5 more questions
Nov. 27th, 2022 01:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitAnother 5 questions, this time from delphi.
1. How did you discover Our Flag Means Death, and was there a moment when you knew this would end up being something you'd feel fannish about?
I kept hearing about it on Twitter ca. March of this year, as it was airing. There was a lot of "this is the best thing EVER," which actually tends to put me off, but also "this has good queer content," which is a draw.
I started watching (almost completely unspoiled, by some miracle) shortly after the season finale aired. Most of the first episode didn't quite work for me on first viewing, because I didn't know how to take it, particularly the humor. I don't like fiction that laughs at the characters, that humiliates them, and it seemed like Stede was maybe going to be the butt of a whole lot of mean jokes about his failures to be properly manly. But then in the end the first episode conspicuously and deliberately didn't do that, quite the opposite.
I'm not sure at what point I really fell in love with the show, but it does a lot of things I have always wanted to see: it's a genre show with queer main characters; it's a show about queer men who are middle-aged instead of teenagers; it's a show where the queer characters get to have sex and romance; it's a queer show where the queerness just happens and isn't in itself "the plot"; it's a show about (to some considerable extent) men and masculinity that skewers toxic bullshit; it's a show with characters of color who have their own stories and aren't just enablers of the white characters' stories; it's a show with a whole variety of physical types, including fat people, and where nobody's Hollywood-beautiful, but where the fat people and the middle-aged people and the balding people and the feminine men don't get mocked. Instead, they get love. And they get narrative respect. Every character who isn't an absolute shithead gets narrative respect, and that makes me so happy.
Looking on AO3, I can see that I posted my first OFMD fic on April 17, which would have been very shortly after I finished watching. And I haven't stopped since, ending a period of not writing that had gone on for years. OFMD made me fannish again, yay! I do fandom now differently than I used to--I'm staying away from Discourse and not actually reading that much fic--but when I wasn't doing anything fannish it felt like a part of me was missing. Glad to be back.
2. Is there something you'd really love to see in season 2 of OFMD (or in fic if you don't want to speculate about next season)?
I want Ed and Stede to get back together, obviously. I want the show to hold to David Jenkins' promise that it's a romantic comedy, so HEAs for everyone including Lucius, who is not dead. (But I do have to admit that I've envisioned the final episode fading to black on an Ed/Stede kiss or whatever, and an end title saying "Ed and Stede lived happily together for the rest of their lives," and then a post-credits scene where we see them being hanged for piracy in 1718. Just to be clear, I don't WANT this to be the real ending! But I'm amused in a terrible sort of way by the thought.)
Anyway, I don't want Ed and Stede's reunion to be the entire plot of S2. I'd like it to either be resolved fairly quickly so the show can move on to other questions like "How are they going to make a living now?" Or for it to be drawn out but backgrounded for large stretches, so that we can get more development for other characters. I want Frenchie's story, and Roach's, and Wee John's. I want more of Oluwande's story than just "He loves Jim and would probably make a better captain than Ed or Stede."
I'd like . . . something for Izzy, some kind of resolution. Redemption is too much to ask, especially since I think Izzy can't become less fucked-up when he's around Ed (it's not Ed's fault, but it's true) and so we couldn't get more than the start of a redemption arc for Izzy before he'd have to leave the story. But I'd like at least a suggestion that he'd not locked into being the semi-comedic antagonist forever. Realistically, what I think we're most likely to see is Izzy dying for Ed. It's not the story I'd choose if I were writing it, but it's what's most feasible within a narrative where Ed and Stede are the main characters and Izzy's not getting his own sad spinoff.
I'd like (I think--it would need to be done well) for the show to address the disjunction between its comedic violence and the ways it questions violence and aggression. Which means, to put it briefly, I'd like Ed and Stede and the crew to stop being pirates by the end, because killing people for money and funsies is not great. (Or I'd like them to do piracy in a good cause, like raiding slave ships and freeing all the enslaved people and taking them back home. But the show has chosen to downplay slavery, for the sensible reason that if it really addressed it, it would have to be a completely different kind of show. So I don't expect that to happen.)
A couple of things I don't want: I don't, despite the undeniable hotness of bearded Rhys Darby, want Stede to become more conventionally masculine in any way at all. It is important that Stede is a man who isn't manly in conventional ways, and that this is valued by the narrative. It's incredibly meaningful that "unmanliness" is narratively shown to be freeing and good. I'll be upset if we lose that.
