Praise! Your! Fandoms! Get others interested!

[crantz]

Hey, everyone! It's Praise Your Fandom time!

Get people into your canon! Tell them what's awesome about it!

Tell them where to find it!

Tell them ALL ABOUT IT!

Please use this format:

<b>Fandom/Canon Name:</b>
<b>What's awesome about it:</b>
<b>Where to find:</b>


Thank you and have a great yuletide!


(ALSO: Please feel free to ask for specific recs too! Like post a thread going 'hey I'm looking for canons with bisexual leads' or something!)

Comments

Heat Island

[izarith]

Fandom/Canon Name: Heat Island (2007)

What's awesome about it: Can I really call this movie "awesome"? Maybe that makes me bad at this whole recommendation thing but I'm not sure I can. It's not what I'd call an incredible film, but it is one I love dearly, and I hope that'll be enough to convince someone here to watch it.



Heat Island is at its heart a heist film about a colorful group of acquaintances whose usual low tier money making schemes suddenly land them in the middle of something much bigger & more dangerous. They acquire a large sum of cash via ~hijinks and spend the rest of the movie trying to maneuver around and outwit the higher level criminals who want it back. And when this aspect is the focus, the movie is genuinely a good time.

Unfortunately... it's a bit tonally confused. It swings back & forth between "fun caper" and "honestly kind of grim depiction of crime in the big city" and if you're just here for a goof you might be a bit taken aback. (If violence against women bothers you, there's one scene in particular that's rather unpleasant.)

But (and I'll be purposefully vague here to avoid spoiling) if you're at all like me in terms of m/m ship preferences, you'll wind up finding this movie very compelling mainly due to its ending. It's tropey in the best way.

Where to find: It might be available on a streaming site somewhere? But you're best off just downloading it straight from the fansubbers: http://tl-skeweds.blogspot.com/
Click the "Mega 1" link on the sidebar and it should be available for direct download from there.

[laughingpineapple]

Fandom/Canon Name: Obduction

What's awesome about it: As a videogame rec, it's a rock-solid title, a classic point and click that's just a marvel of level design, spatial storytelling and sheer amount of ideas thrown into it. If Myst sounds neat, but it's a 6 games + 3 novels franchise that started in 1993 and that's a little daunting, Obduction is all that brilliance in a standalone package.
As a fandom rec, it's all about the worldbuilding. There's a chunk of Earth bubbled up in an alien world, and people from 1800 to 2050 living there, learning how to coexist with three alien species stuck in their same situation, trying to make sense of it, and to make it home. It's a romp through classic sci-fi themes blended together by attentive, expert storytellers. The three main characters are endearing messes, and then there's a whole host of secondary characters, both human and alien, who are fun to speculate about. And they're all nerds. Massive nerds.

Where to find: GoG, Steam, PSN, Youtube playthroughs such as this one

Bitches the Cat

[gloria_scott]

Fandom/Canon Name: Bitches the Cat (Twitter)

What's awesome about it: Bitches was one cool cat, best known for her unrivaled paw work and scathing political commentary which earned her a block from Donald J. Trump's Twitter account. Sadly, she passed a few months ago but she left her Twitter account to Kiddo to run. Now Kiddo, Floof Lion, and the new guy Puff carry on the family's illicit 'nip business, united in their love of playtime and hatred of all things Trump.

Here's Bitches, high on the 'nip and ready to hit the snacks:

Family portrait: Floof Lion (top), Kiddo (mid-tier), Puff (hidey hole)


Bitches has been around the block a few times. She's seen things. The rest of the fam are characters are in their own right, and boy the stories they could tell!

Where to find it:

Link to Bitches' Twitter   Link to Bitches' website   Link to Floof Lion and Kiddo's Twitter   Link to Puff's Twitter

 

[blueteak]

Fandom/Canon Name: un village francais|A French Village
What's awesome about it:
If you're into loyalty, reluctant allies, mentor/mentee relationships, and complicated family relationships, A French Village is the canon for you. The series starts with the occupation of a small French town in 1940, and its current season begins with its liberation in 1944. This series is one of the best at showing how the war influenced people and relationships. It demonstrates, for example, the conditions under which people would collaborate as well as what would make them resist and/or join the resistance even if they had tried to keep their heads down.

A French Village has a sprawling cast and explores the web of relationships between characters as they evolve (or not) through the years, and the show really makes you feel the weight of that time, that sense that this or that relationship would not have worked in 1941 but could in 1944, or that even though there's been vehement disagreement between characters through the years, there's still an innate need to protect one another when push comes to shove. You also see the opposite, when groups that had united against a common enemy start to fracture when they've won, and the tension this causes between people who had protected one another with their bodies and been lovers and/or mentor/mentee.

