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It's my journal and I can whine pointlessly if I want to
NOTE: backdating this entry from May 8 to April 8 to make it drop off reading lists without having to make it private and therefore stop the existing discussions; I just don't want to start new ones right now. I'll fix the date a little later.
Spoilers for Civil War under the cut - I just learned that some LJ styles no longer show the cut text on the friends page. Sorry!!
I've spent most of today feeling gloomy after writing my previous Civil War post, having reminded myself of all the things I didn't like instead of focusing on the things that I did like.
As noted in that post, I didn't hate the movie; I had fun watching it! But I also feel like ... aargh, it's hard to describe. I noped out of the fandom last summer in large part because I was so unhappy and frustrated that the whole fandom kept talking about how much they'd hated AoU and predicting Civil War was going to be terrible, when I just wanted to be happy and enjoy the parts of AoU I liked and look forward to the next installment, and I ended up being bitter and angry all the time; it wasn't good. (Obviously there is nothing wrong with hating either/both of these movies; everyone's reasons were totally valid. It just really wasn't the fandom experience I wanted to have, and it was too ubiquitous to escape; at least it felt so at the time..)
But in the end, they were right. Civil War would've been a big disappointment if I'd gone into it with high expectations (though if you're after a fun summer popcorn flick, it was pretty good imho) and Infinity War will probably be even worse, since it'll have all the same problems AND THEN SOME due to having another bucketload of superheroes to jam in there. So I actually feel like I sort of owe the fandom a thank-you for accidentally harshing my squee hard enough that it didn't get harshed by the movie itself.
(Though I also kinda feel like I have now become part of the problem instead of the solution ...)
I'm not really going out of my way to look for reaction posts right now, but I did run across an interesting meta/reaction post talking about U.S. imperialism in the movie. (Squee harshing warning, if you're prone to that! The phrase "somewhere between morally bankrupt and ideologically horrifying" was used.) I don't agree with all their points, but it pointed out some things I hadn't thought about.
But anyhow, I'm sorry that my journal has turned into Squee Harsh Central, and I hope I'm not bringing people down.
tl;dr - WHY DO I HAVE ALL THESE FEELINGS ABOUT FICTIONAL PEOPLE. >_>
Anyway, I decided to channel those feelings of gloom and overinvestment into finishing up a depressing and long-ish White Collar fic I started between seasons four and five. It was VERY close to being done when season five came along and jossed it, and I quit writing with something like 90% of the fic finished. And I just haven't been in the right headspace to work on it since. Tonight I got the damn thing done (with a certain amount of "wow, self, you were really bitter about canon when you wrote this, weren't you?"). So expect slightly-depressing AU WC fic from me soon, when I've had a chance to edit it. Yay?
It is fascinating to go back and do edits on something I wrote three years ago. The sheer quantity of WORDS I've been writing lately has made a noticeable difference to my general ability to put a sentence together.
Spoilers for Civil War under the cut - I just learned that some LJ styles no longer show the cut text on the friends page. Sorry!!
I've spent most of today feeling gloomy after writing my previous Civil War post, having reminded myself of all the things I didn't like instead of focusing on the things that I did like.
As noted in that post, I didn't hate the movie; I had fun watching it! But I also feel like ... aargh, it's hard to describe. I noped out of the fandom last summer in large part because I was so unhappy and frustrated that the whole fandom kept talking about how much they'd hated AoU and predicting Civil War was going to be terrible, when I just wanted to be happy and enjoy the parts of AoU I liked and look forward to the next installment, and I ended up being bitter and angry all the time; it wasn't good. (Obviously there is nothing wrong with hating either/both of these movies; everyone's reasons were totally valid. It just really wasn't the fandom experience I wanted to have, and it was too ubiquitous to escape; at least it felt so at the time..)
But in the end, they were right. Civil War would've been a big disappointment if I'd gone into it with high expectations (though if you're after a fun summer popcorn flick, it was pretty good imho) and Infinity War will probably be even worse, since it'll have all the same problems AND THEN SOME due to having another bucketload of superheroes to jam in there. So I actually feel like I sort of owe the fandom a thank-you for accidentally harshing my squee hard enough that it didn't get harshed by the movie itself.
(Though I also kinda feel like I have now become part of the problem instead of the solution ...)
