Canon/tags promotion post

[dhampyresa]

Recruit people into your fandoms and/or pairings and/or characters!

Comments

[evewithanapple]

I nominated Rock 'n' Roll High School, which is an ABSOLUTELY FUCKING BONKERS movie from 1979. It's like Grease on cocaine, without the musical numbers. It's what happens when adults who have no idea what The Youths are up to try to write a screenplay about youth culture, then that screenplay gets put through a dozen rewrites and probably at least one round of google translate. It's Roger Corman (of B-movie fame) attempting to make a teen rock musical. Nominally, it's about a teenage girl fighting against her school's virulently anti-rock 'n' roll principal while also scheming to see The Ramones live in concert. However, the actual plot is so . . . bizarre (at one point, exploding mice are involved) that you can pretty much just take the bare bones of the characters and go from there. Specifically, I nominated it for the relationship between the main character, Riff, and her best friend Kate. Their relationship . . . is very gay.







Very gay.

(The best friend does have a male love interest, but he's so bland and irrelevant, you can pretty much ignore him entirely.)

Plus, you can watch the whole thing for free on YouTube! So even if you hate it, the most you'll have lost is an hour and a half of time.

[ultra_fic]

Good grief, I never would've thought of this film if you hadn't mentioned it! lol I only made an effort to see it in the first place years ago because it was The Ramones. One of the weirdest 90 minutes ever! lol

[(Anonymous)]

I'm in dire need of a fifth fandom to offer and want to find something new in this tag set. If anyone's nervous to promote please don't be - we need you!

very large comment coming through pardon me

[intersquid]

(Thanks anon for the reassurance ;w; I hope you find some cool new stuff to get into!)

The Lone Gunmen is a TV series about the three men who make up the titular Lone Gunmen newspaper group, which is dedicated to exposing the truth in conspiracy theories about government corruption and cover-ups. It's a much more lighthearted and comical spinoff of the X-Files, but it stands perfectly well on its own. (I'd personally highly recommend watching the two episodes of X-Files that feature them and show how they met, 5x3 Unusual Suspects and 6x20 Three of a Kind, but they're not necessary.) The plotlines often involve common fic tropes (taking care of a baby? yup! prison episode? of course!) and the writers were definitely aware of how many X-Files fans had the hots for the Gunmen, because they lean pretty hard into fanservice and shipbaiting. The three main characters and their dynamic as a found family are an absolute delight, in no small part thanks to how different they are. Melvin Frohike, the oldest and shortest gunman, was a counterculture radical in the 60s and now specializes in surveillance and photography and wears nothing but leather and ugly vests. Richard "Ringo" Langly, the youngest and tallest, is a punk rocker and D&D enthusiast who used to sell bootleg cable while hacking on the side. And landing right in the middle is John Fitzgerald Byers, a suit-wearing former FCC employee named for the president who was killed on the day he was born, and whose faith in the establishment was shattered on the day he met the other Gunmen. All three of them are varying degrees of weird, geeky, and paranoid, but they're still presented as heroic American patriots (played by Canadian actors) who are doing the right thing by questioning everything. They're joined by Jimmy Bond, an optimistic but not too bright football player who adores them and funds their paper, and Yves Adele Harlow, a mysterious woman who slips in and out of their lives as both an ally and a rival. All 13 episodes are available on Youtube!
(I'm not sure if this needs a content note, but just in case: the first episode, which aired several months before 9/11, revolves around an attempt to crash an airplane into the WTC. Ultimately the plane doesn't connect, but it's a very close call. If anyone needs more details or timestamps for scenes containing certain things or anything else, please let me know!)

Max Headroom is probably familiar to a lot of people, considering he was the face of MTV and Coke (and the infamous broadcast signal intrusion), as well as the host of two different talk shows. In the dystopian cyberpunk canon he comes from, he's the results of the brain scan of a journalist with a head injury turned into a fully sentient AI. The TV series is about the injustices of society uncovered by Edison Carter, the journalist who provided the blueprint for Max, and the people he works with at Channel 23—Bryce Lynch, a 16 year old programming genius who designed Max, and Theora Jones, whose job is to hack into security systems so that Carter can access restricted or guarded areas and get the full truth. The plotlines are sometimes comical and sometimes a little on-the-nose, often both at once (courtroom proceedings being televised as an obnoxious buzzer-filled game show is ridiculous... but really, how many steps removed from that is Judge Judy?) There are tons of offhand mentions of concepts that leave room for worldbuilding headcanons. The technology is all delightfully dated/nostalgic, and there are some plots involving concepts that had barely been explored at the time, like malicious Trojan programs and firewalls. All 14 episodes are free to stream in the US on the CW Seed (and for people not in the US, I can confirm from Canada that using a proxy works just fine. but i never said that shhh)

