sovay: (Renfield)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2018-11-27 02:11 pm

I ain't got to drive it since she brought that thing home

I have never seen Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001). I became culturally aware of the show during college, but most of my information about it has actually come from Tumblr, where gifsets of it are in constant rotation for their convincingly deserved queer lady value. So I'm not sure what to do with the fact that only on my most recent re-read of Phyllis Ann Karr's Chrétien de Troyes-inspired picaresque The Follies of Sir Harald (2001), by which I mean last night, did I realize the entire second chapter is a Xena crossover with the numbers very lightly filed off.

It was not this passage:

A mounted figure waited on the far bank, as if guarding the ford. Sir Harald started on seeing that it was a beautiful woman with long dark hair and piercing, steel-gray eyes, a haughty smirk, and a breastplate in the ancient style, who sat astride a buttercream steed with mane and tail like sun shining on milk, as proud as her rider.

Or this one:

The Lady Gavrielle of Wisten was a pretty, perky, chirky, cheerful-faced young blue-eyed blonde who wore a coronet of thin gold wires interwoven with many kinds of white and blue flowers to set off the honey-russet color of her hair. While not quite of a loveliness to rouse envy in the breasts of the famous beauties of King Arthur's courts, she could at least have held her own amongst them, if only by virtue of her insouciance.

It was the scene where Sir Harald, whose knightly honor has taken a (self-inflicted) beating in the first chapter, runs into someone comprehensively worse at knight-erranting than he is:

"Sir Jokesir the Puissant," the other made answer, drawing himself up proudly. His helmet, if helmet it could be called, was an old-fashioned leather cap with protruding earpieces, covered in overlapping iron plates of which several were absent and most of the rest dented. It would have disgraced a common foot soldier, and it covered none of Sir Jokesir's almost boyish face—a face that would have been more nearly triangular if it had been better fed: his nose narrow; his chin almost pointed; his cheeks almost hollow; and his wideset brown eyes, perched between high cheekbones and spare brows, wearing beneath the braggadocio an almost melancholy cast.

and the Ted Raimi penny dropped.

Karr does note in the novel's afterword, "While, to those readers who recognize the Warrior Woman of Part the Second, I can only apologize for failing to show her in action," so I must have known there was an in-joke from the first time I finished the book. I was just not culturally equipped to get it, as opposed to the Ivanhoe and Mozart shout-outs in other chapters. In my defense, I have spent a lot more time on Tumblr since then, in addition to acquiring reasons to pay attention to Ted Raimi's face.

I think what I'm trying to say is that, [personal profile] skygiants, Phyllis Ann Karr may literally have asked for Kay fic on Yuletide that one year.
selkie: (Default)

[personal profile] selkie 2018-11-27 08:57 pm (UTC)(link)
Chrétien de Troyes-inspired picaresque

Well, that's perfectly in line with today today.

moon_custafer: neon cat mask (gonzo)

[personal profile] moon_custafer 2018-11-27 09:19 pm (UTC)(link)
Went back and read your 2015 post on Ted Raimi – if you haven’t yet seen Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness (1992), Ted has at least three bit parts, including Ash’s bored co-worker in the last scene who has been listening (probably for the dozenth time, by his expression) to the narrative of Ash’s adventures that the audience has been watching.
thisbluespirit: (Default)

[personal profile] thisbluespirit 2018-11-27 09:27 pm (UTC)(link)
a Xena crossover with the numbers very lightly filed off.

