Fanworks Meme
Jul. 28th, 2019 09:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brokenmnemonicThe fanworks meme is going around on twitter, and frith_in_thorns asked me about my feelings on making Kara/Lee vids. That's not something ideally suited to twitter character limits...
I had been fannish about things before BSG. I've also been on the internet for a fair while (since 1993, I think) so I'd had the opportunity to interact with people who shared interest with me (or who were idiots who were clearly wrong about things. 1993 felt more civilised on the internet than 2019 does, but that didn't stop people being wrong...) However, BSG was the first time where I went out and found a big online fandom. That probably made me a late bloomer?
When I was first attracted to BSG, it was partly because of the fact that it looked like it was going to be a long-plot driven sci-fi series that wasn't afraid to have bad things happen. Babylon 5 had done something similar, but there'd been a bit of a drought where sci-fi series were concerned, and what there was, generally involved plots of the week and inevitably a positive ending at some point.
I'm not sure why, but BSG was the first series where I had the urge to actually go out and find people to talk with about it, and I ended up on a BSG RP board. That's largely a bad story for another time, but through there I learned about things like yahoo groups for fanfic, and the existence of livejournal...
When I first watched BSG, I thought the most interesting character for me was actually Saul Tigh. TV series from the time - particularly US-produced tv series - were very big on "USA is the bestest! Oorah!" and pretty much never about the consequences of service in the military, let alone during wartime. My mum is a huge WWI/WWII buff, so I grew up in houses where there were inevitably documentaries about the wars going on, where mum had loads of stories and examples to tell, and where I had plenty of opportunities to watch movies like The Cruel Sea, or Dunkirk, or Ice Cold In Alex... black and white movies made during or after the war, that gave a very different look at events to the more celebrationist films. My favourite was generally the Cruel Sea; that movie was I think the first where I ever saw anything that could be considered PTSD shown, where you saw people working under constant pressure, and where the world was very small - just the one ship and its crew. The crew of the ship didn't win WWII single-handedly, didn't defeat Hitler, didn't steal an Enigma machine or sink the Bismarck. Instead, they spent their war patrolling in the Atlantic and North Sea, possibly sank one U-boat, got sunk by another, and saw some bad things, part of which was caused by the captain because of what he felt was the greater need.
So, it's probably not a surprise that I liked Saul Tigh; he was someone who had quite clearly been broken by the war he'd survived, and was still trapped in that experience, and who was only still going because his mate William Adama had carried him along, and suddenly they were back in the war again, and Saul Tigh was being thrust back into a place where he had to try and be a soldier again, had to make horrible decisions, and... well, it was compelling.
However, the RP forum was always short of players, and I was encouraged to pick a main character to play; one of those most needed was Lee Adama, so I thought "ok, I'll give that a try" and I decided to sit down and rewatch a couple of times, paying particular attention to him and what I thought he was doing/thinking/feeling, and what his relationships were to other people.
That was basically the beginning of a slippery slope. The whole goldfish bowl of screaming tension and stress that was the fugitive fleet was potentially one of the most exciting plot setups I'd seen in a long time - an environment intended to put the characters under intense stress, constantly. All of the usual coping mechanisms for difficult situations - leaning on friends, moving away, changing jobs - were gone, meaning that the options everyone had for coping were seriously limited.
And then, you have these people. Yes, I was watching for Lee originally, so I started out trying to see the environment through his eyes, knowing what we'd been told, and what could be inferred; the estranged relationship with his father, who Lee blamed for both whatever he went through with his mother, but also the death of his brother. Saul Tigh, who you just knew was the surrogate drunk uncle who only appeared when he was either hung over and grumpy or drunk and throwing up in someone's bed, and Kara Thrace.
Kara Thrace was fucking magic. I once wrote a huge LJ post as part of a challenge about the two of them, and the reasons I thought their relationship was the best thing about the show, covering the way the typical gender roles or attributes for the two of them were inverted, through to things like the way that so much of their communication was non-verbal, but perhaps the most compelling thing was the mix of how fundamentally broken and traumatised each of them was before the world ended, let alone after it, and yet how despite all of that, they were somehow also able to be friends and confidants and support for each other. That would be a lot at the best of times, but it also seemed obvious that each of them wanted to be more, but had absolutely no idea how to go about it, and I really, really wanted to hear about other people's opinions on how and why and what they should do.
