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Just gonna throw in my agreement that Iron Man 2 was pretty awesome, yay yay. Pepper and Tony are still the cutest. Don Cheadle's Rhodey doesn't really resemble Terrence Howard's in looks or personality, but hell, it's Don Cheadle, and I liked his version of the character a bit better. I actually felt that he and Tony were really *buddies* in this one. Sara and Shep and I were the only people in the theater who giggled in delight at John Slattery's role.

So, TODAY. Is the one-year anniversary of Star Trek being released in theaters in the U.S., which means I have to

( get sentimental and talk fangirl )

On a tangentially related note, my god, Only Good For Legends is finished and I feel like I'm saying goodbye at the end of a favorite TV show or something, not a fanfic. What am I going to do with myself? D :

This essay will address:

1) (Unavoidably), my opinion on whether Bella Swan should stay human or turn into a vampire.

2) What, essentially, Jacob Black has to do with anything, if his purpose in the end is to serve as anything other than a romantic red herring.

Outside the Bull@#$% Quadrant:
Bella's Incapacity to Carry "Sad Cargo" and the Potential Transcendence
of Jacob's Character in the Ending of the Twilight Series

( Read more... )

Even though I have loved Harry Potter for years and could be pressed to occasionally peruse fanart or fics, I don't know if I will ever be involved heavily into the actual fandom. I think the reason for this is because it is so intensely popular that there are wankers everywhere. The age and demographic is so universal that finding people you can actually agree with and relate to on a lot of things seems kind of dauntingly difficult, especially when there is an overwhelming amount of characters/ships/theories involved, both in- and outside of canon. In the past week, I have only dwelled briefly in my post-OOTP movie excitement, and I'm already pissed off. *sigh*...Wankers who bitch about how they hate the movies because, "My favorite part of the book isn't in the movie whine whine.." like they literally don't understand that it's impossible, when adapting a book into a movie, for them to be exactly the same. And this dumbass today who accused Sara of not being adequately obsessed because she is not currently rereading any of the books for the third time in preparation for the next one. Uh-huh. Even though her reasoning was that she wanted the books to feel new to her when she picked them up to reread them for as long as possible. Even though she's been in-and-out of hiatus on finishing her Marauders-era fic for years, but is not giving up on it. It feels like the fandom is full of a bunch of snobby losers who compete over how many tiny-ass little details from the book they can remember and who's theory is going to be right. OMG SHUT UP. SO NOT MY FANDOM TODAY.
This is kind of making me realize that I'm extremely favorable to smaller fandoms. I mean, BBM has a small bunch, and that was the first fandom I really got into on LiveJournal. I just like fandoms that strike a good balance between sadly inactive and unpleasantly huge. Even though some people might get bored with the lack of bustling activity in a smaller group of fans, I've had experiences of running into the same people on different websites or message boards, and I think it's kind of cool. And you could even argue that a small fandom has louder staying power than a big one after the show is cancelled or the books are finished, etc., because it's easier to make friends. People form really interesting relationships through fandom (christ, just ask "the wives") and sometimes that keeps them coming back when the actual subject of the fandom isn't currently the first thing on their minds.
Oh, and of course the other advantage is troll patrol. In a huge fandom, when the idiots are just everywhere, it gets to be kind of a mess that people can't really fix by banding together. But when everybody more or less knows each other and suddenly some total psycho shows up out of nowhere, you get more of a one-against-the-rest level of ultimate wank combat.
It's kind of funny when I go on and on about stuff like this when I haven't actually been involved in tons of fandom life...

Time to blather about something that doesn't matter.
Over the last few months, I've become a regular on the QAF boards at IMDB. I like a lot of the people who regularly hang out there, and there's a good sense of friendly community. In fact, half the time we're making off-topic posts just to get to know each other because we've already discussed the actual show to death and multiple reincarnations. Lately, though, the serenity has been disrupted by a certain condescending, antagonistic, childish and ignorant entity who goes by tigerlily something-or-other. First she starts attacking the opinions of Aulic, which is the funniest fucking thing ever because you can tell by the level of writing maturity she has to be like fifteen years younger than him. "tigerlily" doesn't exactly write like a grade schooler but she doesn't have to to present her lack of sophistication. She makes comparisons to um...the Holocaust (referring to it as "the 'Caust") and...something about autistic children? to make extremely nonsensical comparisons about, I don't know, people that get passionate about the show, saying, "We just need to get over it already. I mean, six years is way too long to still be caring about 9/11." Motherfucker say that again?
Bitch got busted by the troll patrol. Shortly after the username "tigerlily" was suspended by the administrators (probably because of aforementioned insensitivities), somebody made a post saying that they could confirm with a lot of certainty that she was the same user as this other "chetkpr" who makes a lot of posts for the sole purpose of pissing people off. The sudden appearance of "samla", tigerlily's "best friend" who gave the message that she "left the boards because she was tired of all the immaturity" is also suspicious, since it's probably just her way of lurking on what we're saying about her, and anyway, why would somebody like that have any friends. Whether she really is some psychobitch internet schizophrenic who has multiple unpleasant message board entities or these are all different people, if you go to the profiles of either of these users, they make a disturbingly abundant amount of updates all over IMDB, which practically confirms the suspicion that they are in fact trolls. Because that's what trolls do. They don't have lives apart from simply pissing people off via the internet. Consider the fact that "chetkpr" - who by the way used to have a different username and has been busted before - seems to devote his or her life to hating something in the way that most of internet fandom spends their time loving something. This user has as entire site devoted to proclaiming a hatred for the character of Brian Kinney, and in line with that, the actual personality of the actor Gale Harold, who, by the way, has very little in common with the character. Look, I like Brian Kinney and I think Gale can be pretty hot, and if somebody disagrees with that, that's fine. But spending abundant amounts of personal time on desperately seeking agreement with your dislike of something or someone seems to indicate some level of psychological instability. I mean, what the fuck. The only reason this crap is getting to me is not even because I'm annoyed, but because I've realized that somebody who has just been harmlessly annoying me for a while could actually have something seriously wrong with them.
The internetz is crazy, man.