thuvia ptarth

This year's Festivids collection was amazing! I could not recommend every vid I loved; that would be way too much work. So I'm limiting myself to the ones that I've rewatched the most often over the past week. Have some last-minute pre-reveals recs. [Vidders added post-reveals.]

The delightful ones

• Shut Up and Dance with Me (The Golden Girls) by lilly_the_kid - Sheer happiness.
• Afterlife (The Good Place) by thingswithwings - I had some issues with the last two seasons of the show, but this almost reconciles me to them. Moving and joyous.
• Motel 6 (Hotel del Luna) by imbir - I have not seen this show, but I can confidently state this is a galaxy brain vid.

The delightful ones with the intertextual song choices

• I Want You to Want Me (Much Ado About Nothing) by hartknyx - This is so much sheer fun it makes me want to see the movie again.
• Umbrella (Singin' in the Rain) by tafadhali - An OT3 vid so joyful that it makes me want to dance, and I don't dance.

The dramatic ones

• uyariy nisqayki (listen and I will tell you) (Frontera Verde/Green Frontier) by eruthros - This is powerful and moving and an extremely effective recruiter vid for a source I'd never heard of before.
• Mother Jungle (Frontera Verde/Green Frontier) by eruthros - An extraordinary nonhuman POV.
• Diamond (Hotel del Luna) by imbir - This is gorgeous and striking and brilliantly paced; I have no idea what's going on; it has put Hotel del Luna at the top of my To Be Watched list.
• Doubt (Watchmen) by findmeinthealps - An unflinching Angela character study, gorgeously made, with flashes of the show's sly humor.

Out of all the great Festivids I've watched so far, these are the ones that've stuck with me most:

Love God Herself (Bitch Planet)
You're So Beautiful (The Get Down)*
Tanz aus der Reihe (Ku'damm 56)*
A New Day (Luke Cage)
The Greatest (Pitch)*
Voodoo in My Blood (The Witch)*

* = I haven't seen the source, so -- definitely no source knowledge required

So! Lately people have made me some brilliant things!

First, futuresoon wrote me Must Be Something in the Air, a pitch-perfect Diana Wynne Jones' Derkholm story set after The Year of the Griffin. I have such a soft spot for The Year of the Griffin ! I love that it is a class of misfit students banding together against their teachers, and that the problem is that the teachers are not teaching hard enough. The students are there to learn things, you know! There should be more studying and tougher exams! It is maybe a little too shallow and quick, and I want more of everybody in it, and yet I find it some pleasant and comforting -- maybe because I want more of everybody in it. But especially I want more of plain, sensible Claudia, who fixes everyone's problems, whom Blade falls in love with suspiciously quickly. And it's not exactly that I object to this, because I too find Claudia immensely loveable, it's that, well, it kind of happens in two paragraphs and off-stage. So futuresoon wrote me an episode from Blade's courtship of Claudia, and it contains marsh food and mention of Lydia's divine snacks and Blade being clever and also taking advantage of parental connections, and it mentions everybody and it is just awesome.

Then! There is Festivids! For which I got two amazing vids about relationships between women.

For Huge, [Anonymous #1] made me In the Sun, a Becca character study that puts her relationship with Will in the context of her other relationships--with Chloe, with Alastair, and, not least of all, herself. It captures both Becca's shyness and her self-assertion and, perhaps best of all, there are lots of clips of her reading.

For Nikita (2010), [Anonymous #2] made me Threnody, a study of the connections between--and mirroring of--Nikita and Alex. It is simultaneously epic and tender, it is gorgeous and thoughtful, and it has Maggie Q blowing stuff up.

I forgot to include Nikita (2010) in my Festivids nominations. But at least I found this neat Alex/Nikita flashfic about eroticism and trust.

