I’m a fangirl. Anyone who has known me long must know this fact about me. I love my favorite media quite violently. As it turns out, I’m also a fangirl of fellow fangirls. LolaWaldorf makes my all-time favorite fanvideos because:
a) They are never common.
b) They are always intelligent and are saying something much bigger than just the surface.
c) They are surprising, beautifully edited, and always, always, always hers. You can detect a Lola vid just by her vidding style alone.
d) They take me out of the words in my head and just fill me with feeling. I can’t even really talk about the vids. They just stand entirely on their own.
My top five favorite vids of hers.
1) Glee: Kurt – My love’s too big for you my love.
2) This multifandom piece of brilliance that makes me just flail. Incorporating pieces of other fanvids made to the same song, it’s Florence as the fangirl/boy being devastated by media.
3) Borgias: I walked because you walked
4) Supernatural: Vesuvius – My ALL-TIME favorite video. No one but Lola would’ve made something this brilliant.
5) Sherlock: Rococo – They seem wild but they are so deep.
Danger, Will Robinson!!! Seriously, I really should not start watching this show because LOOK AT HIM. I mean, ugh, it seems like a short tumble down an endless fandom obsession well that I just can’t afford. BUT LOOK AT HIM. *swoons*
Tori Amos’s catalog, for me, has always been about how safe I feel listening to it. Her albums function equally well as works of art and as practical field guides, sending GPS data every few years from new coordinates in the thicket of self-actualization that she and her listeners have been navigating together for two decades. Tori is our flame-haired, first-name-basis, mezzo-soprano GUIDANCE counselor. “When you gonna love you as much as I do?” she asked as a 28-year-old, ten minutes into her first album. She arrived beckoning toward self-discovery and love. Little Earthquakes was a debut, but there is nothing half-baked or under-developed about it. She sailed to shore on a seashell, fully-formed, and offered a vision of identity that demanded acceptance. Her music was strange, her voice was strange, and her message was clear: “There is room for what I’m doing in the world, even if I’m the only one doing it.” We heard that, we pupils, and took it to mean that there’s room for what we’re all doing in the world. Her unflinching career has paved the way for innumerous other unflinching, glorious marchers to their own beat. —Katie Presley
It has been a dream of mine forever to share my love of Tori with a daughter, and I am lucky enough to say that my little girl loves Tori. We spend time listening to her albums together, talking over lyrics, and just being unusually quiet together appreciating the sounds.
This August my daughter is going to her first Tori Amos concert with me, so we’ve been listening to back catalog stuff so that she’ll be familiar with what might be peformed and not just the newer stuff. The other day in the car we were listening to “Crucify” after a discussion of what it is about (how hard we are on ourselves–something my daughter can relate too all too well, unfortunately) and I looked into the rearview and saw that she was crying. I asked, “Why are you crying, honey?” She said, “I don’t know. The music. The song.”
That’s why Tori Amos connects. My life is enriched by her always and ever.
For the record, my daughter’s favorite song on the new album so far is “Selkie” because it is a retelling of one of my daughter’s all-time favorite fairy tales–The Selkie Bride.
More quotes from the NPR piece:
Tori Amos still loves you. She isn’t fucking around.—T. Cole Rachel
More than 20 years after Little Earthquakes, Amos’s guidance has been disseminated and focused. It’s still Tori singing strength to Tori, and Tori singing strength to the women whose stories she’s telling, and to the wider listening public, but there is another, more specific life she is now shepherding: Her daughter’s. Strange Little Girls was for Natashya, about re-imagining the rock canon so that a girl might grow up and feel a part of it. Night of Hunters featured Tash as the supporting character Annabelle in several songs. And Unrepentant Geraldinesshowcases her as a musical peer; as fully half of the conversation, from her own point of view. Good guidance, particularly of the MATERNAL variety, is subtle enough that it’s not immediately apparent when one has graduated to guiding oneself, and Natashya’s development from inspiration to concept to self-fulfilling musician is the precedent and promise of Tori’s earlier albums made manifest. Every Tori Amos record is about breaking free of the stories we’re told and telling our own, but Unrepentant Geraldines is the first with physical proof of the journey. —Katie Presley
Wow. Why do the Germans make me cry with their gay soap couples? Okay, fine, why do all soaps make me cry about their gay couples, regardless of nationality? Oh, Roman. My heart.
This is such a good, good, good, good video.
Training Season can be purchased at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, ARe, and Smashwords. And also on iBooks. Unquestionably talented figure skater Matty Marcus is willing to sacrifice everything for his Olympic dream, but his lack of discipline cost him the gold once before. Now the pressure’s on. He needs a coach who can keep him in line, but top coaches don’t come cheap, and Matty can’t afford to stay in the game no matter how badly he wants to win. When a lucrative house-sitting gig brings him to rural Montana, Matty does his best to maintain his training regimen. Local residents turn out to be surprisingly tolerant of his flamboyant style, especially handsome young rancher Rob Lovely, who proves to be much more than a cowboy stereotype. Just as Matty requires a firm hand to perform his best on the ice, Rob shows him how strong he can be when he relinquishes control in the bedroom. With new-found self-assurance, he drives himself harder to go straight to the top. But competition has a timetable, and to achieve his Olympic dream, Matty will have to join his new coach in New York City, leaving Rob behind. Now he must face the ultimate test. Has he truly learned how to win—on and off the ice—during his training season?
