astolat's livejournal

So in the end, getting home from Wisconsin took me 24 hours, door to door, or 29 if you count the time I *should* have been leaving for the original flight. I am now mostly recovered, but I mention this because if anyone felt sorry for me and wanted to write me some consolatory SPN or David Cook fanfic, that would be okay. *bats eyes*

Speaking of David Cook and fanfic, I have now sat down and gone through the responses to my desperate post trolling for votes the night before the AI finale, and omg, I ♥ you guys so much. :D To make sure I have everyone, below the cut are the ones where people gave me tallies & requests -- if I got something wrong, or if you didn't give me a tally/request yet, let me know! *dances*


anoel: 447 words, House/Wilson
jctl27: 283 House/Wilson
mamadeb: 30 Clark/Lex
svmadelyn: 35 Clark/Lex
m_lasha: 2 Clark/Lex
mosellegreen: 32 Clark/Lex
kyttenfae: 255 SPN
balefully: 58 SPN
blucasbabe: 75 SPN
marinarusalka: 57 SPN gen
coolgrin: 20 SPN gen
loreleif: 50 Kurt/Logan or Xavier/Magneto
theantimodel: 150 Torchwood
ainsley: 12 McKay/Sheppard
loligo: 20 McKay/Sheppard
bibliokat: 1 McKay/Sheppard
harriet_spy: 20 D:tS
exceptinsects: 118 duende universe
evilgeniusmouse: 197 David Cook
malnpudl: 1200 words David Cook

If the multiples of the same fandom don't mind, I will probably combine the word totals and do a single longer story. Also these other awesome people gave me tallies without any request, so if you guys have one, let me know! Otherwise I just hug you all gratefully. :D

sweill: 22 words
pun: 7
moonpupy: 25
tingler: 436
_workinprogress: 1850
wagacca: 75
sprat: 75
rishabree: 20


Adding in my own mad frenzy of dialing and texting, that makes a total of 6549 6607 7553 votes. One small share of the 12 million that put him over the top! \o/ (Though the main effect was to allow me to survive through to the next day with sanity, um, sort of intact, so really I am mostly grateful for my own sake.)

In other David Cook news, look, look, slodwick has made T-SHIRTS. Runs on DC! I am totally going to wear one to the concert. Yes, I am actually going to the Idol tour, in Atlantic City on August 2, so if any of you are going there, let me know!

I am also kind of contemplating hitting the Nassau Coliseum show -- where I saw my first ever concert, Duran Duran! good times -- so uh, if any of you were thinking maybe you might want to go... *waves hand vaguely*

Anyway, I am deeply relieved that I am not the only person on my flist to have developed a ludicrous fannish pash for David Cook. I should warn the rest of you that I totally intend to pimp this guy at you hard, because I desperately need some DC fandom to sustain me here now that the media blitz is over and he is going to disappear into the studio. I am seriously never watching American Idol again. They kill off a character every week, and even if your favorite is the last one standing, the season ends and they don't come back! NOT ON, Idol machine. :(

So here are some reasons why you should also develop a pash for him, starting with...



...the second week, Top 20 competition night, where the contestants get asked to share something about them that America doesn't know. Most of the other guys share things like, "in my free time I go drag racing" and "I smash beer cans against my forehead for fun" and other awesome manly things. Cook takes this opportunity to tell the world that he really, really likes crossword puzzles! ♥



Oh, yeah, and then he sings. There was a 70s theme and he did All Right Now -- it's pretty much a straight cover, fun (especially compared to the lounge-act nightmare of much of the rest of the night) but not one of his really standout performances. However, the judging segment after is a notable part of his story arc on the show, because Simon criticizes him for the crossword puzzle thing and says he has no charisma, and DC talks back. Whenever a contestant does this, it's exactly like when your friend finds a negative comment on her story somewhere and goes all "omg someone didn't like my story!" and you're all, "no, no, don't post, put down the internet and back away" -- you really just cringe and want them to put the mike down. So anyway, he yields to temptation and does it here, but then learns his lesson really quick, because this is the first and last time he ever does it on the show, with one exception, to be described later.