Two of the positive things that came out of the BSG RP were that it showed me my first BSG music videos, and it put me in contact with a Kara/Lee shipper community on Yahoogroups. From there, it was a springboard into a Kara/Lee community on Livejournal, and I was off to the races. There would've been more of an element of culture shock if the communities hadn't been as welcoming as they were, or if they were less enthusiastic to embrace everything about shipping Kara and Lee. My first music video was Falling Is Like This, and I made it over the course of a weekend. I had no idea what I was doing, and as I didn't know anyone to talk to who made vids, I was learning everything I could from the doom9 DVD reauthoring site. I was so enthusiastic about trying to find something to show how much I liked these characters and their screwed-up world and lives, and without thinking about it, I'd decided that a vid was the way to go. By most objective standards, it's a pretty terrible vid; I was using downloaded source, and Windows Movie Maker, so could only cut clips where there were keyframes in the download, so it was a case of finding clips about the right sort of length and smashing them onto a WMM timeline, while WMM constantly crashed on me. There wasn't an established BSG vidding tradition at the time, I think - the fandom was one of those that just kind of spontaneously exploded, in contrast with other, smaller fandoms where vidders from established communities were driving the vidding conversation and establishing the aesthetic, and the shippers were so nice about my vid. It was all about me throwing my feelings onto a timeline, and it turned out other people had the same feelings.
The shippers were also responsible for encouraging me to keep writing, and for a few years I wrote loads of words and made numerous vids, all because of how much Kara and Lee were in my head, and how much there seemed to be to talk about. I think a lot of the shippers - including me - related to how broken each of the characters was in some way or another. There always seemed to be somethign to say or explore, although it was more difficult at times. From the opening credits on, BSG held out the promise that the major plot points were scripted, that there was a coherent narrative, that the characters had predetermined arcs that the actors were able to work around. That premise held out so much scope for conversations and speculations, and for rewatching in an attempt to predict where the plot might be going, to see what clues had been dropped, to try and work out the puzzles that were being set up. Most of my vids were a part of that conversation with my fellow shippers; the majority of my vids were made because I wanted to show how I felt, or how I thought the characters felt, or how they saw their world, the things around them, and most of all, the other half of the ship.
The conversations picked up to an insane pace in the break between S2 and S3, and then again in the huge hiatus, and that was probably when I should've noticed that things were going wrong. There were some cases where people asked me for specific vid themes, but mostly I was working with music that felt right to me, and wrapping the footage around that one way or another. I'd watched the show enough, and was motivated enough because of the company I was keeping online, that I developed a better memory for the show than I think I had anything else before or since. Being part of a huge, rambling, never-ending conversation with people who knew the source every bit as well as I did meant that I could do, and wanted to do, things with footage that I don't think I could do with anything else; the shippers knew each clip, and the context it came from, and could read into things from there, and making it possible to play around with ideas that I don't think I'd ever have had the nerve to do with another source, or another audience, and I trusted them not to scream at me if I made something that didn't work - every fic someone in the community wrote, every vid they made, every songmix that was assembled, was a result of people loving something and wanting to share that, and it was such an amazing thing to be a part of. And it wasn't as if you could hold the ship to the same kind of standards you might a couple in, say, a police procedural. Neither could simply walk away from their jobs, because it might literally mean the entire human race dies. You couldn't have one character put the other ahead of their responsibilities, because people could - and did - die. And for every time where it felt like something went wrong, typically in a way that was very true to what we knew of the characters, there were moments where they actually did sensible, considerate things. More magic.
At the same time, another vidder - bop-radar - started talking to me about vidding, and about my vids; we were both new to what we were doing, and learning at a similar pace, and that turned out to be a huge thing for me. I didn't realise how much of a difference it made to be able to show a work in progress to someone who understood the characters and the source. It was Boppy who introduced me to MariKs, who was light years ahead of both us in terms of vidding ability and vision, while also being a genuinely lovely person who cared every bit as much about Lee and Kara as we did. I think I'd probably have stopped vidding years ago, if it wasn't for them, and the way they shared their time and enthusiasm with me.
