if i've got you i don't need a parachute
Tuesday, 12 August 2014 14:23![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
usuallyhats
First of all, purplefringe made me a vid and you should all go and watch it because it is AWESOME. :D It is about Romana I and her amazing face and how she is the BEST, and it makes me so happy. :DDD
So Nine Worlds was amazing again! :D I went to lots of great panels and hung out with many of my favourite people. I learnt some important things about myself, viz if I am stressed and overwhelmed eating something is a good idea, and also the more people talk about how much they hate Batman the more I sort of secretly love him a bit, or at least the version of him in my head which is made of all the good parts of canon. And I did lots of cosplay, which was v. fun: I really enjoyed planning and making all these costumes, despite all the howling about them I did on Twitter. On Friday I was Steph!Robin: I didn't keep the mask on for very long because I basically had no peripheral vision whilst wearing it, but apart from that and the wig squeezing my head a bit this costume was really fun to wear. On Saturday I went as Sif: I wish I'd had proper boots/shoes, but otherwise, v. proud of this one, especially the way the cape billowed in the wind when I walked from the hotel where I was staying to the one where the con was. :D And on Sunday I was Han Solo, and v. pleased to be wearing actual clothes again (though I did miss the capes...).
In terms of actual panels, pretty much everything I went to was good, great or at least mostly good. :D First, on Thursday night, was one of the panels I was on, Fanvid Adventures In Time And Space! There were some technical difficulties getting the vidshow to play, but they were sorted out eventually and other than that I think it went really well. Also, the vidshow included the premiere ofpurplefringe's Romana I vid. ♥
On Fridaysilly_cleo (who I stayed with on Thursday night) and I got up at a ridiculous hour to head over to the con, meeting cosmic_llin, carawj and ![[twitter.com profile]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
jescissa on the way. (Next year, definitely getting a hotel room for Thursday night too...) The first panel I went to was on Urban Fantasy. This was probably my least favourite of the con, though there was some good stuff in it: Paul Cornell in particular was awesome, and I appreciated that he was very clear straight away about the fact that it's a genre that began as being mostly by, for and about women. There was a lot of talk about how to define urban fantasy, including the possibility that fantasy set in imaginary cities might also be urban fantasy, if the city is a strong enough presence, and discussion about whether that means that maybe Buffy isn't urban fantasy?
Next I went to Queer In The Text, an excellent discussion of queer subtext and text in Classic and New Who. There was also some discussion of trans and non-binary characters, mostly in terms of "let's have some please", but also around the possibility of doing interesting things with Time Lords and gender. And then I continued the theme by going to Suffering Sappho, a wild and wide-ranging discussion of queer representation in superhero comics, both what we have and what we'd like to see. I really liked the point that someone made in the context of how villains are more likely to be queer and that that's problematic that we are beginning to see villains whose queerness is seen as a redeeming feature or something positive about them, eg Harley and Ivy. (I think Savant and Creote, pre-reboot, would also fall under this.) There was also lots of enthusiasm for queering Diana and the rest of the trinity, and also Steve Rogers. YES LET US DO ALL THESE THINGS.
After a quick McDonalds run, it was time for Positive Practice: awesome portrayals of people with mental illnesses, a really thoughtful, measured, careful panel which I enjoyed very much. Bujold's Chalion books and M*A*S*H (among other things) were mentioned as being examples of good representation of mental illness; I love the former (well, the first two, haven't read the third) and am now intrigued by the latter.
Some of us skipped the next session and went off to attempt to check into our hotel room, an unexpectedly torturous process in which we kept being given keys to the wrong room, including the keys to the room of someone who just happened to have the same last name as me. D: But eventually we made it and were able to flop around and recover our collective strength in time to go to a presentation on Self-Identity in YA Dystopian Fiction. This made some great points about how YA dystopias present worlds that are broken in similar ways to our own, and that really are as terrible as teenagers can sometimes feel our world is, but also usually offer the possibility of hope, usually through one exceptional teenager with whom the reader can identify.