I've never actually watched Xena either, and, lol, that is very lightly filed off indeed, only just a bit scratched here and there...
rachelmanija: (Default)

[personal profile] rachelmanija 2018-11-27 09:44 pm (UTC)(link)
I just read her very interesting novel At Amberleaf Fair and the afterword says some parts were inspired by an unnamed obscure musical.
rachelmanija: (Default)

[personal profile] rachelmanija 2018-11-27 11:05 pm (UTC)(link)
I did like it and I'll put up a review tomorrow. I have NO idea what the musical was.
skygiants: the aunts from Pushing Daisies reading and sipping wine on a couch (wine and books)

[personal profile] skygiants 2018-11-28 01:55 am (UTC)(link)
I have that one lying around and have been waiting for The Right Time to read it but THE MYSTERY OF THE UNNAMED MUSICAL just might be what pulls the trigger!
alexxkay: (Default)

[personal profile] alexxkay 2018-11-28 05:40 pm (UTC)(link)
While G&S as a *whole* qualify as not obscure, I wouldn't have put Ruddigore in their top 3 famous plays. I could easily see someone calling Coriolanus "obscure" without meaning any diss to Shakespeare's popularity.
movingfinger: (Default)

[personal profile] movingfinger 2018-11-27 09:49 pm (UTC)(link)
Sir Harald is an interesting choice of names, given the picaresquely wandering Sir Harold Shea (de Camp and Pratt's character). Shea is known as Harald in some parts of the multiverse.
skygiants: Nice from Baccano! in post-explosion ecstasy (maybe too excited . . .?)

[personal profile] skygiants 2018-11-28 01:55 am (UTC)(link)
oh my god OF COURSE SHE DID
lauradi7dw: (Default)

[personal profile] lauradi7dw 2018-11-28 02:19 am (UTC)(link)
As I got to the end of your post, I started humming Joxer the Mighty to myself, and went looking for a link to Raimi singing it, I didn't expect the magnificence that is this montage
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MnMCh2aXitg
kore: (Default)

[personal profile] kore 2018-11-29 01:33 am (UTC)(link)
That is like my favourite Xena episode ever. (It also features like TWO heartbreaking love duets with Xena and Gabrielle.)
genarti: ([fma] EYEHEARTS!!!)

[personal profile] genarti 2018-11-28 05:45 am (UTC)(link)
Oh my GOD. Amazing! And yes, those serial numbers are indeed just barely filed down; she didn't even file them off, she just kind of scuffed them up a bit and called it good.
genarti: Baby sloth looking over edge of cardboard box, with text "...duuuude." ([misc] duuuuuude)

[personal profile] genarti 2018-11-28 06:11 am (UTC)(link)
OH MY GOD SHE HAS WRITTEN BUT NOT YET PUBLISHED A RUDDIGORE/AUSTEN GOTHIC CROSSOVER WHY DOESN'T THAT EXIST YET I DON'T WANT TO READ IT I JUST WANT TO MAKE YOUR GIRLFRIEND REVIEW IT I CAN'T BELIEVE THE ARTHURIAN MURDER MYSTERY IS GOING TO TURN OUT TO BE THE MOST NORMAL THING PHYLLIS ANN KARR EVER WROTE.

OH MY GOD

I TOO WANT MY GIRLFRIEND TO REVIEW THIS, IDEALLY YESTERDAY OR SO

Everything about all of these discoveries is AMAZING, and makes the very existence of Idylls of the Queen make infinitely more sense. *___*
genarti: ([st:tos] kirk's feeling captainy)

[personal profile] genarti 2018-11-28 06:51 am (UTC)(link)
SHE PUT SIR RODERIC MURGATROYD IN HER MASS-MARKET DEBUT REGENCY ROMANCE.

Not only that, but the only review is BY HER, HERSELF, saying "I don't remember writing half of this but I really enjoyed it rereading it 30 years later! :D" I am gobsmacked and thoroughly charmed.
rachelmanija: (Default)

[personal profile] rachelmanija 2018-11-28 08:52 pm (UTC)(link)
And gave it four stars out of five! I am also charmed.
teenybuffalo: (Default)

[personal profile] teenybuffalo 2018-11-29 06:20 am (UTC)(link)
*starry eyes* It's like she wrote it as a present for me, decades ago. And the in-joke character is Sir Roderic, my favorite, not even one of the ones usually played by young sexy performers! I'm feeling warm and fuzzy.

