Vid: Home, Killjoys

[eruthros]

Title: Home
Fandom: Killjoys
Song: Home by Phillip Phillips
Summary: Just know you're not alone.

Made for aurumcalendula for Festivids!

Download: Home on mediafire, 287 mb
Subtitles: Home subtitles on mediafire

Streaming Version:

Lyrics:
hold on to me as we go
as we roll down this unfamiliar road
and although this wave (wave) is stringing us along
just know you're not alone
cause I'm gonna make this place your home

settle down, it'll all be clear
don't pay no mind to the demons, they fill you with fear
the trouble, it might drag you down
if you get lost, you can always be found
just know you're not alone
cause I'm gonna make this place your home

settle down, it'll all be clear
don't pay no mind to the demons, they fill you with fear
the trouble, it might drag you down
if you get lost, you can always be found
just know you're not alone
cause I'm gonna make this place your home

Comments

[aurumcalendula]

This is such a lovely vid! (and the song's so perfect for Pree!)

[jesse_the_k]

I love Pree’s range of home-making. From kindness to fierceness, from low-key to over the top. This vid made me smile a lot and want to rewatch Killjoys!

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for this video! There's sadly so little video examples of Pree on Youtube, so this compilation (and thingswithwings' accompanying "Queens" video about the show's lesbian sociopaths in love) is very welcome for when I'm trying to recommend Killjoys to queer people and need to reassure them that it really will get MUCH better than the Delle Seyah / Dutch foe-yay queerbaiting and Pree's role as vaguely queer comic relief character in season 1.

And also for when I'm trying to explain to the Critical Role fandom that I picture one beloved recurring character (Gilmore) in that no-visuals-other-than-fanart streaming show as "basically Pree from Killjoys, if he was living in a medieval-ish fantasy setting and had magic powers, only minus the elaborate make-up and plus an elaborate beard". Hell, when the character shows up in the pre-stream part of the storyline they're publishing as an ongoing comic series right now, which is probably supposed to lead into the early episodes they're planning to turn into an animated series for Amazon, I would even wish for Pree's actor to do the voice acting, since he's so perfect for the role. Sadly, there's no way the L.A.-based Critical Role production team would ever use Canadian actors. [Matt Mercer, creator of the story and Man of a Thousand Voices, is really, really great at doing Gilmore's dialogue - especially considering it's almost all improvised on the fly - and he clearly loves this particular brainchild of his to bits. But there is the issue of having a queer PoC character played by a straight white guy, when he doesn't have to be anymore, once it's a proper TV series instead of an informal RPG set-up where all the non-player characters are voiced by Matt. At least Liam, who played the bisexual main character Vax in that storyline and as such almost certainly will reprise the role for the animated show, is bi-curious enough to be able to base his character's tentative forays into dating a guy on his own experiments in college. Sadly, the only really self-identified queer actor in the regular cast was playing a probably-straight character in that storyline. Much like with Killjoys, the entire show got more and more queer as the years went by, with the players slowly gaining confidence with their portrayals of queer characters (not all that easy if you're middle-aged, straight and there is no prepared script, only dialogue improvised on the spot), everyone becoming more comfortable with romantic scenes in general (queer or straight - all the players are professional actors, but mostly voice actors doing anime dubbing and video games, so serious adult romance scenes don't come up much in their day jobs) and recognizing that they had attracted an unusually heavily female and/or queer fan community (for something based on a supposed classic "sexist nerdboy" hobby like D&D) who will welcome explicitly queer characters with open arms. So the second storyline that's currently running has half the main characters being openly queer from the start. But I doubt they'll ever get to this second storyline with the comic or animated series, even if it's a same-setting sequel.]

Sorry, I'm getting too far off-topic... I should go to sleep.

[Though I do think it's worth pointing out Critical Role to fans of Killjoys and vice versa. The shows have different genres, obviously, but a similar vibe in terms of flawed/damaged characters, lots of humor, high emotion, cheerful violence, complete lack of sexism, queer-friendliness, and a wholesome emphasis on close, supportive friendships between men and women who theoretically could be attracted to each other, but who really are just friends who are not ashamed to hug a lot. In the case of Critical Role, this applies to the players even more than to the characters. The companion show Talks Machina, where they do Q&As and such, even runs under the motto "Don't forget to love each other" and most of the male players, when out-of-character, seem like they're actively trying to use this platform to show the boys and young men in the audience how much more fullfilling their social life can be if they throw off the shackles of toxic masculinity expectations. It's wholesomeness taken to a whole new level.]


Anyway, I can't "like" your video on Youtube (I don't do social media accounts, for data privacy reasons), but I wanted to let you know that I've watched it over a dozen times in the last few weeks (the song makes me happy) and I will recommend it to other people.