I'm not really going out of my way to look for reaction posts right now, but I did run across an interesting meta/reaction post talking about U.S. imperialism in the movie. (Squee harshing warning, if you're prone to that! The phrase "somewhere between morally bankrupt and ideologically horrifying" was used.) I don't agree with all their points, but it pointed out some things I hadn't thought about.
But anyhow, I'm sorry that my journal has turned into Squee Harsh Central, and I hope I'm not bringing people down.
tl;dr - WHY DO I HAVE ALL THESE FEELINGS ABOUT FICTIONAL PEOPLE. >_>
Anyway, I decided to channel those feelings of gloom and overinvestment into finishing up a depressing and long-ish White Collar fic I started between seasons four and five. It was VERY close to being done when season five came along and jossed it, and I quit writing with something like 90% of the fic finished. And I just haven't been in the right headspace to work on it since. Tonight I got the damn thing done (with a certain amount of "wow, self, you were really bitter about canon when you wrote this, weren't you?"). So expect slightly-depressing AU WC fic from me soon, when I've had a chance to edit it. Yay?
It is fascinating to go back and do edits on something I wrote three years ago. The sheer quantity of WORDS I've been writing lately has made a noticeable difference to my general ability to put a sentence together.
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hahahah sob.
I mean I think you can imagine my feelings about the film so I'll skip it, but in the time waiting for ANYONE to have actually seen it I did keep thinking about your Sad at WC, which at least made me feel less of a freak? So there's that.
(And I mean I am also totally well aware that if the quad of Avengers/IM3/Thor2/Cap2 hadn't been basically "let's create the absolutely PERFECT superhero-movies for M*" then AoU would have been fine and even this one would have been fine, but it's just . . . the experience of having been given The Perfect Chocolate Mousse or something and then having someone literally whip up shit and mud, throw some cocoa in, stick it in a bowl and insist it's the same thing I liked before. It's subjective and stuff, it's just also REALLY UNPLEASANT.)
*okay minor quibbles with all but I quibble with small things in TLotR and it's one of my core texts-of-my-soul, I AM A QUIBBLER.
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(I admit that I'm ambivalent about the idea of getting a third season of Agent Carter -- which seems unlikely, but it's still possible -- because the show has been managing to hit my particular happy buttons PERFECTLY, and I hate the idea that it might end up going off in a direction that makes me feel this way.)
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Although I have to say I felt a lot more charitable and warm to AoU after I read the CW storyline. Comparison is everything I suppose. *solemn* (and ugh but seriously tho: I wanted to be wrong? I wanted SO MUCH to be wrong. like I knew it was never going to be my movie but I really wanted it to pull out an eleventh hour save and at least be something I could enjoy. But. :| /hushes self)
But yeah, I mean, fwiw: that you have actually shared how you felt about WC helped on the "someone else who I like/respect has at least felt this way about SOMETHING even if not this so I am Not A Total Freak", so.
I TOTALLY get that ambivalence about Agent Carter. 100%. Especially since as far as I can tell from osmosis it ended S2 in a pretty reasonable place to end a story-arc, bar the Deliberate Cliffhanger - like other than that stuff seemed to wrap up in some emotionally satisfying ways, so it's REALLY kind of "but what if they fuck it up".
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Yeah, same. Hence the backdating on this post. I don't normally hate-watch things and I don't want to turn into someone who does that, because I know it makes ME miserable, and probably makes people around me miserable too. I don't know if this is common terminology or if this is something you or a friend coined, but I think you were the first person I've seen use the term negstimming and while it may be an imperfect analogy for me as a neurotypical person, it also feels like such a frustratingly accurate word for what I find myself doing under these circumstances (and it helps to have a word for it, so I can tell myself to knock it off). Doing that was one of the things that made WC fandom so miserable for me at the end, and it only ever made things worse, so you'd think I'd learn from my mistakes, but NO.
BRAINS DAMMIT. >_>
But anyway, I'm really glad my WC posts helped; so thank you - it actually helps my mood quite a lot to hear that! (I am going to be bitter on some level about that stupid show to my dying day, s2g.)
Especially since as far as I can tell from osmosis it ended S2 in a pretty reasonable place to end a story-arc, bar the Deliberate Cliffhanger - like other than that stuff seemed to wrap up in some emotionally satisfying ways, so it's REALLY kind of "but what if they fuck it up".