Part of me wants to read the romance novel and part of me is reluctant to do so because it might be a bit of a let-down. Not sure if curiosity will win.
conuly: (Default)

[personal profile] conuly 2018-11-28 06:51 am (UTC)(link)
That's extremely lightly filed off. I mean... those names...!
larryhammer: floral print origami penguin, facing left (Default)

[personal profile] larryhammer 2018-11-28 03:15 pm (UTC)(link)
And a little buffing with a sleeve ...
drwex: (Default)

[personal profile] drwex 2018-11-28 08:23 pm (UTC)(link)
Xena was a lot of fun, kind of a next-generation Wonder Woman (by which I mean the Linda Carter TV version). I think of her as the last fun female action figure before the genre switched over to more gritty/bloody heroines. BtVS was in that genre for a while but ran long enough to evolve into other things.

Interesting factoid: I still follow Lucy Lawless, mostly on Twitter, and she's spent a good part of the last decade being an actual real-life hero with Greenpeace, doing stuff like getting in the way of whaling boats and trying to stop ocean pollution dumping.

And sadly I lost the bookmark, but somewhere out on the web is a wonderful paean written to Lawless/Xena by a woman who had been a model and got a bit part on the series. Basically it changed her life by showing her a wholly different paradigm of what women could be. The author went on to quit modeling, throw off the abusive guys who'd been controlling her life, and go be the woman she wanted to be. Inspiring as all get-out.
drwex: (pogo)

[personal profile] drwex 2018-11-28 09:33 pm (UTC)(link)
Do you have episode recommendations? I am now vaguely curious, but my general impression of the series, beyond the queer gifsets, is serious mytho-historical crack.

I do not. There are no specific episodes that stand out, imo. They're all kind of silly fun and wildly ahistorical. It's complete fantasy and you'll likely hurt your brain if you think of it as having any relationship to actual history.

It's like how Adam West Batman had "crime" that wasn't really anything like actual crime, if you get my drift.
kore: (Default)

[personal profile] kore 2018-11-29 01:38 am (UTC)(link)
....it's pretty much total mytho-historical crack, yeah. I was in it for Lucy Lawless, Renee O'Connor, and Hudson Leick who was an amazing foil to Xena as Callisto. T and I used to watch it in syndication either every night or close to. It was great comfort TV.
kore: (Default)

[personal profile] kore 2018-11-29 03:18 am (UTC)(link)
Callisto was MY GIRL (i.e. she and Xena were kind of Buffy-and-Faith but the blonde was the evil one).
kore: (Default)

[personal profile] kore 2018-11-29 01:35 am (UTC)(link)
And sadly I lost the bookmark, but somewhere out on the web is a wonderful paean written to Lawless/Xena by a woman who had been a model and got a bit part on the series. Basically it changed her life by showing her a wholly different paradigm of what women could be. The author went on to quit modeling, throw off the abusive guys who'd been controlling her life, and go be the woman she wanted to be. Inspiring as all get-out.

I can totally believe that. I CLUNG to Xena all through the nineties. Especially the Callisto storyline about revenge and emptiness, that was pretty damn advanced for a 'silly' crack warrior babe show!
ranalore: Most of my fandoms in no particular order (crackfan)

[personal profile] ranalore 2018-12-05 01:07 am (UTC)(link)
In my defense, I have spent a lot more time on Tumblr since then, in addition to acquiring reasons to pay attention to Ted Raimi's face.

