I love good guys

Today, Vulture.com posted: "Forever Knight Is the Best Vampire Cop Show Ever Made (in Canada)" by Naomi Skwarna.

You may enjoy reading it! She knows what she's talking about, says it sassily, and more than merely name-checks Ger and Parriot. A few excerpts:

"...a certain candlelit, Vaseline-y haze that elicited the feeling, if not the reality, of a saxophone solo — a soft-goth Canadiana aesthetic..."

"...people are constantly getting murdered during the show’s three seasons, often in the cold open — it’s hard to tell if Nick’s vampire-cop tactics are affecting the crime rate at all. Mostly, he tools around Toronto in his teal Caddy on his way to question some babe of interest. And you know what? It’s great. Forever Knight makes a meal of the horny gaze, abundantly populating scenes with smoldering glances, billowing windbreakers, rose petals, and close-ups of bra straps."

"...one may wonder, Why would a French vampire move to Toronto? Did he go to Toronto Police College? There are no clear answers. As in most Canadian shows, Canada simply happens, even to vampire cops."

"As campy as it is, the series is frequently touching, even adventurous..."

This past weekend, I read an essay in the Washington Post that left me with a case of "TV lied to me!" Specifically, Forever Knight, and just about every other police procedural told from the primary perspective of the police officers. (A few procedurals told from the primary perspective of the medical examiners have managed to get this right.) A certain genre storytelling shorthand is flat wrong, and ... we should be able to get some fanfic stories out of that discrepancy, I imagine?

This fannish insight is not the primary point of the essay: "Study finds cognitive bias in how medical examiners evaluate child deaths" by Radley Balko (Feb. 20, 2021 at 8:33 a.m. PST).

Rather, what leaped up and grabbed me with its real-world obviousness, at odds with so many scenes from so many procedurals, is:

...to the extent possible, medical examiners should be given only medically relevant information. Often this isn’t the case, because in much of the country, medical examiners are considered part of the prosecution’s team, not independent analysts. So they’re privy to information that can corrupt their analysis. “I’ve seen cases where a detective was present during the autopsy itself,” Dror says. “There is no acceptable reason for that.” To that end, we could reduce cognitive bias by ensuring that medical examiners’ offices are independent of police and prosecutors, and that law enforcement officials don’t have a say in an analyst’s raises, promotions or performance reviews. That the very notion of a state ME testifying for the defense seems to offend some prosecutors demonstrates that in many jurisdictions, an ME isn’t expected to be independent. [emphasis mine]

( Read more... )

No mainstream media content specifically relevant to my own dearest fandoms again this week, but I did bump into two essays that I thought could be of general interest fandom-wide:

• "Can ‘Harry Potter’ Change the World?" by Hanna Kozlowska (The New York Times; September 17, 2014)
  Kozlowska discusses studies in which fiction readers, once exposed to story passages in which the protagonists are treated badly for belonging to a fictional minority group, are later less likely to express hostility toward real minority groups. The experiments in question all used passages from Rowling's novels, but I would presume that the effect, if real, would be easily duplicated with e.g. well-chosen Uncanny X-Men selections and so on. Stories matter! (You and I knew that, even if they didn't.)


• "The Last Amazon: Wonder Woman Returns" by Jill Lepore (The New Yorker; September 22, 2014)
  Lepore recounts the history of the character as a media property (from her 1941 premiere to the upcoming Dawn of Justice* movie) through the biographies of the people who originally created the Wonder Woman character, the history of the United States and the history of feminism. Even though I knew the bones of Wonder Woman's creation by William Moulton Marston and have read excerpts from her early years, I was still unaware just how deeply, profoundly, blatantly, daringly — and yes, even pow!bam! ludicrously — feminist those early stories were. I learned a lot. Take a look!
  * per a tweet quoted in the article: aka “BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN WITH ALSO SOME WONDER WOMAN IN THERE SO SIT DOWN LADIES WE’RE TREATING YOU FINE: THE MOVIE.”"

We're 5 stories into this year's fkficfest/fkficfest/FKFicFest, with 4 to go!

From the bottom of my heart, I thank first our 9 writers, and then all the wonderful readers who found time to dive into an FK story during this busy work-week. Some people plan to dig into the ficathon over the weekend. I wish them very happy reading! The stories to date have collectively referenced (at least!) every one of the opening-credits cast of characters, and they cross several genres and span all the ratings.

For when you're happily caught up on the fest stories, here are 3 items that happened to cross my radar this week, all of which struck me as FK-related:

• A book about Natalie. I read an engaging, intriguing excerpt on Slate from the new memoir Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner by Judy Melinek, MD, and immediately added the book to my Amazon cart, visions of better-informed Natalie fanfic dancing in my head.


• An analysis about Nick. Also on Slate, I read a Quora answer: "Could Modern Troops Defeat Medieval Knights in Hand-to-Hand Combat?" by Jon Davis, Marine sergeant, Iraq vet, weapons instructor. If I may spoil the ending, he concludes that, all else being equal, a medieval knight would surely defeat a modern Marine in solo hand-to-hand combat; his reasoning covers both culture and technology.


• An essay about all of us. Over in the NYT, columnist Timothy Egan wrote a reflection on Robin Williams's death, and concluded: "My plea here is for people to give the needed space to artists and performers to fail every now and then, and to understand how exposed someone feels when trying something new." That's a profound consideration for everyone, and I'm trying to take it to heart and become better, myself. With my mind full of FKFicFest this week, though, I couldn't help also hearing it specifically in terms of this year's players; with only 9 writers and all FK's diverse perspectives, some of the matches invited bold moves outside of comfort zones. That's hard! And everyone rose to the occasion! There's a lot of "trying something new" in this year's game. I hope we can give each author just the right space.