Speaking of mentor/mentee, here are Antoine and Anselme:

Antoine is mentored/encouraged in the resistance by Anselme, which we can see here:

Other nominated characters are Raymond and Marie: They are lovers when the occupation starts and must contend with differences of opinion on how to respond to the occupation.

The series as a whole is also strong on found family, forbidden love, and relationships with power and/or affection imbalances as well as those where they are much more balanced.


Where to find: 5 seasons available on Hulu!

Fantasy Short Stories

[scribblemyname]

Fandom/Canon Name: To Kiss the Granite Choir - Michael Anthony Ashley
Where to find: Beneath Ceaseless Skies


Fandom/Canon Name: Scry — Anne Ivy
Where to find: Beneath Ceaseless Skies


Fandom/Canon Name: And Her Eyes Sewn Shut with Unicorn Hair — Rosamund Hodge
Where to find: Beneath Ceaseless Skies

What's awesome about it: So I have a favorite fantasy short story pub for a reason. All three of these stories have awesome worldbuilding with fascinating underlying concepts that may or may not have unintended consequences that the characters don't understand and bring down on their own heads or do and exploit masterfully (Scry).


SPOILERS

In To Kiss the Granite Choir, the main character falls head over heels for a woman (Cantilena) of the Baremescre, a people who call sword-fighting singing and who grow their hymns / swords from their bodies. And despite the story being framed around their wedding, it doesn't take over the whole story. And it's messy and complicated and he's a stubborn, willful personality who isn't stopped for a minute by the fact that he's no good at singing at all compared to the people he's landed in and his mouth lands him in so much trouble and so does his finally understanding what his companion was trying to tell him from the beginning. There's a lot of not telling people things but it never feels stupid, just real and messy and emotional and Cantilena's brother is funny and the whole story is just wonderful. Except the end. It's horrible in a good way and leaves a wide open door for some fanfic.

And then there's Scry with enemy lovers who don't ever really talk through their emotions and relationship and he keeps fighting her family afterward and she knew she was going to be disfigured and simply let it happen anyway so she could use her power with more strength and I was shocked at how invested I was in both of them by the end of the story and I loved the way he treated her and looked at her for all his terrible promise. Just so good.

And then there's the heartbreaking wonderful And Her Eyes Sewn Shut with Unicorn Hair with betrayals and worldbuilding reveals and deadly unicorns who kill most people simply because it's their nature and the bargains the characters make for power to save their loved ones and the sister relationship that always makes me cry and the main pairing that's complicated in its own right considering how it starts off and the whole story is so much more rewarding than it has a right to be, seeing as it probably needed to be fleshed out so it had more room to breathe. But it's good anyway and has some room for ficcing.

Shinreigari: Ghost Hound (Anime)

[(Anonymous)]

Based on an original concept by the creator of Ghost in the Shell, scripted and directed by the team who did Serial Experiments Lain, with the same key animator as Hell Girl-- Ghost Hound is a psychological thriller with paranormal components. It features traumatized teenagers in a twisted world surrounded by terrible adults. Out of body experiences, traumatic flashbacks, self-loathing and emotionally stunted conversations make the bulk of the two-cour series, and offer lots of dark potential with the characters and their world at large.

Ghost Hound is available streaming on Hulu for folks in the US. It isn't available streaming on other services that I know of, but can be purchased on iTunes and Amazon instant video.

Lightless

[(Anonymous)]

Fandom/Canon Name: The Lightless trilogy by C.A. Higgins

What's awesome about it: Bratty, godlike AIs coming to terms with their new sentience, intragalactic freedom fighters, and people making terrible decisions because it's better than making worse ones. Also, canon m/m, developed over the series.

The first book, Lightless is about the research spaceship Ananke developing sentience during the capture and interrogation of the son of a famous intragalactic freedom fighter/terrorist. There's intrigue and violence and a wonderfully atmospheric unsettling claustrophobic feeling.

The second book, Supernova, focuses on Ananke's newfound life and powers, and on the leader of the Resistance as she tries to stick to her ideals. In contrast with Lightless, this book feels vast, and there is some really interesting stuff about found family.

The third book, Radiate, follows a similar timeline to Supernova, but from the point of view of two of the characters from Lightless. Ananke is still on the loose, and she's looking for her "father". There's love and struggling with trust and ideals you're not sure you believe in anymore (if you ever did), and continued themes of found family.

I love all the characters in these books- Althea who loves her ship but is afraid of her, too. Ivan who's spent his entire life being groomed for a cause he only sort of believes in. Mattie who cares about people first and ideals second. Constance who cares about ideals first and people second. And, of course, Ananke, the godlike AI who can't stand not getting her way.