The rest of Friday was VID TIME. :Dsuch_heights ran an excellent show featuring highlights of the year in vidding, in the course of which thingswithwings's Leverage OT3 vid Parachute DESTROYED ME WITH FEELINGS. Luckily it was followed by cupidsbow's glorious Hugh Jackman vid , and purplefringe's delightful Pushing Daisies vid, Ne Me Quitte Pas, which helped me recover. All the vids shown were excellent; I recommend watching them all! (The show did unfortunately run into a few technical problems in that the room was a shared one, split down the middle by a divider, with a writing workshop in the other half, and the lighting controls hadn't been properly split so whenever we turned them down they turned them back up again. Eventually we worked out what was going on and managed to compromise on lighting and noise levels and the show was still great, but it was a shame to have to deal with all that right at the start. Noisy panels sharing a room with quiet ones was actually a recurring problem at the con, I felt: I noticed it in the Doctor Who room and the LGBTQAI/Race and Culture room too.)
After a short break, there was a panel on vidding! I was pretty exhausted by that point so I can't remember much of what was talked about, but I really enjoyed it. Some things I do remember include: why is Vienna Teng so popular amongst vidders (many reasons!), vidding differently depending on expected audience (ie recruiter/look at this thing I love vids vs more in depth ones), analysing vids, vidding as a fandom in itself, and many other things.
And then I went back to the hotel room for sleep. Which I sadly did not achieve until about 4.30am, THANKS BRAIN. So Saturday started with me skipping the morning panels in favour of dozing, but I did manage to get up in time for This Will Always Be Your Home, on the Race and Culture track: a really thoughtful discussion of the panellists' various experiences around fandom and race and community, as well as ideas of home and race more generally. After that I went to Wouldn't It Be Cool If..., a fun free-for-all discussion of stories the panellists would like to exist. And then I went back to the hotel room to relax a bit.
Which I needed to do, because then I was on the Received Fan Wisdom is Wrong panel, which I was really nervous about but was lots of fun! We talked a bit about specific bits of fan wisdom that we disagree with (I talked about the awesomeness of Mel, Dodo, and The Underwater Menace, and The Gunfighters also came up as underrated), and also about received fan wisdom in general: why we have it, why it changes. There was also a bit of discussion about the idea of gatekeeping and the desire to have the correct opinions to feel like part of fandom. And we talked about what we'd like to establish as received fan wisdom, so I got to share my theory that Shada is the most canonical story of all because it has happened so many times with a whole roomful of strangers. ;D We also talked a bit about the stereotype of female companions in the Classic series doing nothing but screaming, twisting their ankles and asking "what is it, Doctor?", and about how this is WRONG, and that led into talking about how the production team can also contribute to solidifying received fan wisdom, in this case through the persistent "X will be the first really feminist companion" meme, which is never true because Barbara. Someone in the audience, possibly Liz Myles, also pointed out that it's only the mostly-female companions who the production team praise by explicitly or implicitly putting down previous ones; it doesn't happen when there's a new actor as the Doctor.
And then there was the Bifrost Queer Cabaret and Disco! And if you haven't already heard aboutsuch_heights and happydork getting engaged at the Bifrost, I recommend reading their lovely posts on the subject. ♥
On Sunday I started the day with Chains of Transformation: remixing the remix - the etiquette of transforming fanworks, which got derailed a few times by questions from the audience, but still managed to make some good points, especially about the importance of permission statements and how they can say whatever you want them to say and be as complicated as you need them to be.
I skipped the next session in favour of acquiring tea and food for later, and then went to the v. interesting Reading SF While Brown panel. After that was a session where I had many many potential panels to go to; more or less on a whim, I picked Fashion, Costume and Inspiring Fans, which was a great choice. It was made up of two talks, one on costume design in film and tv (by Gavia Baker-Whitelaw of Hello, Tailor, a blog I definitely recommend if you're interested in costume design), and one on stealth cosplay: what it is, how you might do it and why it's great. The two talks were both really good and also really different in style in a way that complemented each other nicely.
