enchantedsleeper

I'm a little behind on my 3W4D posting - I had planned to have a proper post up today, but it's the last day of April and thus the last day for pimping my small fandom over at smallfandomfest, where I had signed up to write about my favourite podcast, The Strange Case of Starship Iris. I was determined to make the deadline, and so my blogging energy tonight went towards writing my pimp post!

So, I'm including part of that below, with a link where you can read the full thing if you're interested. Pimping my fandom-pimping ;D

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My favourite way to sum up TSCOSI in a nutshell is to say that it's "be gay, do crime in space". Like many excellent podcasts, it's very queer, and has a diverse cast of characters (and voice actors, as the creator made a point of casting VAs who match the race and gender of their characters as closely as possible) with a heavy dose of found family. It's also very funny: the writer and creator, Jessica Best, has a real flair for humour, but the emotional beats also really hit home. There's a reason that Starship Iris has won an Audioverse Award three times (in 2017, 2019 and 2021) for its writing - as well as a number of other awards for production, vocal direction, original compositions and voice actor performances.

But enough accolades - what is the podcast about?

The show page for The Strange Case of Starship Iris at Procyon Podcast Network (a production group that produces TSCOSI along with several other podcasts) summarises the premise as follows:

"In 2189, Earth narrowly won a war against extraterrestrials, but at a tremendous price. Two years later, in a distant patch of space, a mysterious explosion kills nearly the entire crew of the science vessel Starship Iris. The only survivor is Violet Liu, an intrepid, sarcastic, terrified biologist. But as Violet struggles to readjust to life after the Iris, questions abound. Was that explosion really an accident? If not, just what is going on? And why does every answer seem to get more bizarre and more dangerous? If Violet and her newfound allies want to untangle the truth, they'll need courage, brilliance, and luck - and honestly, a couple of drinks."

As the name implies, there's a healthy mystery element to the podcast, which is what first got me interested - I had vowed to start Listening to Podcasts and was working my way through some recs in a group chat, the first of which was Arden, a satirical take on true crime podcasts. After that, I had the urge to listen to another mystery podcast, and TSCOSI was my next pick. Season one has a really clever premise where the episodes are framed as "reports" read by a mysterious government operative, and what starts out as a simple framing device evolves into a central element of the mystery. Little clues to what's going on are scattered throughout the report narration, and we follow the core cast's attempt to unravel the mystery with juuust a little bit more information than they have.

Read on at smallfandomfest...

What small fandom would you get more people into if you could? Small fandom promoing has been a bit of a theme lately, as over on Pillowfort, monsterhugger created a rallying point for small fandoms where people could post about the smaller fandoms they'd like to see content of on PF - or anywhere. After enjoying the Small Fandoms Drabblethon so much in February, I'm really getting into small fandom initiatives...

 It's almost Three Weeks for Dreamwidth again! Here I was so focused on Archive April that I didn't even think about another blogging event that's coming up this month. I'm grateful that I saw bluedreaming's Mastodon post about it or I wouldn't even have realised that it starts tomorrow.

After the event had finished last year, I came up with a blogging prompt idea that I really liked, but it was too late to use it myself, so I waited until now to share it xD (I know I could have posted it any time, but I thought it would have less chance of getting lost in the shuffle this way). It's a prompt for anyone who fancies writing about fanworks (though it can apply to original works, too!)

Here's the idea:

1. Make a list of all of your fanworks (or original works) - up to you what counts as a fanwork, it can be anything you'd like to write about! These don't have to be in a particular order.
2. Give each work a number.
3. Every day (or every other day or however often you'd like to do it), roll some dice* or generate a random number, and then look for the work that corresponds to that number.
4. Write a post about that work - sort of a DVD commentary, maybe talking about how you came up with it, what it means to you, why you created it, how it came together, etc. Anything you feel like!

*Probably several dice depending on how many works you have. It's probably an advantage if you're a D&D player who has lots of dice with different numbers of faces xD

This could be done with any type of list, so you could do it with a list of recs, too, if you'd like to write about other people's creations. Anyway, I thought it would be fun to share this idea for anyone who's looking for 3W4D inspiration (or general blogging inspiration!). For other ideas, ysabetwordsmith has created a really extensive list of prompts and questionnaires. I might also share some 'Blanket Boxes' from Pillowfort - lists of prompts to build your blog (known as a fort :D).

Is anyone looking to take part in 3W4D, and do you have a theme/set of prompts in mind?

Well, I said I wouldn't set out to post every day during Three Weeks for DW, but then I immediately found something else that I wanted to post about, so here we are two days in a row!

