Yknow what I LOVE about the Star Trek fandom? It’s ANCIENT. I had a talk with a nice old lady at the old persons home that my great grandma is in and she noticed my Spock shirt and was like “oh I love that show I thought the premise was lovely” and you all know THE PREMISE is trekspeak for spirk and I was like “do you accept the premise because I do” and she looked at me with the eyes of someone who is reliving their otp moments and she said “the premise is all I wrote about, dear” and we just talked about spirk for a hella long time and I just love how age doesn’t matter in this fandom you can be ninety and still be the biggest spirk bitch ever how rad is that
Reblogging to spread knowledge about the Premise, because I absolutely love that bit of fandom, and I want to make sure that it survives. (and yay to everyone who is part of today’s 10,000!)
hate it when pets learn words, my dog flips out when he hears "greenie" so we had to start saying "G word" but now he knows G word so we have to say shit like "are we out of emerald indulgences"
we have passed through "can you feed the dog?" and are nearly out of "canst thou nutriate the hound" and are going to have to come up with something else soon
We evaluated fandoms that were disqualified or borderline in the past few years of Festivids and generated a list of 182 fandoms that we have disqualified in advance of this year's festivids. Please check this list in advance of nominations to ensure that you don't waste a nomination on a disqualified fandom!
Festivids Disqualifications 2024.
If you think we've made an error, please comment here to let us know.
Fandoms that were eligible in 2023 but are now disqualified for 2024 include: Andor, Blade (1998 Movie Series), Doom Patrol (TV), Everything Everywhere All At Once, Futurama, HIStory2 - 越界 | HIStory2: Crossing the Line (TV), Last Night in Soho, Maurice (1987 Film), Medici: Masters of Florence | I Medici 1 (2016), Miami Vice (TV), My Own Private Idaho (1991), Nimona (Film), Paprika (2006), S.C.I.谜案集 | S.C.I. Mystery (TV), Schitt's Creek, Spyro Game Series, Star Trek Strange New Worlds, Star Wars: Ahsoka (TV), The Bear (TV), The Little Mermaid (Live Action), The Wheel of Time (TV), The White Queen (TV), แค่เพื่อนครับเพื่อน | Bad Buddy: the Series (TV) RPF, 대박부동산 | Sell Your Haunted House (TV), and 대박부동산 | Sell Your Haunted House (TV).
We also evaluated a few new fandoms for scale.
These new fandoms are ineligible for Festivids: Avatar the Last Airbender (Live Action 2024), Fallout (2024 TV), My Lady Jane (2024 TV), The Acolyte (2024 TV), พิษเบ๊บ | Pit Babe (2023), and 눈물의 여왕 | Queen of Tears.
This new fandom is eligible for Festivids: 墨雨云间 | The Double.
One fandom that was disqualified last year may now be eligible: 莲花楼 | Mysterious Lotus Casebook (TV). This is due to massive takedowns on youtube - 97 of the vids on our playlist were removed since last year - but we will take some time to review new vids.
Thanks everyone for your feedback on the rules questions we asked a few weeks ago! Here are our final rulings before we open nominations:
Gen AI vids: We've added some more specific language to the "evaluating rarity" document that specifically says we won't count gen-AI spambot vids as vids for the purposes of disqualifying fandoms. That is, a fandom won't be counted as "too big" for festivids due to a gen-ai spambot. We also clarified that gift vids must be fan made.
Umbrella fandoms about curation: We've added a rule to Umbrella fandoms that they can't be curated lists. There were some persuasive comments arguing that curated lists break the rule about "fandom cohesiveness." However, though they can't be nominated as Umbrella fandoms, some curated lists could be nominated as fandoms on their own. That is, "Films Referenced in the Celluloid Closet [UMBRELLA]" will not be allowed this year, but you could nominate "The Celluloid Closet (1996 Film)" and ask for a vid about the curation choices involved in making that film.
Still image vids: We've removed the rule prohibiting still image vids for both RPF canons and moving video canons. Still image vids will both count for disqualifications (if they are vid-like, see Evaluating Rarity for definitions) and will be allowed as submissions for gift vids.
Cosplay vids: We added a note to the evaluating rarity faq indicating that cosplay vids would count for Festivids if they were vid-like (see Evaluating Rarity for definitions), but not if they were fashion-show-like or scene-like.
