One Direction, teenage Tumblr fandom, and how to be safe and private online.

Thanks to this Daily Dot article about Larry Stylinson "believers" (fans of One Direction who, rather than taking the more conventional fannish route of merely writing fanfic about their favourite boyband, truly believe that two of the bandmembers are secretly in a real-life relationship), I've been seeing way more of 1D fandom than I ever thought I would. But while I found the subject of the article to be very interesting (as was the near-immediate fandom backlash against the article), the points in this post aren't specifically targeted at Directioners -- just a particular subset of Tumblr fandom that seems to include a lot of 1D fans. I've been in a few fandoms myself and have no problem with anyone shipping whoever the hell they want, provided they're courteous to other fans. What I am worried about is the attitudes a lot of younger fans seem to have about fandom, Tumblr, and online privacy.

Larry Stylinson being super adorable. (source)

Aside from the large quantity of messages/comments/tweets the Daily Dot received regarding the actual content of the article, there were a lot of complaints that the article had "broken the Fourth Wall" of fandom. This phrase was bandied about quite a lot and seemed to mean something a little different from its more typical meaning. Another way I've seen this sentiment phrased is "what happens on Tumblr stays on Tumblr". I totally understand these fans' discomfort at the discovery that non-fandom people are suddenly aware of their secret online hobby, but I also find it very troubling that so many of them seem to think that Tumblr is a private place.

Fandom isn't a secret
I found out about fandom around 2002, when I was still a kid. Tumblr didn't exist yet, most of Harry Potter fandom lived on Livejournal and fanfic sites such as FictionAlley, and the way I found out about all this was via a newspaper article about fanfiction. So in my personal experience, without even having to do any research on the subject, I know for a fact that the mainstream press has been reporting about fandom for at least ten years. In recent years, fan culture has come into the mainstream in a big way, with entertainment news and gossip magazines regularly reporting at Comic-Con, and 50 Shades Of Grey topping all the bestseller lists for months. A lot of reporting on fanfiction/fandom is still pretty ignorant and disrespectful because most of the journalists aren't involved in fandom themselves, but fanfic isn't the secret society it was twenty years ago. And I'd find it vanishingly unlikely for anyone currently starring in a fandom-popular TV show or in a band like 1D to not be aware of fandom. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if winners of reality shows like American Idol and X-Factor were actually briefed about RPF as part of their press training, just so they wouldn't alienate fans by seeming shocked or appalled by the concept.

Patrick Stump replies to an RPS fan on Twitter. (source)

That being said, I totally understand why someone would want to keep their own involvement in fandom secret or private. A lot of non-fandom people still think it's a weird hobby, particularly if you're into RPF/RPS, and that kind of thing is important to take into consideration when you're applying for jobs or starting at a new college or school. Which brings me to my main concern about fandom and privacy.

Tumblr isn't private or "safe".
To me, the most confusing thing about the "what happens on Tumblr, stays on Tumblr" philosophy is the idea that Tumblr is remotely private, AT ALL. I was baffled when I noticed people complaining about their Tumblr posts being linked in the Daily Dot's 1D articles, not because I didn't understand the sentiment of being freaked out by the sudden publicity it gave to certain Tumblrs, but because I didn't understand how anyone could fail to realise that all Tumblr posts are public and insecure. Once you make a post on Tumblr, you're inviting other people to blog it. The platform is specifically designed to make it easy for people to spread information and pictures as quickly as possible, meaning that once you've posted something you have no control whatsoever over where it travels.

(source)

On more typical blogging sites like LJ, you write a post and people comment on it. Occasionally someone might quote you on their own blog, alongside some accompanying commentary. Chances are, the only people who will ever see that post are the 60 people who have you friended, plus one or two silent lurkers and some random passers-by. On Tumblr, though, you can spend 15 seconds writing a text-post saying, "I LOVE KRISTEN STEWART!", which is then read by your 300 followers, reblogged by 10 of them, and then maybe reblogged by 10 of each of their followers. The next thing you know, you're waking up to see that your post has 15000 notes, a third of which are from people who hate Kristen Stewart and are arguing with the people who love her. Tumblr is designed to make it as easy as possible for memes to spread virally, and sometimes memes just happen. Sometimes things spread rapidly on Tumblr because they're witty and clever (ie, cartoons by Gingerhaze), but sometimes it's just down to random chance or the fact that they were reblogged by someone with a lot of followers. Basically, it doesn't matter if "what happens on Tumblr stays on Tumblr", because not everyone on Tumblr is in fandom and if your post goes viral then it's inevitably going to end up being viewed by some non-fandom people. Tumblr doesn't have a Fourth Wall; Tumblr doesn't have any walls at all. Being quoted once in a popular blog post by someone like Gawker or the Daily Dot is nothing when compared to that. Which brings me to my next point:

