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Escapade report: part two
Saturday panels
Saturday was full of amazing panel wonderfulness.
Highlander
It has been years since I was active in Highlander fandom, but there was a panel on Highlander and spirituality, and I'd often wondered about this (why do all immortals acknowledge Holy Ground, and questions like that) so I went and mostly just sat quietly and listened and got all nostalgic for the late 90s when I was active in this fandom. (My very first fic was Highlander! And no, I don't have a copy any more and it was very bad and published under my RL name, so you'll all just have to suffer knowing you can't read my goofy story in which, as I recall, Methos was writing X-files fanfic, or something ridiculous like that). Things that were discussed at this panel included: What was the show's perspective on spirituality? Were there any religions that weren't represented? Was Catholicism overrepresented? What motivated Darius? Did Methos actually believe in the holy hottub, or was it enough that he knew that Duncan believed?
The answers, to summarize our conversation, were that the show did seem to have a positive view of all forms of spirituality, though Judaism was somewhat underrepresented, perhaps because the producer was Jewish and wary of imposing his tradition; Catholicism was probably overrepresented because (a) it was so prominent in France and (b) Catholics had a vested interest in keeping immortals a secret, since their whole shtick is the exclusivity of the dying-and-rising messiah; and Darius probably tried a number of different paths after the "light quickening," but the fact that he was a Catholic priest probably didn't mean he thought that was the only path to truth. And some people did speculate that he may not have been entirely on board with the whole celibacy thing. I'm not sure we came to a consensus on Methos and the holy hot tub.
Supernatural: John: Good Hero, Bad Dad?
Since I have a love-hate relationship with John Winchester, I was really looking forward to this panel, and it did not disappoint. We began by brainstorming the ways one might classify John as a good parent and the ways he might be classified as a bad parent. This lead to a lively debate; some things (like giving a 9-year-old a gun) ended up in both columns, because as a number of people pointed out, if Supernatural monsters are real it makes sense to prepare your kids to defend themselves. Eventually the list in the "bad parenting" column far outweighed the "good parenting" column (and for balance we started listing John's other good attributes--most not related to his parenting, like his heroism and his gorgeous eyes--in the good parenting column).
What interested me is that a lot of the things the people in the room seemed to hold John most culpable for were decisions he made after Sam and Dean were adults--like telling Dean he might have to kill Sam. There was an overwhelming consensus in the room that that was a bad decision, whereas people were more divided on his parenting techniques when they were children. Someone pointed out that criticizing John based our cultural parenting standards was like criticizing parents in a refugee camp--they're living in situations of enormous stress, and their situation is so different they may as well be in a different world than us. Similarly, if monsters are real--and if you think they're after your family--you might respond like John Winchester did. One of the mods pointed out, however, that there were hunters who managed not to get their kids involved in the business, and maybe that was a decision John might have made.
This led to some interesting discussion about being a hero v. being a good parent, which for me hearkened back to the heroism panel. The main difference was that in the heroism panel, a lot of people actually thought it was a good thing for heroes not to be so isolated, to have the support of their families and communities. In the "John Winchester: Bad Dad?" panel, people were more concerned with the toll John's quest took on Sam and Dean. I did get the sense that for some people, how John's parenting was evaluated related to whether one thought he was primarily motivated by heroism or an obsessive quest for vengeance. It also made a big difference whether one thought that John had a continuous sense that his family was under siege by whatever killed his wife or not. My personal feeling is that he had this constant sense of his family being under attack, so staying in one place to let his kids grow up safely wasn't an option, because he didn't think they were safe when they stayed in one place.
But we all agreed that John was hot business, which of course is the most important thing. :-)
One of the moderators has a more complete recap of the discussion here.
Identity Politics in Fandom
I'm not really sure what to say about this panel. I think the moderators,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kassrachel and nyssa23, set an excellent tone for the discussion, talking about the need for us as fans to learn to talk about these issues and actually listen to each other, and I really liked it when one of the audience members laid our some ground rules for the discussion, using "I" statements and being charitable about how we interpreted other people's remarks. The discussion itself seemed to want to go into very safe channels, which I guess is to be expected--so, for example, we tended to focus on the politics of representation in shows themselves rather than in fannish texts; people were a lot more willing to talk about the representation of gender than the representation of race, etc. I wish I had taken notes on this panel so I could more fairly represent what was said; i think I'm going to cop out and just refer people to kassrachel's notes from the discussion, which are here. There were numerous references to old(er) controversies (a term I much prefer to "wank") like the debate over antisemitism in the timing of Yuletide signups; my favorite comment from that part of the discussion was "The proper response to "I feel hurt or excluded" is not 'you suck.'"
