Category: A Catch All

Series Squee: Mobile Suit Gundam Wing

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Mobile Suit Gundam Wing is probably the most important Gundam Series in my life – yes, even though I was very invested in the off-the-wall wackiness of G Gundam and would absolutely sacrifice myself so that Tieria and Neil Dylandy (the first Lockon Strators) could live happily ever after together. Gundam Wing was a series I was obsessed with as a teenager… and as a young adult… and now in my thirties. 

Who worked on this series?

I don’t wanna be like “who didn’t work on this series”, but Mobile Suit Gundam Wing has huge crew behind it. Produced by Sunriase and Directed by Masashi Ikeda and Shinji Takamatsu, this series’ script and story were written by Katsuyuki Sumizawa while the iconic character designs were done by Shukou Murase. If you’re a long time fan of mecha anime, you probably already knew that the best Gundams in the history of the franchise – and all the other mech and tech – were designed by Hajime Katoki, Junya Ishigaki, and Kunio Okawara! 

These dudes pretty much built out the Gundams we can’t stop thinking about – and one day I will get a good Deathscythe model kit and put that bad boy together while drunk!

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Here We Are In March

Stitch

February was… a lot. 0/10 do not recommend.

While the harassment I’ve been detailing for months continues to escalate (now strangers are claiming I’ve done the, direct harm and that “PickMe” truly is a racist/misogynistic slur while coming for my writing gig in the name of fandom), I also got… a lot done?

Like anxiety spiraling as creeps on the internet try to destroy your life over shipping really does make you get shit done. Who would’ve thought the sleepless nights were good for something!)

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a letter to the world, a friend, and to everyone else

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You probably don’t know me.  What I do for Stitch’s Media Mix, and Stitch, is largely unseen.  I don’t engage in fandom the same way Stitch does— or for that matter the way most of you do— I tend to more actively interact with news and sports than I do with fiction, and I really enjoy avoiding fan spaces. 

But I have known Stitch for over a decade.  I know who they are as a person and who they are as an author, and who they are as a fan.  I know the work Stitch puts in to every article that gets published on here, on Patreon, in Teen Vogue.  And I believe in the work she’s doing.  It’s VITAL that we actively think about, and actively engage in critiquing the entertainment we consume.  If we cannot critique our entertainment, if we cannot place it in the large context of our society (both how it is informed by society and how society informs what we find entertaining) then we are not doing everything we can to make a better society. 

And Stitch has chosen to not just apply critical analysis to fiction and to music, and to the reactions of the fans. She has chosen to take this really incredibly dense academic concept and make it accessible, both in terms of how it’s written (trust me, every single article Stitch writes could be SO MUCH more dense) but also how and where you have access to it.

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Stitch Wraps Up 2020

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A lot happened in 2020. While it’s been one stressful year, it’s also been a year where I’ve pretty much stayed booked and busy and writing. So for those of you who aren’t super duper online, here’s what you’ve missed in terms of content, milestones, and strange or stressful things.

January

Best Website Content:

Quick Coverage: John Boyega Ends 2019 With a Bang (And a Hearty ‘Fuck You’ To Rey/Kylo Shippers)

Aside from the kiss-and-dissolve, the majority of their intimate moments are fight scenes. Which is fine if you personally view fighting as foreplay but the whiteness leaps out about a fandom that sees violence – including kidnapping and the threat of torture – as a precursor of romance, but clearly reciprocated affection between Finn and Rey as uncomfortable… for her and for them.

Rey/Kylo Shippers: A New Look At An Old Face of Fannish Entitlement

It doesn’t matter that for Rey/Kylo shippers, The Rise of Skywalker provides more fanservice than an A.C.E. concert.

Because while they’ve gotten ninety nine percent of what they wanted from the franchise, they didn’t get the big thing that they really wanted:

Kylo Ren’s redemption in the form of an utterly unearned Happily Ever After where Ben and his tradwife Rey pop out little Skywalker spawn to perpetuate the Skywalker family’s genetics and their shitty legacy.

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Meme-ing For A Reason #3 – Fandom’s Amy Coopers

Stitch
It’s the “they’re the same picture” meme with the panel on the left saying “Amy Cooper lying and saying that Christian Cooper threatened//tried to assault her in her two 911 calls” and the right panel saying “white women in fandom saying that Black people in fandom talking about racism in fandom are abusive/toxic/bullies who have actually harmed them by having these convos” over yellow text that reads “corporate needs you to find the differences between this picture and this picture” with the bottom panel saying: “they’re the same picture”.

I already made the Amy Cooper comparison back in June in Why Write About Fandom Racism At A Time Like This? where I talked about what the racism in the supposedly progressive queer/women run fandom spaces looks like:

It looks a lot like… Amy Cooper calling the cops on Christian Cooper and pretending that her life was in danger when all he wanted her to do was leash her damn dog, actually.

(And before you accuse me of “trivializing real racism” or whatever the actual fake woke set is calling it these days, understand that what Amy did and what the nice white women of fandom do are the same kind of behavior and they all weaponize their white womanhood for the same end: a permanent silencing of Black voices that they don’t like or agree with. I get to make comparisons like that considering that I’m subject to Amy Coopers in and out of fandom.)

