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Here's a fun game: rig a Castiel soundboard to your microphone in Assassin's Creed 3 multiplayer and go HEY, ASSBUTT just before every kill.

~The magic of the internets.~

~~If someone asked you what they should include in a compilation of your pup's "best of" canonical moments, what would you pick out? No arbitrary limits - go nuts.~~

Never mind, that idea was dumb.

What's your favorite thing about your pup's canons?

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Warehouse 13: ARTIFACTS. Artifacts are kinda the greatest thing ever. It's history and sci-fi all glopped together. Granted, sometimes I rant at the show's history, but when they get it right, it's bloody awesome.

And I kinda have to answer the strikeout because I do have a 'best of' moment for Joshua. In the Christmas episode of season 2, Claudia's great Plan is to find Artie's father. To get Artie's father to come back with them, she tells him that Artie's dying. Behind her, Joshua is making the most amazing faces ever and trying to get her to stop this crap but never actually coming out and saying so. And then later when she tells Artie that his father's dying, he just walks back up the stairs with 'HOLY MOTHER OF GOD'. Yeah.

Les Miserables: I can't help it. What drew me into Les Mis in the first place is the music. I've loved the music since I was about seven or so. Mmmmm.

The canon I'm re-apping this cycle: The fact that my character complains about character bleed in canon. Well, and the character in general.

Knox: It's a Batman canon. You can't go wrong with that. Because he's BATMAN!

CharlieQuestion: At the end of the day, it was the DC Universe, one of the best giant playgrounds ever. And even if Charlie was usually off to one side of it, it was still the place that had the JLA and the Titans and the Legion. And Batman. You can't go wrong with that. Because he's BATMAN!

Cyborg: His canon takes the best elements of the old Teen Titans comics and boils them down to their essence. And then makes them kid friendly while retaining the heart and the angst. (The Terra arc was so much better on the cartoon than in the comics.) That's why the sillier Titans cartoon on now works: that heart is still there, even if the supervillains aren't. Oh, and of course Robin was trained by Batman. You can't go wrong with that. Because he's BATMAN! (There is a theme emerging. And I seem to have watched one too many episodes of How It Should Have Ended.)

Howard Stark: A Marvel canon is almost as cool as a DC canon. Another amazing playground, if perhaps not to my liking as much as DC's. And, unlike the comics, lacking in Spider-men and mutants, so not quite as wonderful. But still cool and fun and wacky, even in the 1940s. And it has Iron Man, who is almost as cool as Batman but less relentlessly grim.

Kirk: The future is coming. And guess what? We make it! We don't blow ourselves up. We don't drown under all that melting icewater. We build rocketships from missiles and meet all sorts of alien life, and everything gets better! This was the most optimistic of canons, and still inspires me. (And if you ask me what I dislike most about the new films, it's that loss of optimism.)

Gibbs: The PotC films are zany. The British and the Spanish and the East India Company are all working out their destinies. The world is changing into that of the American and French Revolutions. And this crazy, partly successful pirate comes along and keeps tipping over all the apple carts, followed in his wake by his former crew and his arch rival and the one man in the world who seems to be able to ride into the storm with Jack. It's history colliding with the impossible, and resulting in the maelstrom.

Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes - Gene. Gene is my favourite thing about his canon. He is glorious.

I mean, I could wax lyrical about how funny it is in one minute, and then heartbreaking the next, or the nostalgia value, or the use of music, or the overall story arcs, or the brilliant buddy-buddy cop relationships. But when it comes down to it, Gene is just wonderful, and I love him.

Nolan!verse Batman - how can you not love Batman? It's dark and angsty, but still badass and fun. Bruce is a wonderful character, with a ton of issues but with good values at his heart. I love how Batman is often misunderstood, or used against him, but he still tries to do the right thing. It's a contrast to Superman, whom just about everyone loves (first half of Man of Steel notwithstanding).

Avengers/MCU - my favourite thing? Uhhh...everything? I mean, it's fun, but all the characters have some pretty deep personal issues. But they're not mopey about it; they bicker like kids, then suit up and save the world. Every single member of the Avengers is glorious in some way, and I love how canon lets them have their own individual Stuff to deal with, but then brings them together when they're needed.