I know I am responding to this absurdly late, but I missed your original post about watching seaQuest DSV, since I was still in the crater of life implosion in 2015. I love the first season of that show an absurd amount, the second season rather less. There is no third season, and not just because they changed the name. I've written fic for it, mostly centered on the teen hacker, who is my One True Character in the fandom. I also have a soft spot for the great bromance/ship between Tim O'Neill and Miguel Ortiz (one thing I did like in season two, Migs grew his hair out). My DVDs are in storage in California, and I drifted out of active fannishness for various reasons, but that love will always be there. More relevantly, though, I thought there was so much potential in the rather incoherent worldbuilding and clunky backstory and storylines. It's really a fan's goldmine, but it's never been a big online fandom, which is a shame. I still have WsIP for it, including a few crossovers with other fandoms of the type I call "future in retro." My backbrain likes to puzzle through how the different worldbuilding of things like Dark Angel and sQ might hang together.
ranalore: (cheesequest)

[personal profile] ranalore 2018-12-05 03:01 am (UTC)(link)
I don't care! I like when people comment. Years after the fact is still cool.

That's my general attitude, as well. If I can still remember the topic to which a person is responding, I will happily engage. If not, I'm a fiction writer, I'll make something up!

Agreed. I like the first-season cast: I like them as people, I like their relationships, and I would have liked to see them continue to develop as an ensemble rather than get scrambled by the network in an even worse case of executive meddling than Babylon 5. (I never saw any of the other seasons. I'm glad to hear there are points in the favor of Season 2, though.) I wish they had figured out even a half-unified theory for their worldbuilding, though. The telepathy thing will bug me forever.

I am tempted to urge you to see Season 2 simply because it mucks with the telepathy question even more, and I am just the sort of terrible person who wants other people to be as boggled--and intrigued, but in a rather harassed way--as I am by things like that. Season 2 lost both of season 1's female characters, and replaced them with...vastly inferior female characters, we'll just leave it at that. It also lost Ben Krieg, for whom I probably have an unjustifiable attachment, and Security Chief William Shen, for whom my attachment is perfectly justified. The worst offense, though, to my mind, was the damage wrought to the original characters in the name of both contrasting them better with the new characters, and warping the shape of the show around them, then mutilating them to try to make them fit. I don't recall if the DVDs preserved the segments that were at the end of each season 1 episode, from the then-head of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, talking about the real life marine science upon which some aspect of that episode's storyline was based. That's what the first season was, a very earnest early-90's speculative ecogeek family adventure series with a firm tie-in to real world "save our planet" sensibilities. The second season jettisoned all of that, including the Woods Hole segments, and revamped as a "cooler," "edgier," "sexier" show with a more model-perfect young cast in order to chase after that elusive 18-30 male demographic. It pissed Roy Scheider off, and right from the get-go he was looking to get out of his contract for another season. He succeeded; I don't know if they did. If they did, it was short-lived, because he may have been neither young nor model-perfect, but he was still the linchpin of that show, and it fell apart without him. It didn't help that they replaced him with Michael Ironside. It never helps to replace anybody with Michael Ironside, except maybe Wings Hauser.

I poked at the fandom in 2015: it looked a lot like the remains of an early internet fandom, where half of it had been 'zines at the time and most of the original host sites had died. Much of what I could find on AO3 was people reposting their old stories for safekeeping. (It was fascinating to try to figure out what the conventions of the fandom had been.)

A lot of what there was was actually on lists, so even earlier than personal host sites. I helped some people transition to personal sites, even did a couple of HTML 101 how-tos because I'd already been in fandom for a long time and knew how things could disappear. Then, when everything moved to LJ, I created communities and encouraged people to repost their stuff and ran challenges and exchanges, but I just ran out of time, and other fandoms were catching my primary interest, and I really felt like it was just me doing so much of the admin work, which is a hard thing. So I put up notices when AO3 was live, and pointed at it for people to create their profiles and upload, but I wasn't going to hand-hold at that point. Interestingly, probably the biggest slash pairing was O'Neill/Lucas, for reasons I could never quite figure out, because I thought O'Neill/Ortiz was much more obvious, and while I ship Lucas with everyone, because OTC, O'Neill is not the first person I would have picked. If you are interested, however, I believe I still have saved somewhere a rather good series of long gen stories--I believe there were two--that send O'Neill and Lucas off to work with a whole group of OCs for some special mission or other. I say rather good, though it's been many, many years since I read it and I do remember a few annoying tics, but it was at least good enough I remember reading it several times, and I bothered to save it before it was possible to just download from AO3. I think I remember that the author picked and chose from the worldbuilding to make something coherent. Anyway, I could look for it and send it to you, if you liked.

