Life is a cabaret, ol' chum

One of my favorite YouTubers just did a video on Bit of Earth! It’s a great summary with plenty of primary source material, including Abbey’s blog. She also did a great job countering the transphobia in Jeanine’s book and sorting everything out in spite of its non-linear structure.

Folks like Andy are not rare. I’ve seen people use conventions as a means to gain access to celebs and vulnerable fans. Even the “past lives” hokum crops up more than you may expect – literally the other night, in my own tiny online corner of the historic side of the Franklin Expedition, a dude slid into my DMs with a story of how he feels deeply, spiritually connected to the dead arctic explorer I cosplay as. Dude told me he is destined to repeat the man’s doomed narrative. He suggested I must be part Irish like both him and our blorbo. He talked about how much I look like the man. He bombarded me with appeals to my subject matter expertise. But despite us both feeling strong about “our guy”, Dude was the one with The Big Connection. Imagine that.

Wild stuff, all crammed into a single conversation.

It was like experiencing a clumsy version of Andy’s lovebombing and being pulled into an “inner circle”, something I unfortunately know about.

Andy targeted me back in 2018 when my Critical Role cosplay hit a brief spike of popularity, including cast accolades. It was an intense few weeks of love-bombing culminating in an offer to be part of a secret project that would have us working directly with the cast. Sure, sounds legit. /s

Andy’s tactics failed with me, but I still had a few days at the beginning where I was charmed. Once I realized who he was and how he was trying to isolate me, it was funny watching him speedrun through his playbook. But he still ended up hurting people in the Critical Role community, despite warnings going out from myself and multiple other people.

I could go deeper with details, but I don’t want folks to think Andy’s brand of manipulation is unique. Fandom gives abusers a lot of shortcuts to emotional intimacy, from shared cultural touchstones to all the ways we expose and explore our vulnerabilities via fanworks.

I love fandom. I met my spouse through fandom. I’ve become a better version of myself in part thanks to fandom. My world has gotten bigger.

Abusers in fandom spaces are desperate to make your world as small as possible. If I had been a little poorer, a little more depressed, or didn’t have the industry friends I had, I could have very well been among Andy’s victims.

I am always wary of anyone who tries too hard to make you or themselves a Blorbo by Proxy, like Andy’s time in LotR or my weird Franklin Expedition dude. Or maybe they want to be the new Word of God, like Andy in his Harry Potter days. The end result is the same – leveraging fandom as the only (often, secret) thing that will make your life the best it can be (or worst, if you don’t perform well enough for your abuser).

The best inoculation to people like this is to cultivate relationships with folks who have more than fandom in common with you. We’ll always have those fandom-only friends we love to see every year at convention meetups, but the bulk of your friends should have a variety of interests and so should you.

Be wary of people who want to isolate you from people and interests outside of fandom. Be aware of the tradeoffs you make for being vulnerable or accessible in fandom spaces. Be concerned when someone can only relate to you and the world through a fandom lens.

Never be afraid to skewer a fandom sacred cow, miss a convention, decide not to do a cosplay or fanwork.

And above all, talk to people you trust when a relationship feels off.

Abusers especially thrive in fandoms because abuse is shrugged off as “drama”, silly and blown out of proportion to an outsider. It’s weird fandom jargon or “kids being stupid on the internet”. Abusers count on their victims not telling people for fear of looking weird, or having personal things like kinks exposed.

No. With me, he came to me instantly with 2 things:

1) Presented his background and skillset in a way that absolutely resonated with the character of Percy - a wunderkind with a sort of Renaissance Man schooling, versed in a lot of eclectic and Gentlemanly skills you don’t encounter in the modern age.

2) Intimated he had developed an instant connection with Percy’s actor, Taliesin. He told me stories of them getting so chatty at an event, Tal had to be dragged away. How amazing Tal was, and oh, man, if I could only meet him.