RPF fandom overlap: Broadly, people felt that the current system was fine, so we're not changing any rules here.
Vidding current events: This was a complicated question, and we got a variety of feedback on it from different vidding communities, including people who feel strongly that vids are for entertainment and people who feel strongly that vids are for many purposes. Festivids has a long history of trying to be welcoming to multiple vidding cultures, vidding styles, and vidding themes and topics. For example, Festivids has previously rejected calls to only "count" English language vids for disqualification or to prohibit dialog use in vids, and has agreed to add fandoms like Festivids (the event itself). We feel that our ruling is part of that tradition at Festivids and part of maintaining the ethos of Festivids.
We want to preserve the ability to nominate unusual things for Festivids, while also taking concerns about political topics seriously. We looked at the rules that participants suggested in the comments of our last post, via discord, and via DM—objective rules for types of fandoms that those participants thought should be excluded—and evaluated those rules next to the existing body of work created by vidders for previous Festivids. Many of the proposals addressed additional topics we hadn't discussed in our original question, restricting various fictional, documentary, and non-political non-sports events. Over sixty previous Festivids would be excluded by some or all of the suggestions. To us, those exclusions point to an issue with these proposals: there isn't a single hard and fast rule that would work well to balance political concerns with the history and culture of Festivids, which has permitted political and documentary vids for 13+ years.
We recognise that there were particular concerns raised about vids about current events in the context of a gift exchange, but don't believe a blanket ban on e.g. "political topics" or "documentaries" or "non-entertainment current events" is the right approach, both due to the difficulty in defining those terms and the large number of sources that they would exclude, from nature documentaries to TV shows about recent historical events.
As with all nominations, political events and documentaries will be reviewed by the team of nominations reviewers based on the new rules below, our preexisting nominations rules, and our code of conduct. The rules below do also allow us to exclude a fandom on a case by case basis, even if we can't articulate an objective rule that perfectly covers all situations. If something comes up that we're unsure about, we will ask the community. If you're interested in giving additional feedback about nominations, we post those questions to social media during the nominations period.
We are making the following rules changes:
We added a rule prohibiting some kinds of nominations at Festivids, including real life humanitarian disasters, genocides, mass murderers, serial killers, and dictators, regardless of how long ago they occurred. That is, the rule now explicitly states that you cannot nominate these things under the RPF tag as standalone fandoms. (This has never occurred before but we want to preempt it, and almost all commenters agreed that this set of topics was reasonable to exclude.)
We added a note that the mods may also exclude a fandom from Festivids on a case-by-case basis.
We added a new line to the code of conduct prohibiting giving someone an intentionally triggering or trolling vid.
We're ramping up for a new Festivids season (yikes) and before we start, we have some questions that came up last year and we would appreciate your feedback.
These questions are about:
Umbrella Fandoms About Curation
RPF Fandom Overlap and Definitions
Do These Video Types Count as Vids?
Current Events, Politics, and other RL Fandoms
More details under the keep reading. If you have feedback for us please reply here, reply on the dreamwidth mirror, or email festivids at gmail dot com.
Umbrella Fandoms About Curation:
Last year, we had two nominated Umbrella fandoms that were curated lists - "Films Excerpted in The Celluloid Closet" and "Queer Short Cuts Collection." We allowed both of these last year, but we wanted to check in about this idea. Both of these Umbrella fandoms rely on a third party making a list or collection; our Umbrella rules explicitly say that you can't make an Umbrella fandom that's "my favorite movies," which could also be an example of a curated collection.
Some examples to help us think about this:
Films Excerpted in The Celluloid Closet (note that this particular fandom is not eligible this year because My Own Private Idaho is now too big for Festivids)
Queer Short Cuts Collection
Art in the Louvre
Films on the Syllabus of "Cyborgs, Science, and Gender," UCSC
SyFy Channel Halloween Movie Marathon 2018
The question: should we allow Umbrella fandoms that rely on curation? And if so, where's the line between a curated collection and my personal blog about my fave movies?
