dev_chieftain | DELICIOUS

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Crossposts: http://dev-chieftain.livejournal.com/901667.html

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DELICIOUS

I just had Jack-in-the-Box tacos for the first time ever and they're amazing. They are like crack. I want more already and I'm not even hungry!

In less delicious news, sometimes things like this happen:

Fandom: I want this m/m or f/f couple to have a baby! You can have them be transgendered, or do mpreg/immaculate conception, lol, I don't care!
Dev: Adoption exists! What the heck!

or this:

Fandom: Oo, best idea! Let's have X character in Y crossover to a thing you've never heard of!
Dev: Can there be another fandom for crossovers or something? I don't care about Y fandom and you are GETTING YOUR CONAN IN MY LUPIN

or this:

Fandom: Lol it's better when X character is a girl because he's so girly anyway!
Dev: YOU ARE MISSING THE POINT
Fandom: Ok um then how about turning that butch girl into a dude? I bet then she'd be hot!
Dev: *sob*

Have revived Lebowski-icon because it is appropriate, though I couldn't quite make it perfect using the upload-image/crop feature. I'll fix it when I get home, perhaps!

But really, seriously, those tacos were amazing.

Oops, another edit, because someone at work mentioned the Oscars and what's going on.

Okay, so right, I check the news and find multiple articles about how fabulous Hugo is, how it's an amazing story about a filmmaker in decline, how he misses the good old days and blah blah blah.

You know what, I'm fine with everyone attributing Heath Ledger's last film credits to The Dark Knight. That movie is not that amazing, nor is his performance in it really much to write about (come on; he's doing a Jack Nicholson impression, okay? We can all tell), but you know, lots of people saw it so they see that as his last film.

But SINCE we're not attributing Ledger's final, amazing performance to the film it actually occurred in, can we at least deny Hugo the award that The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus deserved? Here is a film that does what people are telling me Hugo does, but better. Plus, it actually DID contain Ledger's final performance.

I would probably like Hugo, to be honest, because I liked Shutter Island and have nothing against Scorsese. But really? Seriously? Why are all my favorite creative minds always the ones who get shoved off into the background? Scorsese and Gaiman outshine Gilliam and Wolfe, and I feel sad to see it. Shouldn't they all be celebrated?

Bah, whatever.

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Um.

I like mpreg and genderswap and crossovers.

I-- am actually surprised you like mpreg, but I guess I just really don't know what appeals about it, since I don't get it, myself.

Anyway-- the point of my response is that the option of adoption-- you know, the one that doesn't require people to be transgendered-- isn't even mentioned as a possibility, which is weird.

Additionally, I like transgender, but only if everyone's transgendered. If it's a m/m or f/f pairing, and only half is transgendered to make it 'standard', I feel like there's something off about that. : /

As for crossovers, they're fine but it's pretty much a bummer to read a fanfic / watch a movie where you're being told "yes, the characters you like will feature in this story!" and then have them turn out to be a sidenote. I cite the Lupin III / Detective Conan crossover as a really good example; the Lupin III characters in that pretty much were along as cameos, despite it being advertised as a crossover. I don't dislike Detective Conan, but I've never seen it, and I love Lupin III. It was pretty disappointing to get no Lupin III special that year, just because of that project.

I like it for the lolfactor. I can see where it wouldn't be appealing, but I think that in the right hands it can be really funny.

The same goes for genderswap (which I distinguish from transgender; I consider transgender fiction to being about someone being a different gender than the one they were born under, where as genderswap is simply 'lol sudden penis/vagina'. Again, it's the lolfactor that comes from that. It's the same thing that appeals about most crack fiction.

I see what you mean there. If it's a case of mislabeling, it can be annoying. Just say "brief cameo from fandom X" in your notes, instead of saying "crossover between X and Y".

The problem is, I find humor made around outdated stereotypes to be really, really off-putting and not funny at all. The kinds of jokes made about pregnancy (and for the record, about menstruation, and about having boobs, and wanting to cook / manliness / womanliness/ how pretty or not pretty someone is and how much that matters now that they are or are not a woman) tend to be in this spectrum, so I don't find pregnancy an interesting topic to begin with; adding the m to the preg doesn't change that, basically. This sounds like I'm assuming that that's the kind of humor you mean, though, and I'm not. I assume there's actually a vast body of genuinely humorous work out there, but the stuff I have seen despite trying to avoid it is not a part of that, and has put me off.

The thing is, I have a deep interest in genderswap as a serious device. I find the concept both sexy and intriguing. I like the idea of a world where you could just change to be whatever gender you wanted (or NO gender) with the push of a magic button, or something. Not only does the possibility to truly try every flavor excite me (I would be so excited to try being with a lady as a dude, for example), but I think that the kind of fluidity and understanding of gender similarity that would be possible in such a world is really interesting from a literary and philosophical standpoint. Genderswap can be funny, too, but I don't consider it to be if the joke is that now the guy is in touch with his sensitive side / now the girl understands how gosh darned hard it is to control her boner as a boy. That, to me, misses the point, as stated above.

