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metatxtDear Festividder,
Why do I write such long letters?? Because it’s the only time I ever say anything on Dreamwidth? Maybe! But also because I feel really grateful that you are making me a vid for one of these fandoms and this is the only way I have to try and help. So I think I write a lot to try and help a lot. Maybe that works for you! Maybe it doesn’t. If it doesn’t... take what is useful and leave the rest. Media is not one thing and vids can only hold so many ideas within them while being coherent. Just know that I write this much because I love these fandoms and I love that you are making me a vid. You are mighty! And I could never imagine the vid you are imagining right now. What I find most exciting about the fanwork exchange process is connecting through the particular lens of a vid that brings certain elements of a fandom into focus.You are so very appreciated, Festividder. <3 <3 <3
P.S. the length of my comments on each fandom below does not equate to my level of investment. I love alllllllll of these.
P.P.S. I’m so far up the butt of electoral politics and various celebrity shilling that I am finding it hilarious that I requested both Feud starring Susan Sarandon and Will & Grace starring Debra Messing, who have been in a notorious twitter war due to their respective Bernie and HRC stanning.
TL;DR: While the fandoms I requested are diverse in many different ways -- tone, format, projected audience, theme, character, etc. -- I think many of them have the common thread of being politically precarious, as is often the case with media featuring underrepresented groups or ideas.
My particular investments could be described as follows: Women are great. Relationships between women are amazing. Femslash gives me life. Billy from Billy on the Street is literally the only boy for whom I’d be excited to receive a character-vid. Homonormativity bores me. Complexity excites me. SQUEE vids are love. Chosen family. Radical queerness. Reclaiming authorship of experience and narrative. The many different feminisms. Intertextuality, conversations across media, and reflexivity? Yes! Yes! Yes! Crossovers possibilities are described in more detail below, but fandoms with an asterisk are crossover approved!
Warnings: are appreciated for the access of all.
Music: I give some ideas below, but they’re just ideas. I tend to think I don’t like an artist or song and then someone vids it for me and it’s brilliant and perfect, or I do like an artist or song and I get to enjoy it in a whole different way, so I really put my trust in your vision. My only “please don’t do that” songs are the ones with dude vocalists that are sexually coercive or rapey, like “Blurred Lines” or “My Way.” I largely prefer female vocalists but that is not a hard and fast rule.
Beyoncé's Lemonade*
I wrote about Lemonade in last year's letter (see here), and while all of that still holds, I would add this: I trust your vision! I know I have some extra nerdy ideas with most of these fandoms, but I also have a lot of trust in the magic of Festivids and our shared love of Lemonade.
GLOW*
Oh man. I love everyone in this bar. The relationship between Ruth and Debbie is definitely a big draw here, but I am equally invested in the character arcs of Cherry and Carmen. Of least interest to me: the dudes (big surprise, this is a theme throughout!)
I love behind-the-scenes production stories, so I really enjoy the meta-angle and the exploration of performing character and identity, as well as the questioning of stereotypes and whether we can ever reclaim them or imbue them with agency.
I am also a big fan of Camp in all things, so the staginess of their battles and the build-up around wrestling is a lot of fun for me.
I did not watch the original GLOW show of the 80s that this series is exploring, but I would certainly welcome integrating more footage from that original show or other outside elements that help develop your vid concept.
Music: Electro-pop? Ke$ha? 80s hair bands? So many great options.
Feud*
Here’s the deal people: nobody offered this fandom (well, nobody but me). So I am going to assume you haven’t seen it and use this paragraph (um, I mean essay….this is an essay) to tell you why you need to use your precious screen time to watch all 8 episodes of this stand-alone season of Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon as Joan Crawford and Bette Davis.
...This gif of Kate McKinnon as Debette Goldry will help capture the flavor.
Pills and surgeries and sexual harassment and lots of the gross parts of Hollywood, to be sure. But front and center throughout all of it? Joan Crawford and Bette Davis -- how they navigate it all. How they try to be friends. How the industry is invested in their isolation and distrust of each other and continually manipulates them in an attempt to manufacture their performances. And what makes this show so special and unique is the explicitly feminist lens that roots these stories within the subjectivity of both Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. They are the heroines and we are encouraged to empathize with them throughout.