RPF Fandom Overlap and Definitions
We currently define RPF fandoms in ways that are somewhat overlapping and difficult to parse, and we'd like to review these definitions before the next year. For these fandoms, what counts as an RPF fandom at festivids includes both the kinds of vids we'd look for when assessing fandom eligibility and the kinds of vids we'd expect a vidder to turn in for one of those fandoms. In other words, how can we make sure that a participant gets the kind of vid they're expecting, and how can we evaluate whether a fandom is too big for festivids.
Current definitions:
Sports Event (like "Tour de France 2024 RPF"): Vids should be about (or partially about) the Tour de France in 2024, but could focus on just one participant or on a team. For example, a vid about Tadej Pogačar in the 2024 Tour de France would fit this request, and that vid could include some footage of earlier races in setting up the narrative. This makes this category exceptionally difficult to screen for rarity, because it might mean watching much more of a vid than we usually do, and also making judgment calls about whether a vid is sufficiently focused on the specific event.
Sports Team (like "Las Vegas Aces RPF"): Vids should be about people on that team, and could be about individuals or the team as a whole. For the Las Vegas Aces, for example, a vid about their title run as a team or a vid about A'ja Wilson would fulfill this request. This category is pretty easy to explain and to screen for rarity in comparison to sports events!
TV Show/Movie (like "Our Flag Means Death RPF"): As with the sports team, we currently interpret this to include vids about any of the actors on the show. So, for example, we'd count a vid about Taika Waititi's career (if it included OFMD) and we'd count a vid using Vico Ortiz's behind the scenes instagram videos. (We do make judgment calls here, because a lot of long-running TV shows have had one-episode guest stars who are way more famous than anyone else on the show—if Harrison Ford cameoed on a tv show, we wouldn't disqualify the fandom based on that.)
Special Cases (like "Lord of the Rings Production Videos"): In a situation with a filmed making-of or behind the scenes video series, you can also nominate those videos as a fandom by themselves. So the 2003 Lord of the Rings series, which released a bunch of making-of videos on the DVDs, can have a category that's exclusively behind-the-scenes video. A TV show with a behind-the-scenes instagram account can also be nominated separately as a social media account.
Sports Event vs Sports Team, and Show RPF vs Individual Actor RPF are also some of the few places in Festivids where a participant could, in theory, ask for effectively the same fandom multiple times. This hasn't been a problem to date, but it does run counter to our standard rule of avoiding fandom overlap. Some examples:
Maximize your Tadej Pogačar: you could ask for 2024 Tour de France, and also ask for UAE Team Emirates bicycling team, and also ask for Tadej Pogačar RPF, and also ask for Tadej Pogačar's instagram account, with effectively the same optional details for each request.
Maximize your Taika Waititi: you could ask for Our Flag Means Death RPF, and also ask for What We Do in the Shadows Film RPF, and also ask for Taika Waititi RPF, with effectively the same optional details for each request.
Optional details are optional, but that's still a lot of overlap and could be 50% of someone's requested vids!
As you can see, there are some problems with how these different kinds of RPF fandoms are currently defined; we'd really appreciate your ideas and solutions. Do these categories make sense to you as a participant? Is there a better way to structure this?
Also, is it reasonable to only have the behind-the-scenes category of RPF fandoms in situations where there are collected videos (like Lord of the Rings or social media accounts)?
Once we talk this through, we'll be clarifying these categories in "How to Nominate Your Fandom" so that participants will understand what kind of vid you'd likely get for each type of RPF nomination.
Is This a Vid?
Some genres of fanworks that we don't have an official ruling on:
CMV (cosplay music videos): A vid in which the visuals are fans in cosplay, especially common for book fandoms. Here are some examples of the genre; some of these are more "showing off cosplay" and some are more vid-like. Festivids has had a gift vid which used cosplay videos before: Graveyard Girlfriend by livre_libre, which used fan reaction videos and fan cosplay.
Still image vids: A vid that uses photos rather than video footage. The current Festivids rule is that a gift vid for a video source must use at least some moving video—so a vid for a movie could use moving video source from the movie, fanart, animatics, etc, but couldn't use still frames from the movie except in a limited way.