So anyway, at this point, we've basically seen him do a couple of okay audition segments, two middle-of-the-pack performances. I personally was happy to have him there because every time he came out it was rocking and not some awful treacly crap, but he was not my favorite or anything. Then he did this:

Top 16 week, for 80s theme night, he covers Lionel Richie's Hello. No, really, you want to listen to this.



And at that point, for me the show turned into, "Hey, what is David Cook going to do tonight?"

Next up, Top 10 week, where they all have to do songs from the year they were born. He (a) compares his baby pictures to a Marvel supervillain and (b) sings Chris Cornell's version of Billie Jean. You really really really want to listen to this.



(Yes, he was born in 1982. You may cry with me.)

Top 7 week, Mariah Carey is the mentor, which means they all have to sing a Mariah Carey song, even though anytime anyone ever chooses a Mariah, Celine, or Whitney song on the show of their free will, the judges basically go, "well, that was dumb of you". The night is predictably kind of a disaster, and then he does this. Then the judges say lots of nice things and then he cries. ♥

The guy they keep panning to in the audience is his brother Adam, who has brain cancer. Like most reality shows, Idol love love loves sob stories -- they got contestants talking about every trauma they had ever had, and you can see Ryan Seacrest here totally trying to tug it out of DC and failing. DC never said a word about this on the show; it only came out in the media because Adam can't fly on a regular plane, so the people in his hometown organized $80K in donations to get him there.



So around this time I started getting really fannish :/ and was sucked into the endless morass of backstage material that gets doled out in dribs and drabs on the AI website and the Fox extended cable channels. This stuff is ten times more fun and interesting than the pre-packaged segments they do on the actual shows most of the time, bizarrely, although it is a general rule that for the most part, you will come out feeling like there was not enough of your favorite until it gets late enough in the game there is almost no one left.

However in Top 5 week, we get this gift of a behind the scenes video with DC gleefully murdering a poor innocent joke, stomping it into the ground, burying the pieces, and then digging it up for another go. ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥



Next, on to his first performance of Top 3 week, where the judges each get assigned to choose a song for a contestant. Cook gets Simon, who assigns him The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, a super-slow song by Roberta Flack that is possibly the most boring song ever and has been (boringly) covered by everyone else ever. (Though ymmv here as the judges all slobber over how beautiful the original is; I don't get it at all.) He slams it out of the park.



Also in Top 3 week, we get this behind-the-scenes video of him, David Archuleta, and Syesha Mercado talking about their first impressions of each other. The cuteness is off the scale, especially at the end where DC goes off on how Archie is hilariously funny without meaning to be, Archie helpfully demonstrates, and DC cracks up.



Finale night, he and David Archuleta duet on Hero and sound pretty awesome together:



and then DC plays with ZZ Top omg!




...and then finally, the makeup people put too much eyeliner on him, he wins by 12 million votes and cries some more, then he sings the crappy song that won the amateur songwriting competition that Idol runs for the winner's single for some reasons which passeth understanding, and he is really nice to Archie and pulls him on stage with him, and Simon apologizes to him, and he is SO HAPPY. IT IS THE BEST THING EVER. There is even a magic rainbow. (No, seriously, there is. Watch!)



There is much much more and I will probably ramble about it in future, but if you cannot wait :D, there is the excellent davidcookai7 community, which is moderated posting and has a bunch of members-locked stuff, and will probably not be quite as insanely high-volume as it has been lately.

So... I can has fanfic now? Please? *looks hopefully around*

(PS: I note that the Stories EXTREME challenge is running over at otw_onlinecon with, as an example selected totally at random with no undue influence from me at all, "David Cook as a student at Hogwarts" which clearly needs to be written. In fact, I think that is him riding the unicorn in the picture there, in his outfit from Billie Jean.)

:D