Think before you post personal information on Tumblr
I first noticed this trend for posting personal info just after I started writing my Avengers costume design posts. A bunch of people started following me on Tumblr all at once, and I was kinda curious who all these people were. The obvious answer was "Avengers fans", but I was alarmed to notice that a lot of the time when I clicked on a new follower's username, their Tumblr homepage would have a little blurb like, "Hi, I'm Katy, I live in Birmingham, Alabama, I'm 16 years old, I'm bisexual, and I love Avengers and Sherlock!" and then a photo. Perhaps as a person in my early twenties I already qualify as an old woman in some fandoms, but to me this kind of behaviour seems very dangerous, particularly on Tumblr where your profile is likely to be read by a lot of complete strangers.

(source)

In the context of the Daily Dot article, something I found even more troubling was the number of people who were posting comments to the effect of, "I can't believe you linked to peoples' Tumblrs without permission!"/"I can't believe you broke the Fourth Wall like this!" while logged in using their Facebook accounts. Facebook, the social network that most people use for their real-life personal interactions and will probably use to interact with coworkers, family members, and people they met at a party six months ago and never interacted with again. In any other context I'd be happy to see people be so open about their love of fandom, and maybe even interpret it as a sign of a new era in fandom wherein fans can feel comfortable about revealing their internet subculture to their real-life acquaintances without fear of being labeled a weirdo. But if you're simultaneously posting under your real name and freaking out about the concept of fandom going "public" or fans/shippers being perceived in a certain way by "outsiders"? Then I can only assume that a lot of young fans really have no idea how information can be accessed on Tumblr, Facebook, and the internet in general.

A good way to look at this would be through a Sex Ed metaphor. Have fun with fandom, but make sure you always use protection unless you're absolutely prepared for the consequences. Take control of your personal info, and don't post anything in an easily-rebloggable setting like Tumblr or Twitter unless you're OK with anyone seeing it, because the internet gives people the opportunity to be infinitely more creepy than they are in real life. By and large, internet fandom is a great place where you can talk to the kind of geeky, awesome people you might not get to meet IRL (especially if you're still in school), but for every friend you make there are potentially hundreds of people silently passing through and looking at your Tumblr or Twitter without you ever knowing they're there.

I'm going to end this with a story about something that happened to me a couple of days ago. I bumped into an acquaintance and he and his friend stopped to say hi. Me and this person barely know each other so it was only the most basic of exchanges, with the only thing I said to his friend being, "Nice hoodie", because he'd painted graffiti art all over it. He asked for my name, and when I told him all he said was, "See you on Facebook," in a suddenly super creepy voice, before walking away. He went from zero to serial-killer in less than thirty seconds. In retrospect, I wouldn't even have told this guy my name, and I'm pretty sure you wouldn't either. So if you wouldn't do that, why would you reveal your name, age, hometown and taste in fanfiction to every single person who happens to stumble upon your Tumblr profile?

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The Edinburgh Fringe: Surrealist Dutch mime set in a wooden box, stilt-walking Polish astronauts, and a man in a gorilla suit.

Previously: The Edinburgh Fringe.

When I first arrived in Edinburgh at the beginning of the month, my friend Hector told me about the Gorilla Show, a one-off event that he'd heard happens at the tail end of Festival season every year. It's unlisted and unadvertised, and the audience is mostly made up of comedians. And the entire show consists of a man sitting in a rocking chair, wearing a gorilla suit and doing nothing while the audience claps and cheers for an hour. To me, this sounded like the ultimate hipster bait. An untitled show about nothing that people only hear about via backstage word-of-mouth? Excellent! And entirely unprovable. The ultimate in Fringe cliche, really -- ridiculous, fascinating, and based entirely on rumour.

With one exception, I did manage to fulfill my goal of seeing at least one Fringe show per day after work, and amazingly enough only two of the thirty to forty I saw turned out to be truly dreadful. Most of my experiences were either unphotographable or indescribable, but managing to get pictures of the Polish astronaut stilt-walking play was enough for me. Oh, and regarding the photo above? It's not the asinine inspirational slogan it looks like -- in fact, it's a prop from a brilliant show I saw a few weeks ago, a surrealist Dutch mime comedy that took place inside a large plywood packing crate and began with the performers sawing off bits of plywood and handing them out to audience members. NOTHING IS REALLY DIFFICULT, said the side of the box -- written upside down.