We have fandoms where the above rule about still photos in video fandoms isn't clear. For example, is an RPF fandom about a single person a 'video source'? For a lot of RPF fandoms, especially famous actor RPF fandoms, there's a big still-image-only vidding fandom. As an example, here are two playlists that were created for the same fandom: Cate Blanchett vids meeting the Festivids criteria (moving video) and Cate Blanchett vids that are all or mostly stills and fashion photos. It feels really weird to be scrolling though a bunch of vids like this and splitting them apart based on whether there's "enough" moving video footage! Festivids has accepted gift vids for RPF fandoms that use significant amounts of still images, often for the same reason that these fandoms are vidded with stills on youtube: a lot of the fandom is represented by stills. Here's an example of an RPF vid made for Festivids that contains a bunch of still photos: You're My Best Friend, an Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart vid, by such_heights. This vid manipulates the stills, the same way one would in a comics vid; it's not a slideshow.
We also have expanded the kinds of vids that are accepted for moving video fandoms, which also makes this rule a bit confusing! We would accept a vid made for Monkey Man that uses stills of fanart, but we wouldn't accept a vid that uses primarily stills from the film itself. Does this rule still make sense for moving video source given this new context?
Generative AI vids: vids made 100% with generative AI, with generative AI creating new footage and/or performing 100% of the editing of the video. Nominations volunteers pointed out the growing trend of these vids last year and noted that our current rules don't say anything about these vids, so we want to talk about this before adding it to the rules. Our current definition of vids includes "fan made," which in the opinion of the Festivids mods would prohibit this kind of solely-gen-ai vid, but we wanted to ask if anyone feels strongly about this.
Vids that use limited tools that are sometimes called AI—like "remove background noise" or "morph these two shots" or "use a smart tracking effect"—are definitely accepted as they are fan made. We're not talking about limited use tools used by vidders to accomplish particular tasks, but about the 100% AI-generated vids that are showing up all over youtube.
Current Events, Politics, and other RL Fandoms
Last year, we had a non-sports current event fandom nominated for Festivids: "WGA / SAG-AFTRA 2023 Strike (Event)." A related kind of event has been nominated before, when "RPF - Black Lives Matter movement" was nominated (and vidded) for Festivids 2015.
We wanted to think through the kinds of current event, politics, and real people fandoms that would be allowed as fandoms at Festivids, as well as the best language for how to describe them. Current events and political movements aren't listed in the "How to Nominate Your Fandom" list, and last year a participant pointed out that "RPF" feels like a weird framing for a fandom of this type (and that "fandom" can also feel like a weird word to describe a political event or movement).
It's worth noting here that very few political movement fandoms have ever been nominated or vidded, and that when they have been nominated the intentions are very clearly supportive—vidders want to draw attention to and support an important message or movement. However, there's nothing in the existing rules that says these types of vids have to be supportive—our rules say "optional details are optional"—so in theory someone could have made an anti-union anti-WGA / SAG-AFTRA vid last year despite the intentions of the requestor.
There's also nothing in the existing rules about vids using real-life footage of war, humanitarian crises, or death.
Festivids does have a code of conduct that prohibits harassment and discrimination.
The intention of this conversation is to make sure that we understand these kinds of nominations and have rules in place for them, so we're not just reacting in the moment if another activist event or political movement is nominated. We also want to make sure that we clarify this language in the "How to Nominate Your Fandoms" FAQ this year.
Some types of current events, political events, or real people that we could use to think through this category as a whole:
Sports events (for example, Tour de France 2024 RPF): currently explicitly included in the How to Nominate Your Fandom doc, under sports, and called RPF there.
WGA / SAG-AFTRA 2023 Strike (Event): nominated last year, called "Event" with no RPF tag.
RPF - Black Lives Matter movement: nominated in 2015, called "movement" with an RPF tag.
An ongoing political event: what if someone nominated the 2024 USA Presidential Election?
A humanitarian emergency: what if someone nominated the current famine in the Democratic Republic of Congo?
A real life murderer or dictator: what if someone nominated Jeffrey Dahmer RPF? (For comparison's sake: Yuletide has a rule specifically about situations like real life serial killers.)
Please let us know your thoughts on this category. We'd like your feedback on the kinds of fandoms that should be nominateable as well as what kind of language we should use to describe the fandoms.
And finally, a minor rules clarification about the Festivids check in period. We post the check-in post, and then follow up with anyone who doesn't check in via email. This year, if a vidder doesn't reply to that email within a week, we will send their recipient to pinch hit just to be safe. The original gift vidder won't be considered to have defaulted until after the final submission deadline.
