Dear Festividder
Oct. 30th, 2018 09:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eruthrosThank you for making me a vid! I want you to have fun and do Festivids the way you want to, and if that means totally ignoring the optional details that is fine by me. I like a lot of detail when I read letters, because it helps me start brainstorming, so that's how I write mine, but please don't feel obligated to read all of it if you don't like to have so much detail. I like many different kinds of vids and I like these sources, so you're pretty sure to make something I'll like.
There's just one outside the cut tag thing that I'd like you to know, because I have one visual trigger: super fast flashes of lights or colors that have high contrast. Almost all vids are fine for me, but some that intercut two scenes that have very different lighting for two or three frames at a time can trigger this, depending on the amount of contrast between the two scenes, as can strobe lights (in the source) or strobe light effects (in the vid). If you're concerned that you might get close to this, please feel free to run a sample bythingswithwings or ask me about a vid with a similar technique.
General Preferences: I like a lot of things! In terms of things people often worry about in exchanges, I'm fine with: any rating, outside source, crossovers, still footage, dialog over the vid, instrumentals, kink, sex, villainy, comedy, parody, gen, slash, femslash, het, canon pairings, non-canon pairings, critiques, hugs, action, violence, deep character studies, and a bunch of other things I haven't thought of. I have a particular fondness for queer themes, for TEAMS and FOUND FAMILIES, and for places and spaces being related to people and feelings.
Music: I never really have strong ideas about music, so feel free to ignore any suggestions (where I could even come up with them) – they're just here for brainstorming purposes. I am happy to watch vids to all kinds of music! And also vids to spoken words or sound effects or other things.
However, I'm hard of hearing in a way that makes it difficult to parse lyrics that are mumbly or obscured by the instrumentation (but I hear volume and instruments and melody just fine). I happily watch vids even when I can't hear the lyrics very well or at all, but it helps me a lot if I can read them after watching the vid for the first time. I'd really appreciate it if you offered subtitles or linked to lyrics - unfortunately including the lyrics themselves in the post is against the AO3's TOS.
My Cat from Hell [tv]
What it is: A delightful show on Animal Planet about Jackson Galaxy, cat behaviorist, who visits people who are having Cat Problems and tries to solve them. Often the cat is just fine, and Jackson has to teach the cat's owners (or the owner's new boyfriend) how to interact with cats. Jackson drives a pink convertible and carries cat toys in a guitar case and interviews people about their cats and takes all of their issues seriously. This series is full of love and learning to communicate and playing and catios and slowly introducing cats to each other. And Jackson gives people homework, and they do their homework, because they want to make their relationships with their cats work. Content notes: animal harm (mostly talked about as previous experiences of the cat, rarely pictured).
Sample video:
Details: Okay so in our household we call this show "My Boyfriend from Hell" because we are often 100% on the cat's side? Usually we think the boyfriend needs to learn how to interact with cats, or needs to learn to share space and attention, or just needs to fuck off. I would be totally into a vid about cats and cat owners becoming friends and learning to understand each other and also kicking asshole boyfriends out of their lives or making them be decent human beings. Or about cat owners learning things about their cats and coming to an understanding with them. Or just a vid of happy, blissed out cats who are comfortable for the first time! Learning-to-play montages! Happy purring cat faces and slow blinks! There is so much good on this show, so many people working hard to make their relationships with their cats work.
Availability: My Cat from Hell can be hard to find; if you have trouble,![[twitter.com profile]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
bessyboo found a bunch of the show in decent quality and told me she would be happy to assist with source acquisition for a vid.
Mark Does Stuff [web]
What it is: The Mark who Does Stuff is Mark Oshiro; he watches, reads aloud, and plays canons that he is unspoiled for and reacts to them as he goes. His most popular project is probably Mark Reads Harry Potter, but he's been doing this for years and has reacted to a ton of great media! He's recently been watching Steven Universe and Babylon 5 and Star Trek, and reading all of Discworld and Young Wizards. He is also super fun at cons!
