The possibly unavoidable problem the Abridged Series medium faces.

(This can potentially apply to a lot of Internet Content that is serialized and composed of more then just a person talking.)

Most of the fun I've had watching Abridged Serieses on YouTube has been me discovering ones that were already old and so had a lot of episodes I can binge (like how I've gotten into a lot of Anime).  Starting with SMA (Sailor Moon Abridged, the one made by Megamie33), and then Wedding Peach Abridged and a number I looked for based on Attack on Titan and Code Geass and so on.  I've had hours of fun with stuff like that. 

But when one that's just starting catches my eye, and it's inevitably months or even over a year till we get a new episode, it's kinda hard for me to stay interested.  I'm currently subscribed to two channels airing Abridged Serieses of Fate/Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works, and by the time a new episode drops for either my memory has no longer even kept tract of which one was which.

This is not me criticizing the people making them, I know this long amount of time between episodes in unavoidable.  It may seem at first like they're easier to make then an actual Anime since it's using already animated stuff.  But however true that may be is more then counteracted by these being done by single individuals not entire studios, they have far less resources and usually are doing it as a hobby and so also have school and/or a real job to worry about.  So I don't expect them to drop their lives and do nothing but slave over dumb comedy videos for my amusement.

And yet the consequences of this problem are still real.  It's much easier for me to invest in something if I have a reliable schedule to expect new installments, even if it's more then the standard weekly wait of old media, but A Slap On Titan season 2 failed to keep even it's attempt at a monthly schedule.  These shows do build fan bases in-spite of this obstacle, but they could be much larger.  Because I greatly value the potential of this medium, I love Mel Brooks style parodies, but it's much funnier to me now to simply see the actual original show I love dubbed over comically.

Basically it's an art-form I feel has a lot of potential being held back by the fact that it only ever will be done by amateurs.  Professional studios won't treat works they own this way because they want them to be respected, and they also won't engage in something so copyright ambiguous with another studio's work because they want to maintain a moral high ground when they defend their own IPs.

The first thing that enters my mind as a potential solution is the idea of simply not releasing anything till you've completed a whole season.  But again while something like that is a viable risk for professional studios working with Netflix, an amateur probably won't want to put all that work into the later episodes before they even know if they can get a fan base.  Plus I think they value the fan interaction influencing future episodes, sometimes jokes they make about the comments section are part of the fun.

One thing I don't know is whether or not it was always so normal for new episodes to take so long.  Those old SMA videos don't look as polished and sophisticated as the new Fate/ ones I've been following, and it looked like most of the VAs were like actually living in the same city.  In fact it doesn't seem like that series even ran long enough for how long it'd take a current Abridged Series to cover 50 episodes.  But the current artists value the modern advancements and so aren't gonna want to sacrifice them for the sake of getting stuff done faster.

There is one feature of modern Abridged Series production that I personally think is worth throwing out whether or not it would save any time.  The Cartoon Cipher did a video about why Anime Dubs don't edit the lip flaps which of course had to bring up how Abridged Serises do edit them, or do now anyway, it doesn't look like SMA ever did. The fact is the actual Anime in Japan doesn't care if the lip flaps match. Thus I don't even agree with how much legit Dubs bend over backwards to make them match, so I certainly don't get why friggin parodies want to take this one technical aspect more seriously then the original product did.  But regardless I highly doubt dropping that alone would make Abridged Series production significantly more timely.  And I will say they sometimes do make the lip flaps look kinda funny.

I wish there was a way to fix this problem, but I can't think of it.

Well I think Abolishing Capitalism might for at least the creators who don't want to do anything else and only do because they need money to live.  But that isn't gonna happen under this President.

Fifty Shades of (Alleged) Plagiarism

I haven't read or watched Fifty Shades of Grey, so I may be the least qualified person to do this.  But as someone who cares about defending the legitimacy of Remix culture, I really feel the need to address the accusation of it being guilty of Plagiarism due to it's relationship to Twilight.

The deepest I've actually dug into this is these two Folding Ideas videos I recommend.
A Lukewarm Defense of Fifty Shades of Grey (The Movie).
Book Club is a Theatrical made for TV Movie

First thing I want to say is that E.L. James or at least her lawyers have been unfortunately hypocritical in going after Fifty Shades derivative works.  I don't like defending hypocrites, but it's for the benefit of others I'm doing this.

