sunshine_revival '25 Challenge #2: "Write about anything you feel sentimental about..."

One thing I'm perpetually sentimental about is the cartoon Dungeons & Dragons (1983-1985; three seasons, the last one shorter). It was on the air before and after a significant event in my life, making a kind of continuous bridge through that, though of course I didn't know at the time that this was part of it imprinting itself on my imagination, as much as its superior writing (once you get past the first episodes that go out of their way to explain themselves to TPTB), voice acting (Diana's actress won an Emmy for her role, and of course Eric's actor is renowned), storytelling invitation to imagine yourself right into the scenario, and its sneaky continuity and deep lore in the days before continuity was permitted or lore wanted. And these were the days of bargaining with one's siblings over which Saturday morning cartoon would be viewed when on the one TV in the house, negotiating away blocks of the day to ensure you got the one half-hour that mattered.

Of course while the show was a huge success in the ratings, TPTB never stopped being nervous about it, in that age of moral panic about supposed cults and such supposedly using D&D to recruit/hurt kids, which looks like a pretty quaint worry now, but was indeed quite real (that is, not a real threat, just a real moral panic). That affected the show in many ways, most sad, but one incredibly good. TPTB lived in such fear of the Parents Television Council about this specific show that they mandated that our heroes must never use violence or offensive weapons. What a beautiful challenge to put in front of the writers! Surrounded by shows firing assorted colored lasers from guns, our heroes had to use their brains and empathy to solve puzzles and reconcile misunderstandings! And their very personally symbolic totemic enchanted weapons were highly defensive and evasive -- no swords in our heroes' hands! -- with even Hank's energy bow and Bobby's club aimed always at inanimate obstacles, never at people. (That was one of the mistakes the recent revival comics unfortunately made. They ditched that key constraint and gave Hank and Eric swords, showing they did not really understand.)

The recent D&D Honor Among Thieves movie (which was a good movie and deserved more audience attention) made use of widespread nostalgia for this show with a few background cameo tributes, which led some toys to finally come into existence for the show as cross-marketing with the movie, so many decades after we original viewers would have played with them. Though I'm not a collector, I snapped up the action figures and they bring me delight; the Diana figure is standing at the corner of my monitor right now, and the others are on a shelf I cleared for just them, even buying clear acrylic risers to display them better.

You can find the show on DVD (I have the "red box" version from the 25th anniversary). It ran around the clock on Twitch for an event leading up to the movie's premiere. I believe that it's not officially anywhere streaming now [Correction: It's on Amazon's "live" Freevee "Dungeons & Dragons Adventures" channel in the US! See comments!], probably because of complex rights issues (Marvel and Sunbow made the '80s cartoon; Hasbro now owns D&D; Paramount made the D&D movie; Disney now owns Marvel; etc.). Unofficially, it's on YouTube in both English and Portuguese, and many of the scripts are available online, most of them personally posted by the show's most prolific and daring writer, Michael Reaves, who died in '23, and loved the show as much as we do.

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.

A few times a year, I check in on Dungeons & Dragons (Cartoon) fanfic on the AO3, hoping to find a new story to enjoy in this dear fandom that is so small at this end of history. I almost always find something added. Yet I much more rarely find something I, personally, want to dip into, and I've been pondering how much of that is for a curious fandom-specific reason and not just my own idiosyncratic pickiness.

I find that in the modest haul of new D&DC fanfic each year, there's consistently what feels to me like a disproportionate need for pre-screening for the fandom itself.

That is, there are frequently authors who seem to accidentally misapply this fandom tag altogether; I hypothesize that they're unaware of the 1983-85 cartoon and think they're tagging something else; perhaps the years should be added into the canonical fandom tag. More authors apply it to documentation for their D&D campaigns or fic about their original D&D characters, in which they used one or more of the cartoon's cast as NPCs, or used a concept or location from the show, or something like that. And many wholly legitimately include this fandom's tag on massive multi-fandom crossover sagas in which one or more of this cast cameos briefly at some point in a mega-long pan-universes romp starring characters from fandoms I'm unfamiliar with.

There are so few total "D&DC only"/"pure D&DC" stories each year that they often seem, to me, outnumbered by these more marginal appearances within the fandom tag. As in every fandom, of course, ratings, content, genres, completion/WIP, writing skill, etc. all thin the herd for picking what to read! Yet I'm not personally familiar with any other fandoms that inhabit what feels like such a comparatively small percentage of the content under their own fandom tags.

No, on reflection, that last is not true. I do know one fandom even more poorly represented within its own tag, though it is crowded out entirely by one rival. The tag for Daniel Deronda by George Eliot (1876) is more than 2:1 for the TV show Hannibal versus the actual classic Victorian novel or even the BBC TV series (2002) based on the novel. With ten works total, the math is easy. Perhaps that is a concentrated version of the same phenomenon, rather than a different one.

snowflake_challenge '25 #1: Update your fandom information.

I updated my profiles not too long ago, just in June, when I refurbished my journal's banner and default icon to feature Bradamante at dawn instead of Toronto at night. But there's always room for a polish! My DW profile remains a bit longer than my AO3 profile, because of the AO3's prudent word-count limit and my tendency to blither. ;-)

( Copy/pasted text of my DW profile bio )

( Copy/pasted list of interests from my DW profile )

Endgame story spoilers for The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom:

( A gentle nudge observation about an accurate observation that folks are making that I think doesn't go quite as far as it should )

In the climactic final battle of Twilight Princess, when Midna throws herself -- with the full power of the fused shadow -- into battle against Ganondorf, and clearly believes she's sacrificing her life to save Link and Zelda (and, of course, the people of both realms), she pointedly says "Goodbye" to Link, just before she warps him and Zelda away to Hyrule Field.

But at the end of the game, the very end-credits end, when Midna is in the slow-moving act of destroying the Mirror of Twilight, the one and only connection between her world and theirs -- by casting her brightly shining crystal tear to shatter the mirror after she steps through the portal -- she instead, carefully, after a few broken false starts, says "See you later" to Link.

I like to imagine that this is one more character-growth moment for Midna, the character who by far grows the most throughout this story. I like to think that it signals one more development for her from doing it all herself, as again in that battle a few days before the end-credits scene, through the interventions of the Light Spirits after, to Zelda's ringing articulation of Zelda's own understanding -- that the goddess had directly intervened to preserve the mirror to ensure the three of them met -- such that Midna no longer feels it is all on her own shoulders, and no longer shrugs off, defies, underestimates, or -- most touchingly -- feels personally abandoned by her own or Hyrule's divinities (which I'm pretty sure she did before, cf. Zelda's remark about what Midna has suffered). Nothing will be impossible, Midna may be admitting, no hope is beyond reason, by saying "See you later" rather than "Goodbye."

But she still has to shatter the mirror. She cannot allow it to be misused again from either side. No matter what it costs her, personally.

Some corners of the fandom sometimes speculate that Midna killed herself in destroying the mirror. If one wants to make a story where that was an unintended consequence, more power to storytelling! But on purpose? No way. If that, she would have said "Goodbye" again. And she didn't.