Next I went to Gender Roles in Doctor Who, which I will confess I was slightly worried about. There is this orthodoxy in fandom that you can either think that Steven Moffat is perfect and can do no wrong, or you must think he is the worst forever and everything he touches is made of awfulness (and if you're in Doctor Who fandom, you must also think that the RTD era was a queer feminist utopia), and I did feel like the latter feeling was very prevalent at Nine Worlds. And though yes, I do have issues with the Moffat era, I feel like this assumed blanket dismissal is both wrong and unhelpful. Like, if that's how you feel, fine, but don't assume that all other feminists feel exactly the same. Anyway, the list of panellists was encouraging and made me feel like it probably wouldn't just be 75 minutes ofsuch_heights valiantly trying to defend Amy, River and Clara, so I decided to go along, and this was definitely the right choice: it was a great panel! (It helped that such_heights, who was moderating, laid down some ground rules first: no character bashing, and discussion should be more nuanced than just dismissing an entire era as terrible.) There was lots of interesting and insightful discussion, particularly of the structure of the show, plus lots of talk about Barbara's awesomeness and a lovely digression into how wonderful and groundbreaking SJA was. ♥ Some interesting points were also made about male characters, especially Una McCormack locating the Doctor in the tradition of more sensitive, thoughtful heroes like Peter Wimsey (and pointing out that the new series Doctor even has a similar reluctant soldier backstory), and... such_heights, I think, talking about Ian as a male lead who isn't really macho, and who clearly respects Barbara tremendously. Also in this panel I learnt that in some original drafts the Doctor was on Earth to invent colour television (!) and that Ian and Barbara were called Cliff and Lola (!!!). So, all in all, very glad I went. :D
I was planning to go to one more panel at this point, but I had basically run out of steam, so I sat around in the lobby withpurplefringe, silly_cleo, such_heights and raven, which was lovely. Then a whole lot of us had dinner in the hotel restaurant (on the grounds that it wasn't McDonalds), and that was the end of the con. Nine Worlds, you were great, see you again same time next year?
purplefringe made me a vid and you should all go and watch it because it is AWESOME. :D It is about Romana I and her amazing face and how she is the BEST, and it makes me so happy. :DDDSo Nine Worlds was amazing again! :D I went to lots of great panels and hung out with many of my favourite people. I learnt some important things about myself, viz if I am stressed and overwhelmed eating something is a good idea, and also the more people talk about how much they hate Batman the more I sort of secretly love him a bit, or at least the version of him in my head which is made of all the good parts of canon. And I did lots of cosplay, which was v. fun: I really enjoyed planning and making all these costumes, despite all the howling about them I did on Twitter. On Friday I was Steph!Robin: I didn't keep the mask on for very long because I basically had no peripheral vision whilst wearing it, but apart from that and the wig squeezing my head a bit this costume was really fun to wear. On Saturday I went as Sif: I wish I'd had proper boots/shoes, but otherwise, v. proud of this one, especially the way the cape billowed in the wind when I walked from the hotel where I was staying to the one where the con was. :D And on Sunday I was Han Solo, and v. pleased to be wearing actual clothes again (though I did miss the capes...).
