#crew-ra

i see a LOT of people complaining very vocally about catradora not being made canon until the last episode/not getting 'enough development' etc etc and. kdjhgbdnjd it just sort of fills me with a blind rage because do you KNOW what kind of bullshit noelle had to pull to get the kiss to happen? did you know that they were explicitly told 'no romance'? did you know they had to board a version of the kiss where it faded to white before they could actually kiss? do you know about the tricks noelle has spoken about having to use to get spinnetossa alone? and like. to this day i am only convinced that the execs jumped for it because of diversity points and the backlash from voltron. like. before you start complaining about how they should have had more time together in the show/this that whatever you want, pLEASE think about how hard the crew had to work to get as much explict queer rep as they did. don't let yourself fall into the trap of thinking 'oh it was so easy to get catradora canon so they should have done ____ / given us ____ / made ____ _____' because it's more than likely that they could have had the last season censored and all of that rep we seem to be taking for granted removed

I just finished a slew of fanfictions to be released later.   Anyway, while I was working on them, I came across this Youtube analysis of J.K. Rowling that I was watching / listening to of all things.  I was never much into Harry Potter.  I saw the movies like most people in this wide world, but I never read the books.  It just wasn’t something I ever got into.  It was tailored to a younger crowd than I was at the time, it was a bit overhyped, etc. Or maybe I just have an aversion to most things that take place in a school-heavy environment because I am still traumatized from being the Weird Kid.  Whatever. I still find myself interested in media analysis of the work in regards to the fall of the author in the public eye, how she went from progressive icon to cancelled.   The guy doing the media analysis was a cis gay man who was a big fan and spoke of how it helped him form his identity as a kid, even helped him in his journey to come out, and while he is not trans, he knew trans people who had a similar journey, and therefore everything going on with Rowling feels like a betrayal.  I’ve personally wondered “was this always even there with her, beneath the surface?  Or are her Terfy-views entirely new?  After all, people do change, their worldviews included, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.  I mean, the me of 15-20 years ago was an obnoxious evangelical and a lot of my current views couldn’t be more different. I went from conservative --> progressive, utterly sincerely and I think that the opposite can happen, too, people being sincere progressive ---> conservative, because we’re all a bunch of humans and no one and nothing is completely “pure.” Maybe the person who wrote those books really was a completely different person than the one who exists now, holding the authorship rights.   Anyway, since this is a She-Ra fan blog... getting to the point.  Watching this media analysis made me think about how I feel like I have an advantage in certain fandoms I choose to be in, and what seems to choose me.   Harry Potter fans, by and large, seem to have the inability to divorce the story from the author.  This is a fundamental part of how the story is set up.  The books have a single origin-point, this specific author. Films and games and other media are a group-effort, but they all center back to the origin-point of a single author.  The story is inexorably tied to one person, so anyone who is in fandom for it - even if they’re making their own art and stories from it, have to process the fundamental truth of a single origin-point of the thing they’re doing their own derivatives of.   The analysis I watched made no judgement on how people process their grief, as it were.  The host said that he’ll spend no more money on the franchise, but that he’s not giving up his enjoyment of what he once loved and already has.  He knows others the same way - people who refuse to let even the author herself take the good thing they enjoyed away from them. Some, of course, choose not to engage.   I spared a brief thought to “What if someone on the She-Ra crew did something that I thought was really awful?”   And that’s when I realized some of them have.  Not J.K. Rowling levels - obviously, the entire show is incompatible with that.  There are actual trans characters, gay characters, racially diverse characters, disabled characters - they can’t do much that’s really anti-progressive.  But... a few of the creators have said things that I know some of the fans have found off-color... I remember a fiasco when one of the voice actors on Twitter made a joke about Entrapta working for Trump because she’d want to be in the Space Force and she just got reamed by the fans over that.  (She seemed to have forgotten that Entrapta is not white, for one thing).  Then there was the debacle where a joke was made about Bow’s family in the writer’s room that came out in an interview that seemed to me like it was “innocent, but tone-deaf” - like it wasn’t meant as awful, it just “You weren’t thinking, were you?”   In-series, on-screen, the “Let’s leash Entrapta, the confirmed character with autism” joke was...um...it was a thing.  And yet, I’m here, in a fandom, doing fanwork, unbothered by it for the most part because... I think it’s because Spop isn’t tied to a single vision.  It was a group-effort with many writers, a director that conferred with the writers, character designers and story-boarders who eventually got their storyboard running gags into the series (I heard that Rogelio x Kyle wasn’t originally going to be a thing until it became a story-board crew’s running thing).  The writers, artists, voice actors, etc. all had different takes on what they were doing, and to boot, the whole thing was a derivative-property to begin with, a reboot-adaptation of something that existed before some of them were even born.  (I think a lot of the Crew-Ra are younger than my nostalgic and modern-animation loving ass).   Enjoying this property isn’t as much intrinsically tied for me into any single-point origin.  Some people treat it as “N.D.’s vision,” but I divorce it a little from even him, because he didn’t handle all of the story aspects.  (In particular, I’ve heard that he wasn’t much interested in dealing with Hordak, so much of Hordak’s arc was handled by others).  My “side” of the fandom has taken this football and run because we know that the “main creator” wasn’t really the “parent” to our blorbos, that Entrapta and Hordak were largely handled by others on the crew.  So, you know, there’s just not this worshipful “my creator must do no wrong” thing for me at all.  It’s almost like Death of the Author is particularly strong with this property.  I am very much an advocate for Authorial Rights - like, if an author says “my work means this” that fans should listen.  I mostly am into this because I do original work, myself - not that I’m ever going to become well-known, and I just...really, really don’t want far-right bozos pretending my work means something it doesn’t and adopting it as their own, which happens to way too many authors.  (That poor guy who made the frog cartoon even tried to kill the frog off in story, but people still did their own thing with the image and I just feel sorry for the guy).  At the same time, I do believe in a degree of Death of the Author, because, obviously, I write fanfiction and create my own stories, and sometimes my own stories are really off-the-wall of the canon, and purposefully so.   A couple of my upcoming collection stories have... “Ugh, I know that this plotline is so out of character for Etheria, I honestly don’t think it would happen if canon continued beyond a certain point, but I need to include it to make MY plot work!”    I guess I just want to say that I have an easy time of this in fandom because I seem to become most enamored with fandoms that really are “group effort” and are generally cooperate / collective-owned from the get-go with no One Shining Idol-Person to put on a pedestal.  Zelda is a big fandom for me, too, and it’s like that.  In fact that property has some Ship of Theseus shit going on with changing crew working on it over the 30+ years the games have been a thing.   I just wonder if it’s easier to “divorce creator from fandom so you can ignore problematic creator-bullshit” is just easier to do if you know that the base canon has tons of fingerprints from lots of different creators on it.