Sample Video:
Details: I listen to Mark read things at work and he makes my terrible and busy Mondays better! And then at lunch I go read his blog posts about what he just read. I also have been watching him watch Babylon 5 - I usually don't download the videos for the watches but these have been MAKING MY DAY, I am having so much fun watching him pick up on foreshadowing and be astonished by wham episodes. I appreciate his social justice work and his reactions and his stories a lot. I know a lot of Mark Does Stuff fans who love the hilariously wrong predictions best, but what I love most is his intense delight, how much he loves media, and his astonished and thrilled responses to plot twists that he didn't see coming and also to plot twists that he did see coming. His reactions to things like Garnet's song in Jailbreak are delightful and make me feel like part of a fannish community! Also I love when he sings along to things, all his facial expressions, when he shouts "no!" at something ominous, when he hides in his hands or his shirts, when there is a surprise cat, and when he falls out of the view of the camera laughing.
FYI: I asked Mark's permission to nominate him for Festivids and he said yes; there is a possibility that he will watch any vid made for this fandom. If that makes you uncomfortable, you may want to avoid this request or make a note to that effect in your post so that Mark Does Stuff fans will know not to pass the link along to him. (Also, just in case, please don't spoil him for anything he hasn't already watched/read. There's a list on his blog of upcoming projects, and he's only partway into the canons he's watching now.)
Availability: Mark Reads videos are on youtube for free; these are videos of him reading texts. Mark Watches episodes are for sale from Mark's site, but there is also a Mark-authorized site for sharing extra downloads of these eps called The Black Market as well as some torrents (thanks tokate_nepveu for seeding). I have the B5 videos to date and can share them as well.
Pose [tv]
What it is: A tv show about New York ball culture, made by a bunch of queer people who have feelings about Paris is Burning. Contains: a lot of kinds of queer trauma, but mostly written/directed/performed by queer people. This includes homophobia and homophobic violence, transphobia and transphobic violence, HIV and 80s attitudes towards HIV.
Trailer:
Details: I haven't finished season 1 yet, but I will soon! So this description might be missing some important moments from the end of the season. Even though I'm not done yet it's so obvious that Pose is SO VIDDABLE and needs about one million vids. The color! The shots! The framing! Voguing at a ball and voguing on the pier! All the visual elements are so well done.
And on an emotional level so much of this show is about queer community, sisterhood, making your own families, and working as a team. I love Blanca putting her house together! I love Blanca inviting Angel to join the house after Angel gets read. I love that Damon wants to go to fancy dance school but he also learns from the dancers at the pier and at the balls, his community making its own meaning in dance. All the hugs and the supportive relationships! Dinner together on Christmas! Being angry together! It makes me cry.
I also love love love that within like ten minutes of the first episode we're on team BE GAY. DO CRIMES.
I would love a vid about any of the queer or trans folks at the balls in any of the houses, individually or in any group/ship/house; I do not give a fuck about any of the white Trump Towers people. Pray Tell is maybe secretly my favorite? But Blanca and Damon are also my favorites. Blanca being like "we do not have the luxury of shame" is like. Aaaah.
I also really enjoyed this interview with Janet Mock about making the show.
Marvel Comics: Marvel Preview Paradox, Northstar, Cosmic Marvel
I'm putting these three together because they all came out of a multi vid I made this year! All of these requests are queer Marvel comics characters, organized from the fewest comics pages to the most.
Paradox! So Paradox is an anti-gravity dancer and also a shapeshifter:
And he is possibly the first queer character in Marvel comics. I LOVE HIM. He is a secret agent for the ISA, an oppressive space CIA-ish organization, in a future with a lot of income inequality and genetic engineering; he has been nonconsensually genetically engineered to be a shapeshifter. The ISA is super uncomfortable with his queerness (content note for a few instances of queer slurs). The ISA sends him off to investigate rebels; he meets a team of other ISA agents, pursues the rebels ... and then kills his own team. FOR REAL. Turns out he's been a space rebel all along! Then he takes the form of one of his team and KILLS THE EMPEROR. ILU you angry shape-shifting space bi.
Paradox appears in a Marvel Preview in 1980 (which has the above plotline that I'm most interested in), but if you'd like to you can also use his other appearances. One is from Marvel's Bizarre Adventures (a backstory comic from 1982 about why he chose rebellion); the other has him universe-hop into modern comics and the 616 universe in Wolverine: The Best There Is in 2011. (This Wolverine comic is terrible and most of it is kind of unreadable but I'm happy that Paradox is in it, shapeshifting his way around the 616 universe and wearing his 1980s leather pants and white flowy shirt and black vest and leaning dramatically against walls.)