I've been watching "Agatha Christie's Marple" for the past few days and it's pretty good! Marple adaptations all tend to have a better caliber of actors than a lot of bog-standard mystery shows (looking at you, "Madame Blanc"), and while Joan Hickson's Marple is right up there with David Suchet's Poirot and Jeremy Brett's Holmes as "literally can never be beaten, these are the best anyone's done it," both Geraldine McEwan and Julia McKenzie do a fantastic job as Miss Marple.
Then I got to "The Secret of Chimneys," Season 5 episode 2
and guys
Guys
So there's a murder of a viscount, like there is, and this detective Finch rolls up and immediately spots Miss Marple (in her NIGHTIE! standing at the window like some kind of hussy, honestly Jane) and doffs his cap to her with that little smile that makes you go, "huh."
At this point I've watched a couple dozen Miss Marple episodes where she goes through detectives like wildfire and this guy's supposed to be a "*guru*" so I'm expecting some battle of the egos or something and like, Stephen Dillane is great! But bleh, I might have to skip this one.
Then my dude asks Miss Marple to SHOW HIM THE BODY, with a pleased little smile at her as she goes "uhhhhhhhh but my knitting?" (He even does that thing where you use someone's honorific and wait for them to give you their name, and that's when I was like "ohhh this bitch knows exactly who she is.") What follows is what I can only describe as a meet-cute in the secret passageway where the viscount was shot (and in fact the body is STILL THERE) and where Miss Marple literally asks the police equivalent of "is there a Mrs Finch" and he looks at her like this:
At which point I'm like "ohhh my dude not only knows who she is, he deliberately came here without a sergeant so he could draft her," and sure enough he just starts...handing her pieces of evidence like "hey babe can you decipher this note for me thanks love you" while Miss Marple is like, "this approval and camaraderie coming from a cop... not sure if want."
Next is a series of romantic strolls through the gardens while they discuss murder, during which Finch reveals his undying love I mean his research into Miss Marple and the "dozen case files" of her previous exploits that he's collected like some deranged fanboy. Miss Marple responds to this by BLUSHING LIKE A SCHOOLGIRL and stammering about how pish tosh it's nothing really, and I couldn't find a gif of it but he's staring at her like this:
Yeah I bet u r tempted
He also makes a half-hearted attempt at negging her "amateur sleuth" status, only to then immediately assure her that he makes like, so much money being a big fancy detective and can keep her in all the yarn and garden seed she could ever desire.
There's also a late-night tryst at the compost pile right after Finch has been (mildly) poisoned and Miss Marple is like "men are so weak" as she roots through the garbage for clues.
Not how he wanted their first date to go D:
The next morning there's another murder which: bummer, but also allows the two of them to read love letters together and for Finch to give Miss Marple the following look as she explains how secret assignations among lovers can "quicken the ardor":
Miss Marple then goes onto solve the murders and btw hands over the priceless diamond that's been literally missing for two literal decades that she found in her spare time. The entire scene features Finch looking at her like this:
After the dust settles, Finch and Miss Marple have a lovely moment where he calls himself "another one of your casualties," then super casually mentions that he's probably going to have to go on assignment to use the diamond in a daring international espionage case and I can't decide if he's asking Miss Marple to go with him or simply trying to show her that he is cool and smart and would make an excellent wife, but either way the episode ends with her turning him down and Jane, we need to talk about your priorities.
Anyway I've already written 2K about the subsequent 10-year epistolary romance these two have following this episode because I make poor choices.
#one of the many MANY things I loved about this movie was how it dealt with the issues that are unique to Black women#that it’s Black men not having a lot of respect for what they do#that it’s white women not having a lot of respect for what they do#that it’s white men not having any respect for what they do#(and in fact sabotaging their ability to do it on a daily basis)#and showing how these women dealt with all of these different issues in different ways#and with different levels of success#and the scene in the car where Dorothy is talking about how Mary and Katherine are succeeding while she’s still stuck was SO GOOD#because it’s true that success for one means advancement for all but it doesn’t always feel like that#and then when Dorothy at the end ENSURES that her success means success for all#it was just UGH SO GOOD#anyway this moment is where he fell in love with Katherine and it’s really really beautiful#hidden figures motherfuckers (via @leupagus)