Even some people who are ardent defenders of Fan Fiction and other Fan Works like Vraik are calling Fifty Shades plagiarism and saying that it's exactly us who should be condemning her for doing what Copyright holders are so irrationally afraid of.  But I disagree, to me agreeing with the notion that this is plagiarism is in and of itself vindicating the notion that all Fan Fiction is plagiarism.  And that's without even getting into how I ultimately reject Copyright law altogether.

The first context that needs to be added to the fairly well known "it started as a Twilight Fan Fic" fact is that it was specifically an Alternate Universe fan fiction, and one that was more of a retelling of the basic story of Twilight then a sequel or side story.  And that's the real crux of the plagiarism accusation. It wasn't her telling a completely brand new story with Twilight characters and then later writing the Twilight out of it.  Instead we have a story that, in both the version using Twilight names and the one that doesn't, can be described as following the same basic beats as the story of Twilight, but without Vampires or other Supernatural elements.

Thing is, lots of very different stories follow the same basic beats.  Frankly what I'm far more annoyed by are Remakes disguised as Sequels like The Force Awakens and Superman Re[dacted], but no legal objections will ever come up there since they're made by the Copyright holder.  But of course even The Phantom Menace which I really love can also sort of be described as following the same basic story beats as A New Hope.  And comparatively it seems to me like Master of The Universe was closer to TPM then it was TFA in how much it mimics the original.

And that subject brings us to Star Wars relationship to The Hidden Fortress.  The Phantom Menace draws even more on THF arguably, in fact it's TPM similarity that makes me want to get around to actually watching THF some day (maybe once I've actually watched it I'll stop mis-remembering the name as The Forbidden Fortress).  And I shouldn't need to be retreading the defenses of Remix culture that have already been laid out, but my usual allies sometimes disagree with me here.

The thing that makes this Inspired By story feel like more of a Rip Off story is that it actively began under the Twilight name and then later removed it.  And that's why George Lucas is very relevant here.  Because you see there was a stage in the development of Star Wars where he was considering trying to get the rights to simply make it as an adaptation of The Hidden Fortress, but dropped that idea once certain similarities were dropped.  Likewise key aspects of Twilight are dropped for Fifty Shades, I mean MOTU may work fine as a fan fic but if it was an officially licensed Twilight Elseworlds project the publisher tried to make money off of you know darn well someone would go "how can you call this Twilight when no one Sparkles?"

One of the main reasons Star Wars seems so creative even when people are Nerding out over it's influences, are that there were many influences, the creativity is thought to be in how Lucas mixed them together.  So the question is, is Twilight really the only literary ancestor Fifty Shades has?  Often the point of an AU fic is putting the skeleton of one kind of story into a totally different genre and that's exactly what we have here.

What the final product of Fifty Shades still has in common with Twilight is mostly what Twilight has in common with many Teen/YA romances.  The removal of the Vampire aspects make Fifty Shades seem a lot less directly like a Gothic Romance, though Christian Grey is arguably more Byronic then Edward.

If I were to analyze Fifty Shades with no prior knowledge of it's origins, I'd compare it to the many Harlequin romance novels about women having affairs with hot young rich guys that become arguably unhealthy relationships way before I would any typical Young Adult Romance.  And if you told me it started as a Fan Fiction but without telling me of what, my first guess would probably be an Ayn Rand novel.

That's right, once you have even entry level knowledge of Ayn Rand, the ways Christian Gray fits her ideal Individualist male shouldn't take too long to notice.  I'll bet I'm not the first to write about it, but I haven't looked for it yet.  It's interesting how Rand comes up discussing both Batman and Iron Man (I love how Zach Snyder haters will constantly complain about the Randian influences he puts in his DC movies, but are besides KyleKallgrenBHH blind to the far more Randian implications of Tony Stark.  For the record I despise Rand's philosophy, but I can enjoy fiction I don't ideologically agree with).

Recently I've watched YouTube videos comparing Frank Miller's DKR Batman to both Rand's ideal male, and to the Byronic Hero.  And that makes me wonder to what extent the Byronic archetype was an influence on Rand.  But either way this Randian similarity, intentional or not, is a big factor in distinguishing James writing from Meyer's, Meyer as a Mormon was certainly no Individualist.

So at the end of the day Fifty Shades of Grey is no more or less similar to prior works then any other trashy romance novel.  It's only the direct involvement of internet fan fiction and it's stigma that gets it singled out.

I'm a supporter of Fan Films

Fans making their own non-profit works based on what they love.