YES EXACTLY. The S2 ending is actually a really good place to leave the series, and even the Obligatory Cliffhanger provides a fantastic jumping-off place for fixits. I really wouldn't expect a better ending from a hypothetical season three, so the odds are actually good that things would go downhill. But then there's the lure of having more canon, so ... aargh. /o\
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Oh man, no: stimulation-seeking is a human universal and so is the malfunction. (As far as I’m aware we coined it in terms of I didn’t pick it up from anyone else, but given the general use of “stimming” to mean stimulation seeking others probably also came up with it/will come up with it independently.) Any, like, fidgeting behaviour, tapping your feet, even obsessively refreshing your tumbler page, anything like that is stimming, and is meant to self-soothe - it’s just that those are so ubiquitous, and so usually within culturally expected shapes/extents that they’re invisible. People with ASD and other stuff just tend to need More and often develop disruptive or distracting/attention-getting versions because more is needed and unspoken disapproval/cultural expectations aren’t so easily parsed.
And yeah, neg-stimming likewise - everyone does it, a little, because our brains think that stimulation is better than lack thereof even if it’s bad! (or we think knowing everything about the stimulating-thing is important for survival - thus horrible news stories) it’s just for most people it never gets out of hand or life-disruptive so they never quite need a word for it or a concept of it? Whereas if you’re already wrangling a mental illness you’re likely to wind yourself in Extra Trouble if you’re not careful. facepalm
So yeah I’m glad having the behaviour named is helpful! And yeah YOU WOULD THINK, but no like I had to get REALLY STRICT with myself - it’s why I’m totally off tumblr and my network link on my page is literally titled STOP CLICKING THIS FEATHER and it’s STILL taking a lot of effort. headdesk because my head is VERY SURE that I need to know EVERYTHING ABOUT this thing that I’m upset about because reasons and also stimulation and also maybe everyone is ganging up to come and get me! puts brain in corner
No self what we NEED to do is stop doing that thing. Go and play stupid clicky games MUCH BETTER STIMULATION.
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I haven't felt this out of step with What The People Want for a while now.
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Anyway, I think there's also some interplay between these things -- that is, I might have actually enjoyed the movie more if I'd gone into it, like I did AoU last summer, with lots of love for the franchise instead of a lingering load of apathy. So I don't want to predispose you not to enjoy it! But it really isn't just that, I don't think. I actually just wrote out a long comment on the earlier LJ post that basically comes down to, what used to make the Marvel movies shine, compared to most of the other superhero movies out there, is all the little humanizing touches -- the fact that they prioritized those little character moments (even AoU had some, like everyone hanging out at the party or Tony's conversation with Fury in the barn) but they're doing less and less of it, partly because the movies are so overstuffed that there just isn't room, and partly because the fight scenes get fanboy box office dollars and that's what they seem to be courting these days. And it's just going to keep getting worse as they add more superheroes to the franchise.
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Honestly though, I came away from AoS shipping Bruce/Natasha and Clint/Laura, and wanting fic about Wanda and Clint bonding, because that was totally my favourite scene in the whole movie. Based on everyone else's reaction posts, I didn't really bother looking.
But yeah, the movies are getting so muddy, and then the smaller movies are about characters I actively dislike, so I'm left with Agent Carter and Jessica Jones. Which is fine, but I planned my vacation (I only get 2-3 of these a year) around both Cap 1 and Avengers 1 coming out. Now I don't see them until they hit DVD.
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In any case, I suppose it's the natural life cycle of any long-running franchise to have ups and downs and periods of suck. It's possible that one of the new movies will turn out to be brilliant and breathe new life into it (and for me, the ones I've fallen in love with have really surprised me, so I can't even anticipate at this point which one might do it next).
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For me it's getting to the point where I can't mentally square the sexism with my feminism. Like, we get TEN YEARS of the franchise before there's a movie that's not about a white dude? And that's banished to the wasteland of cinema known as February? REALLY? But no, here have Ant-Man, without Janet Van Dyne and Doctor Strange, only more white washed. And, I know I'm in the wrong genre, but it's just... it's getting really bad, you know?
I'm almost mad at myself for letting it get to me, but I just... Ant-Man? REALLY?
But what should really piss me off, apparently, is a character having a wife and kids, because GOD.