Give An Audience A Canon Gay Ship And They Will Be Entertained For One Season. Queerbait Them And You

give an audience a canon gay ship and they will be entertained for one season. queerbait them and you entertain them for a lifetime.

Guards! Guards! was not the first Discworld book I read but it is the one that punched my angsty, edgy thirteen-year-old self in the face. I have never had a book hit me like that since. Nothing has ever picked me up by the scruff of the neck and shown me my own face in the mirror that way.

I was angsting around, all "the world is terrible" and "people are evil" and "humans are a blight upon the earth" and "everyone is stupid" and Vimes showed up and said, "Yeah, and?"

So what? So they're stupid and petty - save them anyway. So they're selfish - save them anyway. So it's all fucked and there's never going to be a happy ending - save them anyway. Do it anyway. You don't get to opt out of caring just because they're grubby and ignorant and reactionary and petty because so are you and that's all we've got.

No other book has ever changed my worldview in one blow before or since. I reckon that's something that can only happen to you when you're a teenager anyway. But I've never quite gotten over it.

I'm in awe how you remember great huge chunks of new canon for these meta, Nym. How do you get all that from a single viewing of a show like SPN?

Heh, it never occurred to me that it was noteworthy! You've really got me thinking, now!

I guess... I approach any TV show I like enough to bother watching with a fanwriter's mindset? I actively character-study the main figures in a show as I go? I definitely don't recall all the monsters-of-the-week and fights and cases of the Supernatural storyline. I was focused on the main and recurring characters and their character arcs, on keeping up with the unfolding story, so I remember the main beats and their significance?

I feel like I missed great, relevant swathes of Dean's and Sam's character arcs, though. Because they were the show's constant, and because the whack-a-mole plot never stopped hammering them in 15 years, I'm sure there's plenty I won't pick up until I rewatch. I still find new things in shows I've seen so often that I could - in the event of a technological apocalypse - recreate the scripts from memory. *cough*Stargate*cough*

I took to using Tumblr's episode- and scene gifsets to help me contextualise and remember the events of specific episodes while I was following Once Upon a Time. I was struggling badly by then with cognitive dysfunction and recall, so I was actively looking for anything that helped me keep my fandom activities going. Writing fanfic most of all. That's why I tag the Supernatural gifsets I reblog or create with the season and episode number - little nudges for my brain to file that canon moment in the right spot in the overall storyline. When I can't figure out what ep I'm looking at/remembering from a glance at Amazon Prime's episode list with its tiny summaries plus my hunch, I google it. Once I've done that, the knowledge tends to stick.

I had an amazing art teacher in my second year of senior school - one of the few positives of my tween and teen years! He told the class about the technique used by Roman rhetoricians to remember their speeches - mentally dividing up the physical space where they were going to speak into 'pigeon holes' and 'storing' pieces of their material in them. Visual cues to recall. I've never stopped using that tip in some way. I guess I sort of use a TV show's episode numbers/titles and even main characterisation beats as my pigeon holes, once I get invested in a show!

Ah, yes, the three types of Doctor Who episodes:

Silly space nonsense that is just a thinly veiled critique of one of society's current issues

Unexpected historical figures show up and do cool stuff that will never make it into any history books

The most traumatizing and anti-capitalistic 45 minutes of television you will ever see

the fanfiction in my head is soooo good wish you guys could see this

there must be something 😳 I can do for you 😳 in return?