oh dear, and also the store is closed on sunday, ugh

( Cut for the grossness of dog bodily functions in a dog who is like 111 in dog years )

Fandom-related news

• Last summer we watched Teen Wolf and then read a lot of it. In spite of the fact that it was so bad I needed alcohol to get through an episode, I was having fun until the creator/writer made such an ass of himself online that I got irritated anytime I saw his name. And then the same thing happened with the fanon, because for like a month every story I tried to read was irritating. It has now been added to Tumblr Savior. Hopefully the sensitivity will subside by the time a new series airs to at least allow me to watch the scenes with Dylan O'Brien in them.



• As mentioned in the last post, my wife has gotten too far into the hockey rabbit hole. She isn't watching hockey, but she's reblogging random images of hockey players who aren't even part of the big OTPs and the other day I caught her reading a completely earnest long screed about how hockey fandom doesn't take Sidney Crosby's pain seriously enough. And nodding along thoughtfully.



• I've been reading a lot of Hobbit fic, but, as my Pinboard account will show, not bookmarking very much of it. I've even been reading WIPs, because several of them are good. I suppose I feel at home in a high fantasy environment, and then there's all the nostalgia for Lord of the Rings (I spent years there and met my wife!).
  
  It might be my imagination, or the fact that I was litearlly a teenager at the beginning of LOTR[/iPS], but it does seem like so far there is not as much decent reading material in this fandom as there was in that one. That doesn't really stop me from reading it and mocking the historical inaccuracies, incorrect punctuation, lack of line breaks, lapses in canon (and speaking as someone who's only read The Hobbit once as an adult and who threw the Silmarillion across the room after a few pages, the fact that I can criticize your lore is a very bad sign indeed), and general failure to understand how the world works (eg [a]the idea that putting a lot of wildflowers in a pot of boiling water would produce a paste instead of a tea followed by a pot with burnt flower bits in the bottom of it, or [b] the notion that the Company would or even could gallop their ponies into Mirkwood and keep galloping all day.) (It's quite cute for the most part. It's like the fanfic equivalent of a baby animal tripping over its own feet.) (In fact it reminds me of the stories I wrote when I was 10 or 11. I didn't have much idea how the world worked either, but I think, if nothing else from the quantity of smut, that these authors are generally a bit older.)
  
  The overwhelming majority pairing is Thorin/Bilbo. I can't actually say it makes NO sense, although I was a bit flabbergasted when I first saw it, because they are after all the two main characters, and exactly the sort of middle-aged dudely characters that fandom loves (and white which fandom also loves). And of course, both characters have an internal character arc that sort of involves each other, even in the book, but rather more so in the movie, where they also have the advantage of the facts that
  
  1. Martin Freeman is, thanks to Sherlock, already a widely-acknowledged fandom sex object, and
  
  
  2. Richard Armitage apparently has an army of female fans already, plus has been styled in The Hobbit so he always looks like he's leaping off the cover of a long extremely purple romance novel about Her Viking Lover or something, one with a spine that automatically falls open to the horribly badly-written dirty bits.
  
  
  The next most popular pairing on AO3 and the kinkmeme seems to be Fili/Kili, which also makes sense because, well, the Hot Dwarves. I'm more surprised that there's very very little RPF than I am by the existence of the incest, there.
  
  After that is probably Bilbo/Bofur, which seems to be fed in equal parts on the scenes where they interact in canon, and the fact that everybody loves James Nesbitt, the twinkly Belfastian George Clooney.
  
  So far, I am reading everything, which is very unusual for me. I'm naturally such an OTP-based reader that in the past I have multiple times imprinted in favor of an OTP simply by reading one story featuring it when I had no familiarity with canon whatsoever, and then refused to read anything else. However, I think the reason for this might be that mostly I just want to read about the characters again, preferably as many of them as possible. I was trying to make a list of which dwarves I most wanted to see more of a few days ago, and eventually decided that "how much I adore this dwarf" is basically correlated 1:1 with "how much I know about this dwarf based on his screentime". Therefore, I conclude that my preferences are meaningless, unless someone is going to convincingly write an Irish or Scottish accent, in which case I will lap it up because I adore accents.