Anyway, just so we're clear, my complaint above wasn't about the kind of thing you're talking about. I'm specifically talking about when people do AUs where the characters are gender-flipped, especially when those AUs only gender-flip certain characters because of their perspective of what's 'normal' for a gender, essentially 'correcting' the characters they thought were 'too weird' to be a girl or guy as they were originally.

I don't really care for crack fiction. Or 'crack' in general; I might be misinformed, so let me know if that's so, but I don't like slapstick, prank-humor, or 'put X person in their place' humor, which are all generally what I see when someone points me at someone and calls it 'crack'.

Amen to that. I wish people would do the labeling, but I can't really hold it against them when it's fandom-- I just wish they would label better. When it's a movie, though, they're making me pay them for their mislabel, so they should goddamn advertise properly. (Case in point: the recent DC:Animated movie "Apocalypse" was almost solely about Supergirl, though it was labeled as being a Superman/Batman film. I found this incredibly insulting, because not only was it false advertising, the implication was that I wouldn't have wanted to see it if it had been open about the fact that Supergirl was the main character-- which I TOTALLY WOULD HAVE! It was totally lame of them.)

I consider crack to be the kind of thing where the universe is fucked over (or cracked) in some way- genderfucked, zombies, someone gets turned into something/something else/multiple somethings, crossovers, or whatever. It's not exclusively humour, although it often is. Slapstick and the other stuff you describe is explicitly in the humour category; whether it works or not, the intention is the amuse. Crack is often humourous, and you often get people who go "wouldn't it be funny if X, I'ma write it and see", where X = something that somehow defies the laws of of the universe they exist in, but it doesn't necessarily mean humour.

Lemme try to put it another way: me and Wolfy both write a lot of crack fic. Back in the day, we were racing to get into all the categories on the TGS cracklist first. But if you've read any of my work, and any of Wolfy's work, one thing you'll notice (other than that her work is vastly superior to mine), is that while our race meant we often dealt with the same subjects, we approached them in very different ways. Like when she did a bodyswap, it was Jeremy and James trying to find out WHY they were suddenly women, and trying to reverse it, and it had a lot of intrigue and seriousness and a very deep plot, not just constant slapstick and boob jokes (though there were those, because Jeremy), but when I did a bodyswap, it was Oz Clarke in a misguided, misinformed attempt to woo James and was mostly OHGOSHWHY and... no boob jokes.

((How in the world can you be friends with Riona and not like crack??? She's practically the posterchild.))

Of course, that's not to say that there can't be slapstick or pranks or comeuppance, but those things aren't defined as crack, that's just people with bad ideas of what crack is thinking "this is humourous, and must therefore be defined as crack". ("To absurd extremes" is another definition of crack, but that's a subset; the original phrase came from being fic that makes you say "what crack was the author smoking when they thought of this?", but it's expanded since the early days of the internet.)

I hope this has been informative to you!

As an author who writes a lot of surreal crap, being told "I'll have some of what you're smokin'!" is occasionally bothersome, since it implies I'd need assistance to come up with that sort of stuff, haha! But anyway: I see what you mean about your type of crack. The 'crack' I see in most fandoms I've been aware of (typically anime and video game fandoms) was always the "LOL I'm so hilarious I'm gonna slam my readers in the face with how funny my one-note idea is!" type. I just don't think it translates well to fanfiction in those cases! Visual 'crack' is often funnier and pithier than the fanfic 'crack'. Comics are a nice middleground, but-- there are some ideas that really are funny as a picture, or a single sentence, but not funny at all when turned into a long story. That's what I don't like.

What you're talking about is something I've never heard referred to as 'crack'. I would just call that 'comedy.' And I like your, and Riona's, and probably even Wolfy's comedic stuff (I don't think I have Wolfy on my reading list, actually...not sure if she'd want me about!)-- I just wouldn't call it crack.

Of course, mpreg is hard to get right without going to humour route, but, you know. Exceptions to every rule. (Like the one where Jeremy got pregnant by the Bugatti Veyron... also one of Wolfy's, if I recall. And very touching, alongside being hilarious.)

Well, see, I have seen mpreg done well. It was on a show called Sliders! I don't know if you have heard of or care about Sliders, but they had an episode where they ended up in a universe where women would die if they didn't transfer their children surgically to their partners for the mid-to-late trimesters before returning the baby/womb for delivery. In that universe, Remy's alternate turns out to be the husband of an important politician, and she's at that step of pregnancy. AU Remy has disappeared or died or something, so he takes on the baby for her for a couple of months to save her life. It's still a funny episode (with pregnancy humor....I can't remember if I found it funny or was bothered by it, honestly, but I think it was funny!) but it does what you're saying Wolfy does, puts that kinda serious spin on there. It's a good example of mpreg and I believe there's probably a lot of mpreg out there that finds a neat balance between silly and serious. I just don't have a desire to look! I don't really like pregnancy as a story device.

