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thuviaptarth) wrote2021-12-30 03:31 pm
Fandom Year in Review: 2021
There doesn't seem to be much point in doing most of my usual vidding year-in-review reflection, since my sum total of work was one vid, one completed Vexercise, and one playlist (the first time I VJ'd at a con!). I did not fulfill any of my vidding resolutions. I am pretty happy with the vid and the playlist.
In fandom, I have been delighted with the bumper crop of new Nirvana in Fire vids. I continue to be most interested in various forms of Mo Dao Zu Shi (and, to a lesser extent, MXTX's other work); I could very easily be fannishly obsessed with Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir, except there isn't enough fic to my taste to feed the habit. For a week or so, the same was true of Lore Olympus, but that faded.
I wrote up a bunch of vid notes for "Nothing Is Safe" before the reveal in February and then didn't post them, because I thought they'd bore people. But I always like looking back to these memes and there's always something I forget I thought or did, so I will include them here.
Alternate summaries I decided not to use:
- Only homies around, everyone here is crew
- The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house
My betas both liked "master's tools", but on reflection I was afraid it might fit into the pattern of white feminists using the quote to refer to everything but racism and homophobia in feminism (the original and unfortunately still pertinent topic of Lorde's essay).
Watchmen is one of the best television shows I have ever seen; the writing, acting, and directing are phenomenal; its ambitions are great, and it mostly achieves them. It looks hard at the centrality of white supremacy and anti-Black racism to American institutions--policing in particular, but also government and commerce. That's what makes it really frustrating that it gestures at, but doesn't follow through on, ways in which the victims of US racism at home can become the perpetrators of US imperialism abroad.
Angela's parents are part of a colonizing army; Angela marries the weapon that won the war. Lady Trieu is named after a major anti-colonial fighter, and then … we get a lot more attention paid to her desire to outdo her (White) father than her position as a forcibly colonized citizen. I expected a Lady Trieu-focused episode on the level of the episodes devoted to Laurie, Wade, and Will the entire time I watched, and I still think the lack of one demonstrates a major blind spot on the writers' part. I couldn't give Lady Trieu the backstory she deserved, but I wanted to elaborate on the connections the show draws between the bombing of Tulsa and the bombing of Vietnam, the US military and US police, and Angela's inspiration for becoming police herself, which is linked to her understandable desire for safety--and also to collaborationist Vietnamese police working for the colonial government, torture, and extrajudicial murder.
I realized "Nothing Is Safe" was perfect for Watchmen in late 2019, either while the show was still airing or shortly after; then for most of 2020 I wasn't sure I would ever make it, because I couldn't bear to rewatch the show.
Partly it was the single note repeatedly plinked, reminiscent of the show's Reznor & Ross score; but mostly it was the refrain, the foreboding, the desperation, the sense of being trapped and scrambling desperately for an escape, a fix, a second chance that you will not get.
Well, okay, it also helps that the entire song is about a group of people being attacked by the police, although the whole meth lab aspect doesn't exactly translate.
Daveed Diggs raps super-fast, but most of the song has a very measured pace. So measured I was worried about putting the police raid/White Night on the first verse, and very relieved when it worked out. I did end up using more long clips and more consecutive clips from single scenes than I usually do. I also held long on some of the reaction shots, even in the fast choruses, because I wanted the emotional impact to hit and hold. (Also, if you can hold for a long time on Regina King's face, why wouldn't you?)
Originally I'd thought this would be an ensemble vid, more or less centered around Angela, Laurie, and Wade (my favorites). I thought about the lyrics some more and realized that one of the reasons the song worked was because so many of the central Watchmen characters are driven by the sudden disruption of safety and their resulting fear, pain, and trauma. That isn't true of Laurie in quite the same way as it is of Angela, Will, and Wade, so I dropped her. It took me a little longer to reconcile myself to dropping Wade (On "splintered chandelier falls and smashes hard/Glass and steel everywhere in every throat, screams in protest", I had Wade kneeling naked in the funhouse with the mirrors shattering, dissolving into Cal on his knees in the cage; it looked so great! But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like that section needed to be Will, so I could lead up to the Tulsa/NY/Vietnam parallels).
Once I knew the sections of the vid had to be divided roughly into Angela (adult betrayal), Will, and Jon/Lady Trieu/Angela (childhood motivation), I had to figure out how to signal the transitions. I rewatched a lot of my favorite multicharacter and ensemble vids and decided to completely ignore the first thing they illustrated, which is that you should set up your multi-character focus for the audience in the intro; I'd already put Angela donning her uniform in the intro, and I liked it. I did adopt the way
sweetestdrain's Guts transitioned from one POV section to another, by having the two characters whose POV was being traded off interacting with each other, for the first POV/focus exchange, if not for later ones. I am pretty happy with how the POV changes worked out, even though I didn't use one consistent method for all of them.
The part of the vid I feel iffiest about: putting Lady Trieu over the lines "damn the fast foreign/Whip was too quick to flip and fast-forward". I needed her in that section to bridge the section on Dr. Manhattan to the section paralleling Klan violence with the invasion of Vietnam and the suicide bombing, but I know the association of Lady Trieu with foreignness plays into the racist trope of Asian Americans as always foreign.
I considered either tinting the black & white footage or desaturating the sepia footage so they would match, but once on the timeline, the rhythm of the variation seemed to work okay. And I didn't want to mess with the strategic use of color in either of those sections, which I could have kept after color changes, but only with some effort.
I originally put the credits in as a placeholder, with the intention of making them neon tubes later, and then I liked them and also I am lazy, so I didn't bother.
Re mechanics: I did a lot of clip color-coding on the timeline to character/time period to make it easier to tell whether I needed more or less of one in a particular section. Or possibly just to procrastinate, I'm not sure.
This was the second vid for which I color-coded the audio track so that the musically similar sections (chorus, pre-chorus, verse) were the same color and it made it much easier to navigate the timeline. Definitely keeping that up.
I couldn't fit it in the vid and didn't want to focus on Jon that much anyway, but something I realized on rewatch: Will and Jon are both children who escape incidents of great ethnic violence. I didn't check the timeline to see if Jon and his father were in New York by the time Will became a cop there (by the time of the Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden), but it seems plausible to me. Of course, the US is ultimately a much safer place for Jon than the place he left, whereas safer places in the United States are just an illusion for Will.
Vidding resolution for 2022: Finish auction vid!
As usual, stealing a final bit from kiki_miserychic:
If there is any question you would like to ask me about any one of my vids or stories (from this year or any year), then go ahead! What I meant by a particular clip or sequence, why I chose to highlight that characterization, why I chose that song, what crack I was taking and where you can get some...anything. Anything you might like to know about how I made a vid, I shall do my best to answer. Or any questions about vidding or writing that I can answer in general, I guess.
no subject
Thanks for selling me on this show, by the way. The only things I had known about it were Laurie's briefcase and the heavy involvement of The Leftovers guy, neither of which filled me with confidence, but I figured there must be more to it if you liked it. And man, there sure was: I think Will's backstory is one those episodes that raises the bar for what a single fairly self-contained hour of television can do.