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Fandom: Defying Gravity (1997)
Fic Title: The Exs
Fic Authors:

pairatime
Type: digital cover
Media: MS Publisher
Art Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: Griff/Pete, OCs
Art Warnings: none

Ahh, sorry I'm late! It's Small Fandom Bang time again, and this year I got

pairatime's fic, which you can read here! I was interested in this idea of how jealousy distorts perception and went with a sort of fragmented approach with a palette that wouldn't be out-of-place in the 90s. Marcus is a stock photo by Tanya Volt and Andrew is Paul from The Object of My Affection, also about queer jealousy in the 90s.

( The Exs )

Fandom: First Kill
Fic Title: Love's not time's fool
Fic Authors:

melime &

bruna_g
Type: traditional cover
Media: coloured pencil on paper; MS Publisher
Art Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: Calliope Burns/Juliette Fairmont
Art Warnings: none

It's that time of year again: Small Fandom Bang! This round I got paired with

melime &

bruna_g who wrote a wonderful fic you can find here. It's much more introspective and evocative than action-based, so I figured a more Symbolist take would suit (which was totally intentional...). I imagine this as the moment directly after the fic. Enjoy!

( Love's not time's fool )

Title: 🆓🗣🗒
Fandom: Star Trek DS9
Language: 😀
Original Title: Free Advice
Author: colorcoded
Original Language: English
Rating: NC-17
Characters/Pairings: Odo/Quark
Warnings: explicit, first time, body horror, cops
Summary: Set during the beginning part of The Ascent. Stuck on an 8-day shuttlecraft journey with only Odo for company? Quark is starting to crack. And so is Odo.

hey... so as part of WIP Big Bang, I claimed art for the sequel fic by Colorcoded, and it took me forever to figure out what I wanted to do, until I realized I really needed to immortalize this story in Emoji. I took my inspiration from Emoji Dick and from this iconic SPN post. I always forget it takes FOREVER to translate something, so I only managed to get this part done, which is essentially the Prologue, but I'm proud of it. Some things were pretty easy to transliterate/translate (I'll leave debates about whether Emoji are their own language to cunning linguists), but some things were surprisingly hard like random body parts or parts of a room. Also it is EXTREMELY frustrating that Emoji look so different across platforms and some don't even recognize certain ones, this was written in iOS but filtered through whatever set AO3 uses. Anywho, I learned way too much about Emoji for this, so here, enjoy my shitposting and the author's smut

Fandom: Supernatural, The Mechanisms
Fic Title: I'd Find Him Through the Depths of Space
Fic Author: Broken_Twisted_Lullabies (AO3)
Type: diorama
Media: plastic display case, fabric and thread, stuffing, marker, tape, glue, craft foam, ink, cardboard
Art Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: (spoilers)
Art Warnings: nudity, imprisonment/medical abuse, coma, fic spoilers

Ahhh, I can't believe I got this

wipbigbang art claim done, and on time! This piece kicked my ass and it's not quite what I envisioned but it still came out pretty cool if I do say so myself. This is from the climax of Broken_Twisted_Lullabies' intriguing fic, which you can find here! The main submission is the first pic, the rest are some detail shots and a glimpse at my process making this.

( I'll Find Him Through the Depths of Space )

CW: pregnancy, homophobia, heterosexism, transphobia, alcohol, fat-shaming, food

Starting out as a joke about Jeff’s softball team whose absence requires Audrey to join temporarily, by the end of s5 Brenda has become a pivotal person in Jeff and Audrey’s lives. She’s not the first openly queer recurring character but she is the longest lasting (not including leads). Brenda agrees to be Audrey and Jeff’s surrogate, which deploys queer reproductive technologies in service of heterosexuality and also serves to contrast her relationships with Audrey and Jeff’s. Brenda injects a queer sensibility into the show that frankly makes it more watchable as a queer fan. Welcome to my Brenda appreciation post.