The other box show I went to (entirely by coincidence -- I wasn't seeking out shows set in wooden boxes, or anything), was "(remor)", an 11-minute-long dance performance, the narrative of which traveled both backwards and forwards in time over a couple's relationship. This was probably my favourite setpiece out of all the shows I saw this year, as the entire "stage" was a single bunkbed. The audience watched from stools about 18 inches away, lighting the two performers with torches in the darkness of the wooden cube.

Based on the works of Polish sci-fi author Stanislaw Lem, Planet Lem was an outdoor production by the same company that created the explosive and mostly dialogue-free Macbeth I saw at the beginning of the Fringe. This show incorporated some stiltwalking and had fantastic sets, but I'd class it as pretty different from the Macbeth adaptation. It was a lot easier to follow (which is saying something, since I know absolutely nothing about Stanislaw Lem) and was generally both weirder and more simple in terms of storytelling.

I tend not to care very much about the quality of costumes or sets when I go to the theatre, particularly at the Fringe where its expensive enough just to be there. Planet Lem, though, had such fantastic visuals that I kind of have to give them extra points. The astronaut/robot suits were movie quality, and were designed with sprung knees so the actors could safely fall from their suits when they were "killed". And the main setpiece was a giant spaceship, slap bang in the middle of the courtyard. Oh, and then there were the creepy dancing foetus-creatures.

The Edinburgh Fringe is probably the one place this show could be put on and not have an audience populated by excited children rather than a handful of baffled adults. Maybe because its marketing was mostly set along the lines of, "come see this Polish experimental theatre's adaptation of some sci-fi author you've never heard of!" when it should've been, "WE HAVE 12-FOOT-TALL ASTRONAUTS DUELLING A ROLLERBLADING ANDROID".

 Oh, and in the end? The Gorilla Show did turn out to exist. And it was brilliant.

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Costume design and movie/TV review masterpost.

Time to make Hello, Tailor more navigable! This blog has been going for almost a year now, and it's getting to the point where old posts are sinking down into the murk. I won't link to everything here, firstly because I'm lazy and secondly because I doubt anybody would be interested, but if you feel a real yearning for reviews of catwalk shows from six months ago then feel free to faff around with the tags until you find what you're looking for. Try stuff like fashion week for more general posts, or Spring 2012 for more specific timeframes. More recent fashion posts are also organised by designer, ie Chanel.

The basis for most of my TV/movie writing can be found in A fan's introduction to costume design, wherein I explain how and why costume design is more important than you think, and the ways in which costume design is often misjudged or misunderstood.

TV shows

The Revenge tag should lead to all Revenge posts, beginning with New style crush: Nolan Ross in REVEEEENNNGGE.

The Teen Wolf tag should lead to all Teen Wolf posts, beginning with Teen Wolf 101: A guide to the eighth wonder of our world. 

The Good Wife: Parenting Made Easy.

The Killing, and the iconic status of Sarah Lund's jumpers.

The most important thing about BBC Sherlock's "A Scandal In Belgravia".

Game Of Thrones: Unwashed Northerners, royal conspiracies, and decapitations all round.

Superhero movies

The Marvel and comics tags are a good place to start, but here's a more conclusive rundown of my superhero posts:

Movie Costumes I Have Loved: Thor.

Movie costumes I have loved: Pepper Potts in the Iron Man franchise.

If there's no such thing as a vintage Captain America venereal disease PSA then I'm going to be so disappointed.

Some hopes and dreams for The Dark Knight Rises.

Avengers costume design posts: 

Pre-Movie Avengers post: Loki's costumes, armour, and image-consciousness.

The costumes and characters of The Avengers. Part 1: SHIELD. Part 2: Tony Stark, Pepper Potts, and Bruce Banner. Part 3: Steve Rogers, Captain America. Part 4: Black Widow and Hawkeye.

Movie costumes I have loved.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Hanna

A Knight's Tale

True Romance

Doomsday

Alien series

The costumes of Alien. Part 1: Uniforms and characterisation. & The costumes of Alien. Part 2: Space suits, retrofuturism, and Prometheus.

The costumes of Aliens, or, James Cameron says Put A Gun On It.

Disturbing viral marketing for Prometheus: Happy birthday David, from Weyland Industries.

Prometheus: Proof that epic sci-fi doesn't belong in the Alien franchise.

Prometheus and the fannish mindset: Plotholes Aren't Everything. 

Costume design and the crew of the Prometheus.

General movie posts. 

The Hollow Crown series: Richard II & Henry IV, Part 1 & Henry IV, Part 2.

Bill Cunningham New York

Oswald Boateng: A Man's Story.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, H&M, and the difficulties of marketing a female action heroine, and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo review post.

Dressing For The Apocalypse: a guide to post-apocalyptic movie fashion.

Neil Marshall set to direct "The Last Voyage of Demeter".

Girl Walk//All Day

Capitol Couture in The Hunger Games.

