Canon Promo Meme

[machiavellian]

I Love My Canon, This I Know
Because the Internet Tells Me So

▲ Step One

Post with a blurb about why your canon is awesome.

▲ Step Two

Tag around. Rejoice when you find obscure canonmates.

▲ Step Three

Enable, lure, and seduce new folks to your favourite canon.

▲ Step Four

???

▲ Step Five

Profit.

Comments

China Mieville's Bas Lag Books

[doul]

If you like: body horror, bad things happening to good people, serious nearly silent warriors, vampirates -- yes, vampire pirates --, political commentary, and a heck of a lot more. Want to know more? Ask me or you can check out this fine, fine TV Tropes Page.

Does anyone else out there play from this canon?

Re: China Mieville's Bas Lag Books

[remade_rebel]

Yo!

Dark Hunters (Sherrilyn Kenyon)

[daughter_of_didymos]

Do you like mythology, secret wars, vampires, were-creatures, bucketfuls of angst, goth demons who like to eat diamonds and put bbq sauce on everything...

And okay romance but you can hit or miss on that part. If so, I have a series for you. Sherrilyn Kenyon's Dark Hunter universe which basically takes all of the above, puts it in a blender and ends up with some really interesting characters.

The Mortal Engines/Fever Crumb books

[themomentoftherose]

It's ten thousand years in the post post post apocalypse and most of the world's cities are on tracks, wheels or other forms of movement and go around devouring each other for resources in a horribly unsustainable deconstruction of Social Darwinism.

I really shouldn't have to go any farther than that but I will anyway. How about a badass female lead who isn't pretty but does sassmouth so many people, stabs assholes, and gets the guy in the end anyway? A male lead who's OK with being the non-action-guy? A million ridic puns? Humor so dark you'd swear it was burnt? Undead dieselpunk cyborgs? Piloted bombs? Fighter airships? Why aren't you reading Mortal Engines?

Peter Watts' Starfish

[rifter]

Do you want:

• Super realistic, utterly terrifying, amoral, and realistically researched hard science?


• Multiple female characters who're brilliant, bad-ass, and pass the Bechdel test at every turn?


• Multiple people of colour?


• Deep sea creatures and general horrors?


• A fine, upstanding author that put all his books online, for free?

Then let's talk turkey!

Superjail

[prisonwonka]

Like strange and kooky animation with freeze frame easter eggs, randomness by the ton, and a body count that goes into the dozens every episode? How about a fandom dedicated to great fanart and more crazy theories that you can shake a conspiracy theorist at?

Then this is the canon for you!

[t_forthemonarch]

Oh Superjail.I'm slowly working my way through the series because I have to take time to recover between each episode.
It's definitely not for the faint of heart, but it's undeniably well done and the character designs are fantastic.

The Dream Machine episode will always have a special place in my heart.

Percy Jackson/Heroes of Olympus

[waterproofed]

There is nothing better than Greco-Roman mythology. Unless it's Greco-Roman mythology set in modern times. If you ever wanted to see just how much of a douche Hercules really is, or want more of a reason to think of Los Angeles as Hell... well this is the series for you!

Be warned that the series is still ongoing, but seriously the original five are awesome and Percy is a hilarious narrator.

Re: Percy Jackson/Heroes of Olympus

[machiabrella]

I've been meaning to read the books. I've always loved the premise of the story so much.

Michael Moorcock - all the things

[una_persson]

Do you like heroic fantasy, but wish the heroes were a little less mighty-thewed and a little more psychologically fucked-up?

Do you like experimental fiction with alternate timelines, resurrections and rebirths, politics, history, people making really terrible life choices, and sex 'n' drugs 'n' rock'n'roll? Are you a fan of J.G. Ballard and William S. Burroughs?

Do you like time travel, alternate history, and steampunk?

Do you like fantasy, time travel, the poetry of Algernon Swinburne, the Aesthetic and Decadent literature of the 1880s-1890s?

Do you like Sherlock Holmes and Sexton Blake?

If any or all of the above apply to you, you should be checking out the novels of Michael Moorcock. In the above list, I've only touched on a handful of his most well-known series, in the following order: the Elric saga, the Jerry Cornelius chronicles, the Nomad of the Time Streams (and also, to some extent, Von Bek), the Dancers At the End of Time, and the Metatemporal Detective. He's one of the great masters of SF&F—arguably of 20th century literature—and there's even more in his vast body of work that I've barely touched on. tanelorn (with which I am not affiliated, except as an occasional observer) is based on his work, so you might've heard of him that way.