Liar! Uncover the Truth is an otome game, and it's absolutely hilarious—both intentionally and unintentionally. The concept is that you, a recently single wedding planner who's yearning to get married, meet ten gorgeous men at a matchmaking party... but a mysterious fortune teller warns you that 9 of them are hiding terrible secrets. Your mission is to sniff out the liars and find your dream husband. There's a ton of content, including shipbaity bonus stories about your love interests getting close, and a lengthy sequel that's currently being published. This is a matter of taste, really, but despite the fact that I found some of the love interests absolutely repellant, every single one grew on me thanks to the way the sequel has been handling their sometimes genuinely frightening lies, and how they own up to lying and strive to rebuild trust. The translators/localizers/writers clearly took some liberties and had a lot of fun with Liar. Lines like “hold onto your panties, bitch, shit's about to get real” and “a guy who matches all your ideals is as rare as a unicorn that fights evil with the power of music” are probably going to stick with me for the rest of my days. It's free to play, but it does take a bit of a time investment unless you pay for more story tickets. It's available for iOS and on Google Play!

Re: very large comment coming through pardon me

[(Anonymous)]

Liar! Uncover the Truth looks so fun. Will definitely download it!

shrubbery ate my baby

[fiachairecht]

Jordskott is a thoughtful, compassionate take on how working for the (Swedish) police uniquely equips one to love and lose and obsess. It is also about trees that would like to eat you, and those are not actually incompatible stories. It's a Scandinoir drama in terms of frame: a traumatised detective returns to her childhood home to deal with her father's company after his recent death, the childhood home she's been avoiding ever since her daughter vanished there years ago. But dealing with the company means dealing with (among other things) witches, a sentient forest, her father's crimes, her daughter's not-quite-ghost/not-quite-self, and a supernatural environmental group. It's about the horror of love and the love of difference and grief and memory and has a wonderful amount of care for women/children/refugees/brainbads who are painted as villains in two many police dramas.

Anyway. More people should come have feelings about women and girls and the forests that would like to eat them because they love them. It's a Swedish show (in Swedish with English subtitles), but it's on ITV Encore in the UK and Shudder through Amazon Prime in the US and ... other places in other places? There's two seasons, 10 and 8 episodes so far, and I highly recommend it for anyone who likes fairytales, mysteries, horror, unique police dramas, and female characters.

The Real Ghostbusters

[dcm]

The Real Ghostbusters is a cartoon from the eighties featuring four men, Egon, Winston, Ray and Peter, who have very distinct personalities and different hobbies but share the same job of ghost-hunting. Because of that, they live together in an ex-firehouse that belongs to them. There is also Janine, the Ghostbusters' secretary and dear friend. She often helps the guys in more ways than just answering the calls, as she saves their lives on occasion. And then there's Slimer, a good ghost adopted by the Ghostbusters under the excuse of having a subject to test their equipment on.

Basically this is a show featuring a team-as-family. They’re sleeping together in one bedroom (the firehouse dorm), and doing all sorts of activities together other than their job, including going on vacation together. These are guys that tease each other but also love one another and aren't shy about showing it. And it’s really what I love the most about this show. It is all too easy to ship them together in various configurations of OT2, 3, 4 and 5. :D

The episodes are all self-contained and you can watch them completely out of order to still make sense. The Ghostbusters have a case to solve each episode, and they get to catch the monster, or monsters, of the week, fearlessly risking their lives while performing their jobs and saving the lives of their employers, sometimes saving New York City or the whole world from apocalyptic-sized threats. Of course there are spooky/cartoonish ghosts, but also a lot of folklore, ancient myths, mysticism, magic and intriguing alternate realities, and the score and background tracks are all simply great!


Additional Notes:

You can find the cartoon on Netflix, the whole series is actually located under the folder 'Season 1' on the network, it is a very long season while they are 78 episodes. I feel to mention that imo you aren't required to watch the whole thing in order to get the characters and write this fandom, besides checking wikipedia should be enough to check which episodes are important for the characters' backgrounds (or I could put together a handy rec list with the best episodes if you wish).

The other folders ('Season 2' through '5') feature actually a sequel/spin-off called "Slimer! and the Real Ghostbusters", a cartoon aimed to younger kids and because of this, the characters' personalities are different and Slimer gets a central role in every episode. I lean toward not considering this show really part of the RGB cartoon, because of how different the characters are and act, though I actually watched it all anyway. XD

(sorry for the bad-quality image)

[teumesia]

Have you ever watched a Western and thought 'hey, wouldn't it be super cool if the guns talked'? If that thought was then followed by 'wouldn't it be even cooler if the guns and trains were actually malevolent god-like beings fighting each other in a bid for control over civilization', The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman is the book for you! (And also if you haven't thought any of those things, because it is kind of out there.)

The characters are all really cool: there's a disgruntled psychologist sent west to a hospital to take care of injured war veterans after it turned out that quiet university life wasn't for her, an evil-spirit empowered gunslinger who'd really rather be doing something else, and a paper-pusher working for the steam engine spirits and together they all end up caught up in the search for the old general of a vanished republic that defied both the gun and engine spirits. It's a lot of fun and the worldbuilding is pretty neat, too \o/