Snow White & The Huntsman: How to tell a fairy story. and Snow White & The Huntsman: The prince doesn't get the girl; the girl gets the kingdom.

And, of course, there  are more being added all the time! If you have any suggestions, just drop me a comment or a message.

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Haute Couture 2012: Armani Privé and Valentino.

Still no time to write a Teen Wolf finale post. Instead: FASHION.

Armani Privé
At first I thought this collection was terribly '80s, but then I realised that the clothes weren't particularly retro in themselves -- it was the styling. The colour scheme was all chilly blues and watercolour lilacs, and the long, loose silhouette looked like the fashion drawings of the '80s rather than the fashions themselves.

Overall I'd rate the accessories in this show far higher than the actual clothes. The plethora of simple, floor-length blue suits and dresses seemed rather boring, whereas the feathered headdresses and sparkling veils were among the few details that seemed worthy of a big-name couture show.

Valentino
This show included just enough moments of heavy-handed historical glamour for me to enjoy it. Valentino are known for their showy gowns, so a 19th-century inspiration was ideal. Not 19th-century in shape, though -- it was more to do with the patterns and colours of antique furniture and interior decor, heavy on the old-fashioned floral motifs and dense embroidery.

I love dresses like these, where the fabric pattern is so obviously taken from at least a hundred years ago but the shape is so unmistakably modern. As long as the fabric is interesting enough, you can cut it down to the simplest minidress imaginable and it's still very obviously couture.

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The Edinburgh Fringe.

This is going to be the kind of What I Did On My Summer Holidays post that seldom appears on this blog, mostly because I've been living in what amounts to a gigantic artists' commune for the past two weeks and am consuming about 1% of the geeky pop-culture stuff I usually do.

Some background, first: The Edinburgh Fringe is an alternative theatre/comedy/music/art festival that runs throughout August, in conjunction with various other arts-type festivals around the city. This year's Fringe programme includes 2842 "official" shows, most of which are stand-up comedy and experimental/indie theatre, plus tons of street performers and unofficial stuff on the side. Basically, for the duration of August every single building in Edinburgh that could conceivably be turned into a theatre venue, is. Up to and including lifts, taxis, and peoples' bedrooms. I'm currently living in the lap of luxury because I have an actual bed to sleep in (thanks to my lovely friends Grace & Hector!), which is more than many of the performers get.

(As an experienced Fringe-goer, I sensibly reinforced my programme with duct tape as soon as I got my hands on it. People may smirk, but WHATEVER. By the end of the month I'll be the only one whose programme hasn't had to be replaced at least once.)

I'm going to as many shows as it's humanly possible to fit around my work schedule, covering as wide a variety of genres as I can. I assume that it's rather obvious at this point, but I LOVE THE FRINGE. There's something for everyone here, from cheesy mainstream stand-up comedy to weird experimental theatre to circus acrobats to jug bands to Tibetan Book Of The Dead: The Musical. Picking what to go to is very difficult, particularly in the first week when reviews haven't come out yet, but the way I see it is that if you're there for the entire month it's almost a good thing to see some terrible theatre in the first few days -- it's an interesting experience, and it provides a kind of palate-cleanser for the rest of the month. (I'm especially sticking to that philosophy this year because the first show I saw was without a doubt the worst piece of theatre I have seen in my entire life.)

Aside from the sudden influx of artists, musicians and theatre folk, the main major change Edinburgh experiences in Festival season is the closing down of the Royal Mile, the highstreet that leads up to Edinburgh Castle. During the Fringe, the Mile is a free-for-all for any performer who wants to advertise their show, meaning that all day every day the streets are filled with professional outdoor performers like jugglers and magicians, plus hundreds of people in weird costumes trying to entice passers-by to come to their shows. It's unfortunate that I don't have my camera with me at work, because these few tourist snaps really are the thin end of the wedge when it comes to weird shit you see on the Mile during Fringe season. My favourite so far is probably the moment when I was helping a fire-juggler set up his stuff while a row of voluminously "pregnant" schoolgirls watched on in the front row. I turned around just in time to see a giant 10-foot sperm advertising Sex Education: The Musical walk along behind them.

This lady is one of the Sundaes, a girl group who I unfortunately haven't seen perform yet because one of them had a wig malfunction when she was meant to be performing on my stage. There are several performers that you get to recognise very quickly if you're living in the main Old Town section of Edinburgh, purely because they're so ubiquitous. Then, of course, there are the ones who aren't so much "performers" as just Fringe-season fixtures. Edinburgh is a small and insular city at the best of times, with a weirdly strong divide between the Old and New towns, but during the Fringe this intensifies because people are so much more recogniseable when they're walking to and from the same venues every day, wearing the same costumes.

