stunt_muppet

> fully intend to do something productive today like writing or homework or beading or whatever it is people do when they don't have many assigned tasks

> spend two hours on /co/ and /cm/ instead

> forget about two phone calls I was supposed to make.

...well, fuck. And now I feel terrible about sitting down to write anything because I've already been inside all day staring at my computer screen.

Have a linkdump while I'm here:

Clip of Season 2 of My Little Pony Friendship is Magic. I mainly bring this up because John de Lancie is voicing the dragon/chimera Discord, at least so the rumor goes. Yes, as in Q. He is apparently trolling the ponies now. Because he can, that's why.

Daniel Radcliffe sings Tom Lehrer's Elements Song. I now adore this man.

Yay!

Note that since I came up with most of these I've seen other people put forward the same theories, but I arrived at them more or less on my own, so. Yeah. For what that's worth.

( Spoilers for the most recent episodes of Doctor Who, Transformers Prime, and Generator Rex behind the cut. )


Oh, and one other thing: there's a reviewer on TGWTG now called Oancitizen who reviews oddball arthouse cinema like Antichrist, Nine Songs, and Jan Svankmajer's Alice (with the gruesomest, most inappropriate bits censored, so no fear). I don't know if any of you out there have the same disproportionate love for Euroschlocky weirdness, but if you are, well, take a looksee. 

And now it's 2 a.m. again so I should go to bed. Curse my late-night habits.

What I was supposed to be doing today: writing an article for a web magazine, which might count as a publication and is due - oh yeah - tomorrow.

What I actually did: Watched up to Episode 15 of Generator Rex. Tried to resist picking up yet another fandom. Realized that this show hit about every single one of my narrative gen-kinks and gave up the whole resistance business. Perhaps a fandom pimping post later? Perhaps. I'm rather excited, anyway

Oh, and reading about craparse, poorly drawn yaoi where shoulders are four heads wide, the uke has one expression, and the sparkly waves of kawaii leap off the screen to smack you. It's rather entertaining. (WARNING: contains rape, abuse, general NSFW-ness, and really terrible art.)

MY LIFE IS A SERIES OF POOR DECISIONS GUYS.

Speaking of poor decisions, a meme from ivy_chan  ! Memes are cool.

Pick a pairing from any fandom I'm in, and come up with a location and/or situation, and I will write you commentfic about the kiss that happened in that context.

I should finish that article now.

So I have got to cut myself off from this cracky character-number meme because it's taking up time that I'm supposed to be using for my essays. Posting the answers I have come up with so far seems a good way to tell myself to stop. I will answer the questions in installments because my answers tend to get stupidly long and if I try to answer them all before I post them I will never get them all done.

You can still ask questions if you like (more crack is good for everyone!), but if you do please do so before you read these answers, because it's kind of spoiled if you know who's who.

Questions answered: Four. Fandoms represented: Doctor Who, Final Fantasy X, NCIS, Iron Man movieverse, Tranformers Animated, Star Trek Reboot, Pirates of the Caribbean, ReBoot, and Bones. I've noted which character goes with which fandom to ease confusion.

( Two of these questions take up four pages, ack. )

---

So very late, guys. Must pick up laundry. Then finish two papers. And then I'm done for a week. Hoorah.

Possibly you all will become so confused that you'll have to watch TFA just to see what I'm on about.

So a couple of days ago when I started watching TFA I decided I wasn't going to ship anything, because they were robots and that's wrong and who ships in a kid show anyway, and that kind of thing leads to regrettable robot porn and awful human!TFs drawings that just turn the bots into whatever fashionable cheesecake the artist prefers.

Two days later I would not say no to Prowl/Bumblebee. Their rivalry and contrasting personalities and the fact that Bee blushes when Prowl pounces on him makes me confused - I'm not sure if I want to read fic about them as combative, wrestling sort-of-brothers or a ship with both brotherly love and rivalry.

Neither would I say no to ( spoilers for The Thrill of the Hunt, like any of you care. ). Because apparently it is not enough for me to ship grumpy old people,I have to ship grumpy old robots too. Why not.

So, you know, just in case you wanted to know what to get me for Christmas.

Yes, I know I could go out to the main fic comm and actually look for some of these things, but the main fic comm is large and scary and full of things I am not prepared to think about yet. Shipping is one thing, but I am just not mentally ready for robot porn.

The funny thing is I said the same thing about Doctor Who fic when I first got into it. Just wait, in three months I'll be drawing horrendously graphic Prowl/Bee and seeing nothing wrong with it, looking back with a chuckle at my quaint prudishness.

Also I may have written Prowl fic. It's gen. I dunno if I'll post it.