Oh, and the Snark of Tony Stark. Can't get enough of that. :D

Les Miserables - ahhh, Les Mis. How do I love thee, let me count the ways. Basically, it's fucking epic. Just looking at the movie/musical - TUNES. The music is fantastic. But as I'm using brick!canon (er...book, that is) for background, history, timeline and plot details...well, it's just a frickin' classic. What I adore most is that every character is not just a character, and there to serve a simple story. Each of them symbolise something, and then mirror another character. You get tiny details, like a scene with a nun (with only a couple of pages of development) who never, ever lies, set against Javert, who also never, ever lies...only in this scene she does lie, just once, to save Valjean. And in that one act (two words, total), Victor Hugo shows the difference in morality between God on one hand, and the Law on the other, and exposes Javert's great flaw.

And then you have the big mirrors - Javert and Valjean, each following a seperate path, and being very different men, but fatally thrown together at every turn. And then, Javert and Enjolras, who are both the absolute extreme of their belief system, and so despite believing opposite things, are actually very alike as men.

So...yeah. I will shut up before I meta us all to death. But basically, my favourite thing about Les Mis is its layers, and the way you can find so much in the text. It's fabulous.

OH AWESOME you did the paragraph of flailing about meta so I don't have to!

(But I will add how Victor Hugo argues with himself constantly, both through characters and in narration, and rarely comes to any easy resolution, which is another aspect of the layers. There's a reason we have a lot of characters symbolizing different versions of similar things, instead of a lot of bad guys against Our Hero.)

Yes, this! Because the way Hugo writes, he has the characters do/say one thing, and then promptly wanders off in his own voice to point out that there are any number of other ways things can be taken. I do <3 him, even if he is random. He gives a lot to think about, and weaves a great story while he does it.

I also forgot to point out the obvious meta of Jean Valjean and Javert having been written as two sides of the same coin, and also inspired by one single man, which (to me at least) is fascinating in and of itself.

Harry Potter

- MAGIC! I also like that on the surface the world seems silly and fun - and it is - but deeper down there is dark stuff going on. Kinda like me and my charming brand of evil! The world building doesn't end, and that is appealing to me. And there's Peeves. I mean, come on, a world without Peeves is a sad world, indeed.

Neverwhere

- Guh, talk about world building. This is a place where the forgotten people, memories, and places of London end up. There is so much to do there, in context of creating stories and background for Ingress and Tom.

Supernatural

- Okay, the show has made egregious mistakes in writing and treatment of many realms of human experience. However. I can't not love a world in which blue collar stiffs save the day. I like Sam and Dean a lot, for all their faults, and I adore Bela Talbot (and Jo and Missouri and Ruby and Ellen and all the other women who've not stayed on screen long enough).

Firefly: The characters, and their found-family relationship (even though it never quite goes smooth).

Gundam Wing: The characters, again, and how there's a lot of nuanced realism in their various reactions to... growing up and living in a shonen mecha universe with over-the-top angsty backstories and giant robots.

Claymore: Oh god, is "the characters" just going to be my reaction to everything? It's true, though. And, again, the ways they cope with a frankly ridiculously horrific universe and job.

Les Mis: What Write said! Uh, I could go on for a while longer too. But also what Quinn said; I've fallen pretty heavily into book fandom now, but it was the music that hooked me back when I was 13 and saw this melodramatic musical I'd never heard of about tragic French people.

Marvel Cinematic Universe: Also what Write said!

Fantastic Four: Family, adventure and exploration. Yes they are a super hero team but they are best written when they are a family exploring; whether the bottom of the ocean, the dark side of the moon, the subatomic world of Central Park, alien planets or other dimensions.

The Watch series: Russian folktales and myth, not to mention most of the problems are solved with intelligence and not brute force.

X-Men First Class: First off, it's the X-men. Second, I loved the 60s world and the new spin on characters I am familiar with.

