Fandom Promo Post

[ashling]

Promote your fandoms here! Talk about where to find them, how long they take to consume, what you like about them, what ships you think are great, etc. etc.

Comments

[gloss]

I have some promos, mostly ideas for safety fandoms:

Not a safety, but far from a time-consuming read, believe me:
Moths - Ouida | free on Google Books or Internet Archive
~550 pgs
This book is my current obsession. This promo post by lunabee34 got me interested. Published in 1880, the novel addresses serious contemporary social issues like marriage, adultery, the status of women, divorce, political upheaval, and class conflict. But it's also a tasty, chewy tropefest of scandal and stoicism, sadism and mutual pining and true forever love. The characters are ridiculous, the prose is beautiful and OTT, and the pining. The pining is out of this world. One lover kisses the hem of his beloved's coat! He sends her secret flowers nestled in large bouquets and messages via jewellery!!

There's also plenty of room for non-romantic fun, including hatesex between Prince Zouroff and the gorgeous tenor (they eventually duel!), femdom with Mme. de Sonnaz, and more.

This is a messy, complicated, imperfect book and I love it so fucking much.

Safeties:
Concept: a witch cat that's too fat to fly | animatic | 1:17 minutes
The title says everything you need to know, but the execution is adorable and there's so much room for storytelling and exploration. Who's the witch? How'd the cat get big? What adventures do they go on?

Parnassus on Wheels - Christopher Morley | book | 35K words
free on Project Gutenberg (linked above)
A woman buys a bookseller's wagon and hits the road. It's funny and wry and I want my own Parnassus.

Earn $20K EVERY MONTH by being your own boss (Brian David Gilbert) | short film | 6 minutes
HAUNTED SPREADSHEETS. So very creepy and smart.

The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water - Zen Cho | novella | 33K words
available wherever you get your (e)books
Modern-set wuxia with LGBT characters and quiet, serviceable magic.

The Tea Master and the Detective - Aliette de Bodard | novella | 35K words
availability info
Blurb: In a galactic empire inspired by Vietnamese culture, a detective and a mindship must team up to solve a mystery. Very loosely inspired by A Study in Scarlet, if Holmes were an eccentric scholar, and Watson a grumpy discharged war mindship. It's lovely and creepy as hell and really cool.

[exchangebench]

Allow me to be lazy for a moment and link to two promo posts I've already made, with the uniting theme of "over-the-top horror manga starring bisexual men who aren't particularly fussed about morality":

Starving Anonymous, a sci-fi horror romp featuring aliens, mad science, sexy cannibalism, and canon mpreg.

Ichi the Killer, a horror action adventure where a masochistic yakuza dude starts crushing on the sadistic serial killer dude who murdered his boss (who he was also crushing on).

[kitsunerei88]

One promo here, for a video game which I would say had a ton of promise that it just never lived up to, and for which I would very much like someone to take from the obviously terrible and incompetent writers and make into something wonderful.

The Suicide of Rachel Foster is a walking simulator set in an abandoned hotel in Montana during a blizzard in the early ‘90s. You play as Nicole, the daughter of the hotel’s proprietors, who is returning to inspect the property before selling it. Her only companion is Irving, a FEMA agent who communicates with Nicole over a primitive cell phone. Together, they dig through the hotel, searching for the truth about Rachel’s death. It's available on Steam and takes about 3 hours to play. You don't need to play it, and it'll probably make you motion sick if you try.

All you need to do is read this review and watch a couple Let's Plays because it's a terrible game and the ending doesn't live up to its promise in the least.

Areas that I think that a ton of promise:

-- Leonard's relationship with Rachel. It was a problem.
-- Irving. Seriously, he is a problem.
-- Rachel. This game is supposed to be about her death, and she doesn't exist. It is a problem.
-- Nicole. She starts this game as a relatable angry-af survivor and that disappears by the end of the game. It is a problem.

