Dear Festividder Letter 2024

Dear Festividder,

Hi! I'm obstinatecondolement, or SweetPollyOliver on AO3. It's that wonderful time again! Thank you so much for offering one of my requested fandoms.

I'm pretty easy to please, so please do feel free to take as little or as much guidance from anything I've written here as is helpful, and I'm more than happy to be surprised.

General vid and music related likes

• Humourous lyrics or ironic pairings of clips with lyrics for a humorous effect
• Character study vids
• Ensemble vids
• Uptempo vids with lots of quick cuts on the beat and a sense of movement
• But also: slower, contemplative vids with long clips
• Vids with a strong narrative/emotional arc
• Music specific likes:
  • Disco, Soul, 60s/70s R&B e.g. Marvin Gaye, The Supremes, Stevie Wonder, The Jackson 5, Smokey Robinson, The Bee Gees, Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, Boney M., Earth Wind & Fire, Chaka Khan and the Village People
  • Rock and pop from the 1960s-1980s, e.g. The Mamas & the Papas, Janis Joplin, Neil Young, Cher, The Turtles, The Beach Boys, Fleetwood Mac, David Bowie, ABBA and Queen
  • Contemporary pop, e.g. Carly Rae Jepsen, Ke$ha, Lady Gaga, Mitski, Hayley Kiyoko, Marina (& the Diamonds), Florence + the Machine
  • Contemporary hip hop and R&B, e.g. Lizzo, Megan Thee Stallion, Doja Cat, Rihanna, Shea Couleé and Janelle Monáe
  • Pop folk, e.g. Simon & Garfunkel, Sufjan Stevens, Belle and Sebastian, Mumford & Sons and Joni Mitchell
  • Vocal jazz, especially Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone and Chet Baker. I mostly listen to stuff from the 1930s-1960s, but I'd be thrilled to get something set to more contemporary jazz or jazz fusion too.
  • Great American Songbook singers, i.e. anyone known for singing things composed by Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Johnny Mercer, Hoagy Carmichael, Rodgers & Hammerstein, etc. but especially Judy Garland
  • Musical theatre e.g. Patti Lupone, Audra McDonald, Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli, Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel
  • Country, e.g. Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Trixie Mattel, Skeeter Davis, Loretta Lyn, Woody Guthrie, Willie Nelson, Shania Twain, Norah Jones, Lil Nas X, Sheryl Crow and Miley Cyrus

Other notes regarding vid preferences

There aren't any genres of music that I actively dislike and if you get the vibe that I would like something based on the things I have listed above, and it's not a DNW, then you're probably right. I often enjoy vids set to covers of well-known songs, so that would be really cool. I don't listen to a huge amount of instrumental music, but I do enjoy it! Also feel free to vid something to a non-music audio source, such as poetry. I also don't mind dialogue in vids, but I prefer that it's over instrumental sections of the music with no lyrics, that there is no audible music from the source's score, and that the volume of the song the vid is set to is adjusted so that the dialogue isn't fighting with it.

DNWs

• Vids set to music by Michael Bublé or Taylor Swift
• Footage of rats
• Sustained strobing or flashing throughout the vid

Requested fandoms

Porridge (1974)

I've been on a big Porridge kick for about a year now. I love how it marries silly sit-com antics with things that are genuinely deeply tragic if you think about them even a little and the shows unrelenting scepticism of The System and its refusal to concede that the character are not playing a rigged game. I do also consider it to be the deeply touching story of a 23 year old first offender and his mission to fuck his middle aged cellmate, but you do not have to indulge me on this and I'd be more than happy with a gen vid. A character study or an ensemble vid could both work really well, and you could go funny or serious to equally great effect. Or both!

Watership Down (Animated Film 1978)

I have loved this movie my whole life. The animation style is so beautiful and the characters are all so distinct and interesting. I love how weird and offputting Fiver can be, and there's something about a rabbit that's psychic that just really seems right. Hazel as the capable but unglamorous leader, Bigwig as the disgruntled but deeply loyal heavy, Blackberry's cleverness, all of the Watership Down rabbits who I could go on about for paragraph upon paragraph. And Kehaar! Beautiful Kehaar with his loyalty to the "stupid bunnies" who saved him and how he is so foreign to them but still a firm friend of the warren. And, oh my god, Hyzenthlay, my best friend Hyzenthlay. I love her and how she stands up to Woundwart, but in a very measured and political way that doesn't come off like a shallow attempt to write a girlboss. I also love how she is almost the midpoint between Hazel with his calm leadership and Fiver with his visions. I also really love her relationship with Bigwig and how they work together to organise the escape from Efrafa.

