Catch-up Meme

[owlmoose]

I've seen a few people do this, but most recently ganked from umadoshi. I suppose it's appropriate to do a catch-up meme a week after everyone else.

So what have you been up to? / Major life changes? Same old same old?

I've been working a part-time temporary job that might become more permanent soon, but that's by no means a done deal. So I'd rather not talk about that publicly yet. Otherwise I feel like it's pretty much situation normal.

What fandom are you in/do you spend most of your time in?

Either Dragon Age or MCU, depending on the day. I haven't been participating much, though, largely because I haven't readjusted to having a job outside the house and with regular hours, and I can't really be on social media while I'm there. Also I have my irritations with both fandoms, in terms of recent content and of the communities, so it's feeling less like happy fun squee times than I want it to be.

Where do you hang out online?

If I'm being honest, I have to say Flight Rising. Breeding and dominance battles continue to hold my attention, and although the site also has its dramas, I'm way less personally invested than I am in my other fandoms. My frustrations with Tumblr as a community and as a platform continue to grow, and I'm taking a semi-hiatus from it, starting tomorrow, mostly to avoid Trespasser spoilers, but in truth I'm running on queue half the time lately anyway.

I do want to post more here, though. More books reviews? (I got some enthusiasm for that suggestion the other day, so thanks for that!) More meta in general? Respond to things on Tumblr here, where we might actually be able to have conversation about them? I guess we'll see. I've also been on Twitter more lately, because it's easier to pop in from my phone while I'm at work.

What are you reading?

I'm in the middle of two books right now: "The End of All Things" by John Scalzi, and "A Red-Rose Chain" by Seanan McGuire. End of All Things is a collection of four novellas, and I'd read the first three when I picked up Red-Rose Chain at McGuire's Borderlands event on Saturday (which was very fun!). Since I was at a good stopping point with the Scalzi, I started reading the McGuire while I was there, and now I want to finish it. So I'll probably do that, then get back to the Scalzi, then begin on the mountain of exciting books that have come out in the last two months (Court of Fives, The Fifth Season, House of Shattered Wings...).

What are you watching?

My main TV project is a rewatch of Star Trek: Voyager. At least, I'd thought it was a rewatch when I started, but almost nothing after the first season has been familiar. I'm positive I watched at least some episodes with Seven of Nine, though, because the reason I remember giving it up was because I got tired of it being the Seven of Nine show. I just finished Season Four, so maybe the part I did watch is coming up. Anyway, I'm enjoying it. It's not as uniformly good as DS9 or later TNG, but when it's good, it's very good, and I really like most of the characters (even Seven, better than I remembered).

We're also sort of slowly working on Sense8, and I've grown into a big fan of The Nightly Show and Last Week Tonight.

What are you making?

Not as much as I would like. I went back on Fangirl Happy Hour to talk about Ant-Man and the current state of the MCU! The episode was released today and can be found here. I have a couple of long projects going, most notably a Dragon Age: Inquisition Hawke/Fenris fix-it fic, but it wants to be an epic and I fear I've bitten off more than I can chew with it. We'll see if I can pull it together -- making enough progress to post it, or at least start posting, is my main writing goal for the month.

What are you squeeing about today?

Not today, exactly, but I already posted about how much I loved Jaws of Hakkon, one of the DA:I DLCs. I've moved on to playing Descent with my Cadash, and I have to admit it works better with a dwarf inquisitor. There's not a ton of unique content for her, but there's enough that I can appreciate the resonance. (No mention of the Hero of Ferelden's being a dwarf, though, not even when Malika asked Renn if he'd met her.) I'm about halfway down to the bottom. Hopefully it won't take too much longer, and then I can move on to Trespasser.

If you could rope old fandom friends into a new fandom, it would be.....

Is it wrong to say that I'd love to new people to get into Dragon Age and bring in fresh perspectives, in hopes of lightening the relentless negativity that I've been seeing since DA:I? I'm not saying that I don't want to ever see any criticism, ever -- there are plenty of valid critiques to make of the new game; I've made plenty of them myself. But it seems like the crits are all anyone ever talks about, and it's getting me down.