They are different from one another and in Hollywood where there is difference, there is the possibility of hierarchy. Joan and Bette’s differences, their insecurities, and their desires based on their differences are regularly exploited and manipulated. Joan Crawford is an aging ingenue who loves acting for the public, whether in character on screen or in her glamorous persona off screen. While Bette Davis wants to be respected and desired for the ferocity of her spirit, her wit, and her incredible talent. Both women want power, but it could be argued that Joan is more comfortable pursuing power through the options socially sanctioned for women, while Bette rejects these paths unless absolutely necessary to get what she wants!
They both want autonomy. They are both terrible to people they love while the majority of the world is wretched to them. And yet, on occasion, they have these beautiful moments when the recognize one another as their mirror, facing the same challenges within Hollywood and the same challenges as a working mother, and they share some level of intimacy and camaraderie. And then someone pulls a thread and everything they bridged becomes unraveled again.
It’s poetic and tragic and haunting, but it also just feels SO GOOD to see their stories being told. It feels so good to have the ugliness they navigated shared in this raw way. I’m not crazy about biopics, but I do enjoy when they make me feel like by watching I am also serving as witness. And, I think most actors from earlier eras are so uniformly digested and understood as decontextualized from their circumstance and known as their icon, it’s really pleasurable to watch something that tries to really explore the complexity of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, as women and icons.
Here’s why you should want to VID it (one day… maybe today!): First of all, visually this show is FUCKING GORGEOUS. I mean GORGEOUS. I mean STUNNINGLY GORGEOUS. The costumes, the set design, the cinematography, just go ahead and marvel at the colors and staging and how everything feels perfectly crafted and how fun it would be to cut it all up in a meaningful way to some audio track that dances around a few ideas.
It’s Hollywood and the entire show is about women negotiating their place in the world but most directly in relationship to their own image and projection. This series is reflexive as FUCK. Do you like vidding what’s in the box, a photograph of the box, a discussion of the box, the box gazing upon itself in the mirror, and all of it within your own digital box? THIS IS YOUR JAM, YO.
Crossover potential: Feud but also actual footage of the films they explore and behind-the-scenes footage of Joan Crawford or Bette Davis. Think about it! NOT interested in Mommie Dearest, tbh.
FINALLY: Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon fucking tear up the screen. This series has LOTS of those amazing moments without talky-face and lots of acting and meaning and LOTS of action shots and it is just supremely vidable.
P.S. <3 <3 <3 for Mamacita and <3 <3 <3 for Pauline Jameson
Music: Damn, I’m really open here. As this series crosses several decades, I think there’s a wide-range of contemporaneous music to pull from, but of course, it is always fun to go against tone but not theme, such as Riot Grrl or other post-90s feminist music. With the campiness and vivid color and staging, I can see musical soundtracks working well also.
Broad City
Abbi and Ilana, my loves. UGH. These fierce queens. Ship vid? yasss queen. Character study, general fun party vid, omg yass. A few notes on boys: Bevers is groce. Trey is kinda sweet but also really icky. Lincoln is a babe. Jaime is adorable.
Obvs I need an Abbi/Ilana ship vid like burning, but I also need ALL of the Broad City vids this world has to offer. I would also enjoy a vid about their constant hustle, both within their careers and on the side. Abbi and Ilana connect to a lot of my feelings about the impossibilities within late-stage capitalism. I really fucking love their passionate and casual commitment to organized politics, not to mention the contractions and layers of their feminist ideals and actions.
Of course... If you have an idea? If you love them like I love them? If you can write in Ilana’s voice better than I can (“you can, dude, you totally can” - Abbi, as Ilana at the co-op), just run with it.
Music: anything that has been referenced within the show or has an “NYC” feel (for lack of a better descriptor).
Grace and Frankie
Gimme all the vids about Grace and Frankie! Their family is fine and all -- I really dig Brianna! -- but as the focus of a vid, I’m less interested in the rest of the family and more here for Grace and Frankie, specifically. On a related note, Sol and Robert make me feel so sad and angry about homonormativity sometimes I have to pause and yell it out. So yknow, obvs they matter, but their love and values are not really *my* queer values, ydig?
I’m here for the odd couple soulmate dynamic between Grace and Frankie. I’m here for Frankie being codependent with Sol and finding independence through her relationships with Grace and Jacob and her art. I’m here for Grace trying so hard not to fail for so long that once her marriage ends she starts to let go of that worry and start thinking about who she is and what she wants. I am also a HUGE fan of their entrepreneurship, if you’d like to focus on that.