Percy Jackson: Greek Gods and myth in a modern world. Some great puns as well.

Spider-Woman: She gets her own heading as she's in several books. I love the super spy theme to her and wish it was played with more. I also loved the freelancer for SWORD (Marvel's version of the MiBs). And let's not forget her snark when she's feeling good about her life. MMmm sandwich.

Star Wars: Jedis, lightsabers, swashbuckling SciFi.

Kate Daniels: Post-apocalypse snark with left of center (wherein Western is center) mythology.

Above all, with everyone of these, is the characters.

Edited 2013-08-01 15:48 (UTC)

Villains By Necessity: The way it pokes at the nature of good and evil.

Warehouse 13: ARTIFACTS. And also the main cast's whole found-family thing.

Percy Jackson: The pure ridiculousness that comes from updating the Greek mythos. (I... got stuck on the Surprise Romans, so I can't really comment on the Heroes of Olympus series - but I did read The Lost Hero and LEO AND PIPER ARE PRETTY AWESOME OKAY.)

Soul Music: As scary as music with rocks in it is, the moment where it first shows up perfectly describes what a good song does to you, even without magic/sentience/whatever it is driving it.

Harry Potter: The world. Certainly not the story, by the last couple books, but the world has so much potential.

Once Upon a Time: The whole 'aha! You thought you knew this story? WRONG!' thing. And, quite honestly, Ruby; from the moment she showed up in the pilot I went 'MORE OF HER PLS.'

Ghostbusters: New York. Seriously. The original movie was essentially New York's very own kaiju movie, even though the giant monster didn't show up until the last ten minutes- but what I've come to love about the canon is that the original boils down to "New York has a Very Weird Problem and its response is to get annoyed, develop private enterprise to handle it, and sell merchandise to the tourists before the boiling marshmallow is cool on the sidewalk." I may live and work in the Boston area now but I was born and raised in New York City, and the city's 'annoyed pragmatism' approach to everyday life just shines through.

Half-Life: This is sort of on the opposite end of the spectrum, in that everyday life is violently disrupted forever. But I think my favorite thing about this canon is that Gordon is an ordinary example of his kind- you can't really call theoretical physicsts ordinary people, at least not if the ones I know are anything to go by- who gets betrayed repeatedly, but has a chance to win anyway. Even down to the moment when the seemingly omnipotent G-Man finds himself thwarted by the Vortigaunts. It's... I'm going to fall back to G. K. Chesterton here. You may have heard his quote about how the important thing about fairy tales is not that they say dragons exist, but that they say dragons can be killed. That's not quite right, but it's very close, and looking at the original quote I find that it really reminds me of what I like about Gordon- and what I think gives Gordon so much appeal in-universe, to the characters we meet and to the others that are implied to exist:

"Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey.... Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear."

Terrible things happen in the Half-Life universe because people insisted, over and over, on betraying the trust that other people had in them. Gordon is somebody who wasn't prepared for that and who should have fallen in the face of that, and he managed to beat it back anyway. The last game we have at the moment ends on a bad note, but whether Valve ever finishes the game or not I like to think that what we've seen so far means that Gordon will be able to see things through to their end.

Half-Life: Opposing Force: Gonna be honest, haven't actually played this one. Watched some of it on Youtube, read the rest of it as plot summaries and in the entry on TV Tropes- yes,

leeshajoy, I know you hate TV Tropes but I would never have gotten interested in Half-Life in the first place without it, so. I can't really say I have a favorite thing about it except that it leaves everything open about Adrian Shephard other than name, rank, age, and a few paragraphs of personal journal entries. I like being able to fill in my characters' backgrounds. Especially when they're ostensibly on the villains' team but wind up serving the same end as the good guys because it's the right thing to do and the right way to survive.

I haven't nailed down yet exactly what my favorite things about the Mass Effect and Dragon Age universes are, although I have to say 'the characters' are a strong contender. I like interacting with characters that feel like real people, even if they happen to be an extremely different cultural and physical kind of people.