The books can be dark at times, but there's always hope. I really like how the themes of found family and self-determination were explored. There's some body horror in the second and third books that's pretty freaky if you're sensitive to that sort of thing, as a heads up. There's plenty of room for worldbuilding and character exploration, and even if no one writes or requests anything for this series, I'd love for more people to read it at least.

Where to find: Amazon, probably libraries as well

Utopia (Channel 4)

[lieu]

Fandom/Canon Name: Utopia (Channel 4 TV show)



What's awesome about it: Do any of the following appeal to you: global conspiracies revolving around hidden messages embedded in graphic novels? Ragtag groups of people forced into tenuous alliances with each other out of necessity? Meditations on personal morality in times of global crisis? Screwed up family dynamics? Sci-fi thrillers set in the real world? Cold war spy hijinks? Loyalty kink and identity shenanigans? Hyper-competent women? Beautiful music and audio-visual design (some selections from the soundtrack, worth a listen even if you don't think you'll ever watch the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6AdD4v4bH0)? Nathan Stewart-Jarrett being beautiful and morally compromised? Rose Leslie being beautiful and terrifying (see icon)? If you answered "yes" to any of the above, consider watching Utopia before sign-ups close!

In terms of style, I'd describe it as Black Mirror meets Tarantino with sides of the IT Crowd and Watchmen. A group of strangers meet on a forum for fans of an obscure comic book and find themselves pursued by relentless assassins. A mysterious woman comes to their aid, but her private agenda may be as terrifying as the alternative. Meanwhile, a bumbling civil servant (played by Jamie Mcdonald from The Thick of It, which is hilarious--this is his useless alternate universe self?) is drawn via blackmail into the sinuous web of an ominous pharmaceutical company. Vestiges of Cold War biowarfare development programs may be pulling strings inside world governments, causing many problems for our heroes. Over it all is the backdrop of impending global food shortages, and it all kind of gets worse from there. There's sexy scarification! Black comedy involving severed fingers! Really fun and colourful visual design! What more could you ask for?

There are two series with 6 episodes each, so it can be binge-watched in a day if you feel inclined. It was, unfortunately, cancelled two series into a planned four-series arc, but the second season finale wraps up many character arcs in a satisfying way, IMO, while also leaving lots of jumping-off points for fic writers to play around with. The rewatch value is very high.

It's hard to pitch this show because pretty much every episode involves a reveal or plot twist of some kind and a lot of its most tropey aspects are contingent on those plot elements. It's also hard to pitch this show because it's both thematically bleak and full of graphic violence. For what it's worth, the series premiere is probably the most concentrated in its depiction of violence, so if you can get through that you can probably make it through the rest. If you're the kind of person who enjoys that kind of thing, please, go forth!

Where to find: The unfortunate thing is that it's pretty hard to get a hold of legally, at least outside of the UK. No DVDs in North America, AFAIK, and I don't think it's on Hulu or Amazon Video. According to one of those international Netflix search engines, you can stream it on NF in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. You can also find download links... around. If you get my drift.

The Sisters Brothers - Patrick DeWitt

[lieu]

Fandom/Canon Name: The Sisters Brothers - Patrick DeWitt

What's awesome about it: It's a black comedy about cowboy. hitmen.



Or, if you want more to go on than just that (in which case you're more discerning than I): it's a super entertaining quick read of a novel about a pair of brothers who are assassins for a crimelord in the Wild West of Oregon & California in the late 19th century. Eli, the POV character, is increasingly dissatisfied with their arrangement and wants to leave the killing business. Charlie, his older brother, does not. The novel is mostly comprised of short and often inexplicable episodes that transpire as they track down their most recent target, an idealistic inventor named Hermann Kermit Warm.

There is a Lot of shipping potential if you like fraught sibling incest. Even if you don't, it's full of eccentric characters and there's so much potential here for maudlin gen "casefic" (with cases being... murders). Eli is one of my favourite narrators I've come across in ages: so thoughtful! So deadpan! !o casually violent! Really, who can pass up an overtly anachronistic neo-Western with a Coen Brothers vibe and some magical realist elements? Again, not I.

It's also being made into a 2018 film starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Joaquin Phoenix, and Riz Ahmed, so... get in on the canon while the getting's good, I guess?

Where to find: Libraries + anywhere else you can buy books! It was nominated for a Man Booker so it should be relatively easy to find.

Shadowrun: Hong Kong

[lucios]

Fandom/Canon Name:
Shadowrun: Hong Kong

What's awesome about it:
Do you like cyberpunk? Do you like fantasy? Do you ever wish there were a combination of the two? Say no more, Shadowrun is here.