Essentially, if you write fic to FIX THINGS, please consider this game as a storyline in need of some extremely heavy fixing.

[with_rainfall]

This fandom is... possibly only available in Australia, at the link below.

It’s a coming-of-age book about a girl called Charlie Duskin. It’s about grief, loneliness, friendship and all the good things YA books are always about. And it’s a funny, sweet, honest book written marvellously. The republished/revised edition, A Little Wanting Song, is markedly different and I personally am not a fan.

Link: https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/aw/d/B0047Y1IS8/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Safety Fandom: Dwarf Fortress

[phyrry]

Dwarf Fortress is a free rogue-like adventure/city-builder simulation game with an amazing depth of scope and a remarkably awful interface. Procedural generation applies to everything from your dwarves' food preferences and favorite kinds of pets to the body material and abilities of the demons and gigantic monsters that may wander in. This leads to some really fucking awesome emergent storytelling, and also a really steep learning curve. (Oops?)

There are no canonical characters; everything is procedurally generated. There is no story but what you make for yourself. The endgame, as such, probably involves death, screaming, and/or magma.

You don't have to be good at the game to enjoy it; some might say it is most entertaining when you have no idea what you're doing. The game's tagline is, after all, Losing Is Fun!

Some histories of single fortresses, from founding to destruction:
🔹Boatmurdered, the amazing Let's Play full of magma and murderous elephants that got me started back in 2010
🔹Bronzemurdered, a short comic by Tim Denee with text-only transcript available at the link
🔹Oilfurnace, another short comic by Tim Denee

Some other short examples of procedural storytelling:
🔹Notes To Urist, my favorite forum thread, has many MANY dwarfy tales. Pick a random page, read a few posts, and enjoy.
🔹Dwarf Fortress Stories is a blog with, again, many short dwarfy tales from the DF trenches.

Download the game at Bay 12 Games.
There is also a fantastic wiki at DwarfFortressWiki.org, good for all your reference needs.

Re: Safety Fandom: Dwarf Fortress

[ashling]

You have put in a lot of work into your research, and I really appreciate it. However, due to the steep learning curve, that howlongtobeat lists it at 66 hours, and that it generally takes more than five hours to reach the Underworld, which is the endgame as I have been informed, Dwarf Fortress will not be accepted as a Safety.

Re: Safety Fandom: Dwarf Fortress

[phyrry]

Fair!

Safety Fandom: Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion... - Sandia Labs

[phyrry]

Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant is a ~95k scientific report that incorporates ideas from experts in a variety of cultural and scientific disciplines on how to make effective long-term warnings for nuclear waste repositories.

The canon is essentially a massive bank of worldbuilding ideas to play with for a post-apocalyptic Earth in which our own civilization has been forgotten. There is also a short story included in section 5.1 of Appendix F (Team A's report) that has several named characters.

You can read excerpts or freely download the entire report as a searchable PDF.

Safety Fandom: Offworld by Celldweller (Album)

[chokolattejedi]

This is an awesome atmospheric sci-fi punk album with 3-5 distinct characters, depending on your interpretation.
- Lyrics and Tracklist
- Spotify Album
- Amazon Music Album

The earthling character features in two songs specifically, 'Too Many Tears'

There's too many tears, too many tears
Too many people in too many years
Some tears of laughter and some tears of pain
That break like a fever and fall like rain

and 'Last Night on Earth'

A restless strain I can't explain
As day fades into night
I turn my eyes towards the skies
Await the coming flight

In 'Tears' he references a Doctor and a Sister (in a context that implies a Nun/Nurse). 'Last Night' also ties to the track 'The Great Divide.'

The second set of characters are the Machine Male/Female. They are introduced in 'Awakening With You' on the cusp of sentience:

I am not certain if I have a heart
But I can imagine it breaking apart
If I could feel something then I'd want to start
With you

[...]