Santo's lucha movies are cheeseball and flat-out insane, and completely sincere rather than cynical or ironic, and I love them for that.

Team Fortress 2: Pure Excuse Plot, pure parody, and while there's plenty of violence and sociopathic behavior, neither death nor pain has any real meaning, so go to town and let it all out without having to feel guilt. That's probably my favorite thing about it: it's so completely cartoony that I don't feel so much as a twinge when I bring somebody down. Or brought, rather, since I haven't played it in ages.

Fallout: My favorite thing about Fallout is that it is a huge, huge world full of tragedy and weirdness and silliness in about equal amounts, so that there's always something else to discover and almost recognize. And that while things are very horrible, life goes on and life has a chance- maybe a very slim one, but a chance- and you can affect that one way or another.

Pacific Rim: Go back to the Half-Life part and check out the Chesterton quote again. I'm tired of grim and gritty movies and anime where everybody is psychologically disturbed and/or the world is fundamentally screwed. Not that I don't appreciate that kind of thing from time to time, but in Pacific Rim, people do everything they can with what little they've got and the good guys win. It's important to me to remember that it is possible to win.

Agree with you on Ghostbusters. A quintessential New York movie. Funny how even as a child when I first saw it, I understood why the Tavern on the Green diners didn't pay attention to Louis as he banged on the window for help.

Heroes - … um. So. I'm not really someone who can compartmentalize and pretend like this show only had one season, not just because my character wasn't in that season, but because I actually had a lot of issues with this show's first season, too, and while the trajectory it eventually went on was… extreme, it wasn't totally baseless. As in, there were warning signs in that first season, and they're magnified for me now. But I suppose I only have to choose one thing, so... I think the reason, beyond my emotional investment in Elle, that I keep playing in this playground is because I like the playground. It provides a broad comic book-y superpower-y environment that I can make up/does not require extensive comics knowledge from me, and it can also have a very global feel, which is something I like to engage with. There were things Heroes did right. But the combination of my bitterness and what it did wrong means I feel like I'm incising those things about it with a scalpel while avoiding the decayed crap around it.

That was a weird metaphor.

Avatar: The Last Airbender/Legend of Korra - It's beautiful, the worldbuilding is a lot of fun, I love all of the characters. I like that it handles itself as both humorous/a kids' show, but also as one that takes the dramatic aspects and how they affect its young characters seriously.

Adventure Time - I like that it's super wacky and funny, but also often heartfelt and clever. It doesn't let one side rule out the other.

Parks and Recreation - I love that Leslie Knope is an admirable civil servant, and I love the show's general emphasis on the relationships between its band of characters. And I like that, for the most part, its humor is good-natured and affectionate. Not that I don't like dark or biting comedy, but it's nice to have this, too.

How To Train Your Dragon - There are dragons that act like cats. And also the tiny sarcastic Vikings who ride them. But seriously, dragons that act like cats.

Grim Fandango - I love noir, so I love this game for its noir feel and it's really impressive storytelling. There are times I wish I could share the story itself in such a way that wouldn't require people to actually play it. (Though you should play it because it's awesome and fun! I just know some people who aren't into computer games and so I wish I could get the story to them, too.) I also like that it manages to do a lot of thematic blending – film noir/Aztec cosmology/Art deco aesthetic/Mexican folklore and do so pretty seamlessly. And I like fiction that can blend like that.

For Felix, it's the... interactivity, perhaps, of the magic system. You have spells that specifically affect the world environment, not just enemies' hitpoints. And that's something you don't see many other places, certainly not to the same extent.

Fluttershy's canon is friendly, and fun, and smart, and adorable. (Twilight Sparkle is also all of these, but she's not specifically my favorite part of the canon.)

Amascut, Fairy Fixit, and Evil Chicken all hail from the same canon so that is the easy. My favorite part... hmm... the storytelling potential but the puns and pop culture references and innuendo are fun as well.