Shadowrun takes place in a cyberpunk dystopian world with fantasy elements and magic. Think Bladerunner and Dungeons & Dragons had a lovechild except dragons run corporations that rule the world instead of sitting on a pile of treasure.

Shadowrun: Hong Kong takes place in Hong Kong as it's name might suggest and you play as someone from Seattle who recently got out of corporate jail for reasons you can decided in game. You're there to meet your estranged adopted brother, Duncan, an ork cop with a temper and your estranged father Raymond Black.

A series of events follows that leads to you becoming a shadowrunner. A criminal who works the streets doing illegal things that no one else wants to including but not limited to: corporate espionage, wet work, working with gangs, finding a serial killer, stealing an actress, and more.

You have a crew consisting of: said estranged brother Duncan, your weird Russian sociopathic half-robot roommate who lives in the basement, a rat shaman who will eat anything, a shy dwarf hacker who's mean with a grenade launcher, and a zombie samurai.

Shadowrun is super funny and has a really engaging plot full of lots of mystery. It's a crapsack world but it has very engaging well-written NPCs who have their own little mini-arcs alongside your teammates. There's background gay NPCs, your brother Duncan is gay, and one of the NPCs you meet is a cool agender monk named Spider Shen.

There's a lot of f/f potential between Gobbet and Is0bel who have a history together and if you're into it, the MC's relationship with Duncan is super slashy because of some choice narration. (How was I supposed to not ship it when my characters notices how buff he is and how shiny his perfect teeth are.) If not, their relationship is pretty fraught but it's obvious they care for each other depending on what dialogue options you take.

Where to find: You can buy it easily on Steam, it's been on sale a couple of times and is actually 80% off atm on hundle bundle: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/shadowrun-complete-collection?hmb_source=search_bar

Deeply Strange Deep Sea Animals

[sathinfection]

Fandom/Canon Name: Deeply Strange Deep Sea Animals

What's awesome about it:

You've probably watched at least one documentary after midnight about all the weird creatures in the deep ocean. But have you ever wondered how they feel? Like, in their transparent, glowing, somehow not liquefied under pressure insides? This could be your year!

The case of characters:

The Greenland Shark, or as Twitter came to know it in this fantastic thread, the Pee Shark. Sadly (or fortunately), the shark is not literally filled with pee, just urea, but don't let that stop you from loving the Greenland Shark. The shark might live for up to 500 years and doesn't become sexually mature until it's around 150. It's basically an elf, if it were a hideous shark scavenging the ocean floor!

Eyeball-Eating Phosphorescent Copepod is the companion critter to the Greenland Shark. Its scientific name is Ommatokoita elongata, and please don't Google it if you're sensitive to eye trauma. The copepod is a tiny crustacean that parasites the shark's eyes and slowly eats them, but it also glows in the crushing darkness of the ocean, so maybe it's a helpful sort of eye horror.

The Whale Fall is what happens when a whale dies and its corpse floats down to the seafloor, where it can support a community of scavengers for decades. There are so many things to love about whale falls! The life coming from death, the hagfishes, the Greenland sharks, the sulfophilic bacteria that finally break down the whale's skeleton. If you're not already convinced that a massive colony of worms feasting on a whale's dead flesh is beautiful, check out this awesome papercraft video about whale falls here. And the wiki page goes into more fine whale detail than I could here.

As for the Giant Isopod, you may have seen that legendary image of them eating Doritos. Sad truth: this is not the diet of Giant Isopods. It's actually dead whales! And other things on the ocean floor! They are deeply (heh) cute.

Where to find:

In the bathyal and abyssal zones.

Namesake

[moontyger]

Fandom/Canon Name: Namesake

What's awesome about it: Do you like dark fairy tales? Ever wish that kind of aesthetic applied to other kinds of fantasy fiction? You might like Namesake!

Namesake is a webcomic about namesakes, people with the names of the protagonists of famous children's fantasy literature who go to those worlds and re-enact the stories: Dorothys go to Oz, Alices to Wonderland, etc. Each Namesake is different, but they are still bound to their story. And the people in those world remember the namesakes and their visit and adjust accordingly. (The recent backstory about Jacks who go to the world of Jack the Giant Killer is fascinating in this respect.)

... it's hard to talk more about the story without giant stories, but there's also an organization for namesakes started by Alice Liddell (and others, but Alice is clearly a major figure).

I have nominated the current Alice, who is an Alice in the Wonderland sense, but unlike most, she has several Cheshire cat lives and they count her as basically one of the family.



And also Selva, who is a witch from Oz. They're... well, not quite a couple yet, but they're both lesbians and there's been some interest and adorableness on both sides and I love them together.