Anyone else a fan? Or better yet, play from any of his books? (I also have an Elric in the stable as well.)

Re: Michael Moorcock - all the things

[(Anonymous)]

Blood and Souls...

Blood and motherfucking Souls.


I have, someplace, a signed 1st ed, Elric Compendium.

[haplesswisher]

Ho'shit. That's totally Kamui's song right there.

X is awesome because there's lots of lovely art (it improves over the course of the series), eyeloss, angst, violence with serious UST, gore, pretty guys hurting even prettier guys, oddly cute moments, more angst, and gay subtext.

There's also something about choices and wishes and the apocalypse, but no one actually reads it for that. Oh, and there's no ending as of yet -in fact, we just hit the ten year anniversary of it's hiatus!

As a warning: it may or may not break brains. Just sayin'. Most of our fandom seems a little (gloriously) unhinged. Join us~~~

[dusk_to_night]

The best description of X I ever heard was "Well, what do you expect from a series where people trade eyeballs if they love someone and impale eachother sensually with shards of glass."

Huge fan, still bitter X is on Haitus and CLAMP will never give the ending even if Tsubasa's Acid Tokyo was clear proof they missed it too. I am pretty much unwilling to ever move on. Or give them more money.

[cherished_avatar]

Okay, so. Reborn. Katekyo Hitman Reborn. My canon kicks butt because it manages to make "world-class assassin infants" seem reasonable (eventually). The first 60-ish chapters are goofball slice-of-life-gone-mad stuff before they settle into plot things, but man once it gets rolling?

It stays funny often enough not to get depressing, but you end up with human experimentation, timelines gone wrong, aliens, people missing their organs, not-quite-magic powers.

It is, sadly, ended. A little awkwardly, but there were a couple of chapters of sort-of wrap-up.

Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Legacy Series

[virginprice]

If you like alternate history, angels, and prostitutes, Kushiel's Legacy might be for you!

Set in an Earth slightly askance of our own and several hundred years behind us, Kushiel's Legacy (beginning with Kushiel's Dart) is the story of Terre d'Ange, a France that was populated by the illegitimate grandson of God and his angelic companions. They live by the precept 'love as thou wilt', but that doesn't stop the political intrigue.

The first trilogy focuses on Phedre no Delaunay, who was marked by the angel Kushiel to always find pleasure in pain. Adopted by a man with mysterious ties to the d'Angeline throne, she becomes a sacred prostitute and spies on the nobility. Ultimately she saves several different countries- and then the entire world.

The second trilogy focuses on Imriel de la Courcel, third in line for the d'Angeline throne and troubled by dark desires that he cannot accept. He has to deal with suspicion, arranged marriages, and trying to be good- a harder task than it seems with the history he carries.

Anyone else out there?

+1

[scalpedsociety]

I just finished the first book in the first trilogy and HOLY SHIT IT'S GOOD. IDK if I'd ever take a character for RP though. I don't think I could ever get the voice right. (Sucks at accents and dialects.)

Tanya Huff's Blood and Smoke Series

[traineeassistantdirector]

That's two different series, one the Blood Books and one the Smoke Books. Just to clarify. The original Blood series is some cool, straightforward urban fantasy, somewhat early in the modern incarnation of the genre. Sex, murder, supernatural horrors. All good. (There was a TV show that was actually pretty good but also edited out one of the best characters for being gay and replaced him with a pointless ingenue, so I'm a little loath to recommend it.)

And then later came the Smoke Books. A weird, silly, tongue-in-cheek sequel series by a more confident, mature author, poking gentle fun at the nature of the genre as well as nerds and fandom in general. The lovable minion from the earlier books (that'd be Tony, here, who was unceremoniously deleted from the show) moves to Hollywood North and works on a goofy vampire drama and the world continues to need saving every five minutes.

Cool characters, fun stories, endless wit that rivals Whedon, and all the demons you could ever need. It's the best.

+1

[thebreakingwave]

As a tiny, I read the Blood books approximately one million years ago and I loved them. I haven't recently re-read them, although since the author works at my local bookstore, perhaps I should.

I'd like to second Huff's writing as a heck of a lot of fun.

[servesthehuman]

HEY GANG, WHO LIKES GARGOYLES?