Probably the most famous of the non-performer Festival people is Lewis, the self-proclaimed King of Scotland. He wasn't around on the day when I took these photos, but if you're from Edinburgh you'll probably recognise him. He has a long grey beard, carries a pink suitcase and always wears a kilt and several brightly-coloured shirts. He's such a Fringe fixture that most of the Street performers don't mind if he decides to go for a brief a brief stage invasion.

The Pleasance Courtyard is a typical example of ridiculous seasonal venue organisation. It's a set of stables and random rooms that for the rest of the year are mostly empty, but during the Fringe become an incomprehensible warren of bars and mini-theatres. The signpost in the middle of the courtyard seems to be well aware of this:

Another entertaining feature of the Pleasance Courtyard is the number of "theatres" there that are literally just porta-cabins. This one houses Peep, a specified venue that hosts three short plays performed in the setting of a peepshow booth.

I considered writing a more formal guide to the Fringe, but by now it's kind of a moot point since we're already halfway through the month plus most of the readers of this blog are in different countries, never mind "not in Edinburgh". This is only the second year I've been at the Festival for the full duration, but I do have a few guidelines for general survival and/or picking and choosing between the dazzling multitude of performances.

Youtube footage of this "Macbeth" -- fingerquotes non-optional -- can be found here.

One of my most solid rules is NEVER SEE MACBETH, which is mostly founded in bitterness because there are always at least (AT LEAST) ten Macbeths on every year and more often than not they'll be put on by an American youth theatre group or some kind of vaguely embarrassing musical-theatre company. Of course, rules are made to be broken and this year I've already found myself going to see one of the Macbeths, a Polish production that involved a lot of fire, nudity, violence and stilt-walking, and the minimum possible quantity of actual Macbeth. The other day I came up with a possible solution to the Macbeth issue, though: DRUNKBETH. I don't have the time or wherewithall (or masochism) to do this myself, but hopefully someone else will one day. The gist of it is: Go to as many Macbeths as possible in a 24-hour period (at least six or seven should be do-able), drinking continuously throughout in some kind of as-yet undecided Macbeth drinking game.

These guys set up some kind of courtroom/electric chair scene in the middle of the road. And I love how the tourists in this next picture decided that the best person to ask for directions was the 10-foot-tall, stilt-walking ukulele player. NBD; just another day at the Fringe. You can get photos like this pretty much by pointing your camera in any direction and taking a picture at random, to be honest.

Trying to converse with a living statue is always disconcerting because they tend to stay in character and it's like talking to some kind of Doctor Who character and/or steampunk automaton. Yesterday I was trying to explain a performance schedule to a living statue (not this one) and felt like an unwilling participant in some kind of performance art while various tourists took photos of our joint one-way conversation.

These two girls were advertising a variety show featuring Frank Sinazi, a Frank Sinatra/Hitler combination impersonator. They seemed quite surprised when they handed me a flier and I told them I'd already seen him a couple of nights ago. Anyway, were it not for the swastika, this lady's skull headdress would be pretty damn awesome.

The show I went to this evening was a circus/physical theatre retelling of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which had the added bonus of being hosted at Summerhall. I don't know if it's just my own ignorance showing itself or if it's a matter of bad advertising on the part of the venue, but I had no idea how varied and straight-up BIG Summerhall is. It plays host to several performance art and dance shows, but is also the main venue for the Edinburgh Fashion Festival (!!!) and a ton of Art Festival stuff that practically seemed like it was being hidden from the general public. For example, located next to one of the bathrooms was this:

And almost every room in the huge, hive-like building was home to some other piece of unadvertised installation art. A fascinating venue to explore, but their marketing department clearly needs some help if both me and my companion (who is an artist based in Edinburgh, for god's sake) were unaware that most of that stuff was there in the first place.

The show itself was in what seemed to be some kind of museum (also mostly unlabeled), upstairs from "the dissection rooms" (this particular block was a former vetinary hospital/school) and between a couple of disused labs. One of my many favourite things about the Fringe is the random nature of the various performance spaces, which are often totally bizarre and unexpected, and can have a significant impact on the staging and tone of the shows for which they are used.