You know, the immensity of this one is pretty huge. There’s a lot of emotion for any fan in watching these images flash by. When one of “your” fandoms comes up, the swell of joy is so sweet, and then the wonder of seeing the little glimpses of how passionate fans are–like the Avatar: The Last Airbender movie protests. Oh, fandom, I love you!
I strongly recommend this vid for a shot of feels in the morning. Also, check out the vidders’ comments HERE.
I finished The Rifter Series by Ginn Hale the other day and now my mind is consumed with two questions:
1) Where is the movie deal/HBO miniseries?
2) Where is the fandom?
In all seriousness, though, where is the fandom for this book series? I went to AO3 and do you know how many fics I found for this amazing series? None. Zero. Nada. Zip.
How is that possible?
My mind is currently full of fanfic ideas that I want to read about. Let’s think them over.
ATTENTION!!! POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT!!!! PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!!
1. PWPs. Hello? Fans? The sex scenes were basically all fade to black, y’all. Hit me with some gorgeous, intense, emotional full-on sexual intercourse between our heroes. Or make up some didn’t-happen-in-canon sex between our enemies. Whatever suits your fancy!
2. Rousma! I am obsessed with Rousma! First, let’s think about the Nayeshi incarnation who was left behind in the woods. What happened to her? Did she poof out of existence when Umbhra’ibaye burned and Jath’ibaye’s timeline of Rousma was not carried off by Khalil? What about her life in the meantime? She was so crafty. What did she do in Nayeshi? I’m imagining some morbid possibility where she finds a human body to inhabit.
3. Rousma in the Jath’ibaye timeline. Does she stay permanently a child since she was but a child when her soul was bound to her bones? If so, would she ever, I don’t know, creep into the body of a dead child and then go live with its parents’? Either because she liked the parents or because she wanted to be in a human body again? I mean, Rousma sort of shares Ravishan’s sharp edges, doesn’t she? I can see her doing something creepy like that.
4. Ah, man, the possible AUs! What would have happened if the note had said “Do” and Kahlil actually got it? What would have happened if they’d never received a note at all, and Kahlil and John moved into a different sort of relationship on earth? Under what circumstances would Kahlil have allowed himself to fall in love with John and, ya know, touch him? What about a genderswitch? What if John and Ravishan were female?
(I’m actually obsessed with how this entire book would read differently if every single character in it were the opposite sex. I’d love to see what that looked like. I mean, would I find Ravishan so incredibly awesome/adorable/amazing/charming/lovable if he were a woman? What would his actions look like from that point of view? What about Laurie? Were she a man, how would I react to her scenes? God, I really kind of want to find a way to read this book with the genders flipped. You know, after I read it again the way it is now. 😀 Do you think I could get a PhD on that analysis?)
5. Laurie and Fikiri. I would love to see more of what their relationship was like. I hesitate to criticize any aspect of these books because they are basically holy to me at this point, ha, but I admit that at a certain point, about 50% of the way through the last book, I realized that I wasn’t going to get what I wanted with regards to Laurie or Fikiri. I understood how and why they’d become so twisted, broken, and desperate, but I guess I wanted to see an evolution of that from the point of her rescue from Umbhra’ibaye to the end-game scenes. I’d like to know more about her relationship with Fikiri especially. He was in love with her, but what were her feelings for him in the end? I suppose the only way to communicate that to us would have been through a kind of info dump, but given Kyle’s last experience of Laurie was over bacon and eggs at a diner, it seemed like a conversation could have been had where we could have been shown more of Laurie’s story. But maybe I’m greedy and just want more, more, more, more of everything about this series! Thus! Feel free to write fanfiction about Laurie and Fikiri, about how they related to each other in the decades between the Umbhra’ibaye rescue and the end-game scenes. I’d read it! I promise!
6.. M-Preg. Because there is no fandom without m-preg, people! It is a true thing! And, fine, yes, I’ll cop to it, the idea of Ravishan knocked up by some weird Kahlil/Rifter magic is too hilarious for me to resist considering despite the fact that we all know m-preg is an abomination. Just imagine Ravishan (poor Ravishan) faced with such an abomination. And surely someone out there would write it? Surely. I mean, there’s no compliment to an author quite like loving her/his creation enough to go the whole damned m-preg route, am I right? 😉 Ha!
I haven’t been doing Fanfic Friday for awhile because I’ve been on a Tumblr fast for some time now. But a friend of mine sent me this gorgeous video and I had to share. It’s just so dang pretty.
Leta Blake 