That's a lot of rambling and background for what should've been a simple question :/ I guess the shorter answer is:
Thanks to the shipper community I was a part of, and thanks to Boppy and MariKs, I felt supported and welcome when I was vidding Kara and Lee. They made me feel brave enough to keep trying to tackle difficult vidding conversations, to keep trying to learn how to do new things, and to try and create vids from different character or viewer viewpoints. Even when the vids didn't work, the people I was vidding for and with were so nice and supportive that it felt like I could in theory try and do anything, even when I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. There are vids that exist and that I'd never put in a vidshow because of how many things I spot in them that I should've done better, and yet I'm always going to be glad I had the chance to share with the shippers because they gave me a chance to share joy - even when things were terrible. Or explore exactly how terrible things were, because it was the feelings that were important.
Of course, it then turned out that RDM didn't have an overall plot, didn't know where things were going, and was basically just screwing with people. The wheels started to come off the wagon with the S2 finale, where it turned out that actually he didn't have any idea where to go from New Caprica, but was sure "the writers room could come up with something." The network demanded changes to the show in S3, but even those changes weren't as significant as RDM's influence; my personal belief is that not getting an Emmy for something like Best Drama - despite having the Time Magazine endorsement for S2 - made him switch over to seeing just how much he could push boundaries and shock people, rather than trying to tell a story that was narratively consistent, or allow characters to have emotional arcs that were internally consistent with what we'd seen. The comment he made that always stuck in my head was that he really liked "giving the fans what they want, but in a way that makes them wish they'd never wanted it." That ended up burning all of the trust out of me for most tv shows, and I think is why I've almost never made another vid for anything that sprang from emotions other than "I think this is funny/cool/exciting". It was only with this year's VidUKon premiere that I actually made a vid that was essentially "here are all my feelings, please look at them", and when I'm feeling introspective, I suspect that this is why I've never found anything that I've been nearly as fannish about as I was Kara/Lee.
frith_in_thorns asked me about my feelings on making Kara/Lee vids. That's not something ideally suited to twitter character limits...I had been fannish about things before BSG. I've also been on the internet for a fair while (since 1993, I think) so I'd had the opportunity to interact with people who shared interest with me (or who were idiots who were clearly wrong about things. 1993 felt more civilised on the internet than 2019 does, but that didn't stop people being wrong...) However, BSG was the first time where I went out and found a big online fandom. That probably made me a late bloomer?
When I was first attracted to BSG, it was partly because of the fact that it looked like it was going to be a long-plot driven sci-fi series that wasn't afraid to have bad things happen. Babylon 5 had done something similar, but there'd been a bit of a drought where sci-fi series were concerned, and what there was, generally involved plots of the week and inevitably a positive ending at some point.
I'm not sure why, but BSG was the first series where I had the urge to actually go out and find people to talk with about it, and I ended up on a BSG RP board. That's largely a bad story for another time, but through there I learned about things like yahoo groups for fanfic, and the existence of livejournal...
When I first watched BSG, I thought the most interesting character for me was actually Saul Tigh. TV series from the time - particularly US-produced tv series - were very big on "USA is the bestest! Oorah!" and pretty much never about the consequences of service in the military, let alone during wartime. My mum is a huge WWI/WWII buff, so I grew up in houses where there were inevitably documentaries about the wars going on, where mum had loads of stories and examples to tell, and where I had plenty of opportunities to watch movies like The Cruel Sea, or Dunkirk, or Ice Cold In Alex... black and white movies made during or after the war, that gave a very different look at events to the more celebrationist films. My favourite was generally the Cruel Sea; that movie was I think the first where I ever saw anything that could be considered PTSD shown, where you saw people working under constant pressure, and where the world was very small - just the one ship and its crew. The crew of the ship didn't win WWII single-handedly, didn't defeat Hitler, didn't steal an Enigma machine or sink the Bismarck. Instead, they spent their war patrolling in the Atlantic and North Sea, possibly sank one U-boat, got sunk by another, and saw some bad things, part of which was caused by the captain because of what he felt was the greater need.
