allusion]," but... perhaps that line should have been rewritten for how the scene was re-staged. Ugh.

Have you had similar experiences with old stories on new devices?

* Ages ago, when some companies maybe didn't realize the full implications of publishing factory reset codes, I unlocked a DVD player to make it region-agnostic. The FK German DVDs have all the visual footage of the initial Canadian airings, which were of course significantly the longest of the many North American cuts over the years -- plus the scenes, mostly just longer establishing shots, that are truly unique to the German cuts -- but very unfortunately the English audio track for those pivotal scenes from the initial Canadian airings is missing from the German DVDs, just as those whole scenes are missing entirely from the North American DVDs and streaming. (My ancient unlocked DVD player needed an adapter to work with the new TV. This is fine.)

How much time passes, in the past of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, between Link being formally appointed Zelda's knight and the day of the Calamity? What does the fandom generally think? What do you think?

(It's difficult to look this up via search, as all the keywords are primarily used for the "higher" timeline of the games, and of course discussion of Age of Calamity's AU differences, and the introduction of the "Champions" Ballad" DLC. This is the only relevant discussion I found.)

My guess right now is that it is likely no more than a year (until Zelda's next birthday), but at the very least three months (given the number and contents of the diary entries and memories). But of the fanfic I've read so far, there's clearly a widespread urge to get at least two and even three years in there. (What I'm wondering is, how much time do I reasonably have to slide in Champion-focused stories? And how young were Zelda and Link when introduced?) I suspect the game designers had one year in mind, but did they embed that intention in canon?

Surely others out there have also had this interpretation, made it their headcanon, and written stories with it. Yet I haven't seen it. I came up with it independently, referenced it in passing in a comment I recently left on a fanfic told from the collective point of view of the people of Kakariko Village, and the author replied that she hadn't thought of that before.

Monarchy is neither inevitable nor required in Hyrule in any age! Let me explain in an essay? :-D

In The Legend of Zelda, the three avatars of the Triforce, the characters who embody wisdom, courage, and power, are customarily shorthanded as the princess, the hero, and the demon king. Now, the representative of courage is always a fighter hero, and the representative of power always commands monsters, but there are 4 games of 20+ in which the representative of wisdom is not a princess: Skyward Sword, The Wind Waker/Phantom Hourglass, and Echoes of Wisdom.

Yes, Zelda is very much a princess in EOW! But she's not only a princess. That's the key to this lock. (We'll get to Tetra, too.)( Read more... )

I was reminded this week that perhaps not everyone knows about the fantastic uncut version of Dead Poets Society (1989) (starring Robin Williams, Robert Sean Leonard, Ethan Hawke, etc.) (directed by Peter Weir; written by Tom Schulman). I feel that everyone should know. This is one of my all-time favorite movies and it is even better with the missing footage. Every moment tells toward the whole and directly plugs into other scenes, answering what otherwise look like holes in the script.

The extended/uncut -- director's cut? -- version aired on US broadcast television exactly once. That's where I saw it. It must have been c. '90-'91? It has never been released on VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, or streaming. Guess where it was released -- seriously, guess! ... Have you guessed? ... Yes, Laserdisc! The one and only authorized home-media release of the uncut version of Dead Poet's Society was on Laserdisc. (If it ever comes out on a medium I can watch, I would like to buy it.)

Today, you can watch the cut scenes on YouTube. Bundled together, they're 14 minutes, 24 seconds. And of course the movie itself (as aired in theaters) is available on Disney+ for free with a subscription, and for a rental or purchase on most (maybe all) the usual streaming platforms: 2 hours, 8 minutes, without the cut scenes.

Why the cuts? Movies rarely ran long in those days, for sure. But while one of the cut scenes indeed seems the least valuable, if something had to be chopped for time, others feel more valuable than some scenes that stayed. The fandom generally believes that those scenes were cut to keep certain subtext from surfacing. I'm personally not necessarily convinced that was the original film editors' motive, even if it could have been a result; I think the general audience would not have seen that subtext, regardless, and time pressures mattered for theatrical releases then. However, the continued choice to not make those scenes available post-Laserdisc has fewer explanations. Either there are rights issues (highly possible), or the director or writer or someone with clout truly doesn't want these scenes in (also possible), or they are indeed, to this day, afraid of subtext surfacing. I may well be naive, but I can't help but feel the first two are more likely. The money they could make would surely have overwhelmed subtext worries by now.

snowflake_challenge '25: A fannish opinion that changed over time

I'll share one opinion and one practice.

Changed opinion: Lacroix. Back when I was a fandom newbie and watching Forever Knight backward -- that is, from S3 in syndication, to Nth-gen S2 VHS tapes generous folks mailed me for the cost of materials and postage, to Nth-gen S1 VHS tapes from different generous folks -- and there were yet episodes that I had not seen, I... founded the Light Cousins and Faithfuls. Sorry! My ill-founded opinion at that time was that the Lacroix character could feasibly and usefully be approached as capable of reform, ideally through his feelings for other characters, especially Fleur and Nick. I was wrong. That's not a useful or supportable approach to the canon story structure or the character's role within it. Of course individual fan writers can and should create such stories as excellent fanfic! But for myself, I reject and disavow that approach. It is not my cup of Ribena. Lacroix is and should be a villain, both a metaphorical representation or mechanism of whatever real-world evil canon is grappling with that week and a practical plot lever to impede or inform Nick's long, hard road toward eventual heroic victory.

Changed practice: Disclaimers. While I always include endnotes on fanworks -- temporarily refraining in anonymous exchanges -- they've shortened greatly over the decades and, in my most recent three works, I've finally found a fully satisfactory substitute for the ancient "Disclaimer" opening. To back up, coming out of paper zine days, it was customary to state that TPTB owned the IP (and no profit was being made, etc.). (Few do that anymore. TPTB know what fanfic is now.) But that's only one of three reasons I've always been such an endnotes fiend. The second, you can guess: academia trained me to cite my sources and to feel anxiety about not doing so accurately and comprehensively. The third ... back in '96 -- two years before Google would be founded, when search was barely a function -- when I had shared all of 2 or 3 short fanfics on FKFic-L, and had given the original FTP Site archivist permission to host them, that was when a stranger who shared my wallet surname -- which was on those posts then because (a) I didn't yet know better and (b) my university, also not yet knowing better, used our wallet names as our email addresses -- searched up those stories and emailed me assuming that I believed in vampires for real and other upsetting things. Long story short, one lesson I took away was to clarify on fanfic that I know the difference between fiction and reality. I've continued all these years, through various boilerplate formulas. My newest, simplest, endnotes opener is: "I wrote this fanfic of [IP] in [Month / season / event]." I'm pleased with this approach. We'll see how it wears.