(Selva is the one on the right)

I also love the art style in general (this is a chapter cover):

Where to find: Since it's a webcomic, Namesake is easy to find! It's right over here!

Alif the Unseen

[primeideal]

Fandom/Canon Name: Alif the Unseen
What's awesome about it: Interested in modern-day fantasy? Arab Spring politics? A wide range of religious characters? Shoutouts to Douglas Hofstadter and other nerdy programming allusions? Books with secret powers? Alliterative vampires and other djinn? Online chatters with surprising connections? This might be the one-shot book for you?
Where to find: Hopefully your library!

[(Anonymous)]

Fandom/Canon Name: Blood Drive (TV)

What's awesome about it: Do you like sex and violence? Do you like alternate history dystopias? Do you like the idea of fast cars which eat people instead of guzzling gasoline? Do you like satires of corporate greed and the entertainment industry? Do you like explosions, including but not limited to exploding cars, exploding heads, exploding buildings, and random fireball belching machines used as set decoration? Do you like canon gay and bisexual characters? Do you like characters routinely getting covered in blood and all sorts of other fluids, some of which glow in the dark? Do you like cannibals, mutants, and robots? Do you like male nudity happening more often than female nudity? Do you like and male characters getting manhandled and/or tied up, handcuffed, or otherwise restrained in pretty much every single episode? Do you like low budget grindhouse aesthetics, riffing on different sets of tropes every episode? Do you like themes of family, loyalty, betrayal? Do you like weird technology, unethical medical experimentation, non-consensual body modification, body horror, and the easily crossed line between human and inhuman? Blood Drive has all of those things and more.

Grace D'Argento signs up to participate in the Blood Drive, a death race across the country in cars that run on human blood, but at the last minute she gets saddled with an unwilling partner, Arthur Bailey, one of the last good cops in Los Angeles, who just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time while investigating weird stuff that has been being done to homeless people, and now they can't get too far away from each other or they'll both be killed by the tiny bombs implanted at the base of their skulls as part of the race rules. Grace needs the prize money to take care of her little sister, but Arthur wants to end this spectacle of death and everyone responsible for it. Before either of them have a hope of achieving their goals, they're going to need to stay alive against the rest of the race's collection of homicidal weirdos and assorted dangers of the post-apocalyptic landscape.

While those two are working out their differences, Arthur's cop partner, Christopher Carpenter, gets a new partner, Aki, who promptly leads him into a trap and reveals herself to be a mole for Heart Enterprises, a mega-corporation with their fingers in everything that is making the world a more terrible place. She also reveals herself to be a robot, one of many in fact. Aki alternately tortures and tries to recruit Christopher until he agrees to work for Heart. He intends to take down the company from the inside, but he has no idea what he's really signing up for until it's too late.

Meanwhile, Julian Slink, creator of the Blood Drive and self-proclaimed Master of Mayhem and God of the Stage, is having problems of his own, because he wants to turn the Blood Drive into an artistic masterpiece of reality television, but his ruthless corporate overlords at (you guessed it) Heart Enterprises have ideas of their own for what they want out of the race, television show, and technology that can create man-eating cars, and the struggle for creative control behind the camera has the potential to be just as bloody as the race itself. It's going to be a long and ridiculously tropey road to the finish line, with a lot of strange stops along the way.

Blood Drive is a thirteen episode series which recently finished airing on the Syfy Channel. Sadly, it appears to have been cancelled after only one season, but that season stands on its own very well.

Where to find: It's available for digital purchase on Amazon. It can also be streamed on Syfy.com if you have a cable provider's details you can use to sign in with. If you have a cable package with on-demand service, you might be able to find it there too.

My Best Friend's Exorcism - Grady Hendrix

[tristesses]

Fandom/Canon Name: My Best Friend's Exorcism, a book by Grady Hendrix

What's awesome about it: Have you ever sat down and thought, "You know what I need in my life? A horror novel with a dash of black comedy that contrasts the horrors of being a teenage girl possessed by a demon with dealing with high school, featuring that 80s vibe"? Then this is the book for you!

Abby and Gretchen are best friends, and have been since they bonded over loving E.T. as a child. So when they drop acid and Gretchen disappears in the woods, Abby is understandably concerned. But when she does find Gretchen, she seems....wrong, somehow, and only Abby can sense it. Somewhere in the woods, something happened to Gretchen. But can Abby figure it out before the thing inside Gretchen destroys both of them?