I can tell I'm too far gone into TFA because I'm already trying to match up each of the Doctors and companions with the Autobot I think they'd make the best team with.

Three would obviously team up with Bumblebee, because we already know how much he loves little yellow roadsters. Plus, Bee and Jo would be enthusiastic and adorable together. I'm thinking Prowl would get along best with Seven, because "chessmaster" is probably as close as a technical-pacifist character gets to "ninja". Seven'd be all over the Processor-over-Matter thing, anyway.

Ten would team up with Blurr because Blurr talks almost exactly like Ten but without the accent. It's a little eerie.

One and Ratchet would complain about those young whippersnappers and how things actually weren't all that much better in their day but bah, nobody appreciates that anymore. I got stuck for a bit on Bulkhead, but I think he'd make a good team with Two, because Bulkhead is a good engineer underneath his somewhat clueless exterior, and Two is all about Obfuscating Stupidity.

After this matchups get a litle harder, mostly because I can't figure out who would be most like TFA!Optimus (maybe Five? Five's got the self-sacrificing thing down, and TFA!Optimus complains about his job rather more than G1!Optimus does, especially since he's implied to be much younger) and I start running low on Autobots whose episodes I've seen. I could start going to the Elite Guard, but Six is way less of a jerk than Sentinel Prime and Jazz and Four have nothing in common besides being enigmatic. And that still leaves Nine and Eight.

...about three people would read this if I ever did a crossover, right?

You'd judge me if I told you I was taking study breaks by watching Transformers Animated, wouldn't you?

I knew you would. Good on you, I deserve judging for that.

I'll freely admit that I've been poking at Transformers fandom since the movies came out, mostly because the TF Wiki is inordinately amusing (they're the Trope Namers for Ruined FOREVER) and is full of loving mockery and frank acknowledgment that their show/franchise ultimately exists to sell toys and they're okay with that. But I hesitated, because between this and Batman I feel like as I grow older the maturity of the shows I watch has plunged, and I fear that a) that says disquieting things about me and b) by the time I'm thirty I'll think Teletubbies is really neat and will hole up in my room watching The Wiggles concerts, quietly drooling. I do still engage in intellectual activity and watch/read things that make me think, I really really do. You guys believe me, right?

Anyway, I'm kind of glad I finally leaped in, because TFA has robot ninjas. (I think Prowl might be my favorite character so far. He's a robot ninja. Who was trained by a robot ninja voiced by George Takei) I'm quite enjoying it so far, though it has the usual problems of not-very-thoughtful kids series (Jazz still talks jive; there are maybe two girl robots in the entire series, and one of them's a Tragic Villain and the other doesn't do anything); it presents Decepticons as credible threats instead of having their schemes foiled every week and it has human characters who don't grate on the nerves. It's not bad for what it is.

It does bring up something that's irked me since I started getting into comics and "boy stuff", and that's that there will, I'm quite certain, never be a Transformers series or a kid's superhero show that's inclusive of a young female audience. And that's because even female SF fans don't think girls like that kind of thing. Male SF fen don't think girls like it because they assume we're too busy talking about lipstick and shoes to appreciate robots beating each other up; even other women (at least that I've noticed) tend to write off action-driven shows (and the military SF or action-SF that tends to arise from people who grew up with them) as "boy stuff", inherently uninteresting to young girls or women.

I think SFF as a genre is definitely improving on the whole so far as representation of women and various racial, sexual, and gender identities goes, though of course it still has a long way to go. But, in the unlikely event that I ever manage to get anything published ever, I'd love to take some of those changes to the boy stuff. I'd like to write military SF with soldiers and generals who are black, Hispanic, Asian, female, genderqueer, trans, gay, bi, people of every variety, and have it not be a big deal. I'd like to write a girl robot who kicks just as much ass as the boys and doesn't have to be a villain or a medic to do it. Hell, I'd like to take on the idea of shape-shifting robots having a gender assignment.

It's a little discouraging knowing that such a project really wouldn't have much of an audience, although I'd also like to query the idea that young boys will lose interest if more than one character on their action-adventure shows is a girl, or that a straight male will see dialogue between two women and read nothing but "shoes shoes makeup boys shoes babies cooking dresses shoes".

tl;dr thanks TFA guys but next time have Arcee actually do something, kthanxbai.

Back to work.

[ETA] Although reading up on Arcee gives me fresh new reasons to hate Michael Bay, who apparently though Arcee wasn't cool enough for the second live-action Transformers movie and delighted in killing her off. Because, you know, Bay, it's not like you had the power as the director to make her more awesome or anything rather than gleefully slaughtering the only female robot in the entire movie franchise after about ten minutes of screentime, you fucking tool.