I was right then and I am right now: there are white women and queer people in fandom who utilize their marginalization (womanhood or queerness, sometimes a blend of both with a splash of mental health issues and claims of trauma inspiring totes valid lashing out thrown in) in fandom.

They use their ability to inspire ATTACK-PROTECT urges in folks in the same way that Amy Cooper tried to utilize her white womanhood to get the cops to come in guns ablaze to protect her from… Christian Cooper’s nerdy ass asking her to put her dog on a leash.

The goal in fandom, as with Amy Cooper and various other cop-calling, hysteria weaponizing Karens, is to control who gets to speak, who is listened to, who is taken as an inherent threatening presence trying to control or harm others… and who should be.

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End of the Year Wrap Up Questions

Stitch

I’m trying to do two end-of-year wrap ups for 2020 – a podcast episode and a blog post – and I’d like to answer folks’ most pressing questions about my fiction, my different projects (Urban Fantasy 101, What Fandom Racism Looks Like, the massive Korean pop/hip hop anti/blackness project), my music choices, whatever!

You can leave a nickname or anon when you ask your question and I won’t be collecting emails or anything like that!

Award Eligibility 2020

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As always, I’m only eligible to be nominated for awards related to fan writing (because my fiction writing is… sporadic and also super NSFW when I do post it). If you were so inclined to nominate me for something – like the Hugo Award for Fan Writer or any similar award – here’s what you could nominate me for!

I’m a fan writer because I’m a fan writing about fandom – maybe not fandoms you think about on the regular, but spaces that need coverage that strays from solely celebratory. My writing primarily focuses on queerness and/or race in media/fandom spaces and I document and push back at established narratives about the supposed progressive spaces and what fandom is actually like when you’re in the thick of it.

As of this point in 2020, I posted 101 pieces on my site for a total of 185,232k words. These pieces covered antiblackness in transformative fandom, Korean pop/hip hop fandom, how a popular Tor release missed the mood of 2020, music reviews, the Star Wars fandom’s endless awfulness… and so much more. I uploaded a handful of videos to my YouTube channel, recorded and posted like nine podcast episodes, wrote for I-D and Teen Vogue, and pissed a lot of racists off in fandom just for pointing out the facts of fandom.

2020 has been tough, but I have put out some of my best work so far despite all the wild shit I’ve been through and it’d be cool if folks recognized that, you know?

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[Guest Post] Co-watching Academia, Locating Happiness

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Over the last few months, a few friends and I have been meeting online semi-regularly to watch pre-recorded conference panels or academic talks. While this originally began as a system of mutual accountability around a seminar series, it’s since mutated into an actually enjoyable part of my downtime.

After years of struggle, the academic conference experience suddenly has room for joy again. It’s been a damn revelation to me! 

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September Plans

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September is all about placeholders, catching up, and hurricane prep.

It’s peak hurricane season from here until the end of October (November usually doesn’t have hurricanes like that but I’m prepared to be wrong) so there is a huge chance that I will be preoccupied with dealing with storms as the month crawls on.

So, I can’t promise any content beyond what I didn’t get to do in August for Patreon (because for once I did most of the stuff for my site) because I’m still trying to hustle and take care of my family since things are tough BUT I will do my best!

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Link Lineup

Stitch

I haven’t shared a lists of links in a while, huh?

Well here’s some of what I’ve been reading, speaking on, and watching across the internet!

Roundtable of Legends of Korean Hip-Hop: The Quiett, Swings & Paloalto | THE VETERAN EP. 1

I’m doing this like intense and incredible speed-run through Korean hip hop across my project because I want to know and listen to everyone and out of nowhere (for me, a person who does not follow HipHopLE on social media and does not read Korean well enough that that’d make any difference anyway), here comes a casual conversation between three of the “greats” in Korean hip hop. Out of the three men here, I’m more familiar with The Quiett’s work but I’ve listened to them all and seen them in things.

One thing that stood out for me was how this understated “three dudes talk hip hop history and memories” was one of the things that felt really close to the things I grew up with in terms of Black rappers siting down and talking about their own histories. So it’s interesting and they touch on a lot of incredible memories and moments in their lives as rappers, producers, and dudes who ran (run?) their own labels or crews.

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#StitchProcesses Blackface

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I knew I’d wind up writing about blackface before this project was done.

Early on in my research before I ever had the #StitchProcesses hashtag and back when I could pretend I wasn’t super invested (like yes, there was a time when I could “play it cool” about all of this), my youngest niece and I went on a binge of research on YouTube. One of the things that kept coming up during my early outlining was how so many of the lists of cultural appropriation taken to extremes involved blackface from idols as part of the problem.

Within minutes of scrolling through YouTube, we came across acts like the still active and  (sort of) blackface-ing Bubble Sisters. We saw a (racist in its own right) documentary on blackface in Korea and Japan that showed a large number of blackface moments that left us both shaking. Some of the same incidents involving idols – like A Pink’s Bomi made up as Michol, the Bubble Sisters’ everything, and Super Junior’s Shindong and Yesung in two separate instances of Blackface and other members of the group supporting a performer in blackface – show up on those same lists about cultural appropriation.

The only problem with that is that blackface is not a form of cultural appropriation. It is minstrelsy and horrifically antiblack on top of that, but it’s not appropriation. They’re not appropriating anything, they’re insulting it.

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