Smallville
Last year at Escapade, whenever I mentioned Smallville I was treated to a rant about how "I used to love that show before they ruined it." That, plus some Smallville-bashing at the SPN panel, made me a little reluctant to go to the SV panel. However, Slinking and Clari_Clyde persuaded me to go, and I'm glad I did. The panel turned out to have more people there than I was expecting--at least 15 or 20, I think--and it was exciting to see there were som many fans who were still into the show.
After my bad experience in the SPN discussion Friday afternoon, I made sure to put it out there early on that I really loved the show, and I actually thought seasons 5-7 were good seasons. It was clear that not everyone in the room agreed with me--some of them said they felt like SV was their abusive boyfriend they kept coming back to-- but after I made my statement it felt like people toned down their critical comments a bit and at least acknowledged that different fans have different perspecitves. That made a big difference to me. Everyone obviously has their own opinion about season 7, and I don't actually mind critical comments on the show; it's really more the false sense of consensus that "everybody" hates the show now that drives me batty.
We had a wide-ranging discussion, from talking about the Clexiness of "Fracture," to revisiting some of our favorite Clex scenes from past episodes, to discussing whether Lionel or Lillian actually had more of a negative impact on Lex's development. The crowd definitely did seem to be very pro-Lex; there was some Clark-bashing that made me wish I could better reproduce some of the good Clark analysis of how he's matured in seasons 6 & 7 I've read from folks likehuzzlewhat or latxcvi or others, just for the purpose of fair Clark representation--but though I like him he's never been one of my big focus characters, so I had trouble marshalling arguments of the top of my head. (Con brain--is that what you call it? Too little sleep, short term memory loss?) My brain did briefly come back long enough to explain my theory of Lana (though to be honest, I think I've just made that argument about Lana as symbolically standing in for early season Lex, only she's going to be redeemable --an argument I'm sure is not original to me but probably stolen from huzzlewhat or bop_radar--so many times it no longer requires brain power to explain it).
I'm not sure how many people bought that theory, but what they did perk up their ears at was the fact that I have rec lists for fic written after season 4, since many of them had lapsed from SV fandom after that point. So I pointed them to my rec tag--but who else has good rec lists for recent fic? (I've been slacking on this the last few months, but I'm sure other people have been reccing stories--where should I point people?)
I'm blanking on what else was discussed in this panel.clari_clyde? slinkling? What struck you about this panel?
Genderswap/bodyswap
I came in a little late to this panel, so I don't know what themes the mods laid out at the beginning, but I have to say this was probably the most fun panel of the whole con, once we stopped asking WHY there's suddenly so much genderswap/bodyswap [the consensus seemed to be: the influence of popslash and anime fans entering SGA and SPN fandoms] and started just giving examples of our favorite/most cracky stories. Suddenly we had manginas and assbabies and pantychrists and other hilarious stories popping out all over, so to speak. Though it was pointed out that there are also tragic genderswap and mpreg stories; someone mentioned a story where Dean gets impregnated by a demon and gives himself an abortion, that I think must be Familial Relations.
OTW
I honestly thought this panel would be a lot more controversial than it was, given the number of LJ debates over OTW (the Organization for Transformative Works) I've seen. Either everyone in the room really was in favor of the project, or else the dissenters were too shy to speak up. I think it helped that the moderators (bethbethbeth and the_shoshanna) started out the session by asking people what they had heard about OTW and clarifying which representations of OTW were accurate and which were inaccurate. I'm far too lazy to type out all the issues that were discussed, especially when kassrachel has an excellent summary of the panel here. I do want to say, though, that this was an excellent panel, and made me even more excited about OTW's projects than I was before.
I had dinner withslinkling and clari_clyde at a mediocre Mexican restaurant downtown, where service was painfully slow, especially at the end when we were in a hurry to get back in time for the vidshow. Actually, slow service seems to have been a theme for the day; the three of us had had lunch in the hotel restaurant with kassrachel and nyssa23, and service had been glacially slow then, too--so much so that I had ended up skipping the 3 o'clock panel and spending way too much money in the dealer's room. But the company made up for blah food and poor service, for sure!
