January posting meme: larger fandom wishes

eris asked if there was anything I wished had a larger fandom, and hahahahaME, but the answer is… yes and no. Of course there are so many things that I wish more people had read and seen and were willing to discuss and shout about and write fic for. I will just mention, yet again, Reginald Hill's mystery novels, and also Christopher Fowler's, and I wish Slings and Arrows had a larger fandom than it does, and so forth; I could list things for days.

But then again… I can't be alone in feeling that often when fandoms expand they change, and not always for the better, so I can't actually wish huge fandom status on anything I love. I'm still pretty curmudgeonly where fandom participation is concerned (my reluctant immersion in all things POI is a significant exception), and so I guess really what I mean when I say "such-and-such needs a larger fandom" is "all my friends should read/see this." I just want to talk to people about stuff, not have vast number of fans I don't know posting gifs on tumblr and writing bad slashfic.

And yes. I should really do Yuletide one of these years. I just wish it wasn't at Christmas, you know? Because a) busy, and b) the time of year I am usually least able to write for psychological reasons. (But just maybe I'll crank out that Bryant & May/Rivers of London crossover sometime this year.)

crashing the plane

In regard to what I said about Lost and nonlinear storytelling: this Flight 815 Crash in Real Time compilation is brilliant. Partly because it brings footage from so many episodes into a coherent whole, but also because it illustrates how integral the story is despite being told all out of order. There are plenty of shows with complicated chronologies, with flashbacks and unreliable narration, but here it's the same moment (which is a very important moment, at the core of the whole show) being experienced by a whole bunch of different characters in different places, shown at widely spaced points in the series. Viewed separately, they tell one person's story at a time, and that's not invalidated but added to when you see them all together and understand cause and effect.

Spoilers, natch. And unless I'm hallucinating, there's some deleted footage in here. (I suppose someday I should own my obsession and buy the DVDs.)