Gargoyles is a 1990s Disney cartoon where a group of gargoyles (stone by day, warriors by night!) protected New York City from antagonists ranging from Evil Riker to a clone of the main gargoyle. It had a story arc, was a bit darker than your average children's cartoon, and was a healthy mixture of science-fiction and fantasy. One episode can have someone Frankensteining a gargoyle back to life, while another episode dealt with magic spells. Expect a LOT of references to mythology and Shakespeare; episodes have characters like Anansi, Puck, Anubis, the Weird Sisters, etc. etc. Macbeth's a reoccurring character, how cool is that? If you like semi-urban fantasy, playing spot the literary reference, ridic children's cartoons and unintentional 90s hilarity (oh Xanatos, you have to explain what a floppy disk is), then Gargoyles is the cartoon for you!

Why should you watch Gargoyles?
-It's got pretty much the entire cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation as bad guys. Aside from Evil Riker, you have Troi the Evil Gargoyle, Worf the Frankensteined Gargoyle and Data the Douchebag Fairy. There are more Star Trek alums, but I can't think of them at the moment.
-It managed to make an anti-gun episode that wasn't too preachy. Good on you, Gargoyles!
-The villains are badass but the heroes are pretty swell also! Lexington is a cutie, at least watch it for him. Plus, Goliath's Keith David. Everybody loves Keith David.
-It's got the Illuminati in it. I'm serious.
-It has a canon dark future AU. Said episode with the dark future AU has more twists than a Chubby Checker compilation cd and it is awesome for it.
-It's all up on Youtube! Seriously, all up on Youtube. There is nothing stopping you from watching it. Just youtube 'gargoyles episode 1 awakening' and go from there!

[stonebrooklyn]

Hello there, obscure canonmate!

I MISS THIS SHOW LIKE BURNING.

Oh, and Kate Mulgrew (Captain Janeway on Voyager) played Titania. Ironically, she's the only ST actor who did Gargoyles BEFORE Star Trek. :D

And the only thing I hear Keith David in lately are the US Navy ads. u_u His voice is amazing.

Once Upon a Time

[untilmylipsbled]

Those familiar words that accompany almost every fairy tale we've ever heard...

Well these aren't the fairy tales you know, folks. Nope.

These are fully fleshed out characters - Snow White is more than a princess with a jealous stepmother; she's someone with a pure heart, compassion, and bad-ass archery skills. Prince Charming has a real name AND is actually a charming person, and he fought long and hard to be with his true love, Snow White. Dwarves and giants and even Jiminy Cricket get epic backstories that make you fall in love with them.

Sounds like everyone's got their happy ending, right? No need for a story? False. The Evil Queen, after her defeat by Snow White and company, refuses to live out in a peaceful banishment. Instead she casts a Dark Curse, the darkest in existence, to 'take away the happy endings' and, more importantly, take all the residents of the Enchanted Forest to a new land, one where the Queen will have HER happy ending.

That world...is OUR world. Specifically, a sleepy little town called Storybrooke, Maine. Here, time is essentially stopped, and all of the fairy tale characters live different lives (with new names) and new memories. Snow White is now an elementary school teacher with no true love in sight. The seven dwarves are all various labor workers in town (pharmacist, night guard, town drunk...), The Blue Fairy is the head of the town nuns, Geppetto never had the joy of a son, etc etc.

They live ordinary lives, and none of them are truly happy. But no one realizes they are cursed, and no one does anything to affect change.

The only one who can save them?



Prophecy foretold that the child of Snow White would save their people from the great curse, and thus she was safely transported to our world as a child. But she grew up to be bail bondsperson with a chip on her shoulder.

On her 28th birthday, a strange knock on Emma's door turns her life upside down. Henry, the son she gave up for adoption ten years ago, has finally found her, and he's convinced that she's 'The Savior' who will bring back the happy endings.

She plays along and agrees to bring him back home to Storybrooke and the care of his adoptive mom. That is, the mayor of Storybrooke herself, Regina Mills, AKA The Evil Queen.

Cue showdown and the journey of a skeptic into a hero.

Re: Once Upon a Time

[scalpedsociety]

I've been meaning to get into the show for quite some time. The premise interested me, plus all the Tumblr hype/hysteria/hating on, and I have played with a Dr. Frankenstein before... I liked him.

...I'm tempted to call it 'The Regina Show' because that's the only character I hear of. XD

Martha Wells's Books of the Raksura

[mentornomore]

Alright, so these are deeply obscure, but I'm still gonna try! Do you like incredibly strange monsters? A total lack of any kind of default to human, so that everything is cool monsters with sincerely alien worldviews? And horrible things that want to eat everyone? Cool dragonlike shapeshifters flying around defeating evil and having complex romantic and general interpersonal relationships? An awesome author who shares short story snippets and fanstuff on her site? Then read these books. And then maybe rp from them so Chime can have a friend.

