MythicMistress

There comes a time in a certain kind of fangirl's life when she's asked why she ships the things she does.

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I was looking through my computer and flash drives recently, and found my lists of original and semi-original story ideas, along with the (lengthy) list of fanwork ideas, and the draft I started as my lone attempt at NaNoWriMo.

Semi-original in this case being related to fairy tales and fairy tale retellings. One of my original story ideas would involve robots. I'm having some qualms about doing the original robot story though, mainly due to the absolute mess generative AI is. It's kind of ironic, now that I think of it- all of those science fiction authors thought AI had to become fully self-aware and intelligent to cause trouble for humanity, and that's not the case right now.

I do want to work on them! I was hoping signing up for getyourwordsout would help with that. Well, we shall see.

For this post, I'm going to talk a bit about my feelings on book-to-screen adaptations. It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine, honestly- telling someone they've watched an adaptation only to have them say "It was a book?"

But enough of that- I would rather talk about how I'd like to to see more books get animated adaptations, as unlikely as that is for most of the things I wouldn't have minded as much. (I swear, the "Animation is for the immature" stigma needs to die.)

On the Tamora Pierce fan forum I used to frequent, one suggestion on how The Circle of Magic/Emelan universe books could be adapted to animation would be in the style of Avatar: The Last Airbender or Studio Ghibli. I personally think that's a wonderful idea- Emelan has more slice-of-life aspects to it than Tortall, so it might not have been as expensive to produce.

Another series I would have loved to see get an animated adaptation (instead of the mess of a live-action movie we DID get) is Artemis Fowl. We see Artemis grow up a bit during the series, and I feel that animating and hiring voice actors would have made things easier had the adaptations been successful enough to continue. (and we wouldn't have gotten that STUPID concept of a giant dwarf! AND they could have still cast Josh Gad!) Besides, some aspects would have been CGI'd to heck and back, so why not do it all in the same medium so it would look better?

However, my stance on this does not hold firm on all book adaptations. Take the adaptation of Uglies. You could argue that doing the film with animation would lend itself better to an uncanny valley beauty effect for the characters post-surgery. But. Later books in the series depict self-harm, and not in an entirely negative manner. I simply cannot condone that. (I'm glad the film adaptation flopped.)

I also love seeing fan creativity when it comes to making vids out of books that never got a screen adaptation, from animatics to found footage vids. Oh well. Guess I'll sit here with my pipe dreams...

I've been wondering if I'll ever manage to finish this, since I'm so very behind.

But I will try.

So, inspirations I get for fanwork ideas (that then end up sitting in my files for ages on end).

I can get inspired from many places. Some places include: long since deleted fanfics, TV Tropes theories, listening to film soundtracks or other music, revisiting canon, and the occasional film trailer.

The most recent piece of inspiration? I ended up with a scenario in my head based on a scene from a musical movie playing out in my head with characters from one of my other fandoms. The first time this happened was at least *nine* years ago and has been percolating ever since. It doesn't help that it's the same character and a similar situation either (the character being taunted over his dark secret).

I just don't know how to get motivated to bring those fanwork ideas to life. Oh well.

I would love a community devoted to the creation of fan songs, whether they be original compositions or parodies/lyrics set to the tune of existing songs.

I think about making it. Dream of it. Have done some brainstorming on how to get one to possibly work. But... No. Not with my motivation issues. And there's too much to ban without me making another sock.

Maybe there's something existing somewhere else that I could join...

My jobs are going okay, I passed both my thirty and sixty day reviews at the warehouse, and I'm mostly keeping up with my janitorial duties at the gym. Hopefully I can keep my quota up at the warehouse and they'll keep me on past the ninety day probationary period. After that, I can possibly quit working at the gym and finally have my weekends back. (Not that I've looked forward to weekends in years even before I started working at the gym.)

I've been on a temporary break from volunteering at the library- I have some training that I need to catch up on. I'll be doing that this Thursday. I needed a bit of a rest anyway, and it gave me the opportunity to hang out at the local community center for people who struggle with mental health issues for a while.

As for songwriting, I'm starting to think that maybe I should go back to my old way of rewriting lyrics for the topic I was trying to write original lyrics for. I have a song in mind that could possibly work for that (Golgotha by Heather Dale). I was also working on another fan song project with my old technique, but I fear I've bitten off more than I can chew- "The Bells of Notre Dame" from Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) just has so much going on in it!

I got what I like to call my "public birthday present" in 2020. A book in one of my favorite SF series was released on my birthday that year. (Though I was a little slow on the uptake getting a copy from the library and didn't get to read it until a few days later.)

Sadly, I was a little disappointed in the book. My reaction was basically, “This series is getting a full-length novel! YAY!” Then, once I had gotten my hands on a copy of the book and actually sat down and read it, the mild disappointment hit. I just would prefer not to have to deal with the shippers being encouraged. I would like a certain bond in the book series to stay platonic, and the content of the novel is opening up potential for romance fans to latch on to.

Ah well, I can’t complain too much, it wasn’t really my birthday present.

(I can't get away with actually naming the book, not really, I don't get that much privacy and the content isn't exactly parent approved.)

I am not going to win any "positive journal of the year" awards at the rate I'm going.

I went and volunteered my time as a comment mod for the sunshine_challenge again. Hopefully that will help me out next month.

Now then, what to do for the rest of the year? Oh yeah. I did try to start a series of posts on my favorite characters on a forum, I could start doing that again, and repost the one entry I had written up here. I wonder if that sort of thing would be accepted at fanifesto?

Of course, I need to cut down on the negativity. Even though I use this site as my primary form of venting, I feel like it's getting a bit excessive.

...and I went and joined 100fandomhell anyway, that challenge is going to be much harder now, even if joining the challenge came before I realized this fandom was one that I feel I can't really write fanfic for.

What are the things that cause me from feeling like I can't write in fandoms, you may ask?

-Shipping wars and/or not supporting or wanting to write the dominant ship
-A volatile fandom
-Canonical LGBT+ content
-Not wanting to support the creator(s)
-Feeling like I'd have nothing of value to add due to seeing that the fandom has thousands of fanfics already

RWBY ticks all of these boxes for me... and there's the title of this post. Before RWBY, it was Harry Potter, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and The Legend of Korra ticking most if not all of these boxes. I still might try to write fics for the shows, but it's not a sure thing. Definitely not Harry Potter though- Rowling's burned one bridge too many.

I was going through my YouTube channel subscriptions earlier this month when I came across Jonathan Young's original album Starship Velociraptor. I listened to the entire album, enjoyed it, and was blown away by Final Frontier, for that matter. But then, at the very end, came a message. It read:

"From the bottom of my heart thank you for listening.
This feels like the first time I have been real in a career of nothing but clickbait.
Perhaps that is a topic for another video.
Our culture of social media algorithms is pressuring artists into making derivative art in order to survive.
As a result- cover songs, fanart, sequels, reboots, and art based on popular franchises is drowning out everything out everything else.
Let's try to change that."

When I read that, I immediately felt sorry for him. Such talent, and his potential's being overlooked! Also guilty for enjoying all the cover tracks Mr. Young and others have done and posted to YouTube. It's a depressing thought, that people who create original works after/while doing derivative works are having those original works overlooked because they create derivative works.

So... Thoughts?