We were just in time for the start of the vid show. I've heard a lot of people complaining about the length of the vid show this year, but actually for me it was just the right length. I really can't process too many vids in one sitting; last year I actually gave up at intermission, because I just felt like I was vid-overloaded.morgandawn has been keeping a list of the con vids here as they are posted online, if you want the whole list. I really adored the first SPN vid, "Sell my Soul," by barkley and destina, which was all about Sam's season 3 journey, and basically broke my heart. The other vids I really enjoyed were giandujakiss's Der Komissar, which was a hilarious James Bond vid; laurashapiro's Heroes vid "Sawatte Kawatte," a Hiro and Ando focused vid that really reminded me of why I started loving Heroes; and Laura McEwan's "Falling Slowly," which was a Starsky and Hutch vid that might have actually sucked me into S&H fandom if I had more time, because DAMN that show must have been slashy, just given that vid. (It's funny, I've seen S&H vids before that didn't have that effect on me; this was was really romantic and well-edited, though).
There's been a certain amount of controversy overabsolutedestiny's vid Deep Kick, and I think it certainly made the strongest impression on me of all the vids in the show. I wouldn't say I necessarily liked the vid--I found it quite disturbing, actually--but as soon as it was over I leaned over to slinkling and said that I didn't know what the source text for that vid was, but I definitely wanted to see it. (The source is apparently a film called "15"). slinkling disagreed with me, btw; she said the vid made her not want to see the source text, but I thought we'd probably already seen the worst of the violence in the vid itself, and I wanted to know who those beautiful boys were and why they were hurting themselves.
The vid show was pretty much the end of the con for me. I did go the the breakfast briefly with Slinkling and Clari, but Slinkling had to leave early to catch her shuttle, and Clari wanted to start the drive home early, and I had to finish packing to catch my own shuttle, so we all left by around 9:15. I was sorry to miss the art show and the morning panels, but given travel time and plane schedules I always seem to miss Sunday at Escapade.
Saturday was full of amazing panel wonderfulness.
Highlander
It has been years since I was active in Highlander fandom, but there was a panel on Highlander and spirituality, and I'd often wondered about this (why do all immortals acknowledge Holy Ground, and questions like that) so I went and mostly just sat quietly and listened and got all nostalgic for the late 90s when I was active in this fandom. (My very first fic was Highlander! And no, I don't have a copy any more and it was very bad and published under my RL name, so you'll all just have to suffer knowing you can't read my goofy story in which, as I recall, Methos was writing X-files fanfic, or something ridiculous like that). Things that were discussed at this panel included: What was the show's perspective on spirituality? Were there any religions that weren't represented? Was Catholicism overrepresented? What motivated Darius? Did Methos actually believe in the holy hottub, or was it enough that he knew that Duncan believed?
The answers, to summarize our conversation, were that the show did seem to have a positive view of all forms of spirituality, though Judaism was somewhat underrepresented, perhaps because the producer was Jewish and wary of imposing his tradition; Catholicism was probably overrepresented because (a) it was so prominent in France and (b) Catholics had a vested interest in keeping immortals a secret, since their whole shtick is the exclusivity of the dying-and-rising messiah; and Darius probably tried a number of different paths after the "light quickening," but the fact that he was a Catholic priest probably didn't mean he thought that was the only path to truth. And some people did speculate that he may not have been entirely on board with the whole celibacy thing. I'm not sure we came to a consensus on Methos and the holy hot tub.
Supernatural: John: Good Hero, Bad Dad?
Since I have a love-hate relationship with John Winchester, I was really looking forward to this panel, and it did not disappoint. We began by brainstorming the ways one might classify John as a good parent and the ways he might be classified as a bad parent. This lead to a lively debate; some things (like giving a 9-year-old a gun) ended up in both columns, because as a number of people pointed out, if Supernatural monsters are real it makes sense to prepare your kids to defend themselves. Eventually the list in the "bad parenting" column far outweighed the "good parenting" column (and for balance we started listing John's other good attributes--most not related to his parenting, like his heroism and his gorgeous eyes--in the good parenting column).
What interested me is that a lot of the things the people in the room seemed to hold John most culpable for were decisions he made after Sam and Dean were adults--like telling Dean he might have to kill Sam. There was an overwhelming consensus in the room that that was a bad decision, whereas people were more divided on his parenting techniques when they were children. Someone pointed out that criticizing John based our cultural parenting standards was like criticizing parents in a refugee camp--they're living in situations of enormous stress, and their situation is so different they may as well be in a different world than us. Similarly, if monsters are real--and if you think they're after your family--you might respond like John Winchester did. One of the mods pointed out, however, that there were hunters who managed not to get their kids involved in the business, and maybe that was a decision John might have made.