And, you better believe I am here for Grace and Frankie as an OTP SHIP. It is cool if you are not, but you should know I am going to have a hard time trying to resist a slashy reading. I do like Jacob quite a bit and his relationship with Frankie, but not to the exclusion of a romantic relationship between Grace and Frankie. I feel pretty strongly that Grace is quite clearly totally in love with Frankie and starting to realize it, while Frankie’s feelings are definitely more subconscious (but definitely there!).
As an aside:tellitslant has really enabled my shipping of these brilliant, hot ladies, and let me just add that the RPF of Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda is *very convincing* Any sort of meta-nods are welcome, though not required.
Music: a vid to “9 to 5” or Dolly Parton would crack me the fuck up, but I am really open to any music and I think there are a lot of interesting options as Grace and Frankie are such different people and likely have interesting differences and similarities in musical taste.
Funny or Die's Billy on the Street
Billy on the Street was on Funny or Die as a web-series and then became a real series that was on Fuse for 3 seasons before moving to TruTV for seasons 4 and 5. You can watch it streaming on Hulu to get a taste of it.
Billy has OPINIONS and he has FACES. And that’s really what I’m here for. I love his urgency and certainty. I love the variety of people that he speaks with and their range of reactions. Certainly Elena is a very important figure in whatever vid you make.
I definitely love the celebrity participation, but I would say I’m here more for the everyday people than the celebs. I DO enjoy how the celebrity involvement adds a new element to Billy questioning folks on the street. Billy telling people Seth Rogen is dead while Seth Rogen pretends to be a cameraman, for example, is fantastic. Celebrities standing around answering questions is really a mixed-bag, for me.
The PRIZES are AMAZING. The obstacle courses are also AMAZING. But really anything where Billy has a big reaction is my fave. I also enjoy when he visibly is lying to people or encouraging them to embarrass themselves (sometimes by being really dull! Why is that pleasurable?? I don’t know!)
Billy Eichner has often said that this is a character he plays, which tracks in the sense that actors and comedians often play versions of themselves that are consistent or diverge in important ways. Billy the host of this show is known to occasionally say things that are fucked up. It’s not a consistent element, but yknow, he does occasionally say fatphobic, biphobic, etc. stuff. Let me just add, the people on the street often contribute a much wider variety of racist, homophobic, sexist, etc. opinions. Billy calls that shit out with several different approaches. To be clearer: Billy on the Street directly engages with the challenges and limitations of critique through reproduction and parody, and as the entire show is improv, these responses sometimes (though not always) address these issues successfully. By the nature of improv and parody, it can be harder to discern whether the occasional failures in these areas are about execution or values and vision.
And to be quite honest, the show moves really quickly and is really fun! And when it's not fun, the variety of NYC street culture and social citizenship makes it always fascinating television.
Music: geez, I have no idea but it has to have a strong beat for sure. This is a show with a lot of intensity, tension, and action. Something you’d play at a dance club maybe?
Will & Grace
I watched Will & Grace before I came out, while I was coming out, and then after I came out. I’m in the midst of a rewatch right now, which has been emotionally ~fascinating~ but also intellectually as the tools I had to enjoy the show at the time are so different than the ones I have now as a queer who regularly nerds out about queer theory.
It’s funny because I really expected less of it to hold up. There are a lot of things we can critique from the get go, and yes, the critiques are broad and deep: the only queer characters in the main cast are two white gay men and an arguably latent bisexual white woman who is regularly very racist/classist. In some ways, the show feels like the origin of hipster-(race)isms where we are supposed to laugh at the person saying the things being ignorant and not think too hard about the perpetuation of these narratives. And there are certainly a few anti-semitic elements in play around Grace. The show really seems to embody a particular anxiety around genderbending as queer rite while rejecting transness in fucked up ways. Again -- there are many ways they could do better.