So, it's probably not a surprise that I liked Saul Tigh; he was someone who had quite clearly been broken by the war he'd survived, and was still trapped in that experience, and who was only still going because his mate William Adama had carried him along, and suddenly they were back in the war again, and Saul Tigh was being thrust back into a place where he had to try and be a soldier again, had to make horrible decisions, and... well, it was compelling.
However, the RP forum was always short of players, and I was encouraged to pick a main character to play; one of those most needed was Lee Adama, so I thought "ok, I'll give that a try" and I decided to sit down and rewatch a couple of times, paying particular attention to him and what I thought he was doing/thinking/feeling, and what his relationships were to other people.
That was basically the beginning of a slippery slope. The whole goldfish bowl of screaming tension and stress that was the fugitive fleet was potentially one of the most exciting plot setups I'd seen in a long time - an environment intended to put the characters under intense stress, constantly. All of the usual coping mechanisms for difficult situations - leaning on friends, moving away, changing jobs - were gone, meaning that the options everyone had for coping were seriously limited.
And then, you have these people. Yes, I was watching for Lee originally, so I started out trying to see the environment through his eyes, knowing what we'd been told, and what could be inferred; the estranged relationship with his father, who Lee blamed for both whatever he went through with his mother, but also the death of his brother. Saul Tigh, who you just knew was the surrogate drunk uncle who only appeared when he was either hung over and grumpy or drunk and throwing up in someone's bed, and Kara Thrace.
Kara Thrace was fucking magic. I once wrote a huge LJ post as part of a challenge about the two of them, and the reasons I thought their relationship was the best thing about the show, covering the way the typical gender roles or attributes for the two of them were inverted, through to things like the way that so much of their communication was non-verbal, but perhaps the most compelling thing was the mix of how fundamentally broken and traumatised each of them was before the world ended, let alone after it, and yet how despite all of that, they were somehow also able to be friends and confidants and support for each other. That would be a lot at the best of times, but it also seemed obvious that each of them wanted to be more, but had absolutely no idea how to go about it, and I really, really wanted to hear about other people's opinions on how and why and what they should do.
Two of the positive things that came out of the BSG RP were that it showed me my first BSG music videos, and it put me in contact with a Kara/Lee shipper community on Yahoogroups. From there, it was a springboard into a Kara/Lee community on Livejournal, and I was off to the races. There would've been more of an element of culture shock if the communities hadn't been as welcoming as they were, or if they were less enthusiastic to embrace everything about shipping Kara and Lee. My first music video was Falling Is Like This, and I made it over the course of a weekend. I had no idea what I was doing, and as I didn't know anyone to talk to who made vids, I was learning everything I could from the doom9 DVD reauthoring site. I was so enthusiastic about trying to find something to show how much I liked these characters and their screwed-up world and lives, and without thinking about it, I'd decided that a vid was the way to go. By most objective standards, it's a pretty terrible vid; I was using downloaded source, and Windows Movie Maker, so could only cut clips where there were keyframes in the download, so it was a case of finding clips about the right sort of length and smashing them onto a WMM timeline, while WMM constantly crashed on me. There wasn't an established BSG vidding tradition at the time, I think - the fandom was one of those that just kind of spontaneously exploded, in contrast with other, smaller fandoms where vidders from established communities were driving the vidding conversation and establishing the aesthetic, and the shippers were so nice about my vid. It was all about me throwing my feelings onto a timeline, and it turned out other people had the same feelings.
The shippers were also responsible for encouraging me to keep writing, and for a few years I wrote loads of words and made numerous vids, all because of how much Kara and Lee were in my head, and how much there seemed to be to talk about. I think a lot of the shippers - including me - related to how broken each of the characters was in some way or another. There always seemed to be somethign to say or explore, although it was more difficult at times. From the opening credits on, BSG held out the promise that the major plot points were scripted, that there was a coherent narrative, that the characters had predetermined arcs that the actors were able to work around. That premise held out so much scope for conversations and speculations, and for rewatching in an attempt to predict where the plot might be going, to see what clues had been dropped, to try and work out the puzzles that were being set up. Most of my vids were a part of that conversation with my fellow shippers; the majority of my vids were made because I wanted to show how I felt, or how I thought the characters felt, or how they saw their world, the things around them, and most of all, the other half of the ship.