( Read more... )

CW: queerbaiting, arranged marriage, toxic relationship, workplace abuse, cultural imperialism, amatonormativity, implied pedophilia, implied incest, fatphobia, misogyny, Orientalism, racism, codependency, BDSM

As we saw, structurally Timmy’s introduction puts him forward as a love interest for Russell, albeit as a queerbaiting joke. That said, an appeal to romantic structures is really the only plausible justification for why their relationship is so all over the place given how infrequently Timmy appears in s3, and s4 only expands the bierotic space their relationship occupies. We’ll return to how their story troubles the amatonormativity of romantic plots, but currently I want to focus on how s4 builds up their relationship as a complicated interpersonal connection instead of simply a plot device, a connection that troubles the idea that becoming the love interest is a good thing.

( Read more... )

CW homophobia, biphobia, sexual harassment, hostile work environment, racism

As originally conceived, Rules was intended to be a show about heterosexuals doing straight people stuff. And while there are references to queerness in the first two seasons, there are few explicitly queer characters. Because the first two seasons were establishing the characters’ relationships to each other, their relationships to others outside their group weren’t really explored. But with s3, we start to see them interact more with the world around them, and given they live in NYC, their social context is a lot queerer than they might have expected. The queer characters in Rules are often props to showcase the characters’ tolerance for difference (or lack thereof) instead of complex subjects in their own right, but this does change somewhat as the show progresses, especially if you consider some of the mains to be queer.

( Read more... )

CW: heteronormativity, biphobia, bi erasure, sexism, toxic masculinity, transphobia

The main point of contrast in Rules is between Jeff and Audrey’s relationship and Jennifer and Adam’s. Jeff and Audrey’s lengthy experience with heterosexual marriage gives them strong opinions on how to make a marriage work, whereas Jennifer and Adam’s relative inexperience means that they encounter many obstacles for the first time. The two couples help each other become better partners, though usually not without getting worse first. There are several axes on which the two couples are foils, such as income level and age, which shapes the difference in their responses to issues. But I also argue that part of the reason is that Jennifer and Adam have more fluid conceptions of sexuality and gender roles that make the hyperheterosexuality of Jeff and Audrey’s relationship unrealistic and uncomfortable for them.

( Read more... )

CW: heteronormativity, compulsory heterosexuality, sexism, reproduction and infertility

Rules of Engagement is a guilty pleasure of mine because it’s so problematic and also just so very straight. Its humour skews a lot more conservative than most of the other shows in this study and it’s definitely not as thematically dense either. Usually this is the kind of show my parents would have on in the background at home, it wasn’t necessarily something we would drop everything to watch. Like most non-soaps of the 2000s and earlier, Rules is designed to be watched in such a way that you can miss a week and not be totally lost, and in fact you aren’t expected to have seen every episode, certainly not right before the next one. Episodic appointment television, especially a laugh-track sitcom, works better with conservative themes because the story is expected to regress to the mean at the end of the episode, meaning character and audience growth have little expectation of permanence. The audience needs to be able to understand the relationships and storyworld at a glance, which rewards stories that conform to stereotypes and well-worn tropes and that maintain a status quo as long as possible. That lack of persistence of memory affects the type of fandom that emerges around traditional sitcoms compared to soaps or sci-fi; cult fandom tends to be less drawn to these types of shows because there’s little payoff for such systematic devotion. Thus, applying a cult fandom approach to watching this is tedious in some ways and illuminating in others. The main takeaway doing so for Rules has given me is this: the straights are Not Okay^TM.