I should really watch/read/dive into _______ and then come talk to you about it!

Uprooted by Naomi Novik! OMG it was so good. I don't want to say any more because spoilers. Just go read it.

What else is on your mind?

Not a lot, really. Which is why I haven't posted so much here, I suppose. I need to get back in the habit of regular posting, if nothing else to help keep better track of myself. I keep saying that and not doing it, but that doesn't mean it isn't true.

Comments

[lassarina]

Man, has the negativity in DA fandom gotten worse? It was really really bad when I left, and that was way before DAI. Ouch.

[owlmoose]

Oh, so much worse. We have a whole new field of polarizing characters and relationships to argue about, with predictable results, and I can already see what exciting new arguments will be coming down the pike for DA4.

I forget, have you played DA:I yet? If not, are you planning to?

[lassarina]

I haven't yet, but I do plan to! I bought it at release but I had too much going on last fall to start it, and then husband laid claim so I had to wait for him to be done. Now he is, and I can play!

....someday. *eyes backlog*

[sarasa_cat]

Fingers crossed that the current job becomes more permanent.

Although my situation is different, I know what you mean about fandom activities slipping to the way side when readjusting to a different work/life/daytime schedule.


What kinds of fresh perspectives do you want to see in DA fandom? I watched tons of new people pour in over the past year+. While they brought in different perspectives, it rapidly became not my kind of fandom. I still think the problem is strongly rooted in how tumblr works as a system: one defends their territory using their blog to amplify/soapbox their message. If they are a shitstirrer, they raise a ruckus within a tag. No sense of community, no community walls like LJ's comms. Tons of reasons to compete (aka, soapbox) and very few reasons to cooperate (aka, build communities around smaller common interests).

Although it doesn't help that Bioware's writers have created a media franchise that is the fantasy RPG equiv of ONTD.

[owlmoose]

See, the new people you mention haven't been a part of my experience at all, probably because I've never been part of the Cullen branch of fandom. So for me it's been mostly the same people, and theme and variation on the same dramas. I've unfollowed a few people, but probably not as many as I should. I agree with what you say about soapboxing, defending territory, and the lack of any sense of community, and in many ways the various arguments about DA:I have made that worse.

What I mean by new perspectives might be more in the line of approaching the game without the weight of expectations. I feel like a lot of the negativity and disappointment toward the game comes from hopes and expectations that weren't met, and while I agree that the game could have been much better in many ways, I think I enjoyed it more than most of my friends did. Which I think has made it harder to create a space where I can express enjoyment of the things I liked, especially since what I liked didn't center on a particular character or 'ship (in which case it would have been easier to find a community to squee with) but rather around the stuff that happens in the world -- the politics, the Grey Wardens, digging up dwarf and elf lore all over Orlais and Ferelden, etc. I want meta conversations about all the implications of everything that happened, not endless rants about how people think the game should have gone differently. I mean, I'm not telling people not to be critical (should I even have to say that?). I had plenty of criticisms and haven't been shy about sharing them. But the balance is off, at least in terms of me being able to enjoy the conversation.

[sarasa_cat]

It is true that Cullen fandom has grown and, in fact, that it has morphed into something humongous and unrecognizable, but I have seen a lot of other new people come in for other aspects that aren't Cullen related. Although, I suspect that I have been aware of rush of incomers since Feb 2014 because my tumblr has a lot of meta that people started reblogging back then. There were days when my activity feed was useless because I would see nothing but 200 likes or reblogs of some old meta from 2012. My follower count quadrupled during the months leading up to DAI's release. Thus, I think these experiences have made me aware of all the new blood across DA fandom, rather than just within Cullen fandom.

Fully agreed that it has all been themes and variations on the same old drama. For you: old people, same old drama. For me: new+old people engaging in the same old drama.