I don't want more of Mary and Doug and the kids; I like that OFMD dares to be a show that doesn't treat The Family as unquestionably sacred and good. I like that it's a show about getting away from reproductive heterosexuality.
I don't want any het romance onscreen. I want to keep my fun little world in which almost everyone we like is queer. Even today there are very few shows that gives us a mostly-queer story, and virtually no genre shows.
I guess all of these boil down to not wanting the show to be any less queer-centric. Because it's a deeply, deeply queer show despite some of its main cast and showrunners being straight.
3. What's one place - a landmark, a restaurant, a neighbourhood - that you'd recommend to anyone visiting a city or town you've been to?
This is a tough one, because I want to talk about Minneapolis/St. Paul (which I still think of as home), but I haven't been there in so long that I'm not sure what still exists and what has closed. But, bearing in mind my out of date knowledge, I'll recommend a few things.
Cross the Hennepin Avenue bridge at night. The bridge is beautiful, especially all lit up.
Explore Nicollet Avenue around Lake Street. It has, or had, a lot of very good, very inexpensive Vietnamese restaurants, a good Asian grocery, a fun coffee shop, an old-school German restaurant hanging on as the neighborhood changed, etc.
And the neighborhood around Powderhorn Park. It can be a little bit rough, but I lived there for years and never had any significant problems. It's another of those very contrast-y places I loved about Minneapolis, with a Swedish import shop one block down from what's essentially a whole Mexican/Latine shopping mall. You can (could?) get freshly made tortillas and cassettes/CDs of Latin music and an unbelievable variety of Mexican candies. Powderhorn Park itself is quite pretty in its small way, with a miniature lake and lots of beautiful trees.
And the west bank of the university. There's a good small concert venue, a Chinese bakery, a fab Ethiopian restaurant, some co-ops nearby, etc. Also non-students can (or at least could) get access to the University of Minnesota library.
Drive or walk along Summit Avenue in St. Paul to see a lot of beautiful, lovingly-maintained Victorian houses from the era of the milling and railroad boom. Nearby Grand Avenue has some fun shops and restaurants, though it's geared much more towards white people with money than other areas I've recommended. Café Latté apparently still exists and has very good cake.
Go to one of the several local diners that serve a dish called Cajun Breakfast and order it. It's a huuuuuuge plate of hash browns with onions and bell peppers, plus 2 eggs, all smothered in Hollandaise sauce and dusted with some kind of Cajun spice blend. It's every bit as greasy and terrifying as it sounds, but so, so good.
Stopping now, but can you tell I miss the place?
4. Is there a genre or trope you've wanted to try your hand at writing but haven't yet?
I'm interested in horror and I've been in several fandoms with a considerable horror element (Buffy and Hannibal spring to mind, as well as Hellblazer comics) but haven't really written much of it. And those fics have tended to be psychological horror (e.g. Cleaving, Izzy post-canon getting all the attention from Ed he ever wanted, and then some). I'd like to try supernatural horror, and OFMD is a promising fandom for it, but I haven't quite gotten there.
5. Do you hold any strong/contentious food opinions?
Not really, or at least not about food per se. There's nothing I absolutely can't eat and very little I dislike so much that I won't. I don't think I've ever had pineapple on pizza, and I wouldn't order it, but I'd try it if it was offered. I don't hate raisins or mayonnaise or olives (yum, olives).
I guess I do have some strong opinions about food culture, particular in the US. I hate the moralizing of food, I hate diet culture and the rebranding of dieting as "clean eating," and I hate the endless marketing cycle of new "superfoods." Goji berries and lion's mane mushrooms won't cure anyone's cancer, sorry.
I am very aware that some people have actual medical reasons to limit their food choices (e.g. allergies, celiac disease, diabetes) but that's not what I'm talking about.
Because of where I work (a "natural" grocery store), I encounter a lot of people who intensely restrict their diets, not on the basis of actual diagnosed health problems but on the basis of "well, this health celebrity said X, Y, and Z." It's so joyless and I feel sad for them. And furious at the people getting rich off of fueling people's anxieties.
Well, that was long.
If you'd like 5 questions from me, just drop a comment.