- Vivi

[(Anonymous)]

Me again. I just wanted to share something with you (and thingswithwings) that I think you will enjoy, based on your list of shows you've been a fan of over the years (especially Steven Universe and Korra). It's a hauntingly beautiful narrative song made by two of the ridiculously talented fans of Critical Role (they even collaborated with a bunch of others to make a whole musical about a few particularly epic/emotional chapters of the first storyline), featuring a couple of the show's characters in a f/f romance (at least one of them is canonically bi, so I can't call it "lesbian"). They're NPCs, so while they are often-recurring characters in the story and important allies to the player characters, their scenes on the show are mostly about their plot-related interactions with the player characters, not with each other. So, due to the nature of tabletop RPG (remember that all NPCs are played by the DM - you can't expect the DM to have long conversations with himself) their backstories and private relationship are mostly just hinted at. (Though they do eventually have a Big Damn Kiss in front of the player characters, because the fans got really invested in this relationship, and when the player characters of the second storyline meet them 20 years later, they're a long-married couple.) This storytelling gap is where this song comes in, which takes the various little bits of information given about their "off-screen" lives in the show and fleshes them out into a comprehensive backstory and character study and troubled romance between two middle-aged women who let go of their chance to be together when they were young, and now that fate has thrown them together gain, they try to find a way through the regret and bitterness because they still love each other dearly.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FodxC8vl2ns
There are subtitles which indicate which character is singing which line, if you have difficulty telling the singers apart.


It's one of the particularly beautiful things about the Critical Role fandom that fan interpretations actively contribute to the experience and are embraced as such by the original creators, who sometimes will even bend the trajectory of the characters' development to accommodate common fan wishes, especially where explicit queerness is concerned. (I mean, they ignore all the porny fanfic, other than giving vague hints and making in-jokes - this show attracts a lot of poly and femdom kink writers, for much the same characterization reasons as with for example Leverage. But when asked directly, the players do say they're happy it's being written, which is more acceptance than I was expecting, considering that tabletop RPG players usually heavily identify with their self-created characters and the sheer amount of cuddling and genuine crying on the show suggests that these players are no different, even if they're professional actors. But the very, very high-quality fanart is an integral part of the show - they happily show it off during the pee break and at the end of the episodes, and the canon character designs for the first storyline - before the show got an official artist - are basically the fanon that the fan artists collectively converged upon.)





[Tangent: I also find it kind of funny (in a happy way) that Matt will happily admit that he based the very femme wizard Allura on himself, and the very butch paladin Kima on Marisha (his girlfriend and later wife, who incidentally did choose to play a butch lesbian character in the second storyline). You see what I meant about the guys actively rejecting toxic masculinity? And why the fanfic-writing contingent of the Critter community has collectively decided that all male player characters who end up in canon hetero relationships will be happy to sub for the female characters? (Or each other, but that's not really canon aside from some semi-platonic for-good-luck kisses and many jokes between straight-but-very-camp/emotional players Sam and Liam, who are BFFs in real life, to the point of affectionally calling each other "husband", and pretending to be dating when they get a bit drunk on "Talks Machina" - and it's truly not the usual mean-spirited game of "gay chicken" designed to make another straight guy uncomfortable, but rather most likely a case of going a bit overboard with their effort to show that they are comfortable with male homosexuality and trying to be welcoming to the show's queer fans. I mean, Liam keeps going out of his way to show that his character is still bi even if he decided to get in a relationship with a woman (he got a lot of complaints for that, because his flirting with the above-mentioned Gilmore was the fan-preferred couple, but I get it: it's much easier to act out a continuous romance subplot with a fellow player than to try and do that with an NPC they only meet every few months) and he gently calls out any gay-stuff-is-inherently-embarrassing type joke the others sometimes still thoughtlessly make. And Sam is notorious for showning up for live sessions at conventions dressed up like he's auditioning for "Starlight Express" or "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert", and has created a (initially closeted) gay character and even a female character (with an estranged husband she still loves, played by the DM), whom he played for months/years on end. And of course every male player has in-character flirted with the DM at some point, and they're generally very good about staying in-character for the scene and not bursting out giggling to relieve their discomfort. But they still shy away from serious m/m romance between player characters - probably because that would embarrass Travis too much (who doesn't want to play-act any romance subplot except maybe with his real-life wife) and because it might make Taliesin (who really is bi) feel put on the spot, given how he clearly suffers contact embarrassment at any queer-related teasing directed at Liam's character and given that he doesn't really make serious flirtation overtures from his side, even when he does play explicitly queer characters. His presumed-straight character in the first storyline also only really started reciprocating after years of being flirted at by Laura's character, so it's probably just that Taliesin is not quite comfortable being publically romantic, as opposed to being publically demonstrative about his queer identity by wearing a purple mowhawk and the occasional pride flag T-shirt. Though once he did get comfortable with having awkward romantic conversations with Laura (while her real-life husband Travis sits right there beside her, shipping them like a 13-year-old fangirl), they quickly graduated their characters to "married couple who have lots of kinky sex off-screen", because Taliesin is a good sport about feeding the fic-writers and Laura has a relentlessly dirty mind.)]