Content notes: queer slurs, dead queer women, non-consensual drug use, fridging
Northstar. Northstar (Jean-Paul Beaubier) is the first Marvel hero to say the words "I'm gay." He came out in comics in 1992, and then he largely dropped out of comics until he reappeared as a mentor to young queer characters several years later. Which is, to be honest, pretty hilarious because he's kind of an asshole of the "I don't care what you think" variety.
This is Northstar in a nutshell, at his own book signing:
And this kind of not-giving-a-fuck is why he can critique superhero politics, stand up to immense assholery, punch homophobic bigots, and be the first superhero to officially come out. (I mean, also he's a speedster, so he always has to be first and most annoying.)
I ship: Northstar with Kyle (I love the moment when Kyle has been brainwashed and Northstar is like obviously he's been brainwashed look at his haircut.") I think their wedding is gorgeous and I love all the other Marvel queer characters in the audience! I love their complicated-by-superheroing romance. I am super charmed by Northstar's superspeed flirting before they live together. I also ship: Northstar and Hector in the 90s when they sunbathed together and flirted at a wedding back when Northstar was mostly hooking up with people and before he met Kyle. Also I firmly believe that Northstar made Iceman his one hookup exception with Kyle as a joke and then was astonished when Iceman turned out to be gay and now he's not sure what to do about it.
Content notes: Homophobic violence directed at Northstar, brainwashing directed at Kyle, fascist government violence, child death.
Northstar appears in a bunch of comics, including several X-Men comics, Alpha Flight, Northstar, several Swimsuit Specials, and other misc issues.
Cosmic Marvel! I wanted to ask for Phyla-Vell and Moondragon, but their appearances are kind of a mess: their main arc gets interrupted by a bunch of huge crossover events that means that most of the most important scenes are in comics with different names, but "cosmic Marvel" covers most of them since they're in the space related series. I love them and their relationship:
Phyla-Vell and Moondragon are so into each other even while they're fighting super powerful dudes, so much in love in a kind of codependent the-only-thing-that-brought-me-back-from-the-dead-was-you way, and also they work really well together and try to communicate even when it's hard. And also Moondragon TURNS INTO A DRAGON and then she CAN'T CHANGE BACK and is like "I understand if this ends our relationship" and Phyla is like "no Heather I still love you to pieces" and then they are still queer and still amazing and Phyla RIDES MOONDRAGON INTO BATTLE. SPACE QUEER WOMEN WITH DRAGONS.
If you haven't checked out these comics before and you're interested, please be advised that Phyla is currently dead (I'd be mad about it but tbh it never lasts).
Phyla-Vell and Heather are in some Captain Marvel (dude version) comics, Guardians of the Galaxy v 2, Annihilation, Annihilation: Conquest, and some other comics as well. I was going to be like "here are the other characters and plots and ships I like in Cosmic Marvel" but nobody signed up for this so I didn't feel like it was necessary. But I am into a lot of other parts of Cosmic Marvel! Mostly the queer parts. Especially the ANGELA in SPACE parts. My gosh is Angela gr8.
Availability: Most of these comics are available on Marvel Unlimited, getcomics.info, or torrenting sites. The Paradox comics are harder to source; if you want them and can't find them, please askthingswithwings.
Different from the Others | Anders als die Andern 1919 [movie, safety]
This is going to get long, sorry. Details below contain references to Nazi Germany; this is the last part of this letter so you can stop reading here without skipping anything else.
What it is: A 1919 film about a relationship between two men, which took advantage of a moment in German history when films were not censored. Different from the Others was specifically written to speak to and about German anti-queer laws, especially Paragraph 175, and it was partially funded by Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. Unfortunately, almost all copies were destroyed by the Nazis; the one remaining copy was recently restored. Content notes: homophobia, blackmail, government oppression of lgbt people, queer suicide.
Clips / discussion: (contains plot spoilers)
Details: I first asked for this film before the 2016 election, in part because I was so excited when I realized it had been uploaded to youtube and in part because of the resonances between present-day anti-queer rhetoric and historic anti-queer rhetoric. That anti-queer rhetoric and anti-queer violence escalated after Trump was elected, and it made this film and its advocacy and its destruction even more resonant for me. We are building our communities; other people are trying to tear them down and burn the evidence. This film is part of an activist response to government suppression, and then it was itself destroyed by the Nazi government censorship program. This is the one of the results of all the research and activist work that was burned in the fires of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft collections.