Out of context quote from Amascut time!
AND NOW THAT I HOLD IT IN MY HANDS... it's so small... so hard... so cold... That explains so much.
The worst part was that this was the quest(s) were she finally got a voice actor and she's practically purring at the end. *headdesk*

AtLA/ALoK

I have to think of just one thing? Crap. Um...all of it? Can that be my answer? Just...all of it? From the world building to the character arcs to just being heart-warming good fun.

I love that it challenges conventions.
Also: Aang.
I mean...LOOK AT THAT FACE. LOOK!
He is the woobiest of woobies.

TMNT

The family dynamic. When it's done well the family dynamic of the Turtles, Splinter, April...and occasionally Casey makes my heart sing.

The Middle Man

That it's sharp, witty, and so chock full of geek references it needs a Works Cited page.

Robin Hood: This was the story I fell for when I was twelve because of the found family, the heroes who were figuring out how to be heroes as they were being hunted and that it was all for home.

X-Men: First Class: Charles and Erik, the way they're trying to understand what it means to be a mutant and the different take on characters I love.

Discworld: Its a world on a turtle and Moist is a conman that ends up working for the government. There's a logic and humor to Discworld that I love playing in and Moist brings together many of my favorite aspects of his world, the humor, the awareness of the tropes that are being played.

3:10 to Yuma: Its a movie that feels like a play, because yes, the settings are wide and open and glorious, but the heart of it is found in relationships. Ben and Dan, Dan and Alice, Dan and William with a fantastic cast that just gets me right in the feelings.

Becoming Jane: Its Jane Austen being smart and trying to find her own way and she falls in love with James McAvoy.

Greek Mythology: I love Greek mythology because its fascinating and fits together strangely but there are truths hidden in it.

The Chronicles of Narnia: Narnia is my childhood especially The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I love how the heart of it is about siblings listening and believing in each other. That so much hinges on the kindness of a little girl and then there is this darkness in it.

The Pirates of Penzance: The music and the last song, I grew up watching this operetta and then studied it in college. I love how its silly but has little lessons crept in and the music.

And I almost forgot one. The Abhorsen Chronicles: I love how Garth Nix plays with tropes, one of the heroes is a librarian, the women are more badass, characters try to deal with trauma, there are arguments about magic and science and there's a messed up family at the heart of it all and Mogget.

Edited 2013-08-01 17:20 (UTC)

The Hobbit: Hobbits. They appear to be such soft, gentle creatures, but they've got that marvelous toughness that enables them to, say, match wits with a dragon.

Merlin: Merlin and Arthur are usually student and mentor in Arthurian stories, so I love the new angle of them being friends and growing up together. (Plus the eye candy. Merlin has a ridiculously beautiful cast.)

Teen Wolf: Its absurdity. It is over the top and I love that.

Kings: I am a sucker for retold Biblical stories, and I've always had a soft spot for Jonathan.

Adventure Time: The depth of the world and the developing layers.

Avengers/MCU: Steve is my favorite thing. He's so good, but he's an approachable kind of goodness. He's just a guy trying to do what's right, who happens to a supersoldier.

That there is not a single racist, misogynistic, bigoted moment.

That it takes rigid story/gender roles and very gently turns them inside out, demonstrating which tropes are harmful and unrealistic for anyone to live by.

That my five-year-old is able to point out which relationships are horrifically abusive, and call them out as wrong, and then watch as they slowly change into something healthier through hard work and communication.

That brute force fails; the way to "win" fights is through talking an emotionally distraught person down and telling them that it's okay to feel what you're feeling.

And then there's the Story, and whom it affects.

Psych - (for Henry & Gus) EVERYTHING. Okay, mostly the ability to take an absurd concept and wrap it around a wonderful cast, great writers and a big ass pile of pop culture (particularly 80s) references for a work of magic. And the Shawn/Gus bromance... that's epic.

Burn Notice I love how HUMAN Michael is. For someone who can come dangerously close to being a Mary Sue in terms of perfection, it's when the writers show how really human and fallible Michael is that really make it for me. Yes, he's a badass but with a heart and his own dossier of mistakes past and present.

Edited 2013-08-03 04:58 (UTC)

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My fanon's name is Guitar Ninjas... and it's about ballet.

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