And yet… there are many other elements that are wildly progressive -- even now! Grace’s relationship with her Jewish identity is really developed and we see that through her family, her choices, and how she talks about what is important to her. Will talks explicitly about how his chosen family is his family and that it should be treated as significant as his brother’s heteronormative nuclear family. I love that this is a sitcom where they want different things in life which are regularly discussed and negotiated: how can they be close when Grace regrets that she never got to be Will’s one time with a woman? or when Karen really hates Grace’s husband (yeah, Leo bores me to tears, too)? or while Jack is essentially a kept boy whose lifestyle is financed by Will and Karen? They are shamelessly flirty and sexual with one another in such a comfortable way that is familiar and makes me feel seen (even if that type of kinship is not as pronounced in my life now as it once was). There’s something about their comfort level with sex and kink and the way it weaves throughout their lives, not just within sex, that feels profound.
I love that their cohabitation together really varies based on the needs of the time, and there is less a focus on “adulting” but rather on negotiating how to be adults together.
In Season 1 I had a really hard time with Will’s internalized homophobia and particularly his femme-phobia. I love his dynamic with Jack though, and how Jack is so committed to Will freeing ~himself~ from this burden. I feel like this is partly how I am able to watch the show and connect with it across the many seasons in spite of the ways it can fail: (for me) they do a really good job of rooting these things in character and I really enjoy watching them challenge each other on their internalized -isms.
And, unsurprisingly, I adore Grace and have a stupid ginormous crush on Grace. Also, I ship Grace and Karen so damn hard. Karen is very clearly in love with Grace and most definitely enjoys some sort of dub-con kinky relationship with Rosario. Karen frequently comparing Grace to a boy and Rosario to a man helps her rationalize her attraction while distancing and demeaning them through misgendering, but um, anyway. I just love them. I love how honest Karen is and how she pushes Grace to be more honest about who she is and what she wants. I love that Grace is awkward and snort-laughs and is weirdly selfish about small things but afraid to be selfish about bigger, more substantive things. And Rosario! Part of me just wants her to be free of this show, because the class politics in here are heavy and Karen is often out of her mind on pills and booze (to start with). But Rosario and Karen do have a push-pull dynamic that often bends to moments of kindness and devotion which leads me to believe Rosario does care about Karen (and Jack!). Anyway, I love them all! Except Leo. He’s so boring.
I haven’t gotten to Season 9 yet, but I will certainly be caught up by the time vids go live.
A chosen family vid, a character study, or a ship vid would be great here.
Music: Mainstream pop or really any queer music might be great here. Would they play it at the white party? At a lesbian house party? Or a drag show?
Wonder Woman (comics)*
What a beautiful and messy fandom this is! Oh where to start. First: there is a lot of canon here AND this is a comics fandom, so it’s a different method of vidding. Mad props for taking this one on. Mad props for making me any vid! But also, I know this presents different types of challenges.
We’re talking 75 years of varied, glorious, bizarre, horrifying, history -- and let’s be honest, I’m not even familiar with more than a small fraction of that archive. Is this a vid about Gail Simone’s Diana, or Rucka’s iconic and epic run, or are you taking us back in time for an encounter with Perez, or on a detour through Sensation Comics and other DC titles? Heck, I have no idea! Perhaps you want to think through the delicious morass of gender critique, goofiness, kink, and racism in the 1940s comics in the wake of biopic Professor Marston and the Wonder Women? Cool! Perhaps your vid has a thematic rather than a historical logic, and you’re going to mine these decades like some sort of deranged treasure hunter to find us a new facet of this story. That sounds amazing!
All I know is that I’m here for DIANA and I’m here for HIPPOLYTA and I’m here for the AMAZONS!! I’m here for Diana interacting with any super- or civilian lady ever (surprise!), from her DC sisters through the eons to the girl who tells her about her feminist theory term paper. I’m here for ETTA CANDY (“woo woo!”) and how she has evolved from fat joke to badass (and I unironically love EVERY Etta for who she is - you get that candy, girl). Shhhh, secret time: I might ship Diana with Etta Candy most of all. My favorite Steve Trevor is the one that takes up the least space (surprise again!). My second favorite Steve Trevor was in the recent movie, and I blame Chris Pine for that, dude is damn charming. ALSO IT’S SAFE TO LIKE MOVIE-STEVE TREVOR BECAUSE HE’S DED 0:-)
It should also be noted that even the grand arc of (comics) encompasses only part of the phenomenon that is Wonder Woman. Crossovers with live action, animated, or fan generated Wonder Woman media are welcome.
Music: Honestly, this vid could be so many different things I don't feel like I have any helpful suggestions?! I am sure you will make the Amazons proud.
