'twill eventually be the season

[kindkit]

It's early days yet, I admit, but I've been thinking about Yuletide. My nomination plans are settled-ish, though the sudden discovery of a wonderful new fandom can always happen.

Here's what I'm thinking:

Grantchester, Leonard Finch

Granchester's first series aired too late last year to be Yuletide-eligible, to my sorrow because it's my favorite new show in a long time. It's set in 1953 and features a vicar, Sidney Chambers, who stumbles into mystery-solving and finds he can't bear to stop. It's well-acted and decently written with vivid, appealing characters. Leonard is Sidney's deacon, an intellectual who has trouble connecting with people but is deeply committed to the church, and is also almost-canonically gay. (The show's gone well beyond hints, but nothing is quite confirmed yet.) I'll probably nominate Sidney and Sidney's friend Geordie Keating (a police officer) as well, but it's Leonard I plan to request.


The Cross-Time Adventures of Colonel Tick-Tock, Colonel Tick-Tock, Bob McCrumbs

This is a segment of the Thrilling Adventure Hour podcast, a sort of affectionate Doctor Who parody in which the Colonel travels around doing things like saving Gilbert and Sullivan from a caveman who got caught up in a time storm and deposited in their flat. It's deeply silly and funny, yet with a thread of darkness that I like, and a thread of empathy and tenderness I like even more. The Colonel, like Leonard Finch, is almost-canonically gay, and Bob is almost-canonically his ex-lover.

There are only eleven short segments, which are listed here and available to download (legally and for free) here. You may find the first few episodes a bit difficult to love, because the segment started out heavily formulaic, but it has since evolved far beyond that.


Hyperdrive, Eduardo York

I recently re-watched Hyperdrive, a 2006-2007 science fiction comedy series starring Nick Frost, and fell in love with it all over again. It's set on board HMS Camden Lock, a ship which tends to see the less glamorous side of space travel, such as trying to convince alien governments to invest in Peterborough. Nick Frost plays bumbling but good-hearted and intermittently competent Captain Michael Henderson, and York (played brilliantly by Kevin Eldon) is his first officer, a raving militarist with a sadistic streak and a penchant for creepy cloning experiments. I adore York. He's awful, and hilarious in his awfulness, but there's a human being under all that, and show makes us see it while never pushing too far into sentimentality. The show as a whole definitely has flaws (some gross-out humor and an unpleasant streak of sexism), but there's enough good stuff to balance it out, I think.

I'm not completely totally 100% sure I'm going to nominate Hyperdrive--if we only get three nominations and something has to be replaced, Hyperdrive will be it--but I'm pretty sure.


I'll probably also request Tintin, but I'm assuming someone else will nominate it.


Anybody else have Yuletide ideas yet?

Comments

[st_aurafina]

I want to say it's too early to be talking Yuletide but it really isn't, is it? Noms probably start in a month or so, or something.

I've got one lined up as a micro-fandom, which is femslash based on #‎FindTheGirlsOnTheNegatives‬, photos of two women on found negatives from the fifties.

Other than that, Killjoys is looking like something I'd enjoy writing fic for. Agent Carter is too big already, bah. I guess that's to be expected.

[kindkit]

Probably sooner than that--it's almost mid-August already, and since the nomination and sign-up processes are long and assignments are supposed to go out at the end of October, I'm expecting things to get rolling around the beginning of September.

Those photos are amazing! And very evocative as well as beautiful--definitely the sort of thing to inspire fic.

[lilliburlero]

Ooh, Grantchester. I'd love to see more fic for it: it's one of those programmes for which I think I might prefer good fic to canon, actually. But I haven't seen any fic that's really up my alley yet.

I haven't been thinking about Yuletide much because I've a long to-write list that I'd like to make a dent in before then. Nominating The Cruel Sea worked out spectacularly well for me last year, so I'll probably do that again. I'll nominate David Blaize, I expect. I've got interested in Horace Annesley Vachell's The Hill (well, I'm interested in Reginald Scaife, who deserves to be in a novel by someone who appreciates him). And then there are the Antonia White books I keep hoping to see fic for. Not to mention my regular fandoms. Decisions, decisions...

[kindkit]

I'm very fond of the canon, but fic could do even more, I agree. Especially since fic wouldn't be bound by the mystery plotlines, which are the weakest part of the show.

I've had The Hill on my e-reader for ages but I can't quite bring myself to begin. I'm worried that the combination of homoeroticism and homophobia will be more depressing than I can bear.

[lilliburlero]

I'd be really interested to see what you think if you do decide to read The Hill. It's very homoerotic, but its homophobia is coded into issues of class and other schoolboy mores in a way that makes it difficult to know how it might ping someone else, if you know what I mean? The thing that annoyed me most about it is that Vachell creates a really compelling character in Scaife, and then falls back on snobbery to explain Scaife's flaws rather than exploring what he's done there. That's what I want fic to fix.

[the_rck]

I've been trying to get myself to think about possible fandoms, but I can't focus right now. I'm hoping that, in a couple of weeks, that will have cleared up (I have a medical test on Thursday, and I should have the results by the middle of next week. If they're bad, Yuletide is off the table for this year. If they're fine, then I can think about fandoms).

I suspect I'll mostly be focused on children's books. I do have list somewhere on my hard drive.