I first learned of the idea via Batman.  Stumbling upon Dead End and Death of Batman via IMDB back when Batman Begins wasn't quite out yet.  A good Website for these classic Batman Fan Films would be BatmanFanFilms.com it still exists but it's forum seems basically dead.  I like films like Patient J and Law & Order Gotham.

That website doesn't include a lot of the more recent YouTube projects.  Like best of all The Joker Blogs.  Which seemed dead but just made a comeback.

But going outside Batman, last year I really loved Sailor Moon The Movie.  It's a American set Adaptation of the first Season of the old Anime.  It uses the old DiC dub names but avoids it's most problematic plot changes (Zoscite and Kunzite are both Male and a couple).  And does a few creative new things.

Only nitpick is I would switch the names of the characters called Jadite and Nephrite, and replace the name Jay with Max.

Last one I want to comment on here is OtaKing's TIE Fighter.  He's a YouTuber obsessed with 80s OVAs and their shading, and wanted to animate a Star Wars project in that style.

My opinion on the video is it looks great, awesome in fact.  The decision to have no dialogue is fine, doesn't suit my preferences but is a valid artistic choice.  And the Sound Effects are good, they sound like right out of a Star Wars film.

But what bugs me is the Music.  He uses a random song instead of the Williams Score, or something evocative of it.  Maybe he wanted it to be like 80s OVA Music, but then he shouldn't make his project a Star Wars one.  Much of what I love about Star Wars is it's Music.  And if animators in Japan in the 80s got the chance to do a legit Star Wars project, they would have wanted to use to that Music.

Tolkien would have wanted his works to inspire Fan Fiction

I don't know where to find the quote now, but I'm pretty sure he had said he wanted in time other writers and artists to add to his mythology.  He knew full well no great mythology is formed entirely from the mind of only one person.  And I include in that both adding to the continuity and creating alternate continuities.

As massive as what he left us is, there is also much room to expand, even without continuing the story past the reign of Aragorn's son.  And if you do go past that the options are endless.

I think he would have wanted people with different backgrounds and experiences and perspectives then him to explore Arda in ways he couldn't.  So yes I think that includes women writers adding a female perspective.  Both further developing the female characters he already provided and creating more of them.  That is part of my defense of how lacking his handling of women was.

I think there is room even to expand Arda beyond just Middle-Earth, Numenor and Beleriand, and explore other less western (white) civilizations.  The Southorns and Easterlings get a bad wrap as seemingly just pawns of Morgoth and Sauron.  But Tolkien did leave more then enough hints that their being in that situation is not really their fault.  I love Faramir's speech at the end of disc one of The Two Towers extended edition.  In the book Sam said it, but I think that's one of the things the movies improved, Tolkien had described Faramir as the most like himself, and I see those words as coming from Tolkien's experience as a WWI solider.

I think it's also plausible to create all new Civilizations for Arda.  Both outside Middle Earth and maybe even within it.  During the second age we know next to nothing about the humans who lived in Middle Earth rather then Numenor.  Then there is the fact that the lands of Middle Earth did exist during the First Age, but the story of the First Age is entirely further west.  Why not invent some matriarchal Amazon like tribes for Arda, both within Middle Earth and without.  Some Edain Amazons who could make sense coming from an offshoot of Haleth's tribe, and some others too.

And the Dwarves (who had 7 clans but we only really ever see one) are equally as open.  The Dwarves seem far less likely to have ever had a matriarchal tribe, but the feminine side of the Dwarves is still entirely open for new writers.

Now it may seem difficult to believe a devout prudish Catholic like Tolkien would ever be Ok with Homosexuality being explored in his mythology.  But he also talked about Applicability, that a story should be interpreted beyond the Author's intent, even in conflict with it.

And you know what, I think it's telling that Tolkien never condemned Homosexuality at any point in his Legendarium (Lewis did with the Hardcaslte character in The Hideous Strength).  In-spite of how G rated his writing was when it came to Sex, he did address sex acts he viewed as wrong.  Eol and Ar-Pharazon are both Rapists in at least one version of their tales.

And Incest is explored, most famously with The Children of Hurin.  But what most annoys me about Tolkien's sexual morality is how harsh he is even to relationships between First Cousins.  The Bible not only never condemns it but even encourages it to an extent.  For the most part being grossed out by Cousin relationships is entirely modern, or Victorian in origin perhaps.  But Tolkien not only codifies it as wrong in Elvish law, but has it at the root of Meaglin becoming the Elvish Benedict Arnold.