Thank you again!!!
Why do I write such long letters?? Because it’s the only time I ever say anything on Dreamwidth? Maybe! But also because I feel really grateful that you are making me a vid for one of these fandoms and this is the only way I have to try and help. So I think I write a lot to try and help a lot. Maybe that works for you! Maybe it doesn’t. If it doesn’t... take what is useful and leave the rest. Media is not one thing and vids can only hold so many ideas within them while being coherent. Just know that I write this much because I love these fandoms and I love that you are making me a vid. You are mighty! And I could never imagine the vid you are imagining right now. What I find most exciting about the fanwork exchange process is connecting through the particular lens of a vid that brings certain elements of a fandom into focus.You are so very appreciated, Festividder. <3 <3 <3
P.S. the length of my comments on each fandom below does not equate to my level of investment. I love alllllllll of these.
P.P.S. I’m so far up the butt of electoral politics and various celebrity shilling that I am finding it hilarious that I requested both Feud starring Susan Sarandon and Will & Grace starring Debra Messing, who have been in a notorious twitter war due to their respective Bernie and HRC stanning.
TL;DR: While the fandoms I requested are diverse in many different ways -- tone, format, projected audience, theme, character, etc. -- I think many of them have the common thread of being politically precarious, as is often the case with media featuring underrepresented groups or ideas.
My particular investments could be described as follows: Women are great. Relationships between women are amazing. Femslash gives me life. Billy from Billy on the Street is literally the only boy for whom I’d be excited to receive a character-vid. Homonormativity bores me. Complexity excites me. SQUEE vids are love. Chosen family. Radical queerness. Reclaiming authorship of experience and narrative. The many different feminisms. Intertextuality, conversations across media, and reflexivity? Yes! Yes! Yes! Crossovers possibilities are described in more detail below, but fandoms with an asterisk are crossover approved!
Warnings: are appreciated for the access of all.
Music: I give some ideas below, but they’re just ideas. I tend to think I don’t like an artist or song and then someone vids it for me and it’s brilliant and perfect, or I do like an artist or song and I get to enjoy it in a whole different way, so I really put my trust in your vision. My only “please don’t do that” songs are the ones with dude vocalists that are sexually coercive or rapey, like “Blurred Lines” or “My Way.” I largely prefer female vocalists but that is not a hard and fast rule.
Beyoncé's Lemonade*
I wrote about Lemonade in last year's letter (see here), and while all of that still holds, I would add this: I trust your vision! I know I have some extra nerdy ideas with most of these fandoms, but I also have a lot of trust in the magic of Festivids and our shared love of Lemonade.
GLOW*
Oh man. I love everyone in this bar. The relationship between Ruth and Debbie is definitely a big draw here, but I am equally invested in the character arcs of Cherry and Carmen. Of least interest to me: the dudes (big surprise, this is a theme throughout!)
I love behind-the-scenes production stories, so I really enjoy the meta-angle and the exploration of performing character and identity, as well as the questioning of stereotypes and whether we can ever reclaim them or imbue them with agency.
I am also a big fan of Camp in all things, so the staginess of their battles and the build-up around wrestling is a lot of fun for me.
I did not watch the original GLOW show of the 80s that this series is exploring, but I would certainly welcome integrating more footage from that original show or other outside elements that help develop your vid concept.
Music: Electro-pop? Ke$ha? 80s hair bands? So many great options.
Feud*
Here’s the deal people: nobody offered this fandom (well, nobody but me). So I am going to assume you haven’t seen it and use this paragraph (um, I mean essay….this is an essay) to tell you why you need to use your precious screen time to watch all 8 episodes of this stand-alone season of Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon as Joan Crawford and Bette Davis.
...This gif of Kate McKinnon as Debette Goldry will help capture the flavor.
Pills and surgeries and sexual harassment and lots of the gross parts of Hollywood, to be sure. But front and center throughout all of it? Joan Crawford and Bette Davis -- how they navigate it all. How they try to be friends. How the industry is invested in their isolation and distrust of each other and continually manipulates them in an attempt to manufacture their performances. And what makes this show so special and unique is the explicitly feminist lens that roots these stories within the subjectivity of both Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. They are the heroines and we are encouraged to empathize with them throughout.
