Monday Trivia
Jun. 14th, 2010 08:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakIt occurs to me I haven't said anything re: World Cup yet. I'm not a football fan, but other people's fannishness is often endearing, especially if it's all over the world. Also, a few years ago I my surprise I found myself utterly charmed by a film in which football plays a crucial role, Das Wunder von Bern ("The Miracle of Bern"), which with its strong acting and excellent storytelling was utterly approachable for a football lay person such as myself. (For a review of why you should watch this film on dvd if you missed it in the cinema, see this post.) Since the film's background is the 1954 World Cup, a rewatching would be very timely indeed.
Meanwhile, yesterday in the train I browsed through the Summer2010 SFX, and found myself rolling my eyes and sniggering at the article about Blake's 7 a lot. Why? Because Jon Hamblin, who wrote it, puts your avarage fangirl to shame in his Avon worship and comes up with such "which show was he watching?" gems of description like "a master tactician and computer nerd, he was sort of the ultimate geek - able to talk to computers and people", or "his slightly cold logic veered more towards pragmatism than sentimentality (see his attempts to throw VIla out of the airlock in "Orbit", but he was also able to show compassion" - in "the episode "Rumours of Death" he takes pity on Servalan when he finds her chained against a wall (...)", or "he was very much to Blake's 7 what Benjamin Linus is to Lost - a manipulative character with equal capacity for good and evil" . Now it's been a couple of years since my last rewatch, but as I recall Avon was severely lacking in the "talking to people" department, more prone to piss them off on a regular basis. Also, Blake was the manipulative one, something Avon called him on only a few dozen times in the first two seasons, so you'd think a fan would remember. And "master tactician"? Looking back over four seasons, I can't come up with a single brilliant tactical decision Avon made. Which is partly because while he was good at critisizing, he went out of his way to avoid leading. The first half of season 3, when Blake is gone, basically has Tarrant in charge if anyone is, and that goes so well - not! - that Avon finally steps up, but his big decisions were: a) Operation Avenge Anna (ends with dead Anna and Servalan restored to power), "Quest for Blake" (ends up first with a destroyed Liberator, which, you know, could have been avoided if Avon had actually talked to his crewmates, and then with everyone just plain dead), and in between some heists where he finds himself double-double-crossed. As for Avon and Servalan in Rumours of Death, actually their exchanges in the cellar are among my favourite scenes for them, and there is some nice ambiguity there at the end when Servalan has Avon put his teleporter bracelet back on, but whatever Avon is feeling when he's not busy breaking down when he realises the truth about Anna, compassion is not it. (More like an impulse to commit suicide by Servalan after he killed Anna.) The Ben Linus comparison is not entirely amiss in that they are both shades of grey, and prone to intense love/hate relationships, but Ben could run circles around Avon in terms of tactics and manipulativeness, while Avon would make cynical remarks about Ben's sincere belief in the island and, up to a point, Jacob. But back to Jon Hamblin and his Avon fanboying. In true fannish fashion, this even extends to summing up Blake the episode by assuring us that Blake "(gave) Avon no choice but to shoot him in a horribly bloody manner". At once, I had flashbacks to PGPs where everyone, including Blake, is busy comforting Avon and telling him it totally wasn't his fault.
The same issue of SFX has an interview with Ron Moore about what he's fannish about, and demonstrates again why despite certain aspects of BSG which infuriated me, I can't stay angry with the man. I mean, other than enduring affection for most of his TNG and DS9 episodes and the part of BSG I really love. You'll recall that for years the media, ESPECIALLY SFX, have been billing BSG as "the anti-Trek" and kept harping on Star Trek by comparison (conveniently ignoring much of ST, I might add), but RDM never played that game or renounced his Trekkish past, on the contrary. When it was 40th anniversary time, he wrote a glowing article for the New York Times, and now in the current Q & A about inspirations, he replies thusly: "(As a child) I sort of graduated from Lost in Space to Star Trek and Star Trek was very, very different. It took the genre seriously, it was what seemed like a real universe, everything fitted together and made sense, and it tackled interesting moral dilemmas every weekk. On top of that it had these fascinating characters at its core, so it was really unlike anything else I saw in television. I grew up fantasizing being on the Starship Enterprise, and then one day I got to walk on the Starship Enterprise, write the stories and sit in the captain's chair and do all sort of things that were childhood fantasies."
(Sidenote: has anyone ever done a study of the "fan-in-charge" phenomenon, because by now there are plenty of compare/contrast possibilities, between old Trekkers like RDM crucially shaping the later Trek shows like TNG and DS9, old Whovians like RTD and the Moff in charge of Doctor Who, and, for good measure, old X-Men fans like Joss Whedon writing Astonishing X-Men?)
He's equally fannish about space per se: "I got into science fiction because I was interested in the American space programme. I watched the Moon landings when I was very young and I was fascinated by space ships and space (...) For a long time as a child I wanted to be an astronaut. My fondest wish was to become a pilot and join the space programme. I was fascinated with all the trappings of NASA in the early '70s, watching the moon landings and the Moon rover, and the news coverage and the magazine articles. I remember writing letters to NASA and drawing pictures of spaceships and sending it to them, and they would send back full colour pictures of spacecraft and shots of the Moon. It was an amazing thing."
