yuletide | Yuletide Fandom Promo 2024!

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!

Cheju has started a spreadsheet for promo! Here's the link!

Here are some areas you can cover:

Title:
Please put your fandom's title in the subject of your comment, too. This helps people find your promo again.

Media:

Approx length:

Where to find it:
(If giving links, please only link to legal sources. You may want to encourage people to contact you directly if they are having trouble finding a canon and you can give them tips)

What is it, in summary?:

What do you love about it?:

What sort of things are you likely to request for it?:

Are there sections of canon (rather than the whole canon) that can be consumed by themselves to fulfil your requests, or that showcase particular characters and relationships?:

Content warnings (ie, rape, incest, racism, gore/violence):
This is at your discretion and is not expected to be comprehensive

(Bonus options: What are you thinking of requesting for this? If you're thinking of nominating worldbuilding, what sort of worldbuilding topics might people explore?)

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

- 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.

Previous fandom promo posts can be found at this tag!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Title:
The Adventures of Tintin

Media: Comic books - both the black/white and the colourised versions.

Approx length: The black/white comics differ a bit in length, but are a bit over a 100 pages each. The colourised versions are 62 pages. There are 9* b/w comics (including the infamous "Tintin in the Land of the Soviets" & "Tintin in the Congo") and 22 colour versions (including "Tintin in the Congo"). Because Hergé, the author, died in 1983 the canon is closed; he didn't want anybody else to continue on the series after his death. Hence why I'm not including the unfinished "Tintin and Alph-Art", as it really only consists of more or less finished doodles and notes. The "finished" version floating around the internet is a bootleg version.

*However, for reasons unknown, only five titles have been published in English. But if you speak French, they're definitely all available in French.

Where to find it: In libraries and book stores. I can't remember if there was made e-book versions recently, either way the comics are best enjoyed as a physical media (European comic books are much bigger than American ones. Each Tintin-book is appr. 23,5x30,5 centimetres and are available in hard cover).
The Wikipedia article is also a good place to start, although it'll never beat reading the albums. ;)
Also, the series has been translated into more or less every language, including regional dialects. ;)

What is it, in summary?: A young, Belgian reporter travels all over the world and solves crimes, goes on expeditions, saves the day/his friends/the world...
In the beginning it's just him and his faithful dog Milou (Snowy in English), but as the series continued, the amount of stock characters grew, and from "The Crab with the Golden Claws" he's accompanied by Captain Haddock.

What do you love about it?: The well-executed plots, the historical context, the humour and the attention to detail in the drawings. (Hergé basically founded an entire school of drawing called "la ligne claire" - the clear line - which is marked by a certain, slight stylisation, all unnecessary "frills" are removed. Doesn't mean unsophisticated, almost the opposite. There's attention to detail, but in an elegant, minimalist way. For a famous example, check out the cover of "Destination Moon".)
That you can both read the stories with your slash-goggles on, or not.
Because of the then laws about shielding children from unwholesome content in comic books, Franco-Belgian comics from that time period are devoid of female characters that in any way could be construed as love interests, meaning that we have basically all-male casts navigating in all-male worlds. A notable exception in this series is the formidable opera singer Bianca Castafiore, "the Milanese Nightingale", who OTOH is portrayed as so much older than Tintin that not even the most zealous censor could claim she was his love interest. Instead the teenage boy just lives in a castle with a much older man whom he isn't related to by blood...

What sort of things are you likely to request for it?: Stories that fill out gaps in canon (of the "wonder what happened between this and that event in the story"-variety). Life at Moulinsart (Marlinspike Hall in English). I'm almost equally likely to request smutty/shippy fics as I am to request stories exploring the friendship between the characters.

Are there sections of canon (rather than the whole canon) that can be consumed by themselves to fulfil your requests, or that showcase particular characters and relationships?: As I am an unapologetically shipper of Tintin/Tchang, you can more or less just go directly for "The Blue Lotus" and the magnum opus of the series "Tintin in Tibet" (with a side of page 5 in the following book "The Castafiore Emerald" where he receives a letter from Tchang). For "daily life at Moulinsart", read "The Castafiore Emerald".
In case of either Tintin/Haddock or the friendship between Tintin and Captain Haddock, I'd say the albums "The Crab with the Golden Claws", "The Shooting Star", "The Secret of the Unicorn", "Red Rackham's Treasure", "The Seven Crystal Balls", "Prisoners of the Sun" and "Tintin in Tibet" should cover it, more or less. (Along with "The Castafiore Emerald" for that glimpse of daily life, along with the beginning of "The Calculus Affair".)
As for the lovely late addition to the cast, Estonian pilot Piotr Szut, he appears in "The Red Sea Sharks" and "Flight 714 to Sydney".
Tintin's arch nemesis Rastapopoulos appears in "Cigars of the Pharaoh", "The Blue Lotus", "The Red Sea Sharks" and "Flight 714 to Sydney". Another antagonist, Müller, appears in "The Black Island", "Land of the Black Gold" and "The Red Sea Sharks".