Fate/zero

[gordianknots]

What if King Arthur was a woman, but also a Pokemon?

Or

What if you just magically summoned up people like Alexander the Great, Gilgamesh, Gilles de Rais and Sir Lancelot, stated them up likw D&D characters and have them act as familiars for magi while fighting for the holy grail, with a healthy dose of intelligent battle choices and character development?


Or

Do you like how Game of Thrones offers commentary on chivalry and makes everyone suffer?

Then hey, Fate/zero's for you, so long as you know what you're in for when the writer is Gen Urobuchi!

The not funny version is as follows: seven masters summon seven servants to their side to do battle for the Holy Grail, which in-canon is an omnipotent wish-granting device. Each servant - a heroic figure based either on history or legend - is assigned a class (Archer, Rider, Assassin, Saber, Caster, Berserker, Lancer), given special skills, and partnered with a master to provide them mana to fight.

And then everything goes to hell, because this is Gen Urobuchi doing the writing.

If you're interested in mythology, enjoy conflict driven by interpersonal relationships, and want something that's fairly short term (25 episodes, available on Hulu and Crunchyroll), there are worse ways to spend a day.

Or you can check out these recaps. (Obvious spoiler warnings.)

Re: Fate/zero

[idealblade]

just some drive by Waver love XD

Marvel Animated

[attention_wenches]

So... Okay, Marvel anything hardly needs pimping. But while there are many, many, many movie folks (hi, guys!) and a core of hardcore comics people (love you, too, and am one of you), I find the cartoons are often a little neglected. I see roleplayers, but not nearly so consistently.

Anyway, here's why you should try out... Well, there's a lot to choose from. I suppose you could play from the super old school, painfully cheaply animated cartoons from the sixties, but that might be hard. But with three solid X-Men shows, several Spiderman shows of varying quality, Avengers Assemble, that weird Iron Man show where he's a teenager (gotta admit, I couldn't get into it, but I'm sure someone enjoys it), and even that cracked out show for five year olds where everyone looks like a lego person... There's a lot to choose from. There are also a bunch of miniseries and short movies floating around. There's a lot!

And they're quality in their own right (to varying degrees), but there are a few distinct advantages. You can play a classic character with their core personality and major history intact, but without needing to have a perfect handle on forty years of backstory, or you can play with the strange what-ifs that Marvel's love of unending AUs brings us.

Me, I've got tiny Loki from Tales of Asgard here, who is pretty great and also allows one to play with all the lunacy and flaws of Loki without being an out-and-out antagonist (which is fun sometimes, but hard if you want to be in a game and not lonely), and Kurt Wagner from X-Men: Evolution, because... Well, okay, I have a couple versions of Nightcrawler because that happens when you have your favorite character picked out when you're ten and roll with it.

Anyway, Marvel Animated friends, assemble!

The Spectacular Spiderman

[moltenman]

Now I play Mark Allan from the obscure Spiderman series: The Spectacular Spiderman. He's kinda, sorta, a villain. To learn more about Mark you'll have to watch the series. But I think the series is much more faithful to the original comics with Spiderman wisecracking and joking more akin to what Spiderman fans love. Watch this show, you will not be disappointed.

Black Lagoon

[nuns4money]

-Do you like Action Anime that does NOT FUCK AROUND on the emphasis on 'action' and will probably get you high off it?
-Do you like a rare Anime that actually improves upon the original manga by adding story and characterization?
-Do you like capable, awesome and badass chicks that actually pass the Bechdel Test?
-Do you like a metric fuck ton of curse words in your series? (The subbed version isn't that bad but imo, the dubbed is pretty good too.)

Then check out Black Lagoon and make this nun less lonely for canonmates!

[two_hands]

Such a good anime. I really need to rewatch it and work on voice testing this one

Decoder Ring Theatre

[girlinasquirrelsuit]

Do you like classic pulp? How do you feel about hard boiled detectives? Old-fashioned mystery men of the pre-Batman kind, who are mostly just dudes who wear a mask with their suit and beat up bad guys with the power of owning weapons? Awesome writing that manages to be just a little tongue-in-cheek, acknowledging the ridiculousness of the premise and its predecessors but reveling in it? A childlike sense of wonder, yet a rapier wit and rare moments of dizzying pathos?

