wembley | Entries tagged with meta

So this young teen I know, a real sweetie, was getting bullied a bit online by her peers, peers who are antis or are turning into antis, and I got mad and leapt on Twitter and had a normal one, as you do. I'm middle aged and have attained zero wisdom. Zero percent.

Instead of working on becoming a better person, I started thinking: mid-2000s Harry Potter fandom on Livejournal was a Caligula-esque orgy of skullfucking, incest and beastiality. Meanwhile, here in 2023, the kid I mentioned above said one sentence -- "I headcanon that [Rarely Appearing Antagonist Guy] is a rapist," used Discord spoiler tags to censor the word "rapist" -- and that one sentence is what initially made her peers so mad.

How in the sweet frosty fuck did we get here?

I'm gonna try to untangle my thoughts. I'm worried I'm about to sound like some right-wing Substack concern troll scumbag, which is absolutely not what I want since I'm a liberal Democrat. I'm also worried these thoughts are so obvious that it's pointless to share them. But, I still want to try hashing it out, and I'd love your help hashing it out with me in the comments.

What I'm wondering is: did three good, important, vital, progressive ideas accidentally pave the way for all this?

( uh oh )

Merry Xmas, happy holidays, happy very belated Chanukah, here's me copy and pasting something I wrote on Bluesky about episodic vs serialized tv:

This person wrote this (which, according to FFA, inspired a long thread by J. Michael Straczynski here):

https://twitter.com/JohnnySobczak/status/1737274115944288440

Sorry to act entitled over a non-serious issue, but it has to be said: being made to wait 2-3 years between seasons of television that are 8-10 episodes long is inexcusable and unsustainable. Just total corporate dissonance with regard to what people like about watching TV shows.

And that tweet and JMS' thread prompted this from me (cleaned up and edited):

Except here's the thing. At least in sff fandom nerd land, where I live, folks were creaming their jeans over serialization for the entire 90s & early '00s. Including me! DS9 was "better & more mature" because serialized. Same for B5. British shows were touted as better because they had fewer episodes -- quality over quantity. We heard this CONSTANTLY. This was the prevailing opinion. I don't remember a lot of discourse about filler episodes around this time (though I feel like I would hear anime fans talk about it?), but tv nerds like me were absolutely & understandably reacting to the pre-Buffy 1950s-80s model where characters simply did not remember what happened the episode before. Miles O'Brien gets brutally tortured? Next ep, he's fine. No emotional continuity, perpetual amnesia. It felt weird! That's not how humans work! It made sense for fans to want something else, for wanting the medium to evolve. And it did! Also, the purely episodic time gave us clip shows & that sucks*. On the plus side, it gave tv big writers rooms because 3 people can't possibly come up with 24 goddamn stories quickly, that's an insane amount of story.

BUT those insanely long episodic seasons, as folks like JMS have pointed out, let us get to know these characters for longer. (Also, less & shorter ad breaks gave us teasers & tags that were purely character-driven. I loved those.) But we can't pretend that the model we've had for the past decade isn't something we all LOUDLY CLAMORED FOR for the *previous* decade. Netflix gave us what we asked for, and gave it to us good and hard, and now we're realizing that, as usual in the US, we have swung wildly between extremes instead of just sensibly moderating. (The Buffy model is A+.)

*except for the Dinosuars clip shows. Those were very good.