Im Gonna Go Ahead And Be A Film Snob And Talk About Why This Is One Of My Favorite Shots From TOS. (I

I’m gonna go ahead and be a film snob and talk about why this is one of my favorite shots from TOS. (I could also say that it’s one of my favorite scenes, because the entire scene actually consists of a single shot.)

We don’t see a lot of bald expressions of emotion in film and television, especially if that emotion is fear or sadness or vulnerability. Dramas will give us some tears, but they always cut a way after a few seconds because a closeup of someone crying is deeply uncomfortable and most movies and TV shows aren’t in the business of making their audiences uncomfortable. It just doesn’t sell well.

But in this scene the camera never looks away. It follows Spock as he sits down at the table, and it circles him as he cries. But there are no cuts. We don’t even get music to create some distance, make it all a little more palatable; we just hear sobs and mumbled math equations.

It’s absolutely excrutiating. It would be excruciating no matter who we were watching, because we are so unaccustomed to seeing unadulterated emotion. And then there’s the fact that it’s a man. And that it’s Spock.

Fifty years later and this is still one of the most daring filmmaking decisions I’ve ever seen on TV (I of course can’t be exactly sure who made it, but I’m assuming it was the director of the episode, Marc Daniels). This shot lasts 1 minute and 45 seconds. We’re in the middle of space and in the middle of a high-stakes episode where the crew is going crazy and the ship is going to blow up or some shit and everyone’s lives are in danger, but we pause 1 minute and 45 seconds to have an uncomfortably human moment with an alien who doesn’t even want to be human, and it’s so awful and amazing.

THE AVENGERS (2012)

fanfic writers are so fucking awesome in the sense that they can take one single scene, that lasts less than a minute, from the source material and turn that one single scene into a 40k word long fic with depth, feels, character study and development and create a whole storyline out of that one single canonical moment.

fanfic writers are so fucking awesome in the sense that they can take one single scene, that lasts less than a minute, from the source material and write 40 entirely different fics about that one single canonical moment and each one of those fics are literal masterpieces.

shout out to us fanfic writers ♡♡♡♡♡♡

one gifset per episode: 5.16 dark side of the moon

It's awesome you've been in fandom so long & can remember so much Nym. What elder wisdom would you share for fans with it all lying ahead?

Elder wisdom? Lordy! I don't think I have any of that. Experience is awesome and educational, but I wouldn't ever conflate it with wisdom. Anyone can think and/or fumble their way to wisdom, at any age. And anyone can be an unthinking twit - ditto. General advice for happy fanning... um... do what you love doing, let others do what they love doing.

Oh, and (for those of us with ovaries and creative inclinations) - nobody tells you that menopause can (not will - can) cause your cognitivie capacity to abruptly drop right out of your foo-foo at some arbitrary cutoff point, erasing decades of learning-how-to-write and leaving you a creative vegetable who needs to refresh their A-B-C and basic pencil-holding technique before writing a bloody grocery list, let alone coherent fanfic or meta. So I'm telling. (This too shall pass, HRT is awesome in the meantime, and you have to laugh like you're living in a Terry Pratchett novel, don't you, or else you'll cry.) There's some elder wisdom!

Yeah, I'm being silly (a bit), but Real Life will always try to cockblock fannish fun - or any fun. Other people tend to try to squash fun that isn't theirs, for whatever reason seems valid to them at the time. Adulting just eats you if you let it, and fandom is as valid a way of balancing that pressure with some release as any other hobby.

Even if the fannish escapism is only dreaming inside our heads, vegging on the sofa with endless reruns of our comfort show, thoughtful moments snatched in the shower or on our way to sleep, or reading AO3 tentacle porn on the commute to work, we need and deserve that space for ourselves to be ourselves. We deserve and need to be energised and passionate and in love with something, so we should hold on to fandom with both hands and give it the credit it's due as a lifestyle.

“I’ve got to send Jodie this,” he says, gleefully. “I’m texting her and sending her pictures, because obviously she isn’t here, but she’s my mate, and we’ve got her on a screen to line me up…” — Extract from DWM Issue 584