I am having problems with backdating and getting things to show up in the proper place, so here, have links to the proper vid announcements posts. I made:

Etheric Messages (Fringe) for charmax
Names (Vampire Diaries) for greensilver

eta: Also, I owe Chaila, Sweetestdrain, and Anoel vidlets, so name your poison fandoms and prompts and possibly I will finish them before 2011, but I make no promises.

Title: Names
Fandom: The Vampire Diaries
Music: "The First Time" by Rose Polenzani
Length: 1:00
Recipient: greensilver for festivids (original post)
Notes: Thank you to rivkat and shati for speedy beta.

Summary: Bonnie character study. My mother and her mother before her.

Note: This has been slightly revised since it was posted for festivids.

Download: AVI 640X360 (8MB) | Subtitles (1K)

( How to use the subtitles )

( Lyrics )

Oh, god, I think I have been watching vids for three and a half hours straight, my eyes are going to fall out. And I haven't commented, not even more than a placeholder for MY VID MINE MINE FOR ME!!, because I can't put reactions together.

But so far, these are my (other) favorites:

Past in Present (Chak De! India)
Mother Mary (China Beach)
Never Be (Criminal Minds)
Me & My 424 (Dark Angel)
Body and Soul (Legend of the Seeker)
You Belong with Me (Lois & Clark)
Feel It (So You Think You Can Dance)
Meddle (The Vampire Diaries)

And I have only seen, hmm, the source for two of these vids. So, you know, canon knowledge not required.

I have been playing mad guessing games about who did which vid in my head, but I am not sharing because I'm not sure everyone would like to play. I will be keeping private score, though! By which I mean that I will remember all the ones I got right and forget all the ones I got wrong and convince myself that I am skilled at identifying vidders purely by style.

ETA: Ahaha. Okay. So as per Yuletide tradition, if you guess which vid I made, I will make you at least a 30-second vidlet for a fandom TBD. Mods and betas are disqualified. No responses before the reveal.

I was vidding at midnight, which I hope will be an omen for the coming year, and I woke up this morning with pink-eye, which I hope will not.

Yuletide
My wonderful writers were the mysterious white hart for The Forest (The Decemberists' Hazards of Love) and the hard-working yhlee for Thousand Voices, One Fight (Janelle Monae's Metropolis: The Chase Suite). Yoon also made me a music video!!!! I am so overwhelmed.

I wrote The Certainties (The Decemberists' Hazards of Love; some Childe ballads also sneaked in, but you can't really tell them from the rest of the album unless you're looking). Unbeta'd, sadly, because my three potential betas fell through, but that is always a risk with pinch hits, as is ambition too grand for the time to write it in. The recipient was very gracious, though, and I was happy to see she had a bunch of full-size stories from people who'd been inspired by her prompts on the pinch hit list.

Festivids
If you need a Festivids beta, I'm available through the deadline. Email me at thuviaptarth at gmail dot com.

Guys, unless my canon beta points out something I have to change, I think I am done! This may be the earliest before deadline I have ever finished anything ever.

I am not sure if I am going to be doing either Yuletide or Festivids next year, but I definitely am not doing them both if they overlap so much again. It is too nerve-wracking.

Yuletide
If you want to claim a Yuletide pinch hit, read this [read this]:

Please boost the signal on this:

We have a backup list for pinch hitting, called yuletidepinchhitters! You can join at the website, if you have a Yahoo account, or by email:

To subscribe to a group's mailing list via email:

Send a blank email to yuletidepinchhitters-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. To activate your subscription, just reply to the confirmation message you receive from the group.

Festivids
I wanted to finish a draft before Yuletide Madness -- okay, I wanted to finish a draft by last Friday -- but yesterday I looked at my three-quarters complete timeline and hated it all so much that I created a new project for my backup song and stared at it a long time before admitting there was no possible way I could complete that vid by the deadline. So I went back to the original project and stayed up till 2am revising the first half and now I am much happier with it but the planned ending won't work and I have no idea what will. Also, I am afraid it won't meet the only and perfectly reasonable Details request my recipient made. I am so sad. I want to make them happy!