Omorka's Lair

Those of y'all who have followed me for a while know that the Spouse is as big a geek as I am, but largely in different fandoms. For example, he's much more (or, from a different perspective, less selective) of an anime fan than I am. While we do have some shared fandoms (we were both Whovians before being a US Whovian was cool), for the most part we head to different panels at cons.

The Spouse actually got me into Channel Awesome and its siblings, more or less by accident; someone linked him to one of Todd in the Shadows's reviews, and he got really into them, then started showing them to me. I was curious about the people who were showing up in the cameos and crossovers, so I started watching some of the other producers; the Spouse did the same for Rap Critic but seemed content to stop there for a while. I'm not sure which of us landed on Chez Apocalypse first, but I started mainlining Brows Held High while the Spouse went for Folding Ideas. Eventually we ended up both watching the others' discoveries. I went from there to the CA anniversary movies, which the Spouse declined to watch on the grounds that he was interested in the reviews themselves, not the fictional bits (we'd run into the same issue when we'd discovered MovieBob a couple of years before - Spouse didn't want to watch the Game Overthinker reviews because of the storyline bits).

I more or less goaded the Spouse into watching the Brad Tries reviews by accident, and from there he picked up the Midnight Reviews and then the Cinema Snob reviews on his own. He seems to be enjoying those, but is much less interested in the Film Brain reviews, either BMB or the Projector ones, which seems odd to me, since the Spouse is as big an Anglophile as he is a Japanophile and Film Brain's reviews are pretty review-y rather than riff-y.

Anyway, the Spouse is a much bigger comic fan than I am - I've mostly been a Marvel girl since before puberty, while the Spouse has ranged across multiple publishers for roughly the same amount of time and has been more interested in the creators. So he'd been aware of Linkara for a long time, but not particularly interested in watching him. When I started marathoning At4W last summer, the Spouse was vaguely interested in what I thought, but not at all interested in watching with me - mostly because he was actively turned off by the storyline, again. However, because this last year or so has been so light on storyline because of the movie, the Spouse has sat through several episodes with me and gotten interested enough to watch some, but not all, of the back episodes. On the one hand, I'm happy to share this with him. On the other hand, the skipping around drives me absolutely batshit, especially when we jump from a relatively recent episode all the way back to the early ones where the sound is awful. There are positives to sharing a fandom with one's spouse, but I really wish he'd either just watch the new ones as they came out or attempt to watch the old ones (even if he skips the ones he'd not interested in) in chronological order.

I have just about decided that I can't keep up with Tumblr and it's silly for me to try. Unfortunately, the Monkees fandom only seems to exist there and on Facebook, and I am not even attempting any fandom activity on Facebook; most of the people I have on there are either former students or family members. Most of the fanart end of the Channel Awesome/Chez Apocalypse famdom seems to be Tumblr-centric, too. *sigh*

I wish this sort of blogging-focused social networking was still popular. There are not words for how much I hate Facebook, and text posts more than three sentences long don't get responses on Tumblr. I don't mind Twitter, but it has pretty severe limitations and IMHO isn't much good for fandom stuff other than news and roleplaying. I end up writing twelve-tweet essays because of the character limit.

Ah, well. At least there are a few folks still left here. I'm going to attempt to journal more often this year, although a lot of the time that's likely to be the "altar log" type posts (which I should be doing more often anyway).

One interesting thing about this new fandom: it's actually an interconnected, tangled mess of interlocking fandoms, many of which have been updating once a week for six years or more. Just under the umbrella of Channel Awesome alone, there are literally dozens of reviewers, with about sixteen "core" ones (counting some of the ones who have since left the site but whose archives still exist elsewhere), all of whom have at least four years' worth of back material and some of whom have as many as eight.

That is to say, I think of all my fandoms only Doctor Who has this much back canon. Even only following about eight of them for their current output (is that right? Loose Canon, Brows Held High, Todd in the Shadows, Rap Critic, Phelous, Cinema Snob, Linkara, Bennett the Sage, and Film Brain, so nine, and I'm keeping tabs on Marzgurl, Diamanda Hagan, and Obscurus Lupa but not making an attempt to keep caught up because not everything they review interests me, and Foldable Human isn't currently updating but I'll be following him again when he starts back up; ah, gods, its worse than I thought), I'm probably never going to get caught up completely, any more than I am all of the Classic Who I didn't catch when it was on the local PBS station. And that's with me choosing off the bat to ignore most of the videogame reviewers completely, and to punt on the question of Spoony until I find out how exactly much of his show I need to watch to fill out Linkara's storyline.

And you know, that's okay. Normally I slurp an entire canon before writing, but given that only the anniversary crossover Awesomeverse and Atop The Fourth Wall (and possibly the Spoony Experiment, but see above) seem to have enough shared world to support fic, I don't think I have to do that this time. For most of the reviewers outside of the anniversary Awesomeverse, it'll be meta rather than fic anyway. But this will be an interesting experiment in fannish uncertainty for me.