Res ipsa loquitur

I’m surprised no one ever drew Venom as the little octopus inside the coconut.

Yikes, I got way behind! schneefink asked, "how about your field of study/work/specialization/hobby and how a book/movie/series/canon got it terribly/hilariously wrong?"

I'm not a journalist any more, but that's what my education and most of my experience was in. So the workplace experience of Eddie Brock in "Venom" is painful to watch.

I dunno, maybe you could have a hobby blog that consisted of confronting the powerful on film? Or maybe they're basing him on Michael Moore or something like that?

In reality, if you suspected that an Elon Musk-type figure was carrying out illegal experiments on poor people, the last thing you would do is confront him on camera -- and I mean that literally: you'd do months' worth of background work, and then, as a final move, you might confront him on camera. (Or maybe not. Maybe you'd call him on the phone, let his spokesperson decline to comment, and then publish what you had, with evidence.)

Real journalism might break that story by going through the guy's garbage. Or maybe you'd use your network to find people who had left or been fired (like, uh, Dr. Skirth? She's an absolutely perfect source) and then take what they told you and find other people to independently verify it. You might be able to find the company that was selling him laboratory equipment. You might be able to hang out with homeless people long enough to see someone get taken by his people, or maybe even get taken yourself.

But nobody, to my knowledge, has ever broken a real story by setting up a camera and then filming while they accused a super-powerful person of doing terrible things and the super-powerful person said, "No, I didn't."



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I spend weekends in Spouseville (where the church has wifi but no climate control and the house has climate control but no wifi) so I figured I'd get a headstart on this.

goss said, "VENOM! Why do you think it's been such an instant hit with Fandom, and what are some of your favourite fanworks so far?" and nestra said, "Any Venom recs?"

Much as I enjoyed it, much as I am loving what fans are doing with it, I stand by my first impression of "Venom": it was a mess. Maybe because they were trying to use the superhero movie toolkit to make a romcom? Maybe just because what we want is a romcom, and we're happy to dismantle a mediocre superhero movie to get one?

I've seen the Sony recut-as-romcom trailer, but I can't watch it all the way through. It's embarrassing without the indescribable magic that we-the-fandom bring to make the whole thing hang together.

(It's OK. I wrote 13% of the entire fandom of the Will Smith movie "Hancock," which was a similar sort of mess: overwhelming subtextual support for polyamory, insights on race and heroism, and an excruciatingly extended scene where someone's head is literally stuffed up someone's ass. I don't mind messes. Fandom knows what to do with messes.)

Honestly, I think the mismatch between what's on the screen and what's in the subtext is a big part of what fandom finds so appealing. It's not so much a story as a story kit, and we're all do-it-yourselfers at heart.

Plus, of course, we're also monsterfuckers at heart. And it's been a while since we had the opportunity to get Tom Hardy naked.

As for recs: I'm mostly not reading comic-based stories -- different characterization, too damned much canon. And I'm so not up-to-date on everything in the fandom. Dira's bookmarks are a great resource.

Cupidsbow is really exploring the alien side of the alien, in a way that I suspect will wind up being secondary canon for a lot of other writers. I particularly liked Food/Trust.

More excellent backstory, and also funny: Wildehack's Intra-Personal Negotiation.

Zuzeca's Attenborough's Revenge has a great Venom voice and a terrific portrayal of Venom's species and what made him a loser among them.

Given a mind-reading, shape-shifting, almost infinitely flexible symbiote, it's dispiriting how many authors go, "I know! I'll make a big muscular dom for rough fucking!" Which is to say that while there's a lot of excellent romance in the fandom, most of the sex has disappointed me. Zuzeca's Conjugal Love is one of the few explicit stories I can really recommend in this fandom.

And another is Dira's Aide-Memoire. I recommend everything Dira has written in the fandom, without exception, but be aware that some of it will make you cry.


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