I want to make it clear that I don't see Weimar Germany as a queer utopia or Magnus Hirschfeld as a perfect queer activist – this film comes out of activism, but it is activism that values socially acceptable gay men. One of the ways this film (and the circumstances of its filming) resonates for me right now is in seeing the work of cis gay men and cis lesbians to make themselves socially acceptable by further marginalizing other queer people; that's not a major part of this film, but it is a circumstance of its production. I also see resonances in "moderates" blaming queer people for the rise of fascist and authoritarian movements rather than thinking about their own complicity - which people started doing without any evidence in Nazi Germany as soon as the Weimar Republic fell. I see this on twitter now too: Trump won because queer people asked for too much acceptance too fast, if we'd only been more patient everything would be fine, and all of the other ways that people tell us to wait for liberation. (If you're interested in this subject, I found Laurie Marhoefer's "Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis" very informative – though reading it is rough right now.) So I'm having a lot of feelings about this movie and what it means in the current moment.
That said, I also find this a super interesting film - combining positive portrayals of queerness with narratives about queer suicide, and doing melodrama and advocacy at the same time. I'm usually a no-queer-films-with-death movie watcher, but when it's pro-queer advocacy and made by queer people it feels different to me than the standard straight-people-love-to-watch-queer-pain film tropes. Instead this film feels like it's trying to take advantage of straight people's love for those tropes. It says: yes, but do you love to watch us in pain when you're the ones who caused it? Do you love to watch us in pain when you could change it? I feel like there's an interesting connection here to other written-by-queer-people texts that use queer death to make activist points (like The Normal Heart), and there's also an interesting connection to the celluloid closet and the death tropes that become the only stories told about queer people.
I would love a vid about Korner and Sivers' relationship (and the difficulty people have with being differently out of the closet); a vid that makes the activism of this film explicit or even turns it into propaganda; a vid about sadness and joy and art and living difficult lives; a vid about queer communities (the gay bar, the lecturers, finding queer friends in boarding school); a vid about Paragraph 175 or about the real world effects of government censorship on the film; a vid about the historic resonance of fascism and anti-queer governments with the present; or, honestly, a vid that just does the plot of the film but faster and without title screens that are up for like ninety seconds.
I feel like vidding this film is like taking it back, bringing it back, saying fuck you to the fascists who wanted it destroyed. It survived. We can still remix it. It still has meaning. The people who made this film are gone now; before they passed away, they had to flee their country, which did its best to destroy their work. But they are still speaking to us.
Availability: There's a version on one on vimeo; there are also several restored versions including one by Filmmuseum Muenchen (DVD only) and one that was done by OutFest/UCLA. There are also several Russian versions available.
There's just one outside the cut tag thing that I'd like you to know, because I have one visual trigger: super fast flashes of lights or colors that have high contrast. Almost all vids are fine for me, but some that intercut two scenes that have very different lighting for two or three frames at a time can trigger this, depending on the amount of contrast between the two scenes, as can strobe lights (in the source) or strobe light effects (in the vid). If you're concerned that you might get close to this, please feel free to run a sample by
thingswithwings or ask me about a vid with a similar technique.General Preferences: I like a lot of things! In terms of things people often worry about in exchanges, I'm fine with: any rating, outside source, crossovers, still footage, dialog over the vid, instrumentals, kink, sex, villainy, comedy, parody, gen, slash, femslash, het, canon pairings, non-canon pairings, critiques, hugs, action, violence, deep character studies, and a bunch of other things I haven't thought of. I have a particular fondness for queer themes, for TEAMS and FOUND FAMILIES, and for places and spaces being related to people and feelings.
Music: I never really have strong ideas about music, so feel free to ignore any suggestions (where I could even come up with them) – they're just here for brainstorming purposes. I am happy to watch vids to all kinds of music! And also vids to spoken words or sound effects or other things.
However, I'm hard of hearing in a way that makes it difficult to parse lyrics that are mumbly or obscured by the instrumentation (but I hear volume and instruments and melody just fine). I happily watch vids even when I can't hear the lyrics very well or at all, but it helps me a lot if I can read them after watching the vid for the first time. I'd really appreciate it if you offered subtitles or linked to lyrics - unfortunately including the lyrics themselves in the post is against the AO3's TOS.
