Fopinions February: First Fandom

[extrapenguin]

Today's Fopinions February is for maggie33! I was asked to talk about my first fandom. But first, two things:

1. space_swap sign-ups have started! They'll be ongoing until next week's Sunday, but please sign-up early if you can.
2. That Guardian post on the cast list is ... started. I wanted to check episode 1 to get one person's name, but ended up rewatching + screencapping alot, oops.

Now, without further ado: My first fandom qua fandom was David Weber's Honor Harrington series, a very loyalty kink-y MilSF book series where the author holds some hilarious/terrible opinions that seep through into the writing but writes an engaging battle scene nonetheless. While he is surprisingly okay with remembering that black people exist and putting women in his space military, there are zero queer people. However! There was one place where he specifically compared two dudes to an actual canon (het) couple, and those two dudes were pretty shippy in any case, so I went and googled.

Lo and behold, I found philomytha's A Commissioner's Duty, which was shipfic for the pair I'd been googling about. As I'd had some brushes with fandom beforehand*, I wasn't completely lost, and eventually ended up diving into AO3 and then DW and then diversifying my fandom portfolio. The rest is history.

(This post's icon from the French cover art for Flag in Exile, which is an amazing piece of art. The French cover arts are in general awesome, eg this one for Honor Among Enemies. Especially compared with the typical Baen cover art, lol.)

* Starting with writing fanfic of Walking With Dinosaurs at the age of 5-ish, and including squeeing over some now-forgotten animes together with friends in high school.

Comments

[asya_ana]

Oooh... are you creating a list of Guardian characters? I wasn't sure if that was what you mean above, but I would cheerlead very hard for that. Especially when I'm trying to get new people into the show who don't have a Chinese background, I think it can be hard for them to keep track of who is who. I would be delighted to have a post to point them toward!

(If that's not what you meant, nevermind. Carry on. lol)

[extrapenguin]

Indeed I am! Entries will look like this:

夜尊 Ye Zun Yè Zūn (朱一龙 Zhu Yilong)
Pillar guy! Likes dressing in white and holding speeches.

Of course, it'd include all the one-episode wonders like Wang Yike, so I have to go search for who the fuck all these people are...

[asya_ana]

Ooh goodie!! I love love love that you are including the Chinese characters for both the actor and the character, pinyin both with and without tones. And an annotation!

Also I was working on a fic yesterday and needed to know the names of 2 very minor characters and I was like... I suffered. Because they weren't even listed on IMDB.

This is a huge gift.

[trobadora]

I wanted to check episode 1 to get one person's name, but ended up rewatching

Haha, that happens to me every time. Yay for getting a start on the cast list, though! I'm really looking forward to that.

[extrapenguin]

I also took 22 screencaps, mostly on the theme of "Shen Wei is besotted and also takes care of the children"! Then I decided I should probably go through the cast list on Baidu first (contains lots of people more than the original link, even if people like Shen Xi, Chu Nianzhi, and Lu Ruomei etc are missing from it) and then read through my notes so I can explain the people.

(I, uh, might make another icons post. After I've rewatched episodes 2-5 as well, and taken screencaps. Perhaps there truly is someone who needs over 100 of Shen Wei's pining faces?)

[extrapenguin]

You're welcome! The original wish was for an annotated list that told who those random characters were, instead of just the name. I chose to include the hanzi because that's how the characters and actors are actually named; pinyin is just a transcription.

Which two characters? I might be able to help, if you haven't already found their names.

[asya_ana]

Thanks so much for the offer! I did find them, but it was a PITA. Having a list would have made it much easier, and I'm sure I would consult such a thing frequently \o/

[extrapenguin]

Actually, since I have reached the limit of people I recall offhand or wrote about in my notes – were they any of these people listed below? (Feel free to PM me with the description if you don't want to spoil your fic in public.)

高天宇 Gao Tianyu Gāo Tiānyǔ (宁桓宇 Ning Huanyu)
谈啸 Tan Xiao Tán Xiào (陈伟栋 Chen Weidong)
王子强 Wang Ziqiang Wáng Zǐqiáng (贾东东 Jia Dongdong)
家辉 Jia Hui Jiā Huī (李严 Li Yan)
季小白 Ji Xiaobai Jì Xiǎobái (买龙 Mai Long)
来苏 Lai Su Lái Sū (吉志威 Ji Zhiwei)
丁顿 Ding Dun Dīng Dùn (赵俊伟 Zhao Junwei)
小全 xiao-Quan xiǎo-Quán (全康伟 Quan Kangwei)
郑中原 Zheng Zhongyuan Zhèng Zhōngyuán (高贵根 Gao Guigen)
郑意 Zheng Yi Zhèng Yì (许烁 Xu Shuo)
高劲风 Gao Jingfeng Gāo Jìngfēng (周杰 Zhou Jie)
包老三 Bao Laosan Bāo Lǎosān (马斯 Ma Si)
安松 An Song Ān Sōng (许家程 Xu Jiacheng)
丹丹 Dandan Dāndān (刘家辰 Liu Jiachen)
波比 Bo Bi Bō Bǐ (胡博 Hu Bo)
小杰 xiao-Jie xiǎo-Jié (李信鹏 Li Xinpeng)
卫蓝 Wei Lan Wèi Lán (张蓝心 Zhang Lanxin)
吕织 Lü Zhi Lǚ Zhī (杨雪莹 Yang Xueying)
刘浪 Liu Lang Liú Làng (孙秋生 Sun Qiusheng)
金浩 Jin Hao Jīn Hào (程魏 Cheng Wei)
朱豪 Zhu Hao Zhū Háo (窦全忠 Dou Quanzhong)
孔鲸 Kong Jing Kǒng Jīng (李佳伟 Li Jiawei)
郑大钱 Zheng Daqian Zhèng Dàqián (吴宣 Wu Xuan)
茵茵 Yinyin Yīnyīn (王心予 Wang Xinyu)
米露 Mi Lu Mǐ Lù (黄雅洁 Huang Yajie)

Anyone else who recalls who these people are is free to reply as well.

