dolorosa_12 | Entries tagged with peaky blinders

This weekend feels more efficient than others so far this year — I've done almost everything I wanted to do, and it's only 1.30pm on Sunday!

Every year, I know this specific

snowflake_challenge prompt is coming: In your own space, create a fanwork. And every year, I swear I'll start working on something so that it will be ready to post by the time the prompt comes around, and every year I end up being completely unprepared.

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of metallic snowflake and ornaments. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

However, this year I'm lucky, in that

threesentenceficathon is also happening, with some great prompts, and so I have fanworks ready to post! I've grouped all my fills together in an AO3 series, so if I fill more prompts, they can just get added on, but at the moment there are three ficlets posted. The fandoms covered so far are Greek mythology (Hades/Persephone), Peaky Blinders (Ada Shelby), and the Rumpelstiltskin fairytale (Rumpelstiltskin/Miller's Daughter). There are a couple of other prompts that caught my eye, so I'll see how many more I can add.

halfamoon will be running again this February. This is a fourteen-day fest focusing on female characters. Every two days, there's a new prompt, for which you can create fanworks, or share recs for other people's work that fits the prompt. The prompts list for this year is out in advance.

The detailed nomination statistics for last year's Hugo Awards have
finally been made public, and there seem to be a lot of problems (most notably, a number of works or individuals that were eligible for shortlisting and achieved the requisite number of votes to be shortlisted appear to have been arbitrarily ruled ineligible for reasons that are as yet unclear). Cora Buhlert's blog post is probably the best starting point, as it's a good summary in its own right, and links to pretty much every other piece of discussion of the matter.

Reading-wise it's been a slow week. I've only finished one book, The Last Sun (K.D. Edwards), the first in a series of urban fantasy books in which characters with supernatural abilities have washed up on the shores of Earth after their home in Atlantis was destroyed, and in which powerful, aristocratic Houses (based on tarot — the Tower, the Lovers, the Hermit and so on) vie for control of their new, closed community. Our point-of-view character is the last remaining survivor of the destroyed Sun House, and he works as a sort of supernatural private detective for hire.

It's incredibly tropey, everyone has incredibly angsty backstories and unresolved trauma, and in general I found it fun in an escapist sort of way. I wish more of the secondary characters were women, and that we got to know more of the interior lives of the female characters we do meet, but hopefully there's more of that as the series progresses — it's not going to stop me reading future books, nor indeed the free short stories that the author has posted online. In fact, once I've finished catching up on Dreamwidth, I'm going to read any of those that fit chronologically with what I've read so far.

Today's post is going to be a quick one — just answering the current

snowflake_challenge prompt, which is: In your own space, rec three fanworks that you did not create.

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of three snowmen and two robins with snowflakes. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

I'm going to use this post to rec three of my favourite fanvids of all time. By way of preamble, I'll clarify a couple of things relating to how I define 'favourite.' Firstly, I'm not an avid consumer of fanvids, and far less a creator (as I said in a previous post, any kind of fanwork involving graphics is basically like witchcraft to me) — I tend to engage with fanvids when someone I know has either a) created or recced a fanvid and b) it's in a fandom with which I'm familiar, so my engagement is somewhat haphazard. I have pretty clear things that I look for in a fanvid: I have to like the music, I have to feel that it fits well with the focal character(s) and the story being told in the vid (or is so outrageously incongruous that that's basically the point), and the editing has to be smooth enough that errors are unnoticable to my untrained eye. I also personally dislike fanvids that have dialogue from the source spliced into the video — I want it to tell a complete story with music and images, without needing source dialogue as a scaffold.

There are some well-known, beloved fanvids that get recced to everyone wanting to know the greatest hits of the medium, and I like them a lot, but I've steered clear of them here as most people will have had them recced before.

With that in mind, here is my totally biased, subjective, created-from-a-place-of-complete-ignorance list of favourite three fanvids:

( Vid recs )

Do you have any particular things you like in fanvids? Do you have any particular favourites?

It's blowing a gale in my part of the world, which seems a suitably stormy end to the working week. I hope everyone else in the UK is safe from the two named storms which have swept through over the past few days!

This week's Friday open thread is in honour of the fact that I've been rewatching the first season of Peaky Blinders. Although I will watch the forthcoming sixth (and final) season when it airs, in general I have no desire to rewatch any season other than the first. I feel the show worked best when its ruthless, ambitious, traumatised Birmingham gangsters were fighting for what felt like proposterously small things: control over a few streets and warehouses, the right to operate their gambling business legitimately at one racecourse — and as they sought more and more grandiose things over the subsequent seasons, things became increasingly ridiculous. There's still plenty to enjoy, but Peaky Blinders is one of the many shows that I feel has a perfect first season, and could have said everything it needed to say in those six episodes.