They are different from one another and in Hollywood where there is difference, there is the possibility of hierarchy. Joan and Bette’s differences, their insecurities, and their desires based on their differences are regularly exploited and manipulated. Joan Crawford is an aging ingenue who loves acting for the public, whether in character on screen or in her glamorous persona off screen. While Bette Davis wants to be respected and desired for the ferocity of her spirit, her wit, and her incredible talent. Both women want power, but it could be argued that Joan is more comfortable pursuing power through the options socially sanctioned for women, while Bette rejects these paths unless absolutely necessary to get what she wants!
They both want autonomy. They are both terrible to people they love while the majority of the world is wretched to them. And yet, on occasion, they have these beautiful moments when the recognize one another as their mirror, facing the same challenges within Hollywood and the same challenges as a working mother, and they share some level of intimacy and camaraderie. And then someone pulls a thread and everything they bridged becomes unraveled again.
It’s poetic and tragic and haunting, but it also just feels SO GOOD to see their stories being told. It feels so good to have the ugliness they navigated shared in this raw way. I’m not crazy about biopics, but I do enjoy when they make me feel like by watching I am also serving as witness. And, I think most actors from earlier eras are so uniformly digested and understood as decontextualized from their circumstance and known as their icon, it’s really pleasurable to watch something that tries to really explore the complexity of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, as women and icons.
Here’s why you should want to VID it (one day… maybe today!): First of all, visually this show is FUCKING GORGEOUS. I mean GORGEOUS. I mean STUNNINGLY GORGEOUS. The costumes, the set design, the cinematography, just go ahead and marvel at the colors and staging and how everything feels perfectly crafted and how fun it would be to cut it all up in a meaningful way to some audio track that dances around a few ideas.
It’s Hollywood and the entire show is about women negotiating their place in the world but most directly in relationship to their own image and projection. This series is reflexive as FUCK. Do you like vidding what’s in the box, a photograph of the box, a discussion of the box, the box gazing upon itself in the mirror, and all of it within your own digital box? THIS IS YOUR JAM, YO.
Crossover potential: Feud but also actual footage of the films they explore and behind-the-scenes footage of Joan Crawford or Bette Davis. Think about it! NOT interested in Mommie Dearest, tbh.
FINALLY: Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon fucking tear up the screen. This series has LOTS of those amazing moments without talky-face and lots of acting and meaning and LOTS of action shots and it is just supremely vidable.
P.S. <3 <3 <3 for Mamacita and <3 <3 <3 for Pauline Jameson
Music: Damn, I’m really open here. As this series crosses several decades, I think there’s a wide-range of contemporaneous music to pull from, but of course, it is always fun to go against tone but not theme, such as Riot Grrl or other post-90s feminist music. With the campiness and vivid color and staging, I can see musical soundtracks working well also.
Broad City
Abbi and Ilana, my loves. UGH. These fierce queens. Ship vid? yasss queen. Character study, general fun party vid, omg yass. A few notes on boys: Bevers is groce. Trey is kinda sweet but also really icky. Lincoln is a babe. Jaime is adorable.
Obvs I need an Abbi/Ilana ship vid like burning, but I also need ALL of the Broad City vids this world has to offer. I would also enjoy a vid about their constant hustle, both within their careers and on the side. Abbi and Ilana connect to a lot of my feelings about the impossibilities within late-stage capitalism. I really fucking love their passionate and casual commitment to organized politics, not to mention the contractions and layers of their feminist ideals and actions.
Of course... If you have an idea? If you love them like I love them? If you can write in Ilana’s voice better than I can (“you can, dude, you totally can” - Abbi, as Ilana at the co-op), just run with it.
Music: anything that has been referenced within the show or has an “NYC” feel (for lack of a better descriptor).
Grace and Frankie
Gimme all the vids about Grace and Frankie! Their family is fine and all -- I really dig Brianna! -- but as the focus of a vid, I’m less interested in the rest of the family and more here for Grace and Frankie, specifically. On a related note, Sol and Robert make me feel so sad and angry about homonormativity sometimes I have to pause and yell it out. So yknow, obvs they matter, but their love and values are not really *my* queer values, ydig?
I’m here for the odd couple soulmate dynamic between Grace and Frankie. I’m here for Frankie being codependent with Sol and finding independence through her relationships with Grace and Jacob and her art. I’m here for Grace trying so hard not to fail for so long that once her marriage ends she starts to let go of that worry and start thinking about who she is and what she wants. I am also a HUGE fan of their entrepreneurship, if you’d like to focus on that.