Make no mistake; despite the fact that the characters are teenagers, this is definitely not a YA novel. It's dark, and it's brutal in parts, and also bitterly funny in others. The friendship between Abby and Gretchen is deep and well-portrayed, and in my opinion it is the core of the novel; the story is as much a tale of friendship as a tale of possession. (Their relationship is also extremely femslashy, if you're into that.)

As far as content notes go, it's pretty par for the course for horror novels. I wouldn't read if you're squeamish. The biggest thing of note is a scene of animal cruelty, though it's not necessary to read so long as you get the general gist of what happened; if you're curious about reading the book but want to skip that scene, I can give you the page number and/or opening line of the paragraph for skimming purposes.

Things I will probably request (and hope to see requested), no spoilers: more details on how the possession plays out, Gretchen POV, emphasis on the horror angle, all the femslash. If that intrigues you, please check it out!

Where to find: Goodreads for more info, Amazon and most book retailers to buy.

[aunt_zelda]

Fandom/Canon Name: The Screw Job - Critical Role (Web Series)

What's awesome about it:
A heist with a team of adorkable but evil criminals! Two women in love plotting their escape from a life of crime! Questionable accents! (Relatively) Short time commitment! The Hateful Eight in a D&D setting!

Critical Role is a long running actual play show where voice actors play D&D and film their games for the internet. (It currently has over 430 hours of content and is no longer eligible for Yuletide.) One week, the GM went to a convention, and one of the players (Liam O'Brien) stepped up to run a oneshot game with unrelated characters, in the Critical Role world. The Screw Job is that oneshot. You don’t have to know a damn thing about Critical Role to watch The Screw Job, it stands alone.

~WARNING~ There is a reference to a major event that occurs in Critical Role in Liam’s voiceover. If you are currently catching up on Critical Role, or plan to, it is advised that you skip to about 8 minutes and 35 seconds into the video, or wait for safety’s sake, unless you are past episode 40 of Critical Role. The Screw Job aired between episodes 65 and 66 if you are a highly cautious individual. I rewatched the video before making this post but it’s possible I missed the cast joking about something on Critical Role at the time during their side chatter. ~END WARNING~

Liam pitches it pretty well here at this timecode if you want a quick rundown of the characters and premise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgHm3Ct0Zh0&t=8m08s

All you need to know going in is that Emon is a city in Exandria, Critical Role’s basic semi-medieval fantasyland setting for D&D, the Clasp is a Thieves Guild with branches in each major city, and the person in charge of a wing of the Clasp is called a Spireling. From all appearances on Critical Role, women appear to have equal rights and homophobia is not a major force in Exandria, at least not in the cities.


The Nominated Characters:

Spireling Shen: the head of the Clasp in Emon. Devious, and recently insulted, he orders a team to steal a large emerald from …
Adelaide “The Shrew” Bluebutton: an independent shady businesswoman who refused to join the Clasp. For the crime of stealing from the business funds, the Shrew kicked out her granddaughter …
Devan Bluebutton: a halfling sorcerer, gambling addict, and a prisoner of the Clasp. The Clasp is “asking” her to help them break into her grandma’s house. She’s plotting her escape from the Clasp’s clutches tonight! She plans to flee with the aid of …
Dren: a halfling rogue with the Clasp and Devan’s jailor. She’s secretly in love with Devan and plotting to escape with her girlfriend tonight! But Dren is the underling to …
Tarvis: a half-orc rogue and favorite of the Clasp, being groomed for leadership. He’s been tasked with obtaining the Shrew’s ledger during this heist and hiding it from his team. He’s also been ordered to kill Devan after she’s served her purpose! Little does he know about …
Delweth: a half-elf rogue, who’s always being looked over at the Clasp in favor of Tarvis. She’s plotting to kill him tonight and get that long-sought promotion, and the rest of the team for good measure! But she’ll have to also deal with …
Obby the Rat: a dwarf rogue and loyal member of the Clasp, who is devoted to Tarvis.


What ensues is a tense but overall comedic D&D adventure, with some real dark moments. The team is, after all, a bunch of criminals bent on grand theft and murder for various reasons. Devan and Dren’s secret romance is particularly adorable, and Tarvis and Delweth’s tension is quite interesting. Liam gave all the players secret objectives, with each person thinking they were the only one with such a secret, something Liam tells the audience right off. As a result, we the audience know more than the characters themselves, and that makes for a very enjoyable and interesting watch as the team sneaks around each other and the shenanigans unfold.


Where to find: Here for free on youtube, just under 5 hours long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgHm3Ct0Zh0
There are unrelated announcements at the start and the character summaries, the show properly gets going around 14 minutes - 17 minutes in.
There's a break at 2 hours and 18 minutes.