Is any of your fic available to read? [edit] Never mind, it looks as though your fic is on AO3. I hope you do not mind if I read it.

I don't mind, though I apologize now, because it is some of my earliest slash, and it definitely shows. I think I got all of it up. I was combing through my early LJ and old personal website to find my stories to upload to AO3, and I think I might still have a few Smallville pieces missing, and maybe a couple of drabbles from my intensive drabble queen period, but I think I got all the sQ.
ranalore: (cheesequest)

[personal profile] ranalore 2018-12-06 03:32 am (UTC)(link)
I read about the changes between seasons when I was watching Season 1, including the younger-hotter cast remix and the genre shifts, although I didn't look too closely into the details; I was very skeptical about trying the later seasons for all of these reasons and then the show dropped off Netflix, which made the decision for me. I have remarkably few feelings about Crocker, but I really objected to losing Westphalen, Hitchcock, and Krieg. (I liked them for themselves and they were all involved in canon relationships I really enjoyed seeing—cranky middle-aged romance and exes who shouldn't get back together. So much better than will-they-won't-they beautiful people.) I got no explanation for Shan.

Crocker was a character they really dropped the ball on; he was clearly intended to be the old man sea, keeper and dispenser of the folklore. If they'd done him right, he'd have been a great counterpoint to the sfnal sensibility of the rest of the worldbuilding and characters, a nod to that in the sea which science will always glance off of. I think the other characters were better-realized, and it was definitely part of their appeal that they were not character types, and did not have relationship dynamics, that were so bog-standard. I will say, I believe an attempt was made to at least keep the young characters--or at least Shan and Hitchcock--but filming was also moved from the West Coast to Florida. So, it was a question of who was willing to make that move, and who could make that move, since some people were doing other shows too. I know Dustin Nguyen (Shan) was doing movies around the Pacific Rim, for example.

I don't know—I was watching it on Netflix, which definitely did not include interstitial oceanography. That sounds charming, though.

When it aired, it was a huge part of the appeal to my neo-hippie eco-warrior might-become-a-marine-biologist heart. When I watched my recordings again, years and years later, those bits were equally delightful and depressing, because the country as a whole had become a lot more cynical about making any effort toward conservation.

And even less likely to survive link rot! I appreciate you having done the maintenance that you did, then, because it sounds as though otherwise I wouldn't have been able to find even the surviving fic that I did.

It makes me sad how much fic has vanished, and not just in sQ. My swiss cheese memory has held onto some very odd things, including some ancient fic I read nearly thirty years ago, now. I wish I'd been more proactive about encouraging some people to cross-post their work, though; there were some stories I really enjoyed, and I neither copied them for my own personal enjoyment offline nor talked to the authors about getting engaged with the communities springing up on new platforms. Oh, but I meant to say that the seadeck community on LJ still exists, even if it's not used, and the fanfic posted to it is still on there if you're interested.

Yeah, I'm sorry, O'Neill is the character I imprinted on, but I still find that actively confusing.

Wait, I recall a friend explaining to me that there was a theory they would bond because they were both geeks? And it was assumed O'Neill's job would also make him good at computers, for some reason. Oh, and the Darwin link, though several characters had relationships with Darwin; I mean, he was a member of the crew. Anyway, you'd think fandom would understand there are different types of geeks, and that's not necessarily an indicator of mutual interests, but apparently not. Also, most of the fic I ran across was conflict-free, spark-free, and saccharine sweet, which appeared to be the point of the pairing, but is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of both characters.

I have found that I did save the two stories I mentioned, but I don't know that I have a current email address for you. I'm ranalore at gmail dot com, if you'd rather not tell me here. Just drop me a line, and I'll reply with the files. They're Temporary Duty 1 and 2.