My Cat from Hell [tv]
What it is: A delightful show on Animal Planet about Jackson Galaxy, cat behaviorist, who visits people who are having Cat Problems and tries to solve them. Often the cat is just fine, and Jackson has to teach the cat's owners (or the owner's new boyfriend) how to interact with cats. Jackson drives a pink convertible and carries cat toys in a guitar case and interviews people about their cats and takes all of their issues seriously. This series is full of love and learning to communicate and playing and catios and slowly introducing cats to each other. And Jackson gives people homework, and they do their homework, because they want to make their relationships with their cats work. Content notes: animal harm (mostly talked about as previous experiences of the cat, rarely pictured).
Sample video:
Details: Okay so in our household we call this show "My Boyfriend from Hell" because we are often 100% on the cat's side? Usually we think the boyfriend needs to learn how to interact with cats, or needs to learn to share space and attention, or just needs to fuck off. I would be totally into a vid about cats and cat owners becoming friends and learning to understand each other and also kicking asshole boyfriends out of their lives or making them be decent human beings. Or about cat owners learning things about their cats and coming to an understanding with them. Or just a vid of happy, blissed out cats who are comfortable for the first time! Learning-to-play montages! Happy purring cat faces and slow blinks! There is so much good on this show, so many people working hard to make their relationships with their cats work.
Availability: My Cat from Hell can be hard to find; if you have trouble,
Mark Does Stuff [web]
What it is: The Mark who Does Stuff is Mark Oshiro; he watches, reads aloud, and plays canons that he is unspoiled for and reacts to them as he goes. His most popular project is probably Mark Reads Harry Potter, but he's been doing this for years and has reacted to a ton of great media! He's recently been watching Steven Universe and Babylon 5 and Star Trek, and reading all of Discworld and Young Wizards. He is also super fun at cons!
Sample Video:
Details: I listen to Mark read things at work and he makes my terrible and busy Mondays better! And then at lunch I go read his blog posts about what he just read. I also have been watching him watch Babylon 5 - I usually don't download the videos for the watches but these have been MAKING MY DAY, I am having so much fun watching him pick up on foreshadowing and be astonished by wham episodes. I appreciate his social justice work and his reactions and his stories a lot. I know a lot of Mark Does Stuff fans who love the hilariously wrong predictions best, but what I love most is his intense delight, how much he loves media, and his astonished and thrilled responses to plot twists that he didn't see coming and also to plot twists that he did see coming. His reactions to things like Garnet's song in Jailbreak are delightful and make me feel like part of a fannish community! Also I love when he sings along to things, all his facial expressions, when he shouts "no!" at something ominous, when he hides in his hands or his shirts, when there is a surprise cat, and when he falls out of the view of the camera laughing.
FYI: I asked Mark's permission to nominate him for Festivids and he said yes; there is a possibility that he will watch any vid made for this fandom. If that makes you uncomfortable, you may want to avoid this request or make a note to that effect in your post so that Mark Does Stuff fans will know not to pass the link along to him. (Also, just in case, please don't spoil him for anything he hasn't already watched/read. There's a list on his blog of upcoming projects, and he's only partway into the canons he's watching now.)
Availability: Mark Reads videos are on youtube for free; these are videos of him reading texts. Mark Watches episodes are for sale from Mark's site, but there is also a Mark-authorized site for sharing extra downloads of these eps called The Black Market as well as some torrents (thanks to
kate_nepveu for seeding). I have the B5 videos to date and can share them as well.Pose [tv]
What it is: A tv show about New York ball culture, made by a bunch of queer people who have feelings about Paris is Burning. Contains: a lot of kinds of queer trauma, but mostly written/directed/performed by queer people. This includes homophobia and homophobic violence, transphobia and transphobic violence, HIV and 80s attitudes towards HIV.
Trailer:
Details: I haven't finished season 1 yet, but I will soon! So this description might be missing some important moments from the end of the season. Even though I'm not done yet it's so obvious that Pose is SO VIDDABLE and needs about one million vids. The color! The shots! The framing! Voguing at a ball and voguing on the pier! All the visual elements are so well done.
And on an emotional level so much of this show is about queer community, sisterhood, making your own families, and working as a team. I love Blanca putting her house together! I love Blanca inviting Angel to join the house after Angel gets read. I love that Damon wants to go to fancy dance school but he also learns from the dancers at the pier and at the balls, his community making its own meaning in dance. All the hugs and the supportive relationships! Dinner together on Christmas! Being angry together! It makes me cry.
I also love love love that within like ten minutes of the first episode we're on team BE GAY. DO CRIMES.