[froggydarren.livejournal.com]

Fandom/Canon Name: Welcome to PHU - Tris Lawrence

What's awesome about it: The serial is full of characters and storylines that draw you in. The first book centers around a freshman in college (Alaric Herne) who is away from his family for the first time, trying to find his place in the world. The characters in the serial are diverse in multiple ways, and the storylines are intricate and captivating - reading the first book was a rollercoaster and a half, with magic, relationships, taek-won-do, shapeshifting, a world 10 years after the first reveal of magic to the public but still adjusting to its presence. And yes, there be dragons ;) Amongst other things.
The best thing? It's only just getting started!

Where to find: It's a web serial that's currently posting its second book - posts are twice weekly, so it's frequent but not overwhelming. The updates can be found on tumblr: http://welcometophu.tumblr.com

Sagas of Sundry: Dread

[laurenthemself]

Fandom/Canon Name: Sagas of Sundry: Dread

What's awesome about it: 80s nostalgia. Snarky teens. Canon, on screen, explicitly stated queerness. Adorable cast. Creepy Storyteller. Creepy setting. Creepy everything. Using the Dread game mechanics, this series started as a one-shot RPG for International Table Top Day (ITTD), which then expanded into a short series. The total runtime of canon is around six hours all up and is a rollercoaster of All The Feels. The characters are compelling, the storyline is creepy as fuck, and you'll never look at Jenga towers the same way again.

Longtime friends Sat, Kayden, Darby, Raina, and Tanner are finally free of high school, and decide to take a fun camping trip in the woods on Black Mountain. Dread being a horror RPG, it does not go as planned.

Where to find: The ITTD episode is available on YouTube here. It's two and a quarter hours long and is a complete story in itself.

If you like that and want more, the following six-episode series is available on Project Alpha. It's a year later, and the group reunite to return to the mountain. Project Alpha is a paid site, however there's a 30 day free trial membership available, it's $4.99USD a month thereafter, and because there are only six episodes at roughly 40 minutes each, you can marathon all the Sagas of Sundry: Dread content in a day. Multiple times if you want to!

Violent Playground (1958)

[count_nickula]

Fandom/Canon Name: Violent Playground (1958)

What's awesome about it:
Liverpool D.S. Jack Truman (Rank stalwart Stanley Baker) is pulled off an ongoing arson investigation to pitch in at the Juvenile Liaison section. He reluctantly apprehends the 7 year old Murphy twins, Mary and Patrick, and takes them home where he finds their mother has left them, and their father is “away at sea”. Unemployed teenage brother Johnnie (David McCallum), and the eldest sister, nurse Cathie are their only family.

Johnnie leads a motley gang who intimidate young laundry van driver, Alexander into driving them around Liverpool. This makes a perfect cover for Johnnie's firebug kink. Meanwhile, Alexander's sister Primrose desperately wants to help her brother, but she knows the working class community would turn on them if she talked to the cops.

Johnnie finds himself torn between the hero worship from the kids, egged on by his friend Slick, and to find more innocent pursuits, encouraged by Cathie's priest Fr. Laidlow (Peter Cushing), his former teacher 'Heaven' Evans, and Sgt. Truman.

The film almost dives into typical American style juvenile delinquent exploitation flick, including an unintentionally hilarious scene where Johnny and his mates dance ~~menacingly~~ at Truman as a pretty awful rock 'n roll song blares out, but it's saved by some fine performances, unexpected humour, a proto- kitchen sink drama style and a chilling school-room hostage situation.

Where to find: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7JRZlHBZpg
Run-time: 1hr 41min

Fun fact: Both Tsai Chin and David McCallum are still working at age 84.

Things to note: There's some schoolyard racist epithets directed towards Alexander, character death, and some gun violence at the end.

In the tagset are Alexander, Johnnie Murphy, Primrose, Slick.
Johnny obviously gets the most canon development, but I'd absolutely love to see something that also explores Alexander, Primrose, or Slick's lives.

Pix:
David McCallum as Johnnie Murphy and his wonderful hair.


Michael Chow and Tsai Chin as Alexander and Primrose


Sean Lynch as Slick



Johnnie and Fr. Laidlow: https://i.imgur.com/za6Z7yu.jpg

Johnnie and Slick (hello slash potential!): https://i.imgur.com/5aK3X8c.jpg

Johnnie and Mary:  https://i.imgur.com/OiFW0p8.jpg

Johnnie and Cathie: https://i.imgur.com/NPsppvM.jpg

And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side - James Tiptree Jr.

[sathinfection]

Fandom/Canon Name: And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side - James Tiptree Jr.