And, you better believe I am here for Grace and Frankie as an OTP SHIP. It is cool if you are not, but you should know I am going to have a hard time trying to resist a slashy reading. I do like Jacob quite a bit and his relationship with Frankie, but not to the exclusion of a romantic relationship between Grace and Frankie. I feel pretty strongly that Grace is quite clearly totally in love with Frankie and starting to realize it, while Frankie’s feelings are definitely more subconscious (but definitely there!).
As an aside:
tellitslant has really enabled my shipping of these brilliant, hot ladies, and let me just add that the RPF of Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda is *very convincing* Any sort of meta-nods are welcome, though not required.Music: a vid to “9 to 5” or Dolly Parton would crack me the fuck up, but I am really open to any music and I think there are a lot of interesting options as Grace and Frankie are such different people and likely have interesting differences and similarities in musical taste.
Funny or Die's Billy on the Street
Billy on the Street was on Funny or Die as a web-series and then became a real series that was on Fuse for 3 seasons before moving to TruTV for seasons 4 and 5. You can watch it streaming on Hulu to get a taste of it.
Billy has OPINIONS and he has FACES. And that’s really what I’m here for. I love his urgency and certainty. I love the variety of people that he speaks with and their range of reactions. Certainly Elena is a very important figure in whatever vid you make.
I definitely love the celebrity participation, but I would say I’m here more for the everyday people than the celebs. I DO enjoy how the celebrity involvement adds a new element to Billy questioning folks on the street. Billy telling people Seth Rogen is dead while Seth Rogen pretends to be a cameraman, for example, is fantastic. Celebrities standing around answering questions is really a mixed-bag, for me.
The PRIZES are AMAZING. The obstacle courses are also AMAZING. But really anything where Billy has a big reaction is my fave. I also enjoy when he visibly is lying to people or encouraging them to embarrass themselves (sometimes by being really dull! Why is that pleasurable?? I don’t know!)
Billy Eichner has often said that this is a character he plays, which tracks in the sense that actors and comedians often play versions of themselves that are consistent or diverge in important ways. Billy the host of this show is known to occasionally say things that are fucked up. It’s not a consistent element, but yknow, he does occasionally say fatphobic, biphobic, etc. stuff. Let me just add, the people on the street often contribute a much wider variety of racist, homophobic, sexist, etc. opinions. Billy calls that shit out with several different approaches. To be clearer: Billy on the Street directly engages with the challenges and limitations of critique through reproduction and parody, and as the entire show is improv, these responses sometimes (though not always) address these issues successfully. By the nature of improv and parody, it can be harder to discern whether the occasional failures in these areas are about execution or values and vision.
And to be quite honest, the show moves really quickly and is really fun! And when it's not fun, the variety of NYC street culture and social citizenship makes it always fascinating television.
Music: geez, I have no idea but it has to have a strong beat for sure. This is a show with a lot of intensity, tension, and action. Something you’d play at a dance club maybe?
Will & Grace
I watched Will & Grace before I came out, while I was coming out, and then after I came out. I’m in the midst of a rewatch right now, which has been emotionally ~fascinating~ but also intellectually as the tools I had to enjoy the show at the time are so different than the ones I have now as a queer who regularly nerds out about queer theory.
It’s funny because I really expected less of it to hold up. There are a lot of things we can critique from the get go, and yes, the critiques are broad and deep: the only queer characters in the main cast are two white gay men and an arguably latent bisexual white woman who is regularly very racist/classist. In some ways, the show feels like the origin of hipster-(race)isms where we are supposed to laugh at the person saying the things being ignorant and not think too hard about the perpetuation of these narratives. And there are certainly a few anti-semitic elements in play around Grace. The show really seems to embody a particular anxiety around genderbending as queer rite while rejecting transness in fucked up ways. Again -- there are many ways they could do better.