I'm processing the Salvation Code (It is written:)
"It's not good for machine to be alone"
And now my vision is so clear
I must wake another unit so she too is self-aware

The other songs have similar themes, but don't directly state their speaker, though Mother's Arms is likely not about the machines >.>

It is all lovely and atmospheric and ripe for the world building. And less than an hour long!

Safety Fandom: 教主和小师妹的故事 | Sect Leader and Little Shimei's Story (2019)

[phyrry]

Sect Leader and Little Shimei's Story is a fourteen-minute long live action video full of femslashy vibes and cultivation sect politics.

The video is available on Bilibili and extrapenguin has made their fansubs and some additional links available here.

[moongoddex]

Popping here because two of my fandoms don't show up on howlongtobeat/bingeclock;

Dr Frank's Build-A-Boyfriend is a free Otome on Steam. It's available here to play (Walkthrough here) or here to watch a playthrough if you're working on a tablet. (Good Ending pt 1 and Good Ending Final are mostly redundant videos on that playlist, save for the last 15(?) minutes of Final!)
It's cute, funny, and has a lot of potential for worldbuilding and post-ending fic.

Also; Pokemon Origins works as a primer for the plot of the Kanto games, standing alone as a self-contained story. There are 4 episodes at around 20 minutes each!

Palo Santo - Years & Years (Short Film) [SAFETY]

[yelp]

If you enjoy human/android relationships, a cyberpunk dystopian future, or power imbalance, you might enjoy this!

Premise: androids have taken over the world, but they thirst for real human emotion. They hunt down humans to perform for them in nightly cabarets, so they can vicariously experience ~feelings~ by watching.

There are two ways to consume it:

• as a short film (15 minutes long)
• as a series of three music videos (about 14 minutes altogether):
  • Sanctify
  • If You're Over Me
  • All For You

-arrives late- Fandom Promo!

[flowersforgraves]

May I interest you in a WWII zombie movie? If you like body horror, feels, and trope subversion, "Overlord (2018)" is a safety fandom you may enjoy! The movie takes place the night before D-Day and follows a small group of American soldiers airdropped in France with a mission to destroy the radio tower preventing air support from coming in. With most of their unit dead, Boyce and his companions ally with a local young woman and her kid brother to complete their mission. But the occupying Nazi force has been experimenting with the local tar, and have created a reanimating serum that induces supernatural strength and twists the body.

ROT13 for spoilers: Vs lbh rkcrpg gur punenpgre gb qvr va n ubeebe zbivr, gurl cebonoyl qba'g. Gur Wrjvfu naq Oynpx cebgntbavfgf obgu fheivir, nf qb gur lbhat puvyq naq gur bayl srznyr punenpgre.

You can watch Overlord on Hulu or Netflix.

SAFETY Among Us

[feckyeslife]

I am here to sing the praises of a safety fandom that has slunk through the vents to shank me in the heart: Among Us!

This is a PC or Mobile video game. It is Free to Play on mobile and has a small fee (I think 5 USD or so) for PC. It is an online multiplayer game where you are in a crew of astronauts in space-themed maps. There isn't a lot of lore per se as everything is mostly gleaned from the environment in the maps, so this isn't a game where you need to play X hours of story or read every scrap of every document -- there's no story at all!

Each match there are 1-2 Impostors among the crew. While all the Crewmate players have tasks to do around the ship to try and get the goal completed, the Impostors have a very different goal -- to kill enough of the Crewmates to win! When people are killed and bodies found, all players (except the dead) can talk in a meeting to try and pinpoint who might be the Impostor(s). Each round is fairly fast, between 5-10 minutes. You only need to play a few rounds to get a good feel of the game.

Fandom focuses on the hilarity that sometimes happens in matches or they focus on the creepy, thriller feeling of the crew being stalked by an unknown Impostor. It's a nice slice of anything goes and I really have enjoyed watching the fandom bloom, esp on AO3!

I think I've definitely talked for too long about what is a pretty straightforward game, but yeah!