So my question to you is this: what TV shows do you feel are perfect at one season, and then could (or should) have ended?

Other than Peaky Blinders, I feel this applies to Veronica Mars, the BBC Musketeers and Robin Hood shows (both of which are very silly, but were the correct kind of silly in their first seasons), and the original British series of Broadchurch. I feel that popular British miniseries are particularly at risk of this — showrunners get the go-ahead to produce six episodes, they make something that ends up being a huge hit, and then people want them to make more, when the original show was complete in and of itself.

Thank you also to everyone who left comments on my last post. I'm not going to go back and respond directly, but I'm grateful for your kindness.

Day Fifteen of the fandom meme is a prompt very much to my taste, because I am all about the song lyrics:

O: Choose a song at random, what ship does it remind you of?

I have been listening to a lot of Promenade Cinema at the moment, so why not have a song selected at random from their discography?

I've chosen 'The Quiet Silently Wait':

I keep a candle for the nights when the lights go out.
I watch the sun depart & leave the sky to darkness.
Beneath the windows are the faces without features,
And in the mirror, the shadows drawing closer.
As the candle goes out,
They give you nothing.
Under street lights in the rain,
I am dissolving, I am dissolving.
As the quiet silently wait, see them smile.

To be honest, this could be any of my ships: I tend to like melodramatic 'us against the world' ships where at least one half of them is leading a revolution, usually against the beings/rulers/social class to which the other half of the ship belongs.

But in the instant where I first read the lyrics, the first ship that popped into my head was Tommy Shelby/Grace Burgess from Peaky Blinders. He's a 1920s Birmingham gangster, traumatised by his experiences in World War I and a childhood of the quiet violence that comes with extreme poverty, who reacted to his experiences by doing everything he could to insulate himself against the possibility of ever feeling fear again. (In his case this means terrorising everyone else and acquiring as much money as possible.) She is the spy sent to infiltrate his operation. (Together they ~~fight~~ do crime!) They find happiness, occasionally, in quiet moments, in the dark, in the spaces between. But, mostly, they're doomed to tragedy — the fatal flaw for Tommy, for anyone whose greatest horror is the thought of ever being afraid again, is caring about other people. If you care about a single other person it is impossible to live without fear.

They're messed up, they hurt themselves and each other, and I still love them anyway.

( The other days )

I'm at home today, because this evening (too early to be able to get there after finishing work), I am going to be fulfilling a lifelong ambition and seeing Massive Attack live in concert! And not just any concert — an anniversary show focusing on the music from their Mezzanine album. Seeing my favourite band of all time perform the songs from my favourite album of all time is just so amazing. Fifteen-year-old Ronni would be astonished at her good fortune!

As a result of being home, I've been trundling back through my reading page, and come bearing links.

First up, if you, like me, recently watched Russian Doll and loved it,

rachelmanija has set up a discussion post here. Spoilers are allowed in the comments.

I really shouldn't sign up for multiple exchanges simultaneously, but the new

peakyblindersficexchange sounds right up my alley. I love the show, and definitely think we need more fic for this fandom. If you're interested in participating, the various deadlines are there in the Dreamwidth account. It seems to use OR matching, and matches on relationships rather than characters, and my impression is that if you don't see your chosen relationship(s) in the tagset you can request that they be added. Assignments are a 500-word minimum.

If you, like me, adore the 'absolute unit' meme (basically, square sheep), you will also adore

bironic's latest fanvid. I've embedded the Ao3 link below.

Squares Are Everywhere (90 words) by bironic
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: "Absolute unit" livestock meme
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: cows - Character, Sheep - Character, Pigs - Character
Additional Tags: Memes, Humor, archival images, Art, Video, Embedded Video, Fanvids
Series: Part 58 of vids by bironic
Summary:

"In awe at the size of this lad. Absolute unit." Or: improbably shaped livestock.

This feels peak millennial, but I discovered this poem, 'The Ex-Girlfriends Are Back From the Wilderness' by Hera Lindsay Bird via Florence Welch's Instagram account, and I kind of love it. like too much Persephone and not enough underworld…/wearing nothing but an arts degree. I feel seen.

I hope you're all having wonderful Fridays.

I know it's a bit late, but I was in Germany without my laptop, and then flat out at work this week, so this is the first chance I've had to post a bunch of links to Yuletide fics. This was my first year participating, and it all went a lot better than I was expecting.

kmo wrote Ouroboros (Wise Child series, Juniper and Wise Child, gen) for me.