On Sunday night I went to An Evening With Amanda Palmer And Neil Gaiman, which is sure to be one of my highlights of the month. Amanda Palmer's music and career has been my #1 fandom since childhood (back when it was still The Dresden Dolls' music and career), and every time I see her she seems to become more entertaining, thought-provoking and beautiful. Right now I'm rending my clothes just a little because she's going to be making a surprise appearance at the Boom Boom Club cabaret tonight, but it doesn't start until 12:30am and I have work tomorrow. TRAGEDY. The idea of having an Amanda Palmer concert take place in the same city as me and me not going to it = torment and agony

I'm glad I made it to the Amanda & Neil show because it's so different from what I presume most of her gigs will be like for the next couple of years. Her new album is about to come out, at which point she's going to be touring for at least a year with her new band, on a more traditional touring schedule of album-track performances. An Evening With Neil And Amanda is more relaxed, with appearances from unexpected guests (the hilarious Andrew O'Neill and Michael Pope) and a combination of original Amanda songs, semi-obscure covers, and readings from Neil Gaiman's poetry and as-yet-unpublished next novel.

Oh, and as a postscript, here's a picture of my friend Dan. I occasionally get people asking why I don't post more pictures of my own outfits, and the real answer is because I don't have a decent camera, I'm a terrible photographer, I don't have a full-length mirror, and I'm too British to get other people to take photos of me to conceitedly post on the internet. So instead, here is a photo of Dan. He has great dress-sense and I can get a good photo of him without ending up with a Myspace Arm situation occurring.

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Links post: Test footage from Alien, jewellery by Salvador Dali, behind-the-scenes photos from The Hollow Crown, and more.

Alien: Test footage of the original xenomorph actor in Alien, Bolaj Badejo, has surfaced on youtube. A while ago one of my friends said that one of the good things about Prometheus was the fact that Ridley Scott could now afford to do something "better" than just have a really tall skinny guy wearing an alien costume, and I was like WASH YOUR MOUTH OUT. "Necessity is the mother of invention" is like the first commandment of movie costuming and special effects, and most of cinema's most impressive and sneaky tricks have been invented by people working on comparatively low-budget movies like Alien. In my opinion that tall skinny guy in an alien costume is still as creepy as all get-out, and certainly better than most CGI monsters up until very recent times.  

Dali jewellery, 1950. From How To Be A Retronaut.

Kehinde Wiley. This artist paints strikingly intense, colourful portraits -- his homepage can be found here. I love the mixture of very modern contemporary models and this almost glowing, Renaissance-era background in some of the portraits.

Londoners! Or people who will be in London on the 16th, 17th and 18th of August! If you like comics, awesome stuff, or awesome stuff about comics, then you should go to see Full Stage Splash: A Comic Look at the Comic Book. It's a show about the history of comicbooks in the style of the Horrible Histories BBC sketch show or the Reduced Shakespeare Company, and I highly recommend it. Tickets are £7.50 (less than a movie, if you're in London!) and you can get them HERE. Were I not working at the Edinburgh Fringe right now I'd be at the Camden Fringe for sure, watching this play. ;)


Behind the scenes of The Hollow Crown. Related to my earlier posts about the BBC's Hollow Crown series of Shakespeare adaptations, here are some backstage photos by Charlie Gray.

DYI comicbook high-heels tutorial. I haven't tried this yet, but it looks pretty easy and if you do it right, the results should be awesome. All you need are some cheap high-heeled shoes and a bunch of old comics!

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Teen Wolf 2x11: "Battlefield".

(Previous Teen Wolf episode reviews can be found on the Teen Wolf tag, along with Teen Wolf 101.)

This week's Teen Wolf is messing up my life in a very real, logistics/scheduling type way. I'm at the Edinburgh Festival at the moment and have a very tight timetable of work and Fringe shows, but how can I keep up with all that if I'm too busy hand-carving an Oscar statuette for Dylan O'Brien?? Seriously, let's all open up a WikiHow tab right now, look up "How to make an Oscar", and then build that shit out of tinfoil and glitter glue or whatever the hell fake Oscars are made of. THEN MAIL THEM ALL TO DYLAN O'BRIEN.

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Battlefield: a disjointed episode, deserving of the disjointed review it's going to receive thanks to my overly busy schedule. We all tend to complain when one of our favourite characters (LYDIA) doesn't get enough screentime in any particular episode, but this ep proved that it's no longer possible to include everyone and set out a coherent plot at the same time. While there was just as much melodrama as any other episode of Teen Wolf, Battlefield fell into all the predictable pre-finale traps: it focused on a rather silly premise -- the portentious lacrosse game of doom -- and was mostly just setup for whatever happens in the finale. It would've been a lot better to split the multiple Lacrosse Night arcs into a two-parter because in this episode there was just way too much going on, and not in the usual "too much awesome happening at once" kind of way. So many of the main characters have gone through major life changes in the past few eps that their reactions are mostly taking place offscreen, resulting in Allison and isaac both seeming like they've had complete personality transplants during the unscreened moments between episodes.