In terms of actual panels, pretty much everything I went to was good, great or at least mostly good. :D First, on Thursday night, was one of the panels I was on, Fanvid Adventures In Time And Space! There were some technical difficulties getting the vidshow to play, but they were sorted out eventually and other than that I think it went really well. Also, the vidshow included the premiere of
purplefringe's Romana I vid. ♥On Friday
silly_cleo (who I stayed with on Thursday night) and I got up at a ridiculous hour to head over to the con, meeting cosmic_llin, carawj and Next I went to Queer In The Text, an excellent discussion of queer subtext and text in Classic and New Who. There was also some discussion of trans and non-binary characters, mostly in terms of "let's have some please", but also around the possibility of doing interesting things with Time Lords and gender. And then I continued the theme by going to Suffering Sappho, a wild and wide-ranging discussion of queer representation in superhero comics, both what we have and what we'd like to see. I really liked the point that someone made in the context of how villains are more likely to be queer and that that's problematic that we are beginning to see villains whose queerness is seen as a redeeming feature or something positive about them, eg Harley and Ivy. (I think Savant and Creote, pre-reboot, would also fall under this.) There was also lots of enthusiasm for queering Diana and the rest of the trinity, and also Steve Rogers. YES LET US DO ALL THESE THINGS.
After a quick McDonalds run, it was time for Positive Practice: awesome portrayals of people with mental illnesses, a really thoughtful, measured, careful panel which I enjoyed very much. Bujold's Chalion books and M*A*S*H (among other things) were mentioned as being examples of good representation of mental illness; I love the former (well, the first two, haven't read the third) and am now intrigued by the latter.
Some of us skipped the next session and went off to attempt to check into our hotel room, an unexpectedly torturous process in which we kept being given keys to the wrong room, including the keys to the room of someone who just happened to have the same last name as me. D: But eventually we made it and were able to flop around and recover our collective strength in time to go to a presentation on Self-Identity in YA Dystopian Fiction. This made some great points about how YA dystopias present worlds that are broken in similar ways to our own, and that really are as terrible as teenagers can sometimes feel our world is, but also usually offer the possibility of hope, usually through one exceptional teenager with whom the reader can identify.
The rest of Friday was VID TIME. :D
such_heights ran an excellent show featuring highlights of the year in vidding, in the course of which thingswithwings's Leverage OT3 vid Parachute DESTROYED ME WITH FEELINGS. Luckily it was followed by cupidsbow's glorious Hugh Jackman vid , and purplefringe's delightful Pushing Daisies vid, Ne Me Quitte Pas, which helped me recover. All the vids shown were excellent; I recommend watching them all! (The show did unfortunately run into a few technical problems in that the room was a shared one, split down the middle by a divider, with a writing workshop in the other half, and the lighting controls hadn't been properly split so whenever we turned them down they turned them back up again. Eventually we worked out what was going on and managed to compromise on lighting and noise levels and the show was still great, but it was a shame to have to deal with all that right at the start. Noisy panels sharing a room with quiet ones was actually a recurring problem at the con, I felt: I noticed it in the Doctor Who room and the LGBTQAI/Race and Culture room too.)After a short break, there was a panel on vidding! I was pretty exhausted by that point so I can't remember much of what was talked about, but I really enjoyed it. Some things I do remember include: why is Vienna Teng so popular amongst vidders (many reasons!), vidding differently depending on expected audience (ie recruiter/look at this thing I love vids vs more in depth ones), analysing vids, vidding as a fandom in itself, and many other things.
And then I went back to the hotel room for sleep. Which I sadly did not achieve until about 4.30am, THANKS BRAIN. So Saturday started with me skipping the morning panels in favour of dozing, but I did manage to get up in time for This Will Always Be Your Home, on the Race and Culture track: a really thoughtful discussion of the panellists' various experiences around fandom and race and community, as well as ideas of home and race more generally. After that I went to Wouldn't It Be Cool If..., a fun free-for-all discussion of stories the panellists would like to exist. And then I went back to the hotel room to relax a bit.