This led to some interesting discussion about being a hero v. being a good parent, which for me hearkened back to the heroism panel. The main difference was that in the heroism panel, a lot of people actually thought it was a good thing for heroes not to be so isolated, to have the support of their families and communities. In the "John Winchester: Bad Dad?" panel, people were more concerned with the toll John's quest took on Sam and Dean. I did get the sense that for some people, how John's parenting was evaluated related to whether one thought he was primarily motivated by heroism or an obsessive quest for vengeance. It also made a big difference whether one thought that John had a continuous sense that his family was under siege by whatever killed his wife or not. My personal feeling is that he had this constant sense of his family being under attack, so staying in one place to let his kids grow up safely wasn't an option, because he didn't think they were safe when they stayed in one place.
But we all agreed that John was hot business, which of course is the most important thing. :-)
One of the moderators has a more complete recap of the discussion here.
Identity Politics in Fandom
I'm not really sure what to say about this panel. I think the moderators,
kassrachel and nyssa23, set an excellent tone for the discussion, talking about the need for us as fans to learn to talk about these issues and actually listen to each other, and I really liked it when one of the audience members laid our some ground rules for the discussion, using "I" statements and being charitable about how we interpreted other people's remarks. The discussion itself seemed to want to go into very safe channels, which I guess is to be expected--so, for example, we tended to focus on the politics of representation in shows themselves rather than in fannish texts; people were a lot more willing to talk about the representation of gender than the representation of race, etc. I wish I had taken notes on this panel so I could more fairly represent what was said; i think I'm going to cop out and just refer people to kassrachel's notes from the discussion, which are here. There were numerous references to old(er) controversies (a term I much prefer to "wank") like the debate over antisemitism in the timing of Yuletide signups; my favorite comment from that part of the discussion was "The proper response to "I feel hurt or excluded" is not 'you suck.'" Smallville
Last year at Escapade, whenever I mentioned Smallville I was treated to a rant about how "I used to love that show before they ruined it." That, plus some Smallville-bashing at the SPN panel, made me a little reluctant to go to the SV panel. However, Slinking and Clari_Clyde persuaded me to go, and I'm glad I did. The panel turned out to have more people there than I was expecting--at least 15 or 20, I think--and it was exciting to see there were som many fans who were still into the show.
After my bad experience in the SPN discussion Friday afternoon, I made sure to put it out there early on that I really loved the show, and I actually thought seasons 5-7 were good seasons. It was clear that not everyone in the room agreed with me--some of them said they felt like SV was their abusive boyfriend they kept coming back to-- but after I made my statement it felt like people toned down their critical comments a bit and at least acknowledged that different fans have different perspecitves. That made a big difference to me. Everyone obviously has their own opinion about season 7, and I don't actually mind critical comments on the show; it's really more the false sense of consensus that "everybody" hates the show now that drives me batty.
We had a wide-ranging discussion, from talking about the Clexiness of "Fracture," to revisiting some of our favorite Clex scenes from past episodes, to discussing whether Lionel or Lillian actually had more of a negative impact on Lex's development. The crowd definitely did seem to be very pro-Lex; there was some Clark-bashing that made me wish I could better reproduce some of the good Clark analysis of how he's matured in seasons 6 & 7 I've read from folks like
huzzlewhat or latxcvi or others, just for the purpose of fair Clark representation--but though I like him he's never been one of my big focus characters, so I had trouble marshalling arguments of the top of my head. (Con brain--is that what you call it? Too little sleep, short term memory loss?) My brain did briefly come back long enough to explain my theory of Lana (though to be honest, I think I've just made that argument about Lana as symbolically standing in for early season Lex, only she's going to be redeemable --an argument I'm sure is not original to me but probably stolen from huzzlewhat or bop_radar--so many times it no longer requires brain power to explain it).I'm not sure how many people bought that theory, but what they did perk up their ears at was the fact that I have rec lists for fic written after season 4, since many of them had lapsed from SV fandom after that point. So I pointed them to my rec tag--but who else has good rec lists for recent fic? (I've been slacking on this the last few months, but I'm sure other people have been reccing stories--where should I point people?)
I'm blanking on what else was discussed in this panel.
clari_clyde? slinkling? What struck you about this panel?Genderswap/bodyswap
I came in a little late to this panel, so I don't know what themes the mods laid out at the beginning, but I have to say this was probably the most fun panel of the whole con, once we stopped asking WHY there's suddenly so much genderswap/bodyswap [the consensus seemed to be: the influence of popslash and anime fans entering SGA and SPN fandoms] and started just giving examples of our favorite/most cracky stories. Suddenly we had manginas and assbabies and pantychrists and other hilarious stories popping out all over, so to speak. Though it was pointed out that there are also tragic genderswap and mpreg stories; someone mentioned a story where Dean gets impregnated by a demon and gives himself an abortion, that I think must be Familial Relations.