Again, don’t think of Andy in terms of the weird shit like wizard battles and channeling hobbits. Break down his tactics. He tried 2 different ways to set himself up as a proxy/gatekeeper for something I liked.

1) He tried to make me feel that working with him would be the closest thing to working with an actual Percy, from the access he had to things like black powder, to the deep lore cuts that went into the projects he pitched me.

2) He tried to set himself up as a gatekeeper to access to the cast of Critical Role. A holy grail for so many fans.

Both methods were a means to pull me into his influence, piggybacking on what he hoped was an exploitable hyper-fixation. If I wasn’t fixated on LARPing within the CritRole world, maybe I was fixated on meeting the cast and kickstarting a costuming career.

This is why I say Andy is not unique. Abusers will use your interests and goals as cheat codes to control you. Fandom structures by their very nature just make this easier in some ways.

It’s important I reiterate that no one is immune to manipulators. Andy’s tactics fizzled on me because he didn’t have anything to offer I didn’t already have, but he still charmed me in those first few chats!

His only error was that he mischaracterized what kind of mark I was. I thought he was a snot-nosed, albeit talented, college kid who could use some cheerleading and if he had tried the “exploit the fandom dad” route instead of the “exploit the uberfan” route, he might have gotten more than just time out of me.

I think Andy realized he was failing with me, because our last few days of chats were a scattershot of attempts to find something to hook me. It got a little sad and desperate, but all the same, was very calculated.

That said, however, even if some or all of them are hook closures, that doesn't obviate their irritation to me, because that still is simply not how dresses from the period were constructed. (Disclaimer here that we are lucky to have a huge number of surviving garments from this period and they often have a variety of quirky elements, so I am certain there exists an example of this type of closure on an 1880s dress, but I myself have never seen one and I'm talking here about generally used construction methods.)

Hook and eye closures were very common, but they would be built into the dress's design; so for instance if we look at this dress of Marian's from 2.04:

Those actually might be hooks! But they still make no sense, because there's already perfectly logical and unobtrusive place to put the fastenings for the bodice (down one side of the front panel where it connects with that little fold to the side of the bodice).

You see this time and again with the back-fastening dresses in the show--there is almost always a more logical and accurate way to fasten them, which can be proved partly by looking at the other dresses in the show that do not show back fastenings. And while clearly the costumes on the show are not going for 100% historical accuracy (or even, say, 80% historical accuracy), this is one of those instances where using the historical methods would actually improve their design and functionality specifically as film costumes. The back closures are visually noticeable and eye-catching in a way that period invisible closures are not, something that seems like it would be seen as a big advantage for TV costumes that can be expected to be seen by the camera and audience from any angle.

So my argument against these is not just about accuracy for accuracy's sake (though I, personally, feel that that's enough), but also accuracy in order to learn from design tricks of the past that are still useful and applicable today, even in situations that would be foreign to the people who developed them.

Part of the reason it was decided that my studio would do back closures in the majority of dresses was for uniformity and ease for the onset wardrobe team who dress the actors and don’t necessarily have the historical background to know how multiple hook&eye panels at the side front might work.

In regards to historical accuracy in construction, in the film and tv costume industry something that we strive for (largely because of the rise in HD cameras) is to construct these dresses more perfectly than historical methods would allow and we use more modern couture methods to do so. Its a mistake to think that we aren’t very familiar with the extant garments our recreations reference and if you have looked closely and even held these antique garments you would know that they are often messily hand stitched and somewhat wrinkly when worn, things we work to counteract when making ours. Thus the reason we don’t try to make them like they would have been made then.

Interview with the Vampire (1994), deleted scene… maybe

gimli:

aragorn:

gandalf:

Boromir:

Elrond:

From the Neil Gaiman: Dream Dangerously :) (you can watch here in US or with US vpn :) <3)

Here you go, boss.

Eva Green.

Good Omens Fancomic Tartan and Starlight! Part 3

I ran this in May 2020, and it’s now collected up :

https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/821316098/tartan-starlight-go-comic