Which I needed to do, because then I was on the Received Fan Wisdom is Wrong panel, which I was really nervous about but was lots of fun! We talked a bit about specific bits of fan wisdom that we disagree with (I talked about the awesomeness of Mel, Dodo, and The Underwater Menace, and The Gunfighters also came up as underrated), and also about received fan wisdom in general: why we have it, why it changes. There was also a bit of discussion about the idea of gatekeeping and the desire to have the correct opinions to feel like part of fandom. And we talked about what we'd like to establish as received fan wisdom, so I got to share my theory that Shada is the most canonical story of all because it has happened so many times with a whole roomful of strangers. ;D We also talked a bit about the stereotype of female companions in the Classic series doing nothing but screaming, twisting their ankles and asking "what is it, Doctor?", and about how this is WRONG, and that led into talking about how the production team can also contribute to solidifying received fan wisdom, in this case through the persistent "X will be the first really feminist companion" meme, which is never true because Barbara. Someone in the audience, possibly Liz Myles, also pointed out that it's only the mostly-female companions who the production team praise by explicitly or implicitly putting down previous ones; it doesn't happen when there's a new actor as the Doctor.
And then there was the Bifrost Queer Cabaret and Disco! And if you haven't already heard about
such_heights and happydork getting engaged at the Bifrost, I recommend reading their lovely posts on the subject. ♥On Sunday I started the day with Chains of Transformation: remixing the remix - the etiquette of transforming fanworks, which got derailed a few times by questions from the audience, but still managed to make some good points, especially about the importance of permission statements and how they can say whatever you want them to say and be as complicated as you need them to be.
I skipped the next session in favour of acquiring tea and food for later, and then went to the v. interesting Reading SF While Brown panel. After that was a session where I had many many potential panels to go to; more or less on a whim, I picked Fashion, Costume and Inspiring Fans, which was a great choice. It was made up of two talks, one on costume design in film and tv (by Gavia Baker-Whitelaw of Hello, Tailor, a blog I definitely recommend if you're interested in costume design), and one on stealth cosplay: what it is, how you might do it and why it's great. The two talks were both really good and also really different in style in a way that complemented each other nicely.
Next I went to Gender Roles in Doctor Who, which I will confess I was slightly worried about. There is this orthodoxy in fandom that you can either think that Steven Moffat is perfect and can do no wrong, or you must think he is the worst forever and everything he touches is made of awfulness (and if you're in Doctor Who fandom, you must also think that the RTD era was a queer feminist utopia), and I did feel like the latter feeling was very prevalent at Nine Worlds. And though yes, I do have issues with the Moffat era, I feel like this assumed blanket dismissal is both wrong and unhelpful. Like, if that's how you feel, fine, but don't assume that all other feminists feel exactly the same. Anyway, the list of panellists was encouraging and made me feel like it probably wouldn't just be 75 minutes of
such_heights valiantly trying to defend Amy, River and Clara, so I decided to go along, and this was definitely the right choice: it was a great panel! (It helped that such_heights, who was moderating, laid down some ground rules first: no character bashing, and discussion should be more nuanced than just dismissing an entire era as terrible.) There was lots of interesting and insightful discussion, particularly of the structure of the show, plus lots of talk about Barbara's awesomeness and a lovely digression into how wonderful and groundbreaking SJA was. ♥ Some interesting points were also made about male characters, especially Una McCormack locating the Doctor in the tradition of more sensitive, thoughtful heroes like Peter Wimsey (and pointing out that the new series Doctor even has a similar reluctant soldier backstory), and... such_heights, I think, talking about Ian as a male lead who isn't really macho, and who clearly respects Barbara tremendously. Also in this panel I learnt that in some original drafts the Doctor was on Earth to invent colour television (!) and that Ian and Barbara were called Cliff and Lola (!!!). So, all in all, very glad I went. :DI was planning to go to one more panel at this point, but I had basically run out of steam, so I sat around in the lobby with
purplefringe, silly_cleo, such_heights and raven, which was lovely. Then a whole lot of us had dinner in the hotel restaurant (on the grounds that it wasn't McDonalds), and that was the end of the con. Nine Worlds, you were great, see you again same time next year?