December posting meme: Fandom appeal

leesa_perrie asked: Pick a fandom and tell me what got you so excited about it.

Ooh fun. :D

You know, there's a general, overall answer to this, and I'm answering with that, rather than with a specific fandom example, because this is something I've kinda wanted to make a post about for awhile. I can actually peg the specific combination of factors that tends to draw me to something fannishly. There are always exceptions, but most things that have gotten their hooks in me have the following factors: worldbuilding that is clever, fun, and interesting enough to make me want to explore the world more, but not so tight that there's nowhere to insert my own imagination; an ensemble cast with a number of different characters I like in different ways; and a character relationship (or much more rarely, an individual character) that pings my id. And for the latter, the relationships that make my id go "zing" are usually (though again, not always) either an antagonistic friendship with combined elements of love and situational distrust, or two characters who start out disliking each other and fall in "like".

You'd think with a roadmap that detailed, I'd be better at guessing what I'm going to like, but the subjective elements are SO subjective (and so hard to recognize at first glance) that I have a long history of initially dismissing the things I later fell in love with. There are a few things I've glommed onto from the first episode, e.g. Agent Carter, but it's more common for me to go the route that I went with shows like Stargate Atlantis, White Collar, or more recently Flash, where my first reaction to it was disinterest, and then I watched enough episodes to have it grab me.

So actually that's more of a general answer than a specific answer, but I guess that's the way my brain rolls tonight. :D

Totally wrong Flash predictions

Well, seeing how I'm zero for whatever on my predictions for Flash this season, now that I've watched the mid-season finale I may as well make some more probably-very-wrong predictions for the back half of the season. Who knows, if I keep taking wild swings, one of them might land eventually ...

These involve spoilers for the mid-season finale and also for the one thing I know about future episodes, which was mentioned in past entries.

(I'll probably do this for Legends of Tomorrow after their mid-season finale too, because why not??)

( Spoilers under the cut )