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The betas
I understand that the three betas are going through a lot right now, but wasn't Isaac a grade-A douchebag just last week? Why is he the one who is suddenly glomming onto Scott as his moral inspiration while Boyd runs around in the forest with Erica? Especially since Boyd was the only one who previously exhibited any signs of maturity or thoughtfulness, whereas now he's apparently 100% onboard with this rather baffling idea of joining a pack of complete strangers. Although I did appreciate how Boyd didn't attack Allison when she shot him, even though I'm pretty sure he'd been given ample opportunity to put a claw through her throat.

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The Isaac we saw in this episode seemed totally different from the angry, dickish Isaac I remember from before. I definitely buy him (and the other betas, for obvious reasons) as a person looking for a leader/parental figure, but it just seems so unlikely that he'd pick Scott. With Boyd, I get the impression that he has a little more self-confidence than Isaac and Erica, and the reason why Boyd was OK with following Derek (for a while) was that Derek was the most practical option: he was the only person who knew how to be a werewolf. More than all that, though, the Three Betas subplot has been one of the things that's suffered most from their lack of screentime, mostly because we've seen so little on the subject of how becoming a werewolf has changed their lives. At the beginning of season 1 Scott had Stiles for backup, not to mention having several months to adjust to his werewolfhood, but Isaac, Erica and Boyd were thrust into the middle of a gang war almost as soon as they were bitten.

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Stiles
With Teen Wolf you can talk about the female gaze (gayze?) until the cows come home because of the way every single episode must by law have at least one gratuitous shirtless scene and/or lingering shot of Tyler Hoechlin expressing emotion via his deltoids. With this episode, though, I've just gotta talk about that very first scene. Every time I think the camera people at Teen Wolf can't possibly be caressing Dylan O'Brien's face any more, they zoom in so the entire screen is taken up by Stiles' 492 trembling eyelashes. The idea of a scene where a character a) talks explicitly and honestly about their feelings (to a school shrink!!), and b) helpfully exposits about what happened since the last episode... well, basically it rebels against everything I think of as good writing. AND YET. AND YET. Dylan O'Brien is such a talented actor that he totally carries it off.

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I've been trying to work out how Teen Wolf fits into the post-Buffy TV world, and I still haven't quite worked it out. Joss Whedon's writing is 100% genre-savvy, with the characters in things like Buffy, Firefly and Cabin In The Woods all either subverting or directly challenging genre tropes. Buffy and Xander especially were very aware of their respective roles as stereotypes of characters found in teen horror movies, and acted accordingly. Teen Wolf, on the other hand, has a full cast of people who act like horror movie idiots. Stiles is the only really genre-savvy one, although that might not so much be a geek-culture thing (ie, like Xander or Peter Parker) so much as the fact that he has excellent intuition. Stiles just knows stuff, and not in the sense that he "just knows", which definitely would be bad writing -- it's more like he's the only character who pays attention to everything going on around him, and then at some point a Sherlock Holmes moment happens at the back of his mind and he realises Oh shit, this is what's been happening all along. Not only is Stiles the "smart" one, the researcher; he has this impressive faculty for finding the truth without actively looking for it. Which is kind of what happened throughout this episode, producing a very effective feeling of foreboding.

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Five solid minutes of Stiles having a breakdown is horrible to watch for two reasons: Dylan O'Brien SELLS IT, and seeing Stiles upset is like seeing your mother upset. I mean, yeah, Stiles Is The Pack Mom is funny because it's true, but the scene with the school counsellor was one of those moments where you realise that Stiles really doesn't have a support base of his own. He is the support base. He's going through hell; he's the only kid in the show who is reacting "normally" to the horrors they've all experienced (probably because he's the only character who is mature and thoughtful enough to process it all), but he's also the only one who has literally no one to turn to. For that reason I can believe that he might speak to the school counsellor, plus the fact that this scene works on another level that acknowledges the audience and allows us to share his feeling of nameless dread. Right from the beginning he clearly knows that something is going to happen to him, and because we're genre-savvy (and we know that Stiles Is Always Right) we start freaking out along with him. But the thing is? For once, Stiles doesn't "know" anything -- because his perceptions are totally skewed by trauma -- but that doesn't stop us knowing, especially when we see Stiles more-or-less saying goodbye to Scott before the lacrosse game. By the time Stiles does the unthinkable and actually participates in the game, I knew that something was going to go horribly wrong. My only consolation is that there is zero chance of Stiles being killed off because he's the fan favourite and the entire Teen Wolf production team are 100% aware that Dylan O'Brien is a future superstar. 