The series can sort of be divided into different groups, depending on what you want to focus on:
"Tintin on his own": The early volumes from "The Land of the Soviets" through the first half of "The Crab with the Golden Claws". These are also the stories with the most visible inspiration from Real Life events (hello Bordurian dictator "Müsstler" in "King Ottokar's Sceptre"!)
"Tintin and Haddock go on fantastical adventures": From the second half of "The Crab with the Golden Claws" and onwards.
"Tintin and South America": "The Broken Ear", "The Seven Crystal Balls", "Prisoners of the Sun", "Tintin and the Picaros".
"Tintin and Eastern Europe": ("The Land of the Soviets"), "King Ottokar's Sceptre", "Destination Moon", "Explorers on the Moon", "The Calculus Affair".
"Tintin and the Middle East": "Cigars of the Pharaoh", "The Crab with the Golden Claws", "Land of the Black Gold", "The Red Sea Sharks".
"Tintin and the supernatural/fantastical": "Cigars of the Pharaoh", "The Blue Lotus", "The Black Island", "The Shooting Star", "The Seven Crystal Balls", "Prisoners of the Sun", "Tintin in Tibet", "Flight 714 to Sydney". (The supernatural/fantastical events in these stories range from "there was a natural explanation all along" to dreams of vengeful mummies, a yeti and aliens!)

Content warnings: The series can't always hide that it was created between 1929-1976. Especially the first couple of albums ("Tintin in the Land of the Soviets" through "Cigars of the Pharaoh") can be...interesting... to read in 2024. Keep in mind, though, that the first three albums were essentially dictated by the editor of the newspaper where Hergé worked, and that Hergé himself was very young at the time. (He was going on 22 when he began the series.)

From "The Blue Lotus" onwards he became more conscious of doing proper research, to a degree where he did several "George Lucas" on some of the albums, from not wanting "The Land of the Soviets" to be reissued, to reworking a couple of the albums. Most notable is "The Black Island" which was brought up to date in the 1960's, whereas it originally was set in a pre-war Britain. He also agreed to redraw a page of "Tintin in the Congo" for the Scandinavian publisher, so the rhino doesn't get blown up (! As happened originally!) but instead is scared off by a gunshot.
I'd also argue that one could read the early works and just as easily laugh at the old-fashioned, colonialist, anti-communist, views expressed there. Or they could be used as an argument for portraying Tintin as a violent brat, if you so please. ;)
As historical documents, however, I do think they should be read. Both to see how Hergé developed as an artist and a human, but also to see the views held by a colonial power in pre-war Europe.

It also should be noted that alcoholism is a pervasive theme once Haddock makes his appearance. He's at his lowest in "The Crab with the Golden Claws", but his thirst for whiskey (or other hard liqueur) plays a role especially also in "Red Rackham's Treasure" (where it's purely for laughs) as well in "Explorers on the Moon" where the result of his drinking is almost fatal. (Yes, it's a series where people sometimes die, although none of the main cast ever gets seriously hurt, and it's never graphic.)

Drug addiction and drug smuggling are also touched upon in "The Blue Lotus" and "The Crab with the Golden Claws". In the former we also see the inside of an opium den, although this being a very wholesome comic overall, it's probably the nicest and cosiest opium den you'll ever see. ;) (But we do see people lying on mattresses smoking opium/passed out from smoking. Although, again, the harshest facts are glossed over somewhat by the people smiling beatifically and looking like they just take a nap! *g*)

Also note that the stories I grouped in the "supernatural/fantastical"-category feature themes such as medically induced madness, a giant spider, human sacrifice almost taking place and one brief sequence where all the protagonists dream of a mummy coming alive.

But to round this off: The wonderful thing about this fandom is that you can choose a very kid-friendly "nobody ever dies"-approach or a grittier, more realistic take, and both views can be supported by the source-material. :)

Yuletide Fandom Promo 2024!

The Adventures of Tintin (comics)