I am fairly new to the fandom (nine months-ish, five on tumblr), so I missed the glory days of the tight cast and what TW was before (*sign of the cross*) season four (*tosses salt over shoulder*). Furthermore, the sterek fandom just received another painful blow when Hoechlin announced he wasn’t coming back.
I’m going to tell you what my mom said, because she’s rad as hell and helps me think of nice vocabulary for my fic, and she’s the wisest person I know.
A few weeks ago I went to her all bummed out because I suddenly felt embarrassed for putting so much effort into a story about two characters that technically weren’t real, and that one of the characters wasn’t even on the show anymore(!) And she just kept chopping carrots and said,
“Star Wars came out decades ago and people still collect thousands of dollars of merchandise because they love it. People still go to comic con and dress up in costumes for all kinds of characters that ‘don’t exist,’ but would you really go to Disneyland and tell a little girl that Cinderella ‘isn’t real?’”
And I said, “No, that’s terrible, Cinderella is real to that little girl.”
And then my mom put down the knife and looked me in the eye because I had walked straight into her trap, and chomped down on a carrot and said, “Exactly. Characters live forever, and they can be as real as you want them to be. You’re still writing and drawing art for your story, right?”
And I said, “Well yeah, but Derek and Stiles were never even together on the show and the show is terrible and I feel silly now blah blah what am I doing with my life”
And then my mom dumped the carrots into the pot of soup and said, “Who cares about the show? Why should the show influence your take on the characters? You’re taking two characters that you love and you’re making something new with them that you share with other people. You’re having fun! You’re expanding their story! You don’t need the show to enjoy that.”
And then I said “okay thanks, Eggers” (that’s her nickname because once she dropped an entire tray of deviled eggs at a party and they went bouncing everywhere and it was hilarious) and I went back out to the porch and kept writing.
My mom can say some pretty crazy things (she thought Instagram was “Instagrammar” an app for posting spelling errors), but I think she’s right with this one. One thing that’s pretty cool about the sterek fandom is that despite the blatant tabooing the show’s shown us, we just kind of picked up our things and left together to go hang out elsewhere. We’re still here, we’re still writing fanfics and making gifs and art and “expanding the story” ourselves. I have so much fun creating my work, and if you have fun writing or reading other people’s fics, that’s awesome! Keep on keepin’ on. Derek and Stiles are still alive and well in fandom, so really – why not enjoy that? 🙂
A few months ago, I said on this blog that in my head PJO is an anime with a badass opening credits. I meant it quite literally, like I can actually picture this OP in my head, with all the shonen tropes like Percy walking around pretty backgrounds, cool fighting scenes with lots of camera movements and huge statues of the Gods standing ominously in the background, Nico standing in the rain till Reyna and Hazel and Jason come for him and a ray of sunshine breaks throught the clouds and light hits his hopeful face, GIMME ALL THE TROPES hahaha. Doing the whole opening would be impossible for a single person but I really wanted to try one big “shonen” group shot, so here you are !!! This actually took me AGES, I’m not kidding, the folder for this on my computer is named “batshit crazy ” for a reason, it may not look like it if you don’t know animation but a really huge amount of work went into this. I think it’s actually the biggest thing I ever did for a fandom. I can’t say how many hours I spent on it since I didn’t count, but let’s say I started this in September and spent a lot of week ends and most of my Christmas holidays on it, and I just finished it this week. I had a lot of fun though !!! And I learned a lot too, this was my first time trying to animate japanimation style, with not many in-betweens and ultra dynamic poses. So yeah, I hope you guys will like it !
I want to thank fimyuan and bisexualjason for keeping me motivated with their lovely comments through the project, even when I was complaining about my own decisions to animate friggin’ skeletons, hahaha. Another big thank you to my friend Wekake who went through the animation frame by frame and spotted all the little compositing mistakes that remained ;p
A few words on the process : I animated and colored everything in TV Paint, drew the background in Photoshop, and composited everything in After Effects. The song is an extract of the Yowapeda opening “Reclimb” by Rookiez is Punk’d because I wanted something very distinctively shonen but no lyrics, and I like that song ^^ I animated directly without any model sheet references which is definitely not how you should do it, hahaha, hence the design inconsistencies, but honestly even my madness had its limit and I didn’t want to spend more than a year on this thing ;p
Shadow In The Light 