[asya_ana]

Unfortunately not. :( Maybe you could crowd-source it in a G Doc and share with sid_guardian/Discord? I'll try to keep my ears open when I'm watching 23+

[maggie33]

So your first fandom was a book fandom. Mine, too - The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice. I never had another book fandom later. Well, I read a few Harry Potter fics back in the days, but I never felt like I was really in that fandom, my interest was very casual and random. :)

And those French covert arts are indeed wonderful.

Also, yay for the cast list. That would be super helpful for writing fics and posts.

[extrapenguin]

Ha, all my fandoms (save Guardian and Nirvana in Fire) are book fandoms! I just 100% prefer text-based canons all the time. Any non-book fandoms I'm more in the periphery of/just a casual.

The cast list will be done and posted next week, hopefully. I'll rewatch another few episodes for names-gathering, then attach a list of names I want descriptions for to some post.

[extrapenguin]

I'll attach the list to a post here once I've rewatched a few more episodes for names! I have suspicions about who a few of these people might be/which episodes they come from, but must confirm.

[krait]

Ahh, Honor Harrington! One of my milSF novels, and probably the reason I like the genre as much as I do. Alas, it became one of those Fandom 180s for me; I threw At All Costs across the room at about fifty pages in and swore off the whole mess, because I Just Could Not with the sheer stupidity. But I still occasionally reread the first book.

(Have you ever read the series Weber co-wrote with Ringo? I did, back before Oh John Ringo No happened, and it was interesting how it revealed each author's strengths and weaknesses. The female characters are worse than Weber would write, but on the other hand a gay character actually exists.)

I'm jealous of the French for having much nicer HH covers! Oh, Baen, why are you so... *vague hand gestures* It's funny how after you've read ten of them you can pick out a Baen book just by the cover art style; I couldn't describe it to you, but I can say conclusively "that's a Baen cover" when I see one!

[extrapenguin]

I was young/uncritical enough that I read up to ... A Rising Thunder? (IDK. One of the ones where they go to war against the Sollies.) before running out of books and only later realizing it was dodgy (and also just finding the later installments increasingly dumb). Nevertheless, the first books were good, and hit me at exactly the right time, when I really needed someone like Honor Harrington as a protagonist. Flag in Exile, despite the Graysons, is a nice comfort read.

I haven't read the co-written series! Huh, I didn't know John Ringo had less problems with gay people.

Baen covers are legendary for a reason! I just wish they could maybe get the French covers for reprints/other translations, but alas.

[krait]

That title doesn't even sound familiar to me, so it must be some ways after my stopping point. You have (or had) greater fortitude than I. :D The first books are still good and I sometimes reread them, with a sigh and a 'pity he never finished this series, huh?' after the seventh book. :D My favourites are probably the first one (because intro to the character and fun space battles!), the one where Tankersley becomes a thing (because yay, a boyfriend for Honor whom I like!), and the two that comprise the prison-planet escape (because I love survivalist narratives and revenge narratives!)

I don't know that John Ringo has fewer problems with gay people, but at least he doesn't forget they exist. (We find out one of the space marines is gay because someone zooms in on his reading material and it's gay erotica.) He's not a major character, but we come to know him a little, and I appreciate that he's just... there, being gay while doing his duty as a space marine same as everyone else in the group. I grant you, he dies before the end - but so does pretty much everyone so I really don't think of that as a mark against.

On the other hand, 'every red-blooded man loves big tits' is also among Ringo's contributions to the narrative. D:<

Haha, Baen covers really are... I think "notorious" might be a better term, but yes, they are certainly A Thing in and of themselves! Knowing that other countries get better covers makes me wonder anew at why the original covers are so... typical.

[extrapenguin]

It's actually book #5, the one just after Paul died and was avenged! I did like the first book, but it's got some early-episode weirdness re: sexism existing in Manticore. Paul Tankersley is shrug, in that I wasn't that into the get-together but at least he's better than White Haven in retrospect. The prison planet narrative was very nice! I liked the bits that weren't focusing on White Haven's sadfeels.

Yeah, that is a decent way to include a gay space marine. Even if Ringo has ... other problems to "compensate" for the fact that he recalled that gay people exist.

I have no idea why Baen covers are like they are, but perhaps it's simply the house style that was established at the start, when they ... only ever hired one illustrator to do them, who had A Style? IDK.

[krait]

Ahhh, that's probably why I didn't remember it, then; I am sad when I encounter Tankersley's death, and try to avoid it. (All the more when I remember who he's eventually replaced with. Ugh. I like a fair number of age-gap and commander-subordinate ships, but NOT that one! They have all the chemistry of a tank of xenon gas.)

Ringo has many, many problems, but yeah, at least that's (presumably) not one of them. Kinda ironic when Mr Redblooded Men Love Tits appears to be the reason Mr Strong Female Characters remembered gay men are a thing.

Heh, you know what, "we're on a shoestring budget and thus have This One Cover Guy" makes a whole lot of sense, considering Baen's history. They either got the One Cover Guy to train a couple of apprentices (or algorithms) to make covers, perpetuating the style, or they still haven't hired anyone else and it's been the same guy for the last twenty years. :D