The Super Happy Love Blog Award

Despite having fallen way behind on responding to these tag posts, I’m definitely feeling the love today! Thank you to both Keiko and Yomu for tagging for The Super Happy Love Blog Award and I hope you’ll all send some love their way and check out their respective blogs. I’d also like to thank Pinkie, for creating such a positive and fun tag for us all to share.

The Rules:

1. Thank the one who tagged you and please tag the original post as well. This is my first blog tag and a bit of a passion project so I would like to see where it spreads! Oh, and use Super-Happy-Love as a tag!
2. Display the Super Happy Love Logo in your post and share the rules!
3. Choose a minimum of 2 out of these 6 prompts to answer in this blog! More is always allowed! These six prompts are as follows!
   – Tell about a person you love, this can be a friend, partner but also a celebrity or even youtuber who means a lot to you. As long as they once took breath on this earthly realm you are allowed to pick them… Tell us why you love them.
   – Write something about a fandom or franchise you love. It can be your favorite game series or about just about anything that is bigger than just a single product! Tell us why you live this so much!
   – Tell us something about a character that you love. Do you have a Waifu, a Husbando, maybe a mentor or someone who taught you a valuable lesson. Tell us why you love them.
   – Tell us something about a piece of music that you love. Does a anime intro mean a lot to you? Did you have a special memory to a pop song, like your first dance at your wedding? Maybe a piece of video game music? If you love it, you should tell us why!
   – Write why you love a piece of media so much! A Book, A Game, A Anime, A Movie maybe even a random piece of fan art, you are free to pick as long as you can show us why you love it.
   – Write something about yourself that you love! For those who like a challenge, there is a hard mode in this blog prompt as well. Tell us why you love a certain aspect of yourself
4. Put on your rose tinted glasses. For once you are allowed to gush about the things that you love without having to balance it out with negatives so that you seem objective. In fact your are actively encouraged not to bring negativity into this tag. So no “Nowadays.. <topic> is poopoo but back in my days.. .it was great. Just say it was great! Love is blind after all!
5. Tag 6 bloggers you love so they can take on this challenge as well.
6. Everyone who comments something lovely about your post ALSO gets nominated. (Should they so choose).

I’ll be answering two of the prompts today.

Write something about a fandom or franchise you love:

If I’m going to pick one franchise to gush about, that franchise has to be Star Trek. I’m what you could call a legacy Trekkie, my mom was A Star Trek fan and I recall watching Star Trek The Next Generation (TNG) on TV regularly from a fairly young age. When Star Trek Voyager first started airing, my whole family would sit down to watch the new episodes together, at least for the first couple seasons. Then, during my tween and early teens years, I went through a period where I wasn’t really watching any version of Star Trek anymore, not because I’d made the choice to stop watching it, I just wasn’t catching it on TV at that time. All that changed when I was in high school and, one fateful weekend, I just happened to turn on a TNG marathon and, wouldn’t you know it, they were playing all the episodes that I remembered watching and loving as a child. I spent all day binging episode after episode, pleasantly surprised by how much I remembered of a show that I hadn’t seen in years and also delighted by all of the things that I could now better appreciate as an older viewer. I’d always loved the great characters and exciting, sci-fic action, but now I was drawn in by the interesting ethical questions and moral dilemmas the cast faced each episode. By the time that marathon wrapped up I was completely hooked and started watching reruns of the show on the sci-fi channel every week and saving my pennies so I could purchase the ridiculously expensive DVD box sets. I also made my friends and family members watch the show with me and, when I’d finished devouring all of the episodes of TNG, I moved on to the other television series. I’ve now watched almost all of the numerous TV series and movies that are a part of the Star Trek franchise and my love of  all things Trek has grown to the point that my mother gifted me her autographed picture of Patrick Stewart doing a sexy pose, in a sort of passing of the fandom torch. Thank you, mom. Not only did you give me life, but you also gave me nerd culture!

I think what I love about this franchise so much is it’s focus on philosophy. There are certainly episodes or movies that are more focused on humor or action, and those are fun and great in their own way, don’t get me wrong, but the episodes, regardless of which series we’re talking about, that to me are the most quintessentially “Star Trek” are the episodes that wrestle with a specific issue and really push the audience to think. A perfect example of this would be the season 2 episode of TNG “The Measure of a Man”, where a hearing is held to determine if Lieutenant Commander Data, an android, is the property of Star Fleet or his own person and thus has the right to refuse to participate in an experiment that Star Fleet Command had ordered him to cooperate with, despite the potential risks. This is a great starter episode if you’re new to Star Trek and are interested in giving it a try, by the way.

I’ve already gone on for quite a while here, so I think I’ll wrap thing up by saying that, while TNG is my first Star Trek love and remains one of my favourite of the TV series, my all-time favourite version of Star Trek is the once maligned television series, Star Trek Deep Space Nine (DS9). For a long time, this show was considered the black sheep of the Star Trek family due to the fact that it was significantly darker in tone then the series that had come before it, but this series also boasts a richly complex plot, a great ensemble cast and some of the most clever writing in the entire franchise. Thanks to streaming platforms, like Netflix, this gem of a show seems to be finally gaining the recognition that it deserves and I couldn’t be happier to see it growing in popularity as more people are starting to discover it.

Tell us something about a piece of music that you love:

The song I picked is “Crazy” by Ben Rector, as this is a funny and cute song that I figured not very many people are likely to have heard before. I don’t really have a story to tell about this one, I just like it and wanted to share it with you all. Give it a listen, maybe you’ll love it too.

Thank you again to Keiko and Yomu for the tag. It was great to have an excuse to talk about some of my favourite things and I had a lot of fun writing this post. Now it’s time to spread the love.

I’m tagging the following bloggers for this award:

• Lynn Sheridan
• Mallow
• Scott
• Moyatori
• Tessa
• Inskidee