So that he considered Same-Sex love less worth condemning then Cousin love, is interesting.  Tolkien also enjoyed a Lesbian Nurse Story.

Everyone has talked endlessly about the things in Tolkien that can be interpreted as male Homoerotisism.  But since Tolkien never passes the Bechel Test, actual relationships between women are virtually non existent.  So we have to look elsewhere for an excuse to interpret a character as Lesbian.

Tolkien may not have been aware of it, but it is now well known that Virginity in the ancient mythologies Tolkien drew on was often code for Lesbianism.  The most popular Tolkien character to see as possibly Lesbian by virtue of her seeming aversion to men is Tar-Ancalmine.  Unfortunately she seems to make a very problematic stereotype whatever orientation you give her.

The top two women in Tolkien I like to interpret as Monosexually Lesbian are Haleth and Tar-Telperien.  Both were leaders of their people who made a point of never being married.

Haleth as an early First Age human I don't even visualize as a Medieval person.  The Human tribes during the First Age I see as Ancient, but not Greeco-Roman Ancient, more like the Ancient pre-civilized Celtic and German/Norse tribes.  Haleth however seems to me like exactly the kind of woman who would wind up being a lover of Artemis.  Since I see some of Artemis in Nessa, I wind up shipping them together.  But there is also room to invent for her a human lover from her tribe, or have her meet an Elf.  A human from another tribe seems unlikely as I think she was always pretty far away from them.

Tar-Telperien, I have seen two people in the Fandom community already say she is Asexual in their head canon.  That is an equally valid interpretation from what little we are told about her.  But I really want to see a High Fantasy story about a Lesbian Queen, with a lover probably from a lower class.  Possibly drawing some inspiration from Berenice and Mesopotamia (free cookie if you know what I'm referencing).  And as far as room for that in Tolkien goes, Tar-Telperien is the best option.

All three Queens of Numenor get a bad wrap.  I feel like Tar-Telperien is the easiest to defend.  Her condemnation is entirely in her foreign policy.  Crap was going on in Middle Earth between Sauron and The Elves, and she choose to stay out of it.  In real life that is exactly the foreign policy I prefer as a former Ron Paul supporter, The U.S. should stay out of wars fought on other Continents.  It's hard to apply that to a fantasy setting where one of the Geo-Political entities is a literal Fallen Angel.  And I'm sure Tolkien had the WWII era American Isolationists in mind when he wrote characters like this.  But I for one will not condemn her for refusing to take her people to a war that did not really involve them.

She is also notable for being the only Ruling Queen who's known to have had a brother.  Speculation on that has been done elsewhere.  What I note here is the fact that her brother's son became her successor, and we do not know a name or identity for the mother of that son.  I think it's possible that if Tar-Telperien was exclusively Homosexual, but had a lover who was Bi/Pansexual, or at least more open to male-female intercourse for the purpose of reproduction then she was.  I could see her marrying her lover to her brother.

I do indeed consider the possibly of actual legal Gay Marriage in Arda unlikely, For the Elves Hetero-Intercourse and Marriage are the same thing.  We've seen in Fantasy and maybe History also examples of something like the above suggested arrangement with men.  A man in a royal gay male paring marrying his lover's sister.   Like Renly and Loras on Game of Thrones.

The Tolkien women who have loved men could certainly still be Bi.  But there is one more character I want to discus who's Sexuality is entirely up for debate.

Nienor Niniel, daughter of Hurin and sister of Turn Turambar.  Her relationship with her brother came about from the dragon Glaurung's manipulation of events, an argument can be made it tells us nothing about her actual Sexual Orientation.

You may be thinking "all he did it seems was wipe her memory?".  The key thing I think in Tolkien's mind was that their ignorance of their relationship to each other caused their natural sibling bond to be misinterpreted as romantic.  It didn't at all happen simply because she thought Turambar was Hot.

I found one Fan Fiction once were Niniel had a romantic relationship with Nellas before she went to search for Turin.  Then she survives her jump into the water, Nellas tracks her down and they raise the baby together.

Update:I'd like to thank Dawn Felagund for identifying the Quote I mentioned.

http://dawnfelagund.tumblr.com/post/119237448828/jaredmithrandir-olorin-tolkien-would-have-wanted

"I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd."

Another additional note. On my connecting Nessa to Artemis, It is notable that in the oldest versions Tolkien wrote she wasn't Tulkas wife yet, that was a separate Aniur.