I wrote one gift fic and one treat, and both were well received, considering they were for very tiny fandoms.

Beyond the Ninth Wave (Wise Child series, gen). After being driven from their home by Fillan Priest, Juniper and Wise Child adjust to a new life on Finbar's ship.

Reverberations (Romanitas trilogy, gen). Several years after the events of Savage City, Una, Makaria and Noriko meet. All three feel the effects of the war and slave rebellion in different ways.

I really enjoyed many of the fics in the collection this year. Here are some of my particular favourites:

Far from the Blessed Isles by

Miss_M (Greek Mythology; Penelope, Circe, Nausicaa, Calypso; T). The dead talked a lot among themselves, there being little else for them to do. Conversation tended to run along circular paths. I love this because it's absolutely unflinching in how it reveals what a raw deal women got in Greek mythology, but still allows these women a space to express their anger about the injustice they experienced.

The Banishing of Winter by

Skeiler (Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell; John Uskglass; G). In 1202, The Raven King "quarreled with Winter, and banished it from his kingdom so that it enjoyed four years of continual Summer." This is that story. This is absolutely fabulous, managing to retain the whimsical, scholarly tone of the book while also perfectly capturing the spirit of a folk tale.

The Price of Honor by

keilexandra (The Lions of Al-Rassan; Rodrigo Belmonte/Jehane bet Ishak/Ammar ibn Khairan; M). Jehane and Ammar try to make a life for themselves in Muwardi-occupied Al-Rassan. Some things, a very few of them, may be more important than honor. What-if? AU. Warning for implied sexual violence. If this isn't what happened, this is what should have happened. I particularly appreciate that the author managed to resolve the love triangle in a way that still included Rodrigo's wife, Miranda.

Robbing Peter by

cantstoptemplarswillgetme (The Musketeers; d'Artagnan, Porthos, Athos, Aramis, Constance; T). There's no summary, but this is a very silly heist fic, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Somebody's Waiting for Someone by

stellatundra (Peaky Blinders; Ada Shelby/Freddie Thorne; T). It might be Tommy he goes to France for, but it’s Ada he comes home for. A Freddie-centric fic examining his relationship with various Shelbys.

I also loved almost all the Clarke/Bellamy/Raven fics for The 100 fandom.

Current Mood: peaceful
Crossposts: http://dolorosa-12.livejournal.com/207377.html

Day Five: Favorite female character on a male-driven show

Polly Shelby in Peaky Blinders

Peaky Blinders, is, at its heart, a show about male violence. It's about violent men, traumatised by the violence of the Western Front in World War I, returning home and unable to deal with their PTSD. It's about a world that has never offerred these men any option but to be violent, and the uses to which they put that violence. It's about clever, violent men harnessing the violence of others to their own ends. It's about a community accepting a level of male violence as the price it pays in protection from other violent men, men outside the community.

It's also a show about how the women around these violent men manage their violence.

Polly Shelby is the ageing matriarch of the Shelby clan, a multigenerational family of racetrack gangsters who have occupied the role of de facto rulers of the 1920s Birmingham slums for decades. They lead a gang known as the Peaky Blinders. As in other occupations, when the young men went off to war, Polly stepped up to run their operations. She and the other Shelby women actually ran things perfectly well on their own, and one of the minor subthreads of the first season dealt with how Polly and her nephew Tommy renegotiated their respective roles within the Shelby leadership after his return to Birmingham. Since Tommy's return she has alternated between an admiring enforcer of his plans within the family and the Peaky Blinders as a whole, a sounding board for Tommy to speak to behind closed doors, and a restraining voice of caution whose keen sense of self-preservation sometimes wars with Tommy's grand vision. In spite of these various conflicts, Polly remains talented at manipulating and directing the various nephews, cousins and friends within the Peaky Blinders, and it's in her story that we see most clearly the other side of the show's thematic coin: Peaky Blinders is about male violence, but it's also about women's responses to that violence. Polly's preference is to turn that violence outward, using it as a weapon to protect her position in the community and keep that community reasonably harmonious.

In the first season, Polly frequently acted behind the scenes to get things done, either because she saw things Tommy didn't notice, and dealt with them before they became a problem, or because she was trying to spare him from having to make personally difficult choices. This desire to act alone frequently put Polly in conflict with Tommy, even though this was a trait he shared. Polly is blessed with a razor-sharp ability to read people and come to the correct conclusions regarding their actions, choices and the consequences thereof. However, the second season is showing that she has some significant blind spots, and, most importantly, that the only person she can't read is herself. I'll be very interested to see where her story ends up.

( The other days )