I also just really love the worldbuilding in this movie and how lapine religion and mythology is so deeply real and present in-universe. It captures how precarious and brutal the lives of these prey animals are, but in a way that really centres how they see both the world and themselves. They are at the mercy of strange and unfathomable forces, but they are the heroes and they never give up. All the world will be your enemy, prince of a thousand enemies, and if they catch you, they will kill you. But first, they must catch you!

Supacell (TV 2024)

This show was such a surprise to me and I wholeheartedly recommend watching it if you haven't already, even if you're planning on vidding one of my other recommendations, if only because I want more people to talk to about it, haha. The worldbuilding is so cleverly conceived and the characters are all so grounded and real in a setting with superpowers and sinister hooded figures acting as bounty hunters for mysterious evil organisations.

I love all of the main characters and the ways they clash and contrast, and their ties to friends and family outside of each other—Sabrina's sister Sharleen, Tazer's grandmother and the other Tower Boys, Michael's fiancee Dionne, Andre's son AJ, Rodney's friend Spud—being what ultimately leads them to work with each other. Some kind of ensemble vid would be amazing, but you could zoom in on one character, or on one relationship, and that would also be so effective.

The Tick (2016)

So, fun fact, this is the fandom that got me to start vidding, haha. I was trying to put a playlist together and it wasn't going anywhere but I knew that I wanted to do Something with one song in particular, so I decided to give vidding a go on an impulse. Needless to say, I am very fond of this fandom

I really love how earnest the show is, despite it being comedic. It's so refreshing, even eight years after it came out, to see a superhero show that isn't cringingly embarrassed that it's a superhero show.

I love Arthur's arc and the way the show deals with mental illness and trauma, and I also really love his relationship with the Tick. Dot is such a deep well of characterisation and I think her season two plotline where she comes into her own after spending most of her life trying to look after Arthur is amazing. Overkill is also fantastic and I love how his gritty antihero shtick is undercut and clowned on several times, but his trauma never is even when elements of it are presented comedically (YMMV, though, I suppose). I also find his relationship with Dot very compelling. I think there's so many ways you could do a vid for this fandom: it could be campy and silly, it could be sad, it could be around a theme like loss, or heroism, or it could be focused more on a single character study, or a relationship, or relationship(s). There's a lot of scope!

The Tick [Umbrella]

It's really interesting to me how unique The Tick is as a superhero franchise in that all its different iterations, which are all so different in tone, have had the creator Ben Edlund at the wheel. It can be gritty or cartoony, cynical or sincere, adult or kid-friendly, but it's all still Ben Edlund's The Tick. I think that it is a fascinating lens to look at where the superhero genre was at at the time of each adaptation—what was being satirised and what did that reflect? There is also something interesting to me about how the Tick himself is kind of a mystery. He's not a Superman or a Batman type figure with a coherent origin story or a secret identity, he exists in each story to be The Tick.

Some Like it Hot (1959)

I'm so deeply in love with this movie. I probably know it word for word, shot for shot, but I still laugh at all the jokes and scream at all the same things every time I see it. I love how it's both silly and zany but also quite sweet and sensitive. I also do absolutely read it as a trans movie. As my youngest sibling recently said of Daphne, "Transition did save her. From the mob, but also in general."

Singin' in the Rain (1952)

This movie is both another all time personal favourite, but one I think is incredibly viddable with all its gorgeous dance numbers and fun facial expressions to cut to. I really love that it's a movie about movies (and a musical about musicals). Maybe it's growing up on The Muppet Show, but any kind of story with an on-stage and off-stage element to it really speaks to me. I think that basically any of the characters would be so fun to centre a vid around, but something shippy (Kathy/Don, Kathy/Don/Cosmo, Don/Cosmo, onesided Don/Lina, the list goes on), or something with the whole ensemble, or something about putting together a movie/showbusiness, etc., would all work really well

Star Trek: Lower Decks

I am so enraptured with Lower Decks. I love how it is so fond of the franchise and respects it so much while still being very silly and both more overtly comedic and horny on main (this is a family show, Gene!) than its predecessors. The characters might be 2D animated, but they are never flat and, again, the comedic tone of the show never robs any of them of being more than just funny. In particular, I love how Beckett tries to rougish and devil-may-care, but she cares so much, and her arc relating to her relationship to the institution of Starfleet and its ideals. This is another one where you could go in so many different directions and tones and all of them would work really well. You could do something funny, something serious, something that's both, a character study, something around a theme, an ensemble vid.