What's awesome about it:
James Tiptree Jr., also known as Alice Sheldon, was one of the finest SF authors of her time. Before Tiptree was outed as Sheldon's pseudonym, Tiptree was considered one of the leading luminaries of 'masculine' science fiction, as compared to the soft and squishy 'women's' school. Her two most famous short stories are probably "The Women Men Don't See" and as Raccoona Sheldon, "The Screwfly Solution."

The title of "And I Awoke..." is a reference to Keats' "La Belle Dame sans Merci," where a knight is destroyed by the beauty of an otherworldly woman. Tiptree's story is about humans coming into contact with aliens, and becoming obsessed with alien sex. It's definitely a great place to start if you want to write xeno! It's definitely a dark, but unique, take on human/alien relations, and it's very short, leaving plenty of room for worldbuilding.

Where to find:
Lightspeed Magazine has uploaded the full text here. Check it out!

Princess Protection Program

[anthusiasm]

Fandom/Canon Name: Princess Protection Program (2009)

What's awesome about it: Princess Protection Program a made-for-TV movie that aired on the Disney Channel in the 2000's. The premise: protagonist Carter is a normal teenage girl whose father works for an international organization that rescues princesses in dangerous situations and ensures their safety by creating fake identities and hiding them in other countries (yes, really). When Princess Rosalinda's tiny country is taken over by an evil general, the organization rescues her, and for her safety, she has to live with Carter and her father and blend in as a normal teenager in small-town America.

There's some fantastic femslash potential between Carter and Rosie. Carter is played by Selena Gomez in all her surly, baseball-capped glory, and Rosie spends the first half of the movie following her around like a lost puppy. Carter tries to keep her distance at first, but eventually softens. She's adorably protective of Rosie, and, at the end of the movie, is willing to make huge sacrifices for Rosie's safety.

This movie features bad accents, fish-out-of-water shenanigans, a well-intentioned and lovable dad who just wants his daughter to be happy, an over-the-top evil dictator who likes to dramatically swish his cape, a goofy trying-on-clothes montage, scenery-chewing mean girls, women who come together and support each other, girls who stand up for themselves when guys treat them poorly, and not one but two scenes where ice cream gets dumped on someone. So, basically all the ingredients of a good movie.


Where to find: Netflix!

Mystery Skulls Animated

[(Anonymous)]

Fandom/Canon Name: Mystery Skulls Animated

What's awesome about it: Do you like Scooby Doo? These music videos are a loving tribute to it, looking at what might happen if the Gang got in over their heads and found something actually supernatural. The animation style is brightly colored and fun, and all the characters manage to break away from their inspirations to become compelling in their own rights. Also, singing ghosts. What's not to love?

Where to find:

The music videos are both on Youtube, and the character profiles and some miscellaneous backstory can be found on the creator's blog.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlEb3L1PIco
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUYM5WNdNGc
http://mysterybensmysteryblog.tumblr.com/CharacterProfiles

[radialarch]

Fandom/Canon Name:
Those People (2015)

What's awesome about it:
So hey, what are your feelings on a metric fuckton of gay pining?

Those People is loosely a coming-of-age story centered around CHARLIE, a mild-mannered art student pining over his best friend, and SEBASTIAN, the friend who's pretended for years that he hasn't noticed because he's terrified that a relationship between them will inevitably end in flames and drive Charlie away from him forever. Sebastian, not the most morally upright of human beings, has no qualms about using Charlie's feelings to manipulate the two of them into an uneasy middle ground where he might fuck other guys, but the person he always comes home to is Charlie.

And then Charlie gets a boyfriend, and this carefully-balanced equilibrium blows up.

Included in 1.5 hours of runtime: people making terrible life choices! lovingly lingering shots of hands and suits! very bad idea almost-threesomes! enough repressed feelings to fuel a small country! and, slowly, eventually, people who learn to figure out the difference between what they want and what they need.

Where to find:
Currently streaming on US Netflix! Maybe also on some platforms that can be googled.

[alexseanchai]

Fandom/Canon Name: Mary Mary - SJ Tucker (Song)
What's awesome about it: It's a feminist pagan spin on the genesis of Christianity. SJ Tucker's got real skill for poetic imagery. (And it's a five-minute fandom!)
Where to find: stream with lyrics on Bandcamp

[alexseanchai]

Fandom/Canon Name: Mother of the Crows - Seanan McGuire (Song)
What's awesome about it: This song embodies autumn for me. And, though afaik the Mother of the Crows herself is McGuire's invention, it's such a beautiful example of polytheistic hymn. (And it's a five-minute fandom! If you don't own McGuire's Wicked Girls CD, it is a $15 investment, but check out the album's title track on YouTube and if you like McGuire's style there then you'll probably like the whole album.)
Where to find: lyrics on artist site and buy album on CDBaby