And yet… there are many other elements that are wildly progressive -- even now! Grace’s relationship with her Jewish identity is really developed and we see that through her family, her choices, and how she talks about what is important to her. Will talks explicitly about how his chosen family is his family and that it should be treated as significant as his brother’s heteronormative nuclear family. I love that this is a sitcom where they want different things in life which are regularly discussed and negotiated: how can they be close when Grace regrets that she never got to be Will’s one time with a woman? or when Karen really hates Grace’s husband (yeah, Leo bores me to tears, too)? or while Jack is essentially a kept boy whose lifestyle is financed by Will and Karen? They are shamelessly flirty and sexual with one another in such a comfortable way that is familiar and makes me feel seen (even if that type of kinship is not as pronounced in my life now as it once was). There’s something about their comfort level with sex and kink and the way it weaves throughout their lives, not just within sex, that feels profound.
I love that their cohabitation together really varies based on the needs of the time, and there is less a focus on “adulting” but rather on negotiating how to be adults together.
In Season 1 I had a really hard time with Will’s internalized homophobia and particularly his femme-phobia. I love his dynamic with Jack though, and how Jack is so committed to Will freeing ~himself~ from this burden. I feel like this is partly how I am able to watch the show and connect with it across the many seasons in spite of the ways it can fail: (for me) they do a really good job of rooting these things in character and I really enjoy watching them challenge each other on their internalized -isms.
And, unsurprisingly, I adore Grace and have a stupid ginormous crush on Grace. Also, I ship Grace and Karen so damn hard. Karen is very clearly in love with Grace and most definitely enjoys some sort of dub-con kinky relationship with Rosario. Karen frequently comparing Grace to a boy and Rosario to a man helps her rationalize her attraction while distancing and demeaning them through misgendering, but um, anyway. I just love them. I love how honest Karen is and how she pushes Grace to be more honest about who she is and what she wants. I love that Grace is awkward and snort-laughs and is weirdly selfish about small things but afraid to be selfish about bigger, more substantive things. And Rosario! Part of me just wants her to be free of this show, because the class politics in here are heavy and Karen is often out of her mind on pills and booze (to start with). But Rosario and Karen do have a push-pull dynamic that often bends to moments of kindness and devotion which leads me to believe Rosario does care about Karen (and Jack!). Anyway, I love them all! Except Leo. He’s so boring.
I haven’t gotten to Season 9 yet, but I will certainly be caught up by the time vids go live.
A chosen family vid, a character study, or a ship vid would be great here.
Music: Mainstream pop or really any queer music might be great here. Would they play it at the white party? At a lesbian house party? Or a drag show?
Wonder Woman (comics)*
What a beautiful and messy fandom this is! Oh where to start. First: there is a lot of canon here AND this is a comics fandom, so it’s a different method of vidding. Mad props for taking this one on. Mad props for making me any vid! But also, I know this presents different types of challenges.
We’re talking 75 years of varied, glorious, bizarre, horrifying, history -- and let’s be honest, I’m not even familiar with more than a small fraction of that archive. Is this a vid about Gail Simone’s Diana, or Rucka’s iconic and epic run, or are you taking us back in time for an encounter with Perez, or on a detour through Sensation Comics and other DC titles? Heck, I have no idea! Perhaps you want to think through the delicious morass of gender critique, goofiness, kink, and racism in the 1940s comics in the wake of biopic Professor Marston and the Wonder Women? Cool! Perhaps your vid has a thematic rather than a historical logic, and you’re going to mine these decades like some sort of deranged treasure hunter to find us a new facet of this story. That sounds amazing!
All I know is that I’m here for DIANA and I’m here for HIPPOLYTA and I’m here for the AMAZONS!! I’m here for Diana interacting with any super- or civilian lady ever (surprise!), from her DC sisters through the eons to the girl who tells her about her feminist theory term paper. I’m here for ETTA CANDY (“woo woo!”) and how she has evolved from fat joke to badass (and I unironically love EVERY Etta for who she is - you get that candy, girl). Shhhh, secret time: I might ship Diana with Etta Candy most of all. My favorite Steve Trevor is the one that takes up the least space (surprise again!). My second favorite Steve Trevor was in the recent movie, and I blame Chris Pine for that, dude is damn charming. ALSO IT’S SAFE TO LIKE MOVIE-STEVE TREVOR BECAUSE HE’S DED 0:-)
It should also be noted that even the grand arc of (comics) encompasses only part of the phenomenon that is Wonder Woman. Crossovers with live action, animated, or fan generated Wonder Woman media are welcome.
Music: Honestly, this vid could be so many different things I don't feel like I have any helpful suggestions?! I am sure you will make the Amazons proud.
Thank you again!!!