Disney is building up a real head of steam with its unnecessary live-action remakes of classic animated films, and while more people are talking about The Little Mermaid at the moment (understandably given the very real uncanny valley horror of the realistic sealife), its Peter Pan remake, Peter Pan & Wendy, has also just dropped. Not in cinemas, mind you, but straight to Disney+, which doesn't say a lot for Disney's confidence in the whole production. So last night, in retaliation, I decided to rewatch one of my all-time favourite films: the 2003 live-action Peter Pan, starring Jeremy Sumpter and Rachel Hurd-Wood.

I've been more than a bit obsessed with Peter Pan ever since I was little; I have early memories of me and my brother being allowed to stay up late to listen to a radio drama serialisation of the book, and I watched the Disney animated film on endless repeat. I once went to our local church fête dressed up as Peter Pan (the outfit was actually a Robin Hood costume belonging to my brother, with a Peter Pan hat that my mum sewed with a little red feather in it). My greatest wish was to be able to fly, and of course to never grow up. (I'm sad to report that second one did happen, at least in part. Growing up is a state of mind). I even have a dedicated Peter Pan section of my bookshelf with a Peter Pan bookstop :D (It only has a handful of books, but still).


The Peter Pan bookshelf, with background ukulele. I recommend the Jonathan M. Wenzel book, by the way, it's pretty good.

So you can imagine my excitement as a 12-year-old (the same age as Wendy in the film, in fact) on holiday in the US with my parents, seeing posters advertising a live-action Peter Pan film! We usually saw a couple of films each holiday (the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings films were being released at around the same time) and so my mum took me to see it, and I was absolutely in heaven the whole time. I had a cherry ring pop (which was a sweet and a flavour that you don't get over here in the UK) and all was right with the world. My mum even enjoyed it too, I remember her laughing at some of the comedic scenes.

Months later, I was vibrating with impatience for the DVD to be released and watched the few clips that they had made available online over and over again, which means that those parts of the film have a particular resonance for me when I watch them now.

Given the special place that this film holds in my heart, I've been extra wary of other live-action remakes of Peter Pan; I did not see the 2015 Pan film when it was released, and based on what I've heard, that was a good call. I also didn't have any interest in watching Peter Pan & Wendy, mostly based on the general quality of Disney's other remakes, but earlier I decided to check out a trailer just to see whether Disney had decided to do anything novel or interesting with this particular adaptation.

And... nope. Honestly, the film just looks really boring. The casting is good and actually diverse (which you can't say for the 2003 film, though I will give them credit for casting an Indigenous and Iroquois-speaking actress, Carsen Gray, as Tiger Lily, who in one scene tells Captain Hook that he's old and smells like bear poo - according to the behind the scenes info - but that's about it), but nothing else that I saw in the trailer inspired me at all. Why does Neverland look like a flat, endless field?

The special effects in the 2003 Peter Pan film are a bit dated (there's a sort of kaleidoscope sequence when the kids enter Neverland that looked odd even at the time), but the world of Neverland is visually incredible: lush, dreamlike, colourful and full of life. It's got cotton candy-like pink clouds that the kids can bounce on. It looks like the kind of thing that would come from a child's imagination. Neverland in Peter Pan & Wendy, at least the parts shown in the trailer, just looks washed-out and grey.


Really, Wendy? Because it doesn't look that hard to dream up...

There's a lot that's silly and a bit campy and over-the-top in the 2003 film, but it is a kids' film, and you can tell the makers understood the directive - Peter Pan, and Neverland, is supposed to be whimsical. And viewers are capable of suspending disbelief and entering into the spirit of things. Contrast that with Peter Pan & Wendy, where they apparently decided not to make Tinkerbell glow because "a viewer would be uncertain of where the light originates". In the trailer, Tinkerbell does look like she's glowing at a few points, but apparently it's the fairy dust that glows, whereas she doesn't. Because we can have fairy dust and flying kids, but a luminescent fairy is just going too far.

It's really just same old, same old with Disney's live-action remakes which take "realism" as the be-all and end-all for reasons no-one can fathom, but it's disappointing considering that this is one story where that's absolutely not the point. (And I mean, films with talking lions and a magic genie and mermaids are also not meant to be realistic). I wanted to just dunk on the film for being bad and unnecessary, but reading how excited Alyssa Wapanatâhk (the actress who plays Tiger Lily in Peter Pan & Wendy) is about her character and the care and attention put into making her authentic and respectful gave me pause, and maybe it'll be enough to get me to check it out. But it also makes me wish that she (and the other actors) were getting a better film, one that seemed like it was a genuine passion project and labour of love rather than part of a long list of systematically churned-out remakes.

Anyway, I want to channel some of this grumpy energy into spite-creating fanworks for the 2003 film, but I don't have any specific ideas at the moment (prompts are welcome!). Maybe I'll finally make the time to create one of the fanvids that I've been sitting on ideas for for years...