snowy fannish 50: fandom manifesto

[karanguni]

Today's snowflake_challenge prompt is In your own space, write a promo, manifesto or primer for your fave character, ship or fandom, which I shall shamelessly steal for purposes of Fannish 50 as well.

Whenever someone says manifesto, my first and only thought is the Prince of Tennis fandom manifesto for Tezuka/Fuji, from the glory days of LJ. It hasn't necessarily aged well, but then again, how are you supposed to age 13-year-old tennis-obsessed boys who can summon dinosaurs and defy the laws of physics?

So I guess I'll speed date what few character/ship/fandoms float to the top of my mind:

Character - Final Fantasy VII - Tseng

Hailing mostly from both fandom interpretation, the animated Last Order and the beautiful and soon to be remastered in non-PSP format Crisis Core, the Tseng I love is an erstwhile corporate black ops villain who's also a "if it wasn't me doing these deeds, it'd be someone else doing them, and much more crassly." He wears a suit even in intemperate climes, has a firm grasp of capitalism at its worst, and may or may not have drunk the magical juice of a crazy company that has bad intentions but good propaganda. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, and Tseng's my first and favourite moral grey area navigator. Some of my favourite lines from Before Crisis involve him telling a genetically modified Army boy-space-friend – surely the antithesis of Tseng's super-smooth city slicker self – that Tseng gets paid better because his job involves occasionally exhuming people. Did he also end up ordering a snipe on this SOLDIER boy later on? Maybe.

I have no real reason to love this character as much as I do, except that when you spend years of your life playing FFVII, re-watching Advent Children, obsessing over the only-available-in-Japan mobile Before Crisis, and inventing yourself a headcanon of corporate anti-hero villainy as the world starts to burn down around you (2007-8 financial crisis, yay!), and then further headcanon of economic imperialism and neo-colonial behaviour in which Tseng is a member of the aggressed nation helping to aggress it... it sticks!

Will people in 2023 end up seeing him the way I see him, especially with the FFVII:Remake and Crisis Core releases coming up? No idea! But this character gave me an amazing writing partner who wrote a Stockmarket AU with me that remains one of my favourite fandom experiences, some of my first independent pieces of writing I was proud of, and serves as an ageless vehicle for my feelings about how people might end up making choices in hyper-urban worlds dominated by monopolistic market forces. SO THERE.

Ship - Prince of Tennis: Tezuka/Fuji

Tezuka's a 40-year-old tennis megastar trapped in a 13-year-old's body. In addition to an inability to speak using words, he'll injure himself for his teammates and his nation, obsess over nurturing young talent, and competence porn his way to the top. Some people find him made out of cardboard, I find him made out of dinosaur dust.

Fuji's a 400-year-old kitsune trapped inside a 13-year-old's body, waiting for something in life to interest him. He's a genius at everything, doesn't give a damn about anything, and the only thing that breaks through his anhedonic world view/happy smiley exterior are 1) people fucking with his people and 2) people who challenge him in a way that makes something inside of him burn, and by people we all mean "Tezuka".

Put the two together and even canon writes them in as walking under an umbrella in the first snow together. In sepia.

Fandom - The Culture

It's not Elon Musk. It is post-scarcity absurdity. But embedded in The Culture novels is my sci-fi Discworld; we lost Iain M. Banks too early. Every year I put one of them on as an audiobook and learn something new about how I think about what a ideal-ish future might look like. The novels might look like they're all about sentient Minds inside of funnily-named ships &c., but they're really some excellent examinations of humanity. I'm always amazed to go re-learn which year each of the novels was written in, because each one seems fresh every time the real world throws us some absurdist late-stage curveball. If I try to type out what's in them it all sounds terrible – emo amnesia-addled James Bond-y type turns into a sharded semi-immortal human weapon, emancipated body slave takes revenge on piece of shit ex-owner-and-rapist, egotistical game player gets conned into playing game for reasons of foreign intervention fiddling, bunch of overpowered Minds meddle with humanity and galactic civilisations for their amusement – but the execution is always smart and more nuanced and exceedingly not focused on having infinite time to spend in a Happy Fun Space.

I'm always learning, with this canon, and the fandom has fantastic writers in spite of its tiny size. Not everyone will like The Culture, especially if one's starting point is Consider Phlebas, but for those who do - jump on board for the next tour of Yuletide!

IV. Death by Water

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
                               A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
                               Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

-- The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot