As of the time I started writing this post, I've been in a sort of "lame duck" situation, having accepted an offer for a job some distance away, starting at some point in the future, and with frankly substandard economics. This means that to land on a role with better outcomes for all of those things, I must wait and prepare for opportunities I am already in the pipeline for instead of simply spamming new applications indefinitely.[1] The spamming of applications was strangely enough a task that consumed time and got me to feel something (in this case tedium), so mission accomplished for that. Also in this time, I took inventory of what I have previously read for the purposes of both becoming more well-read and for stuff to write about on this website, and noticed that the protagonists all went through hell for payoffs that fall far short of unambiguously good.[2] I needed to dive into stories that take place in simple places to live and make choices, where good puts it all on the line against evil and wins.
The prescription for these malaises was Magica Riot, the queer magical girl rock band (already an enticing five word story, like a more efficient and woke anecdote about Hemingway) at the center of author Kara Buchanan's Maidensong Magica universe. Having read through both published novels, I was inundated with the exact catharsis I needed in this moment.
Despite the fantastical premise of magical girls channeling the power of empathy and kindness through their songs to destroy supernatural threats being inherently cathartic, the moments that stuck with me were those grounded in reality. Trans joy[3] is the name of the game for Magica Riot, and it begat more specific forms of itself such as romance, solidarity, and redemption. Claire Ryland being the vector of all of this made it easy to live vicariously through her on top of being legitimately invested in the well being of the band and their circle.
It's been a while since works of fiction have been able to accomplish the Jim Valvano triumvirate of thinking, laughing, and crying that forms the basis of this site, but these novels did it.
In an additional effort to stave off ennui, I have been various types of videos free on YouTube that I think are engaging, prioritizing new standalone releases or latest installments in ongoing miniseries I've been keeping up with. Around this time, these options were exhausted, so I opened up the "to rewatch" vault, settling on the one multipart Jon Bois/Alex Rubenstein creation that I haven't touched in full since I was watching the premiers:[4]The History of the Minnesota Vikings. The coincidence that led to me writing about this and Magica Riot at the same time is of course that our protagonists are clad in purple and the quest for a cathartic resolution is hanging over the stories.
Obviously, when it comes to real history and other non-fictional documents, there is no authoral planning or intervention to be a guarantor for a good ending. As sports fandom is in many ways the biggest vehicle for fostering communities in the real world, the burden that comes with a long championship drought is many people's first exposure to how reality is more disappointing than fiction. This isn't to say that having various superstitions about team performance is simply a form of copium shielding fans from the inherent chaos of there being no indication that zigging or zagging is on the horizon when it comes to the fate of sporting organizations or events: creating the framing device of [insert sport here] gods meticulously counting the karmic beans of [insert team here] is a fun visual to have.
The flipside to unpredicability, that eventually the rug won't be pulled, is part of what keeps us coming. It's why all of the spaces I'm in are primarily celebrations of real live events.
Here's a thing about Jon Bois and his works, something that he himself and many reviewers of his works on Letterboxd back when that site still allowed free YouTube videos up there: a lot of people's first exposure to certain sports and their lore is through these videos. Parlaying off of that fact, there are people adept enough in playing along with Jon's music library to set the tone for what is about to happen. The shining example of this is "Zero Gravity", which has become known as the Jon Bois Cinematic Universe's answer to "Harpua":[5] when you hear it, something historic is about to happen. The last time this was busted out in a Bois project, Edgar Martinez hit The Double. It is only appropriate that it returns during the Minneapolis Miracle, a moment of equal magnitude both in terms of stakes for the team and euphoria for the fans.