So Decoder Ring Theatre is great, is what I'm saying. Their two big shows are Black Jack Justice (Noir detective) and The Red Panda Adventures (old-school super heroics with Nazi punching on the side). It's all free online and there are seasons and seasons of shows already there for the listening.

I play the leading lady from each show, Kit Baxter-Fenwick/The Flying Squirrel and Trixie Dixon, Girl Detective. Because I love them. (For bonus points, despite being set in the forties and fifties respectively, RPA and BJJ feature awesome lady characters, acknowledgement of social issues, and absolutely no hiding behind their genre and setting to get away with sucking.)

Terminator

[godelsolution]

Like robots? Like the apocalypse? Like future wars? Enjoy Michael Biehn, Summer Glau, Nick Stahl or for some reason Christian Bale? Like the idea of a series that makes their OWN alternate universes? TERMINATOR.

The Hour

[tenerelupum]

* Awesome ladies. Awesome, awesome ladies.

* Wonderful, passionate, flawed people who care a lot about each other and about JOURNALISM.

* All the period scenery/costume porn you could ever want.

* Did I mention the awesome ladies?

* Romola Garai, Ben Whishaw, Dominic West, Oona Chaplin, Anna Chancellor, Peter Capaldi...

* Spy shenanigans.

* Noir shenanigans.

* The smartest fucking writing on the planet.

[noteventherain]

All of this, seconded. If I ever see a Lix or Marnie in this comm I'll probably cry.

the brothers bloom

[dostoevsky]

The Brothers Bloom is a caper film that takes place in a fantasy world that is a lot like our world, except with more literary allusions and fabulous hats. The plot is twisty and fun—and uneven in places, but whatever. The characters make up for it. They include codependent con artist brothers, an heiress who can juggle chainsaws while riding a unicycle, and Rinko Kikuchi blowing shit up.

I have spent a lot more time pining for castmates than I have actually playing from the canon, but the mysterious burst of activity on the tumblr tag of late has given me some hope.

[scalpedsociety]

They include codependent con artist brothers, an heiress who can juggle chainsaws while riding a unicycle, and Rinko Kikuchi blowing shit up.

...Tell me more.

Batman: The Brave and the Bold

[hypnotic_patter]

My canon is like the Silver Age had a baby with Justice League Unlimited, which was then raised and nurtured by Batman: The Animated Series. It has obscure comic book characters who haven't been seen in decades, and excessive gorillas and robots, and completely ridiculous superhero shenanigans tempered by a serious treatment of dramatic situations that occasionally ventures into heartbreaking.

Also a musical episode starring this dude, as voiced by Neil Patrick Harris.

[t_forthemonarch]

ACK! I've been meaning to watch this series for ages.
I should get on that. I do have a weakness for ridiculous superhero shenanigans.

Battletech/Mechwarrior

[littleshortforanelemental]

Do you like giant robots but wish they were treated more like weapons of war and not sixty foot tall Batman? Did you like Game Of Thrones, with its feuding noble houses? Into Proud Warrior Races? Wanna be able to play out these things from the comfort of your own home without the mess and inconveinence of getting decapitated by a particle cannon?

Then you should try 25 year old new Battletech! Comes in three flavors:

-The boardgame, where you command teams of mechs (they're the ones who invented the term!) against your friends or neighborhood gamestore weirdos, all without spending hundreds of dollars (we're looking at you, games that start with "W" and end with "arhammer40k")(the basic rule set is free!)

-The free to play online simulator, where you jump right into the cockpit and discover what the guy who was in the Godzilla suit must have felt like.

-The fiction, depicting a universe spanning hundreds of star systems, where feudal lords fight over the throne of the vacant Star League, vicious, genetically engineered Clan warriors are poised at the heart of the Inner Sphere like a dagger and the phone company is evil as fuck.

Don't delay! Try Battletech today!

Franken Fran

[stitchedupbodyguard]

Like body horror, black comedy, endearing but sometimes terrifying characters, and well writen stories? Here's the tropes page.

Book Girl (Light Novels)

[tohko_amano]

-Love books, unsure of books, or want to see the good that they could possibly do in a characters life?

-Like realistic characters with issues that do take awhile to resolve-and are sometime never fixed at all?

-Like beautiful artwork in your light novels? This really shouldn't be what sells you though..

-Love adorable and semi-derpy main characters who are unique?

-Like good mysteries and wonderful descriptions of human suffering?

Then the Book Girl light novels really are for you, trust me!