I would love a vid about any of the queer or trans folks at the balls in any of the houses, individually or in any group/ship/house; I do not give a fuck about any of the white Trump Towers people. Pray Tell is maybe secretly my favorite? But Blanca and Damon are also my favorites. Blanca being like "we do not have the luxury of shame" is like. Aaaah.
I also really enjoyed this interview with Janet Mock about making the show.
Marvel Comics: Marvel Preview Paradox, Northstar, Cosmic Marvel
I'm putting these three together because they all came out of a multi vid I made this year! All of these requests are queer Marvel comics characters, organized from the fewest comics pages to the most.
Paradox! So Paradox is an anti-gravity dancer and also a shapeshifter:
And he is possibly the first queer character in Marvel comics. I LOVE HIM. He is a secret agent for the ISA, an oppressive space CIA-ish organization, in a future with a lot of income inequality and genetic engineering; he has been nonconsensually genetically engineered to be a shapeshifter. The ISA is super uncomfortable with his queerness (content note for a few instances of queer slurs). The ISA sends him off to investigate rebels; he meets a team of other ISA agents, pursues the rebels ... and then kills his own team. FOR REAL. Turns out he's been a space rebel all along! Then he takes the form of one of his team and KILLS THE EMPEROR. ILU you angry shape-shifting space bi.
Paradox appears in a Marvel Preview in 1980 (which has the above plotline that I'm most interested in), but if you'd like to you can also use his other appearances. One is from Marvel's Bizarre Adventures (a backstory comic from 1982 about why he chose rebellion); the other has him universe-hop into modern comics and the 616 universe in Wolverine: The Best There Is in 2011. (This Wolverine comic is terrible and most of it is kind of unreadable but I'm happy that Paradox is in it, shapeshifting his way around the 616 universe and wearing his 1980s leather pants and white flowy shirt and black vest and leaning dramatically against walls.)
Content notes: queer slurs, dead queer women, non-consensual drug use, fridging
Northstar. Northstar (Jean-Paul Beaubier) is the first Marvel hero to say the words "I'm gay." He came out in comics in 1992, and then he largely dropped out of comics until he reappeared as a mentor to young queer characters several years later. Which is, to be honest, pretty hilarious because he's kind of an asshole of the "I don't care what you think" variety.
This is Northstar in a nutshell, at his own book signing:
And this kind of not-giving-a-fuck is why he can critique superhero politics, stand up to immense assholery, punch homophobic bigots, and be the first superhero to officially come out. (I mean, also he's a speedster, so he always has to be first and most annoying.)
I ship: Northstar with Kyle (I love the moment when Kyle has been brainwashed and Northstar is like obviously he's been brainwashed look at his haircut.") I think their wedding is gorgeous and I love all the other Marvel queer characters in the audience! I love their complicated-by-superheroing romance. I am super charmed by Northstar's superspeed flirting before they live together. I also ship: Northstar and Hector in the 90s when they sunbathed together and flirted at a wedding back when Northstar was mostly hooking up with people and before he met Kyle. Also I firmly believe that Northstar made Iceman his one hookup exception with Kyle as a joke and then was astonished when Iceman turned out to be gay and now he's not sure what to do about it.
Content notes: Homophobic violence directed at Northstar, brainwashing directed at Kyle, fascist government violence, child death.
Northstar appears in a bunch of comics, including several X-Men comics, Alpha Flight, Northstar, several Swimsuit Specials, and other misc issues.
Cosmic Marvel! I wanted to ask for Phyla-Vell and Moondragon, but their appearances are kind of a mess: their main arc gets interrupted by a bunch of huge crossover events that means that most of the most important scenes are in comics with different names, but "cosmic Marvel" covers most of them since they're in the space related series. I love them and their relationship:
Phyla-Vell and Moondragon are so into each other even while they're fighting super powerful dudes, so much in love in a kind of codependent the-only-thing-that-brought-me-back-from-the-dead-was-you way, and also they work really well together and try to communicate even when it's hard. And also Moondragon TURNS INTO A DRAGON and then she CAN'T CHANGE BACK and is like "I understand if this ends our relationship" and Phyla is like "no Heather I still love you to pieces" and then they are still queer and still amazing and Phyla RIDES MOONDRAGON INTO BATTLE. SPACE QUEER WOMEN WITH DRAGONS.
If you haven't checked out these comics before and you're interested, please be advised that Phyla is currently dead (I'd be mad about it but tbh it never lasts).
