sholio | Linkdump

fandom_stocking is taking signups! I'm signing up this year for the first time -- last year I had a lot of fun going around stuffing stockings, so I wanted to play too this year!

Other linkage ... this is -- well, I honestly can't figure out if it's the most awesome thing I've ever seen, or the silliest thing I've ever seen. Maybe a little of both? These women made an Elfquest fan trailer with really astonishingly good costumes and mind-blowing resemblances between the actresses and the elves. Not only can I tell exactly who everyone is at first glance, but they've even captured the way they stand and move from the comics, and their facial expressions. I didn't know it was possible to simulate the Elfquest elves that closely with real live actors. At the same time ... let's just say that some things which look just fine in a comic become LOLarious when played out by actual human beings. >_>

I have been reading the most awesome book on writing, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. I'm pretty sure someone on my flist recommended this to me awhile back, and it is alternately interesting, hilarious and inspiring. As well as just being a fun book to read, there are a number of useful tidbits on writing, although it's hard to sit down and condense it into how-to-write bullet points -- a lot of it resonates with me, but it's as much how she says it as what she says. She has a way of describing the creative process, especially the messier parts of it, that makes me go "Oh thank goodness it's not just me". Highly recommended.

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I have to say, good production values or not, that ElfQuest trailer fails as trailer, at least if it was intended to be like a movie trailer. The only thing I know about ElfQuest is that it is a really popular fantasy comic (judging by the massive number of fans I've seen at cons when the creators were there) whose fans sometimes howl while standing in line. This trailer did not intrigue or hook me, instead two minutes into it I was bored and wanted to click away, and even holding out to the end, I still don't know what the ElfQuest is about or what the setup/premise of the film would be.

I don't really think it's supposed to be, though -- I mean, no more than, say, a fanfic is an advertisement for the show that inspired it. I get the impression that it's by fans, for fans ... that you're not so much watching it to go "Oh, that would be a great movie!" so much as "Oh, wow, they really got that character's pose from issue #2 down!" (Not to mention an excuse for a bunch of Elfquest fans to put on furs, run around half-naked in the woods, and have fun doing it.)

... that's just my take on it, though.

That could be. Just from the way you called it a trailer I expected it to be like the faux movie trailers or the trailers for AU scenarios and such, that tell a story quite clearly.

But most of the fake trailers and AU vids I've seen have been dependent on viewer knowledge of the source material as well. It is possible that the EQ one is more so than most, and it's true that I don't generally go around looking up fake trailers or fan-made parodies of stuff I haven't seen, but I don't usually get the impression that, say, a fan-made fake trailer for a Batman movie is being aimed as a marketing tool at people who have no exposure to Batman -- it's meant for Batman fans to go "Oh my God, check out that awesome chick they cast as Poison Ivy". Fan-made pimping tools do exist -- "gateway" fanvids, say, that show some enticing clips of the show in the hopes of luring other people into your rare fandom -- but it's not usually my default expectation when I check out a fanwork. (I'm not saying that it is yours, either -- it just would never have occurred to me to look at it as something which is aimed at an outside audience rather than an inside audience, I guess is what I'm saying.)

Maybe it was so incomprehensible because there were just too many characters? Even just figuring out who the protagonists and antagonists were was hard for me (I mean my best guess was that the heroes must be that ensemble of the idyllic frolicking elves who ran away from the presumably bad werewolf-elf in the beginning, and that the cavemen were also bad guys because the elves hid from them while fleeing from the werewolf, but that the main, smart bad guy was the evil witch with glowy eyes who tortures people with magic). Whereas I don't think you could make a Batman trailer where even someone unfamiliar with Batman couldn't pick up that he is the main character (unless you do "Batman reimagined from Joker's POV" or something like that, and then you would guess the main character was Joker).

Ohhhhh god, seeing your assessment of it made me realize .... there's one thing that's not at all evident if you haven't read the original series, which is that they only cast the female half of the cast. They left out the male elves, who include the protagonist, his best friend and his romantic rival, who drive a lot of the action. And it *is* a huge series, with a huge cast, and they lumped together characters from several different eras. So what you're seeing is basically 30 years of Batman canon as depicted with just the female Batman characters, set vaguely close to the beginning of the timeline except there are a number of characters who don't show up until much later.

... no wonder you're confused. XD I would be too! Actually, you got an impressive amount of the basics given everything that's been left out! (Actually, the only thing that's not quite right is that the werewolf-elf is actually an ally, but there's no way to tell that from what's depicted.)

All trailer-fail aside, it really *is* a good series -- at least the first part of it; there's a fairly self-contained storyline that took place over 20 issues or so ... and then there was more, and at first everyone was happy until it JUST KEPT GOING far beyond the point where it should have been put out of its misery. *g* But it is actually quite good -- there's excellent worldbuilding, good art, and complicated character relationships with canonical queerness (even if it's mostly in the background, and a lot of it went over my head as a kid). The whole thing is online.

LOL. I had thought they had just cast male and female elves with women because they were pretty and androgynous in the source or something like that, and contrast them with the evil cavemen racially.

At first I was undecided about the werewolf-elf and I thought maybe the voice belonged to it and it was just telepathically warning the frolicking elves, but then the other wolf towards the end growled evilly, so my interpretation of events shifted.

LOL. I had thought they had just cast male and female elves with women because they were pretty and androgynous in the source or something like that

No, they said on the website that they'd stuck with the women to make it easier to "cast" (since they despaired of finding enough small, slim, elfin-looking men who also resembled the characters -- probably a valid concern *g*). But I can see why you would think that, especially since a lot of the costumes could work for males or females.

I'm tempted to go reread it now ... I wonder how it would read to me now, since I first read it when I was quite young, and it's been 10 or 15 years since I last reread the whole thing. At one point it was a huge influence on my adolescent drawing style (and I still catch hints of it in my art occasionally).

Ooooh! Anne Lamott! *squees* She makes my heart so happy! :D :D :D I've read Traveling Mercies by her and an excerpt from Bird by Bird. Have you gotten to the "Shitty First Drafts" part yet? That section made me want to jump up and down and scream, "I KNEW I WASN'T CRAZY!!!!"

Also, while I'm in the squeeing mood, if you haven't already, I would also recommend Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. To be fair, it's a book on "Christian Spirituality" and not so much on writing, but it's also more about him and how he grew into the person he is now. He has a couple of good chapters in there about the writing process and how writers don't get paid much because they don't do much (ex: sit around all day and halfheartedly work on the next book), but he's hilarious too. :)

Thank you for the recommendation! :D I've been wanting to read more good nonfiction lately.

... and Anne Lamott is so much fun! I haven't read anything else by her, but I'll have to look for other books of hers. "Bird by Bird" is awesome. "Shitty First Drafts" is a great chapter, but they all are -- I think the one that really cracked me up was one chapter where she's talking about having revised/rewritten the same novel several times, each time sending it to her editor and having it rejected, and each time cranking up her level of suicidal angst another few blackly hilarious notches ... it really shouldn't be as funny as it is, and yet, I want to make my husband read that chapter and go "This is exactly what it feels like!"

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