yuletide | 2021 Yuletide Promo Post

Welcome to the Fandom Promo post, everyone!

Here's where you get those eyes on your fandoms for sign ups!

Share what makes your Yuletide fandoms the shiniest and why you love them. A big part of Yuletide is how small our fandoms can be, and this is a good way to make sure other people know what gems there are out there!

Suggested form to use:

FANDOM NAME:
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT:
WHERE CAN I FIND IT (optional):

(Bonus optional: What are you thinking of requesting for this?)

EDIT:

Useful tips (Not required, but helps people if they want to engage with your fandom!):

- Mention what form of media the canon is. Is it a comic miniseries? Is it a twenty season tv show? Is it a book? Is it a twitter feed?
- Is it standalone or part of a series?
- It's best to make each fandom its own entry with its own title in the subject line! That makes it easier for people to find/see what you're promoting! Don't worry about 'spam', that is the entire point of this entry and you're using it exactly as intended.

For reference, last year's promo post!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

FANDOM NAME: Oliver Appropriate - Say Anything (Album)
As the name says, it's an album. Specifically, it's a concept album that came out in January 2019, and is the sequel to Say Anything's 2004 debut "...Is A Real Boy" (of "Wow I Can Get Sexual Too" fame)

WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: It's a really good, really fucked up look at how toxic masculinity is, and how pervasive homophobia is. I once referred to it as "part of the 'homophobia will kill us all' canon", and I stand by that.

The album has a cohesive narrative.

It follows a man, Oliver, who is a washed up emo musician living in Brooklyn. After his brief success in "...Is A Real Boy", he finds himself working at a marketing think tank and spending all of his time going to bars, getting drunk and high ("I can't even think of / days without something in my nose"), and talking about how great his band was ("we were once the greatest / ... hoping the girls clinging to the bar / know who we are").

He'll kiss another guy to show off in a bar ("tonight I'll kiss a boy / to a round of clapping"). There are hints of his repression all throughout the first half of the album, but we also see what a genuinely horrible person he is. Max Bemis, his creator, describes him as "a self-loathing, slightly homophobic misogynist ... a true product of the subliminal Millennial Fixation with wealth, power, denial, and the need to possess."

When he actually goes through with it and has sex with another man, he falls in love with him. He refuses to acknowledge it and represses it ("So now you need to follow, let go, or bury below, but you can't escape the sinking feelings you don't outgrow", "Because Bowie's my excuse / So I can brag of how I tried", "I was fine before you made my know myself / I wish I could go back") - eventually causing him to lash out violently at the man he's fallen in love with ("It's so Long Island that my first vulnerability / is the last thing you'll see").

This is not a happy canon whatsoever.
The ending can be interpreted as not-totally-hopeless (and, I believe, is meant to be somewhat hopeful), but as a whole it's dark and messed up. It's a condemnation of internalized homophobia and toxic masculinity and all those things entail.

Plus, this is the character who "...Is A Real Boy" is about - like, don't we all want to watch him self-destruct in the end?

WHERE CAN I FIND IT (optional): Spotify, also presumably most other places music is streamed.
Lyrics are available here.

See evidence post.