Social trends aren't created by fandom, though, always look for the marketer behind the curtain

Honestly, I might just end up blaming Marvel for this, too.

I was already a bit confused as to where the idea came from that Star Wars movies aren't self-contained narratives that introduce and then deal with primarily the elements in their own movies, because every one of them needs to be viewable without having seen any of the other ones, y'know? That was the way of The Franchise Movie. If you absolutely had to know something from another movie, the film would literally flash back into it.

But then Marvel came along, and now everything is shared continuity, every throwaway line might be explaining or referencing another movie, and so the expectation is that nothing is thrown away, anymore, and everything builds on itself.

And that wasn't ultimately even true for fucking Marvel itself. I enjoyed the way Infinity War brought everything together, pulled elements from every movie leading up to it, but then Endgame didn't actually do anything with those elements other than... kinda just. Do a victory lap around the fact that they were now the most dominant form of cultural product in the world. I found that so gauche I've yet to even watch Endgame.

This is one of the places where I really got the criticisms towards TLJ -- because it wasn't a self-contained narrative that could be understood without any external reference points. Like, I think it was intersex-ionality on Tumblr who pointed out that this is what makes TLJ feel so much like a transformative fandom story rather than a source material story, because it takes the stuff that was kind of just a given and goes "wait -- let's re-examine that". But that's not what made it good, the strong narrative and the interviewing themes was.

I just... feel like it's a problem that even while I try to understand what people think went wrong with TROS, I keep finding myself talking about movies that are not TROS. I shouldn't even need to make those fucking comparisons. I should be able to just discuss the movie itself, because Star Wars movies are self-contained stories and have always been. Frankly Sequel Trilogy not having substantial timeskips between movies felt off to me from the start, because it was bringing "language" over from different franchises that started to make Star Wars feel like every fucking other franchise movie rather than its own thing.

Correct for bias in "a writer is liable to think like a writer" if you're not one, I guess.

(Crossposted to Tumblr.)

This whole debacle validates my belief that on a subjective level, there's a sweet spot of narrative complexity that the source material needs to hit to generate lots of fic. If the source is a swiss cheese of holes, you gotta do a lot of building yourself before you're capable of writing narratively satisfying fic, but if the source is too well substantiated and dense, you gotta dig quite a lot if you wanna do anything other than comment on the surface elements and aesthetics of it.

But if the source is just right -- with bones that feel sturdy enough to build on but also not so dense as to be overwhelming to find things to say about -- it'll be easy to immerse yourself into and still find uncontested ground to build your own stories on.

And, yeah, of course this is extremely subjective because everything has a fandom and people who like it and almost anything can spark a conversation. What counts as too mealy or too lean will vary wildly based on your tastes and preferences, whether you like arguing with and openly challenging the source material will vary, whether you're even interested in being given something "new" as opposed to just enjoying the soothing familiarity of something simple -- all those vary, and all those contribute to what kind of fandom people "go for" as individuals.

But I maintain, at least from my vantage point of the "core" of fandom being the fic writers, the essayists and the people with a ton of headcanons -- this is why some fandoms manage to fit inside the comfort zone of so many people, and why the relative quality of a work isn't a consistent determinator for how big of a fandom the thing has.

Overall the chicken-egg problem doesn't exist for FANfic b/c fanon and canon are distinct entities

Sidenote -- I've never liked things being described as "fanficcy".

And like there's the obvious reason, which is that often that word is used to describe narrative incoherence and poor structure, and generally to convey that the thing is of "lesser quality" than the rest of the "canon" it is being compared to. That is just jerky and judgemental on its face, especially considering how much of fandom is "well this thing is bad, but we're gonna bring out the things that are lovely about it by ourselves" and how generally the ability to write good fic is no less an ability to write than the ability to write original fiction. They're overlapping but non synonymous magisteria.

But frankly I also don't like it when things are described as being "like good fanfic", because often the things (outside the assumption of amateurish quality) that make a work feel like fic are just plain old peppers metatextuality. Fandom does not have exclusive possession of the ability to look at a text and then write another text commenting on it (even while I agree that fandom definitely has sophisticated methods and conventions of metatextual analysis. It's kind of our subcultural hat.)

I dislike the word "fanfic" being used in a context without a "canon", and about things that aren't expressly written to be fanfic, as opposed to things that are simply transtextually charged. In general, I dislike transtextuality that doesn't expressly identify the paratext/hypertext (including fic with the serials filed off), because in my experience that's an easy way to slip into lazy allegory. Not all metatextual writing is fanfic, even while all fanfic is metatextual.

(I also dislike a little bit about how describing things that are a part of some canon as "fanfic" blurs the line between creator and fandom. Not because I have any particular reverence for said creator, but because it just feels like a sneaky way to get away from being subjected to death of the author, to prime people into reading a motivation that would be similar to a fannish motivation. It also ignores that people are entirely capable of writing transtextually charged material without ever realising that's what they're doing.

I don't think the act of creating canon is pure and untainted, but I think granting things that do not have the depth of analysis going into them than your average fanfic does anything but cheapen fic as its own written art form.)

*noises of 'I don't get paid enough in the first place'*

There's a specific kind of annoyance I get when people call bad animation (or just animation they don't like) "cheap-looking" because I can guarantee, whatever they think that animation cost, it costs way more.

Even a few seconds of "quick" animation (i.e. anything done in Flash, HTML5, DUIK) can easily cost a few hundred bucks b/c of all the associated costs. Freelance animators undercharge like hell for their work, as do freelance editors of both video and sound.

IDK like. I guess the jokes don't matter as such, but. That's my job. Nothing any artists does actually costs "a five bucks" and the general inability for people to grasp how much art costs is what I'd call "an actual problem."