Haven't finished reading this comment but I wanted to jump in with the EEESLIDERS love before I did. EEESLIDERS.

There was an episode of Enterprise that had canon MPreg. I can't remember the episode that well beyond the fact that Trip was embarassed and that the Klingons thought it was funny, but I remember being pretty gleeful I saw it because, lol, canon mpreg.

But I'm pretty used to MPreg being a pretty small niche of interest, and good MPreg that isn't just about reinforcing gender stereotypes being an even smaller niche, so it's cool. I wasn't saying HOW DARE YOU NOT LIKE THIS THING THAT I ENJOY IN A SPECIFIC SETTING or anything.

It is definitely worth noting that when people tell you "this movie is about Batman!" and then that movie is absolutely not about Batman, and is in fact made by someone who thinks Batman is stupid and his fans are stupid, that is ALSO crappy in the exact same fashion. I basically want accurate advertising, but because of the way crossovers work, crossovers get listed as both fandoms, even when one features MUCH more prominently than the others. It'd be like if I told you that this journal was an awesome place for crossovers about the Big Lebowski, but I just have this one icon with a screencap from the movie-- talk about false advertising! Even if I do LIKE the movie, I'm not talking about it all the time, after all.

While I revile fandom generally, I'd say one of the best things about it is the acceptance of homosexual pairings. If they take that away by genderswapping to prevent something "uncomfortable," then they're making a big mistake. As you might recall, otherwise reasonable people who will remain nameless have spoken disparagingly about "latch key kids" without regard for how awesome a single parent has to be to succeed at it. I personally believe that some of these fandom people might be equally uncomfortable with a child being raised by anything other than a mother and a father, and this is the way they express it.

On the other hand, if they wrote nothing but gay fic for years and wanted to mix it up just for the sake of variety, that's totally cool!

Pfft, you and I both know she didn't have the slightest clue we both were when she said that, but yeah-- I think you're tapping into something here. One of my big complaints with Disney (I have complaints about Disney! Really! Even though I defend them a lot) is that they so rarely acknowledge that the family unit isn't always perfect. I'm not saying every story has to be Roald Dahl level of depressing in terms of how screwy the family unit can get, but the world could definitely benefit from some more Karate Kid, or even Lilo and Stitch.

That's true. I guess it doesn't bother me if they're doing it for variety; variety is awesome! I just feel like refusing to write about men or ladies unless they were originally the opposite gender breeds misogyny/misandry, and that's still not so awesome.

Absolutely. And I particularly agree with you when you say that it's completely fucked up when they reverse gender someone because they seem like they're "socially female/male."

By arranging everybody into these neat little preconceptions, they're just making the characterizations less interesting!

There's a reason it's totally awesome to see people riff on the stereotypes in D&D by playing "against type." That way we get elves who love cities, and dwarven ascetics.

On a somewhat related note, your coworkers don't still think I'm your "gay roommate," right?

Considering I totally fetishize the idea of genderswapping for the potential sexy funtimes, I'd hope it's clear that that is the only reason I am against gender reversals, haha. :)

That, too! (As pointed out in the Manly Guys Doing Manly Things I was laughing at yesterday, haha!)

Elves who love cities are CLEARLY the best. Also, elves who are pathological liars. (I need to do SOMETHING with Matachin someday, because I love her.)

HAH! No, now they all think you're my "boyfriend". To be fair, the ones that were the most...rude about it are long gone on to other jobs. But the ones that remain are trying to enforce societal norms by rolling their eyes and nodding knowingly when I tell them I don't like the word 'boyfriend'.

On the plus side, my boss and I once had this conversation:

Dev: Well-- he's basically, if you must call him something like that, my heterosexual life partner.
Boss: Ahh, the ol' HLP. Got it. ;) Well, now I must share KNOWLEDGE about BOYS! In case you want it.
Dev: Sure?
Boss: Most of us guys are TERRIFIED to settle down until we're thirty. And then we're TERRIFIED not to because we're losers if we don't.
Dev: So I've been told! It's the same for girls, but the settle down part is supposed to kick in four years ago for me.
Boss: Well, that's stupid anyway. But if he ever breaks your heart, blah blah blah, tell me. I'll laugh at you.
Dev: You're awesome, boss. :)

Haha! Some of your co-workers are pretty all right.

Yeah!

Not that I don't have romantic and sexy feelings for you and my ever increasing harem, I just have thousands of memories of being teased about people I didn't even find attractive as potential "boyfriends" for me, and boy, I hate that word so so much!

I personally enjoy the word "lady-friend", but I don't think there's a male equivalent, haha!

I guess "Lord-friend" would work, but that sounds terribly hilarious!

I know, it's totally bogus! Lady-friend is a great word. Hrm! I already use the term dude-guy, but I think that doesn't convey much in the way of affection, just gender.

Gent-friend?

It'll take thought, I don't know! A tricksome problem indeed, monsieur.

Gentleman caller is the one I go with.

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