OTW
I honestly thought this panel would be a lot more controversial than it was, given the number of LJ debates over OTW (the Organization for Transformative Works) I've seen. Either everyone in the room really was in favor of the project, or else the dissenters were too shy to speak up. I think it helped that the moderators (
bethbethbeth and the_shoshanna) started out the session by asking people what they had heard about OTW and clarifying which representations of OTW were accurate and which were inaccurate. I'm far too lazy to type out all the issues that were discussed, especially when kassrachel has an excellent summary of the panel here. I do want to say, though, that this was an excellent panel, and made me even more excited about OTW's projects than I was before. I had dinner with
slinkling and clari_clyde at a mediocre Mexican restaurant downtown, where service was painfully slow, especially at the end when we were in a hurry to get back in time for the vidshow. Actually, slow service seems to have been a theme for the day; the three of us had had lunch in the hotel restaurant with kassrachel and nyssa23, and service had been glacially slow then, too--so much so that I had ended up skipping the 3 o'clock panel and spending way too much money in the dealer's room. But the company made up for blah food and poor service, for sure! We were just in time for the start of the vid show. I've heard a lot of people complaining about the length of the vid show this year, but actually for me it was just the right length. I really can't process too many vids in one sitting; last year I actually gave up at intermission, because I just felt like I was vid-overloaded.
morgandawn has been keeping a list of the con vids here as they are posted online, if you want the whole list. I really adored the first SPN vid, "Sell my Soul," by barkley and destina, which was all about Sam's season 3 journey, and basically broke my heart. The other vids I really enjoyed were giandujakiss's Der Komissar, which was a hilarious James Bond vid; laurashapiro's Heroes vid "Sawatte Kawatte," a Hiro and Ando focused vid that really reminded me of why I started loving Heroes; and Laura McEwan's "Falling Slowly," which was a Starsky and Hutch vid that might have actually sucked me into S&H fandom if I had more time, because DAMN that show must have been slashy, just given that vid. (It's funny, I've seen S&H vids before that didn't have that effect on me; this was was really romantic and well-edited, though).There's been a certain amount of controversy over
absolutedestiny's vid Deep Kick, and I think it certainly made the strongest impression on me of all the vids in the show. I wouldn't say I necessarily liked the vid--I found it quite disturbing, actually--but as soon as it was over I leaned over to slinkling and said that I didn't know what the source text for that vid was, but I definitely wanted to see it. (The source is apparently a film called "15"). slinkling disagreed with me, btw; she said the vid made her not want to see the source text, but I thought we'd probably already seen the worst of the violence in the vid itself, and I wanted to know who those beautiful boys were and why they were hurting themselves.The vid show was pretty much the end of the con for me. I did go the the breakfast briefly with Slinkling and Clari, but Slinkling had to leave early to catch her shuttle, and Clari wanted to start the drive home early, and I had to finish packing to catch my own shuttle, so we all left by around 9:15. I was sorry to miss the art show and the morning panels, but given travel time and plane schedules I always seem to miss Sunday at Escapade.
no subject
I'm still liking the analogy that came to me during that conversation, which has Clark and Lex locked in this endless co-dependent relationship, where by this point they each know that the other one is terrible for him, and that he's terrible for the other one, and they've done unfathomable damage to each other, but yet they CANNOT leave each other alone. Because they imprinted so strongly on each other, and they both feel this (totally unhealthy) sense of responsibility for the other, not to mention possessiveness. If I ever wind up writing more SV fic, I suspect it will center on this idea.
no subject
What, you thought I was such a canonist I never lived in the land of Clex delusion? I still have one foot firmly in denial-land, where somehow someway in the future they overcome their enmity and live happily ever after. Probably a la
Wow, the world seems very rose-colored today. It must be these new glasses I have!
(Despite my desire to live in rose-colored denial-land, however, I would *love* to read any stories you wrote about their fucked-up codependent relationship, precisely because it seems so canonical and real to me. I just would have to read it on a day when I was in the mood for angst.)
Note that I even have an icon that is totally appropriate for such a story!
no subject
Yes! I love this reading--and it feeds into my love for the epic and eternal nature of their relationship.
If I ever wind up writing more SV fic, I suspect it will center on this idea.
If you write it, I will definitely be reading it. :)