There is no end to fandom love.

Valve is making a fifteen-minute Team Fortress 2 movie.

No, really. Gabe Newell confirmed a fifteen-minute TF2 movie.

Guys, they're making an honest-to-fucking-God I'm not shitting you here Team Fortress 2 movie.

This is big for me for the obvious reasons, and it's only because I already had a large mug of hard cider I'm not bouncing around the room and rolling around on the floor. I'm seriously really very close to that because I honestly don't know what else to do other than roll around on the floor and hurry up and wait.

That said, there's one other thing I want to say - something I should sit down and really think about the right way to put into words, something that explains part of what sets TF2 aside, and this movie is just a part of it. Which is that it's the one fandom where the creators gave the fans the canon. Newell mentions the Source Filmmaker, which is the video capture and editing application Valve uses to make all its little promotional videos. A few months ago, they released it - the whole thing, the whole shebang, the entirety of everything in there - to everyone. For free. No questions, no payments, just putting it out there. Anyone who wants to play with the characters and sets from the game is free to do so. They're free to make up their own stories - granted, without the voice-actors there, but with everything else intact. Basically, Valve gave the fandom the canon to play with.

There's no way that could happen with any other fandom. Fans can't get the actors of Teen Wolf or Supernatural or Person of Interest on the line. Christopher Nolan isn't going to shoot more footage from Inception. A Song Of Ice And Fire is going exactly where George R. R. Martin wants it to go, and it'll get here when it gets here. Hockey RPF isn't kidding itself. The list goes on and on.

And with TF2, there's no one stopping anyone. Sure, Valve makes the official content, they write the scripts for the actors, they determine what goes into the game and how it develops...and they gave the fandom the canon to play with. It's a beautiful thing. No other fandom has quite the freedom, and few other companies and creators take so much joy in what their fans do, to the point of running competitions and rewarding the grand prize winner with a trip to Valve for a filmmaking session with the company's animators.

It's a lovely fandom we've got going on over here. And I'm still fairly buzzed. And I'm about ready to finally start rolling around on the floor, so I'd better get on that.