Not only have I also seen the same negativity you mention here -- negativity from unmet expectations -- I have also seen many unrealistic or poorly proportioned expectations. For instance, have you seen some of the twitter copypasta tumblr posts from the Bioware devs that have been reality checks to gamers/fans about the amount of work that goes into making a game? (Wait, didn't you reblog some of those posts? ;)

...idk, given the purchasing price of a AAA game plus the extra cost all its DLCs and given how long a gamer must wait for a AAA game to come out, I can understand why fandom can turn into the complaint hotline when the game isn't exactly what the gamer wants. But I also know how impossible it is for developers to meet those expectations, despite their final crunch working 'til 2am most nights for a few months. Believe me, I know. I guess I just sympathize with all parties involved.

ANYHOW. Enough of that.

I want meta conversations about all the implications of everything that happened, not endless rants about how people think the game should have gone differently.

Now that I have vicariously seen how the game ends -- and I think Trespasser was very interesting -- I too am interested in stepping back and looking at Thedas end-to-end to see what all of this implies because quite a few mysteries were cleared up, more or less.

I must admit that without Trespasser, the initial game didn't really work for me. There were aspects of the main story that really bothered me (in a critical theory way, and in a "not my media, nope" sort of way) that were left hanging with a giant WTF but then, later, those aspects were beautifully resolved in Trespasser. Honestly, I like the game's main story far far far better after watching (sadly, not yet able to play) a few "Let's Plays" of Trespasser. That said, while playing the original game late last year, I enjoyed the side quests and the random open world aspects far more than the main game. Also enjoyed Cassandra's, Leliana's, and Josephine's stories very much (worth the price of the game, for me). Cullen's romance is very interesting from a feminist perspective and has wiggle room for parallel-but-different interpretations. But the main quest line from Corypheus onward failed me ... until Trespasser.

I sort of feel like the balance was off in how they presented the main story but, overall, the ideas are Intriguing.

I had plenty of criticisms and haven't been shy about sharing them. But the balance is off, at least in terms of me being able to enjoy the conversation.

Yep. The discussion on tumblr is a mess. Oddly, the discussions on reddit have been far more interesting and far more civil. In my experience, the best discussions about the kinds of lore things you are talking about have mostly happened away from fannish tumblr's eye.

ATM, I don't have a working machine that can play DAI. Once that problem is solved, I want to go back and finish up quests I didn't have time to play last December and then play through the DLCs. The Dwarf and Elf lore plus the implications it all has on the Chantry's telling of history already has me thinking. It's an interesting world they've built. Curious where they will go with it.

[owlmoose]

For instance, have you seen some of the twitter copypasta tumblr posts from the Bioware devs that have been reality checks to gamers/fans about the amount of work that goes into making a game? (Wait, didn't you reblog some of those posts? ;)

Entirely possible. ;) I am a fan of keeping my expectations of mainstream media properties within the realm of realism. So even if I didn't reblog them, I almost certainly nodded along in appreciation.

Once you have the opportunity to play the DLCs for yourself, I'll be very interested in hearing what you have to say. :)

[ossobuco]

I would love to see some new blood especially re: Origins and II and watching them have the kind of overwhelming feels that I had, and falling back in love with the games that way. I remember playing them fresh and coming onto Tumblr meaningfully about the same time and having such warm interactions with people who weren't yet so jaded by the tumblr politics.

Voyager, my loooove. I actually really got to like Seven, but it was really only after they started developing her (and especially her relationship with Janeway) more.

How is Sense8? I have a coworker who raved about how good it was for weeks, but I haven't watched it yet... partially because I heard somewhere that there was a lot of sexual content, and I don't want to deal with that.

[owlmoose]

I know what you mean. I miss the days when *I* was the person not jaded by Tumblr politics!

We haven't gotten beyond the third episode of Sense8, so I can't really say. The pacing is kind of odd? LIke, there are a lot of characters, and some of them have a lot of stuff happening, but others almost nothing, and the first three episodes all play slowly until a big noisy action scene near the end. I think the effect is supposed to be slow and mysterious, which would work better if we weren't taking such big gaps between episodes.

I'm just into Season 5 of Voyager now (took a break for my epic run on all the DA:I DLC), and I'm hoping to get to know Seven as more of a person and less of a puzzle. I do like her relationship with Janeway, and the parallels between them.