( Read more... )

CW: unreality, paranoia, schizophrenia, psychosis, suicide, graphic depictions of violence, mind control, delusions, gaslighting, experimentation, child abuse, medication

( Delusions and Moral Entanglement )

CW: ableism, body horror, gaslighting, emotional and financial abuse, euthanasia, drugging, overdose, genocide

( Cookie Rights Are Disability Rights )

CW: infidelity, heteronormativity and compulsory heterosexuality, problem with no name, suicidal ideation, sexualized violence, assimilation

“Striking Vipers” is clearly a love story, but what’s less clear is whose love story it is: Theo and Danny? Danny and Karl? Roxette and Lance? All five together? The episode neatly wraps up the immediate question—how do the five of them move forward—without addressing the larger issues at play both before and after their lives collide. Most reviewers have noted how the scenario presented in the ep raises several provocative questions about digital sexuality (Mellor; Shaw-Williams), virtual gender (Handlen), Black masculinity (Grant, Young, and McKenzie; Paul), queer fantasy (Griffiths and Jeffery), and bromance (Lodge), among others, none of which are definitively resolved. But I think that’s actually one of the strengths of this episode: an understated approach allows for all these themes to remain complicated and holds space for the messiness of adult relationships. Furthermore, the indeterminacy is part of the point in the queer aesthetic permeating the show, however much it ostensibly is about heterosexuality. Because of the inescapable backdrop of straight suburbia, the contingent, playful approach they take towards navigating it together is satisfying and retains a resistant queerness.

( Read more... )

CW: racism, blackface, torture, incarceration, racialized violence, Nazis, body horror, sexual assault, ableism, euthanasia, death, white supremacism, self-harm

( Racial Politics of Audiencing )

Fandom: The Magnificent Seven (1960)
Fic Title: Desencuentro
Fic Author:

sweety_mutant
Type: traditional banner
Media: pastel on paper
Art Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: Chris Adams
Art Warnings: religious imagery, death, fic spoilers

Right, yes, that's today! I also claimed a fic by

sweety_mutant for Small Fandom Bang, which you can find here. It took a couple drafts to get to something I was happy with, but I think it turned out okay!

( Desencuentro )

CW: amatonormativity, surveillance, manipulation, compulsory heterosexuality, dissociation, kink

( All Real Love Is Queer )

CW: torture, body horror, dehumanization, sexual assault, misogyny, racism

( Revolt of the Dolls )

CW: death, spirituality, toxicity, ableism, euthanasia, homophobia, bury your gays, unreality

( Queer Afterlives )

CW: compulsory heterosexuality, bullying, ableism, commodification, femmephobia

~~my meow meow beanz!~~

( Queer Precarity )

Title: Mr. Jumpy Legs: The Unauthorized Documentary
Type:gen, crack, crossover, mockumentary, academia
Word Count: ~10.1K
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: Mr. Jumpy Legs, Tara, Michael, the Doorman, Janet, Eleanor, Original Human Characters, Original Frog Characters
Warnings: canon-typical (Sex House) torture, imprisonment, abuse, exploitation, atmosphere of sexual coercion (no coerced sex acts depicted), amatonormativity, cruelty to animals, non-consensual drug use, cults, mental illness; graphic depictions of animal death, animal experimentation
Summary: On a fateful trip to Earth, Michael Realman gifts the Doorman an actual, living frog. *campaign attack ad voice* But who is Mr. Jumpy Legs? Who indeed.

A/N: At last, I can post one of my favourite fics I've ever written! This was written for

smallfandombang Round 12, and the fucking fabulous art by

dejesss can be found here. (I'm begging you check it out it's such quality shitposting and I can't stop staring at it) Missed out on being the first Sex House fic on AO3 by six weeks, but I finally finished a fic for Small Fandom Bang!
LMAO almost forgot to link to the fic, does help.

Okay, unpopular opinion time: I think Family Shatters is better than Zero, and I actually kinda like it. It’s still not the best spin-off miniseries, but I get what they were going for. I think to understand and appreciate Family Shatters, you have to be familiar with and enjoy fluff as a genre. In one sense, I think it knows what their audience wants, but because we don’t really care about the characters beforehand and crucially we don’t create the fluff ourselves, it falls short of its intentions. But I think Family Shatters points out an important tension between what fans want a show to do and what they want to do to a show.

( Read more... )