The conversations picked up to an insane pace in the break between S2 and S3, and then again in the huge hiatus, and that was probably when I should've noticed that things were going wrong. There were some cases where people asked me for specific vid themes, but mostly I was working with music that felt right to me, and wrapping the footage around that one way or another. I'd watched the show enough, and was motivated enough because of the company I was keeping online, that I developed a better memory for the show than I think I had anything else before or since. Being part of a huge, rambling, never-ending conversation with people who knew the source every bit as well as I did meant that I could do, and wanted to do, things with footage that I don't think I could do with anything else; the shippers knew each clip, and the context it came from, and could read into things from there, and making it possible to play around with ideas that I don't think I'd ever have had the nerve to do with another source, or another audience, and I trusted them not to scream at me if I made something that didn't work - every fic someone in the community wrote, every vid they made, every songmix that was assembled, was a result of people loving something and wanting to share that, and it was such an amazing thing to be a part of. And it wasn't as if you could hold the ship to the same kind of standards you might a couple in, say, a police procedural. Neither could simply walk away from their jobs, because it might literally mean the entire human race dies. You couldn't have one character put the other ahead of their responsibilities, because people could - and did - die. And for every time where it felt like something went wrong, typically in a way that was very true to what we knew of the characters, there were moments where they actually did sensible, considerate things. More magic.
At the same time, another vidder - bop-radar - started talking to me about vidding, and about my vids; we were both new to what we were doing, and learning at a similar pace, and that turned out to be a huge thing for me. I didn't realise how much of a difference it made to be able to show a work in progress to someone who understood the characters and the source. It was Boppy who introduced me to MariKs, who was light years ahead of both us in terms of vidding ability and vision, while also being a genuinely lovely person who cared every bit as much about Lee and Kara as we did. I think I'd probably have stopped vidding years ago, if it wasn't for them, and the way they shared their time and enthusiasm with me.
That's a lot of rambling and background for what should've been a simple question :/ I guess the shorter answer is:
Thanks to the shipper community I was a part of, and thanks to Boppy and MariKs, I felt supported and welcome when I was vidding Kara and Lee. They made me feel brave enough to keep trying to tackle difficult vidding conversations, to keep trying to learn how to do new things, and to try and create vids from different character or viewer viewpoints. Even when the vids didn't work, the people I was vidding for and with were so nice and supportive that it felt like I could in theory try and do anything, even when I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. There are vids that exist and that I'd never put in a vidshow because of how many things I spot in them that I should've done better, and yet I'm always going to be glad I had the chance to share with the shippers because they gave me a chance to share joy - even when things were terrible. Or explore exactly how terrible things were, because it was the feelings that were important.
Of course, it then turned out that RDM didn't have an overall plot, didn't know where things were going, and was basically just screwing with people. The wheels started to come off the wagon with the S2 finale, where it turned out that actually he didn't have any idea where to go from New Caprica, but was sure "the writers room could come up with something." The network demanded changes to the show in S3, but even those changes weren't as significant as RDM's influence; my personal belief is that not getting an Emmy for something like Best Drama - despite having the Time Magazine endorsement for S2 - made him switch over to seeing just how much he could push boundaries and shock people, rather than trying to tell a story that was narratively consistent, or allow characters to have emotional arcs that were internally consistent with what we'd seen. The comment he made that always stuck in my head was that he really liked "giving the fans what they want, but in a way that makes them wish they'd never wanted it." That ended up burning all of the trust out of me for most tv shows, and I think is why I've almost never made another vid for anything that sprang from emotions other than "I think this is funny/cool/exciting". It was only with this year's VidUKon premiere that I actually made a vid that was essentially "here are all my feelings, please look at them", and when I'm feeling introspective, I suspect that this is why I've never found anything that I've been nearly as fannish about as I was Kara/Lee.
