Vid Rec: Marvel vs. DC, the Musical!

Meta rec: thefourthvine on why being the Audience *matters*

It matters when you are part of the audience.

I spent my childhood reading stories about kids who find various magical things and go on adventures, and also just about every children's book ever published in the UK. I couldn't imagine myself in those books - it was obvious that I was never going to find a magic amulet or a secret corridor or a sand fairy; our house didn't even have a basement - but I certainly knew they were written for me.

And then I became a teenager. I was still voraciously reading, and struggling to find the genre that fit me as well as my childhood reading had. I read everything I could find - hard SF to Anne Rice, Dorothy Sayers to Charlotte MacLeod. I also read an awful lot of stuff published before 1900. (My flirtations with plain fiction and romance novels didn't pan out. I'm just not that type of girl, apparently.)

I kept casting around, though. And I kept going back and secretly re-reading the books I'd loved as a kid. Partly that was because, okay, I read like I breathed, and there were only so many books in the world, and I couldn't afford to turn my back on old favorites. But partly that was because I missed something about those books, something I couldn't identify, something I described to myself as a feeling of safety.

When I found fan fiction, I realized what I was missing. I missed being part of the audience.

I know, I know: you read something, you are obviously part of the audience. But I'm talking about the imaginary audience, the audience in the author's head, the one the book is written for.

Go read the rest.

So, apparently I'm not the only one who watches Classic Who streaming on Netflix

I've spent the last couple of days watching the first few episode arcs of Doctor Who that come up on Netflix and are available for streaming, and this completely random sampling of six or so episode arcs (spanning the whole of the classic Who) has had a surprising number of scenes I recognize from my classic Who fanvids--several per arc, actually.  Given the number of episode arcs that Classic Who has, it's quite striking.  Either the episodes that are streaming and come up first in "Doctor Who" searches on Netflix are among the classic episodes, or vidders use the streaming eps for clips.  Or both.

(Vids are What About Everything and Movin right Along; episodes are The Tomb of the Cybermen, The Curse of Fenric, Pyramids of Mars, The Horror of Fang Rock, The City of Death, and a couple others.)

(Also, the first Daleks were awesome villains, and very well done.  The first Cybermen ... not so much.)