Phyla-Vell and Heather are in some Captain Marvel (dude version) comics, Guardians of the Galaxy v 2, Annihilation, Annihilation: Conquest, and some other comics as well. I was going to be like "here are the other characters and plots and ships I like in Cosmic Marvel" but nobody signed up for this so I didn't feel like it was necessary. But I am into a lot of other parts of Cosmic Marvel! Mostly the queer parts. Especially the ANGELA in SPACE parts. My gosh is Angela gr8.
Availability: Most of these comics are available on Marvel Unlimited, getcomics.info, or torrenting sites. The Paradox comics are harder to source; if you want them and can't find them, please ask
thingswithwings. Different from the Others | Anders als die Andern 1919 [movie, safety]
This is going to get long, sorry. Details below contain references to Nazi Germany; this is the last part of this letter so you can stop reading here without skipping anything else.
What it is: A 1919 film about a relationship between two men, which took advantage of a moment in German history when films were not censored. Different from the Others was specifically written to speak to and about German anti-queer laws, especially Paragraph 175, and it was partially funded by Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. Unfortunately, almost all copies were destroyed by the Nazis; the one remaining copy was recently restored. Content notes: homophobia, blackmail, government oppression of lgbt people, queer suicide.
Clips / discussion: (contains plot spoilers)
Details: I first asked for this film before the 2016 election, in part because I was so excited when I realized it had been uploaded to youtube and in part because of the resonances between present-day anti-queer rhetoric and historic anti-queer rhetoric. That anti-queer rhetoric and anti-queer violence escalated after Trump was elected, and it made this film and its advocacy and its destruction even more resonant for me. We are building our communities; other people are trying to tear them down and burn the evidence. This film is part of an activist response to government suppression, and then it was itself destroyed by the Nazi government censorship program. This is the one of the results of all the research and activist work that was burned in the fires of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft collections.
I want to make it clear that I don't see Weimar Germany as a queer utopia or Magnus Hirschfeld as a perfect queer activist – this film comes out of activism, but it is activism that values socially acceptable gay men. One of the ways this film (and the circumstances of its filming) resonates for me right now is in seeing the work of cis gay men and cis lesbians to make themselves socially acceptable by further marginalizing other queer people; that's not a major part of this film, but it is a circumstance of its production. I also see resonances in "moderates" blaming queer people for the rise of fascist and authoritarian movements rather than thinking about their own complicity - which people started doing without any evidence in Nazi Germany as soon as the Weimar Republic fell. I see this on twitter now too: Trump won because queer people asked for too much acceptance too fast, if we'd only been more patient everything would be fine, and all of the other ways that people tell us to wait for liberation. (If you're interested in this subject, I found Laurie Marhoefer's "Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis" very informative – though reading it is rough right now.) So I'm having a lot of feelings about this movie and what it means in the current moment.
That said, I also find this a super interesting film - combining positive portrayals of queerness with narratives about queer suicide, and doing melodrama and advocacy at the same time. I'm usually a no-queer-films-with-death movie watcher, but when it's pro-queer advocacy and made by queer people it feels different to me than the standard straight-people-love-to-watch-queer-pain film tropes. Instead this film feels like it's trying to take advantage of straight people's love for those tropes. It says: yes, but do you love to watch us in pain when you're the ones who caused it? Do you love to watch us in pain when you could change it? I feel like there's an interesting connection here to other written-by-queer-people texts that use queer death to make activist points (like The Normal Heart), and there's also an interesting connection to the celluloid closet and the death tropes that become the only stories told about queer people.
I would love a vid about Korner and Sivers' relationship (and the difficulty people have with being differently out of the closet); a vid that makes the activism of this film explicit or even turns it into propaganda; a vid about sadness and joy and art and living difficult lives; a vid about queer communities (the gay bar, the lecturers, finding queer friends in boarding school); a vid about Paragraph 175 or about the real world effects of government censorship on the film; a vid about the historic resonance of fascism and anti-queer governments with the present; or, honestly, a vid that just does the plot of the film but faster and without title screens that are up for like ninety seconds.
I feel like vidding this film is like taking it back, bringing it back, saying fuck you to the fascists who wanted it destroyed. It survived. We can still remix it. It still has meaning. The people who made this film are gone now; before they passed away, they had to flee their country, which did its best to destroy their work. But they are still speaking to us.
Availability: There's a version on one on vimeo; there are also several restored versions including one by Filmmuseum Muenchen (DVD only) and one that was done by OutFest/UCLA. There are also several Russian versions available.