By the way, I am very spoiler-averse, so if you comment about OFMD, please avoid S2 spoilers. Speculation is fine so long as it's not based on spoilers. Thanks!
delphi.1. How did you discover Our Flag Means Death, and was there a moment when you knew this would end up being something you'd feel fannish about?
I kept hearing about it on Twitter ca. March of this year, as it was airing. There was a lot of "this is the best thing EVER," which actually tends to put me off, but also "this has good queer content," which is a draw.
I started watching (almost completely unspoiled, by some miracle) shortly after the season finale aired. Most of the first episode didn't quite work for me on first viewing, because I didn't know how to take it, particularly the humor. I don't like fiction that laughs at the characters, that humiliates them, and it seemed like Stede was maybe going to be the butt of a whole lot of mean jokes about his failures to be properly manly. But then in the end the first episode conspicuously and deliberately didn't do that, quite the opposite.
I'm not sure at what point I really fell in love with the show, but it does a lot of things I have always wanted to see: it's a genre show with queer main characters; it's a show about queer men who are middle-aged instead of teenagers; it's a show where the queer characters get to have sex and romance; it's a queer show where the queerness just happens and isn't in itself "the plot"; it's a show about (to some considerable extent) men and masculinity that skewers toxic bullshit; it's a show with characters of color who have their own stories and aren't just enablers of the white characters' stories; it's a show with a whole variety of physical types, including fat people, and where nobody's Hollywood-beautiful, but where the fat people and the middle-aged people and the balding people and the feminine men don't get mocked. Instead, they get love. And they get narrative respect. Every character who isn't an absolute shithead gets narrative respect, and that makes me so happy.
Looking on AO3, I can see that I posted my first OFMD fic on April 17, which would have been very shortly after I finished watching. And I haven't stopped since, ending a period of not writing that had gone on for years. OFMD made me fannish again, yay! I do fandom now differently than I used to--I'm staying away from Discourse and not actually reading that much fic--but when I wasn't doing anything fannish it felt like a part of me was missing. Glad to be back.
2. Is there something you'd really love to see in season 2 of OFMD (or in fic if you don't want to speculate about next season)?
I want Ed and Stede to get back together, obviously. I want the show to hold to David Jenkins' promise that it's a romantic comedy, so HEAs for everyone including Lucius, who is not dead. (But I do have to admit that I've envisioned the final episode fading to black on an Ed/Stede kiss or whatever, and an end title saying "Ed and Stede lived happily together for the rest of their lives," and then a post-credits scene where we see them being hanged for piracy in 1718. Just to be clear, I don't WANT this to be the real ending! But I'm amused in a terrible sort of way by the thought.)
Anyway, I don't want Ed and Stede's reunion to be the entire plot of S2. I'd like it to either be resolved fairly quickly so the show can move on to other questions like "How are they going to make a living now?" Or for it to be drawn out but backgrounded for large stretches, so that we can get more development for other characters. I want Frenchie's story, and Roach's, and Wee John's. I want more of Oluwande's story than just "He loves Jim and would probably make a better captain than Ed or Stede."
I'd like . . . something for Izzy, some kind of resolution. Redemption is too much to ask, especially since I think Izzy can't become less fucked-up when he's around Ed (it's not Ed's fault, but it's true) and so we couldn't get more than the start of a redemption arc for Izzy before he'd have to leave the story. But I'd like at least a suggestion that he'd not locked into being the semi-comedic antagonist forever. Realistically, what I think we're most likely to see is Izzy dying for Ed. It's not the story I'd choose if I were writing it, but it's what's most feasible within a narrative where Ed and Stede are the main characters and Izzy's not getting his own sad spinoff.
I'd like (I think--it would need to be done well) for the show to address the disjunction between its comedic violence and the ways it questions violence and aggression. Which means, to put it briefly, I'd like Ed and Stede and the crew to stop being pirates by the end, because killing people for money and funsies is not great. (Or I'd like them to do piracy in a good cause, like raiding slave ships and freeing all the enslaved people and taking them back home. But the show has chosen to downplay slavery, for the sensible reason that if it really addressed it, it would have to be a completely different kind of show. So I don't expect that to happen.)
A couple of things I don't want: I don't, despite the undeniable hotness of bearded Rhys Darby, want Stede to become more conventionally masculine in any way at all. It is important that Stede is a man who isn't manly in conventional ways, and that this is valued by the narrative. It's incredibly meaningful that "unmanliness" is narratively shown to be freeing and good. I'll be upset if we lose that.