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Allison
Fans like us, the ones who spend too much time on Tumblr and write and/or read review blogs like this one -- we've probably thought quite a lot about why Allison acts the way she does. But what about the average 16-year-old watching this show? I'm not so sure that they're going follow such a swift transition from the relatively peace-loving Allison of three or four episodes ago, and the Allison we just saw remorselessly shoot a teenage boy in the chest. I don't mean that to be patronising, rather than just to point out that you really have to think about Allison's backstory and family relationships to even remotely legitimise such a swift turnaround. Yes, Gerard is a psycho and an expert manipulator and, basically, a lifelong cult-leader, and yes, Allison is a vulnerable teenage girl whose mother just died, but have we really seen much of either of those things in conjunction with one another? I don't think so. Given the extended time of a two-part episode I believe this issue could've been solved, but as it stands I found it quite out of character for Allison to shoot Boyd. Of all the hunters, surely Allison is the most equipped to cut through the anti-werewolf bigotry that made Gerard and Kate so evil, so why does her murderous rampage include harmless highschool students rather than just Derek? Allison's drastic step towards hardline anti-werewolf violence also makes me concerned for the future of the show's writing in a more general sense, because Scott can't be the "good guy" and be in a relationship with someone who is willing to kill an innocent person in cold blood, and Allison can't be redeemed over a short stretch of time. We're meant to believe that grief has sent her over the edge into the kind of unhinged violence that Kate loved, but that's just a reason, not an excuse.

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Anyway, the TL;DR version of this is that I can't judge yet whether Allison's characterisation is inconsistent or not, but whatever happens the show will need to acknowledge that she is Doing Bad Things. At some point I want to write a whole post all about the Argents, when I have time for writing again.

Derek and Peter
Derek vs Peter = eternal torment because Peter Hale is an expert at feelings and power-struggles and Derek has the social skills and self-awareness of a breezeblock. To be honest, picking Peter up and throwing him against stuff  is the only workable solution because there's no way in hell that Derek is every going to defeat him in a battle of wits. Of course, violence doesn't really work either because in addition to having precisely zero ethical qualms about killing people to get what he wants, Peter doesn't seem to care if you try to kill him. He's like the Joker in that respect. His only flaw in this episode was that since his return to the land of the living, he's decided to grow a goatee and buy some douchebag jeans. Change out of the douchebag jeans, Peter! You're like forty years old! You don't want to look like a Coldplay dad.

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Like the showrunners of Revenge, Jeff Davis likes to luxuriate in his ridiculous supervillain dialogue. Here are some of my favourite Peter Hale lines from this episode:

1. "I'm out of commission for a few weeks and suddenly there's lizard people, geriatric psychopaths, and you're cooking up werewolves out of every self-esteem-deprived adolescent in town." <--- accurate.
2. "I'm not a total psycho." 
3. "Right now, Jackson's identity is disappearing beneath a reptilian skin." <--- SERIOUSLY. Can you even imagine him and Gerard having a conversation with each other? I can't.

JUST THINK HOW MUCH FUN IT MUST BE TO SAY THOSE LINES.

Misc. (See, I told you this review would be pretty disjointed.)
One thing that didn't ring true for me was Peter's claim that only one person can sway Jackson through the Power Of Love, and that's Lydia. I mean, really? Firstly -- and perhaps this is just down to the nature of a fast-moving show like Teen Wolf, where it's easy to forget which characters know each other on a personal level -- how does Peter knows this? I would've thought that most of what he knows about Jackson was originally viewed through the lens of Lydia's own perceptions. Lydia and Jackson are both lonely, but it's never really been clear whether they actually love each other or not, particularly Jackson. The "she's his kryptonite!" thing works with Scott and Allison because it's so patently obvious, but the only person Jackson ever interacts with in a positive manner is Danny. In fact, before the game he was warning Danny to stay safe, not texting Lydia or anyone else. The best thing about Jackson as a person is his friendship with Danny, a friendship that seems astonishingly functional, affectionate and trusting considering how much of a dick Jackson can be in every other facet of his life.

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DOES ANYONE NOT SHIP THIS?? Although really, my OTP is Parents/More Screentime. They both delight me because they seem to exist on a different, slightly more realistic plane than the younger generation of characters, a fact that is particularly entertaining during moments like the locker-room scene when Scott's mother is the only person who notices how incredibly weird Coach Finstock can be.

Teen Wolf realism rating: Can someone please explain to me how Scott leaves the messages on Allison's car window? Because that's been bugging me ever since it first appeared on the show, and I suspect I may just be idiotically missing something? Like, how are the messages on the inside of the window? Wouldn't it make more sense for them to be on the outside?? My other minor logistical qualm is about the Hale house, whose state of disrepair seems to vary with every episode. I don't think we've seen anyone actually stand on the stairs yet because everyone tends to jump or get thrown all the way over them, but in this episode we saw Peter get flung against some wooden balustrades that would surely have been burned down years ago. (No, I don't know why I noticed that, either.)

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