See, imagining young Ron drawing pictures of the moon and slightly older Ron, after joining the TNG writing team, using the first opportunity he gets to sit in the captain's chair reminds me of how much the current crop of showrunners are themselves the product of fandoms and "one of us" in both the good and the bad sense. No one is prone to get argumentative about fandom and into "I am right and you are wrong" mode more than another fan. And then there is the tendency to drawn-out WIPs where the plot isn't really mapped out... Still. Nobody said that when there geeks are in charge, this would result in fannish paradise.
Meanwhile, yesterday in the train I browsed through the Summer2010 SFX, and found myself rolling my eyes and sniggering at the article about Blake's 7 a lot. Why? Because Jon Hamblin, who wrote it, puts your avarage fangirl to shame in his Avon worship and comes up with such "which show was he watching?" gems of description like "a master tactician and computer nerd, he was sort of the ultimate geek - able to talk to computers and people", or "his slightly cold logic veered more towards pragmatism than sentimentality (see his attempts to throw VIla out of the airlock in "Orbit", but he was also able to show compassion" - in "the episode "Rumours of Death" he takes pity on Servalan when he finds her chained against a wall (...)", or "he was very much to Blake's 7 what Benjamin Linus is to Lost - a manipulative character with equal capacity for good and evil" . Now it's been a couple of years since my last rewatch, but as I recall Avon was severely lacking in the "talking to people" department, more prone to piss them off on a regular basis. Also, Blake was the manipulative one, something Avon called him on only a few dozen times in the first two seasons, so you'd think a fan would remember. And "master tactician"? Looking back over four seasons, I can't come up with a single brilliant tactical decision Avon made. Which is partly because while he was good at critisizing, he went out of his way to avoid leading. The first half of season 3, when Blake is gone, basically has Tarrant in charge if anyone is, and that goes so well - not! - that Avon finally steps up, but his big decisions were: a) Operation Avenge Anna (ends with dead Anna and Servalan restored to power), "Quest for Blake" (ends up first with a destroyed Liberator, which, you know, could have been avoided if Avon had actually talked to his crewmates, and then with everyone just plain dead), and in between some heists where he finds himself double-double-crossed. As for Avon and Servalan in Rumours of Death, actually their exchanges in the cellar are among my favourite scenes for them, and there is some nice ambiguity there at the end when Servalan has Avon put his teleporter bracelet back on, but whatever Avon is feeling when he's not busy breaking down when he realises the truth about Anna, compassion is not it. (More like an impulse to commit suicide by Servalan after he killed Anna.) The Ben Linus comparison is not entirely amiss in that they are both shades of grey, and prone to intense love/hate relationships, but Ben could run circles around Avon in terms of tactics and manipulativeness, while Avon would make cynical remarks about Ben's sincere belief in the island and, up to a point, Jacob. But back to Jon Hamblin and his Avon fanboying. In true fannish fashion, this even extends to summing up Blake the episode by assuring us that Blake "(gave) Avon no choice but to shoot him in a horribly bloody manner". At once, I had flashbacks to PGPs where everyone, including Blake, is busy comforting Avon and telling him it totally wasn't his fault.
The same issue of SFX has an interview with Ron Moore about what he's fannish about, and demonstrates again why despite certain aspects of BSG which infuriated me, I can't stay angry with the man. I mean, other than enduring affection for most of his TNG and DS9 episodes and the part of BSG I really love. You'll recall that for years the media, ESPECIALLY SFX, have been billing BSG as "the anti-Trek" and kept harping on Star Trek by comparison (conveniently ignoring much of ST, I might add), but RDM never played that game or renounced his Trekkish past, on the contrary. When it was 40th anniversary time, he wrote a glowing article for the New York Times, and now in the current Q & A about inspirations, he replies thusly: "(As a child) I sort of graduated from Lost in Space to Star Trek and Star Trek was very, very different. It took the genre seriously, it was what seemed like a real universe, everything fitted together and made sense, and it tackled interesting moral dilemmas every weekk. On top of that it had these fascinating characters at its core, so it was really unlike anything else I saw in television. I grew up fantasizing being on the Starship Enterprise, and then one day I got to walk on the Starship Enterprise, write the stories and sit in the captain's chair and do all sort of things that were childhood fantasies."
(Sidenote: has anyone ever done a study of the "fan-in-charge" phenomenon, because by now there are plenty of compare/contrast possibilities, between old Trekkers like RDM crucially shaping the later Trek shows like TNG and DS9, old Whovians like RTD and the Moff in charge of Doctor Who, and, for good measure, old X-Men fans like Joss Whedon writing Astonishing X-Men?)
He's equally fannish about space per se: "I got into science fiction because I was interested in the American space programme. I watched the Moon landings when I was very young and I was fascinated by space ships and space (...) For a long time as a child I wanted to be an astronaut. My fondest wish was to become a pilot and join the space programme. I was fascinated with all the trappings of NASA in the early '70s, watching the moon landings and the Moon rover, and the news coverage and the magazine articles. I remember writing letters to NASA and drawing pictures of spaceships and sending it to them, and they would send back full colour pictures of spacecraft and shots of the Moon. It was an amazing thing."
See, imagining young Ron drawing pictures of the moon and slightly older Ron, after joining the TNG writing team, using the first opportunity he gets to sit in the captain's chair reminds me of how much the current crop of showrunners are themselves the product of fandoms and "one of us" in both the good and the bad sense. No one is prone to get argumentative about fandom and into "I am right and you are wrong" mode more than another fan. And then there is the tendency to drawn-out WIPs where the plot isn't really mapped out... Still. Nobody said that when there geeks are in charge, this would result in fannish paradise.
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Date: 2010-06-14 06:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-14 06:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-14 07:14 am (UTC)