I don't want more of Mary and Doug and the kids; I like that OFMD dares to be a show that doesn't treat The Family as unquestionably sacred and good. I like that it's a show about getting away from reproductive heterosexuality.
I don't want any het romance onscreen. I want to keep my fun little world in which almost everyone we like is queer. Even today there are very few shows that gives us a mostly-queer story, and virtually no genre shows.
I guess all of these boil down to not wanting the show to be any less queer-centric. Because it's a deeply, deeply queer show despite some of its main cast and showrunners being straight.
3. What's one place - a landmark, a restaurant, a neighbourhood - that you'd recommend to anyone visiting a city or town you've been to?
This is a tough one, because I want to talk about Minneapolis/St. Paul (which I still think of as home), but I haven't been there in so long that I'm not sure what still exists and what has closed. But, bearing in mind my out of date knowledge, I'll recommend a few things.
Cross the Hennepin Avenue bridge at night. The bridge is beautiful, especially all lit up.
Explore Nicollet Avenue around Lake Street. It has, or had, a lot of very good, very inexpensive Vietnamese restaurants, a good Asian grocery, a fun coffee shop, an old-school German restaurant hanging on as the neighborhood changed, etc.
And the neighborhood around Powderhorn Park. It can be a little bit rough, but I lived there for years and never had any significant problems. It's another of those very contrast-y places I loved about Minneapolis, with a Swedish import shop one block down from what's essentially a whole Mexican/Latine shopping mall. You can (could?) get freshly made tortillas and cassettes/CDs of Latin music and an unbelievable variety of Mexican candies. Powderhorn Park itself is quite pretty in its small way, with a miniature lake and lots of beautiful trees.
And the west bank of the university. There's a good small concert venue, a Chinese bakery, a fab Ethiopian restaurant, some co-ops nearby, etc. Also non-students can (or at least could) get access to the University of Minnesota library.
Drive or walk along Summit Avenue in St. Paul to see a lot of beautiful, lovingly-maintained Victorian houses from the era of the milling and railroad boom. Nearby Grand Avenue has some fun shops and restaurants, though it's geared much more towards white people with money than other areas I've recommended. Café Latté apparently still exists and has very good cake.
Go to one of the several local diners that serve a dish called Cajun Breakfast and order it. It's a huuuuuuge plate of hash browns with onions and bell peppers, plus 2 eggs, all smothered in Hollandaise sauce and dusted with some kind of Cajun spice blend. It's every bit as greasy and terrifying as it sounds, but so, so good.
Stopping now, but can you tell I miss the place?
4. Is there a genre or trope you've wanted to try your hand at writing but haven't yet?
I'm interested in horror and I've been in several fandoms with a considerable horror element (Buffy and Hannibal spring to mind, as well as Hellblazer comics) but haven't really written much of it. And those fics have tended to be psychological horror (e.g. Cleaving, Izzy post-canon getting all the attention from Ed he ever wanted, and then some). I'd like to try supernatural horror, and OFMD is a promising fandom for it, but I haven't quite gotten there.
5. Do you hold any strong/contentious food opinions?
Not really, or at least not about food per se. There's nothing I absolutely can't eat and very little I dislike so much that I won't. I don't think I've ever had pineapple on pizza, and I wouldn't order it, but I'd try it if it was offered. I don't hate raisins or mayonnaise or olives (yum, olives).
I guess I do have some strong opinions about food culture, particular in the US. I hate the moralizing of food, I hate diet culture and the rebranding of dieting as "clean eating," and I hate the endless marketing cycle of new "superfoods." Goji berries and lion's mane mushrooms won't cure anyone's cancer, sorry.
I am very aware that some people have actual medical reasons to limit their food choices (e.g. allergies, celiac disease, diabetes) but that's not what I'm talking about.
Because of where I work (a "natural" grocery store), I encounter a lot of people who intensely restrict their diets, not on the basis of actual diagnosed health problems but on the basis of "well, this health celebrity said X, Y, and Z." It's so joyless and I feel sad for them. And furious at the people getting rich off of fueling people's anxieties.
Well, that was long.
If you'd like 5 questions from me, just drop a comment.
By the way, I am very spoiler-averse, so if you comment about OFMD, please avoid S2 spoilers. Speculation is fine so long as it's not based on spoilers. Thanks!
