the phantom of the opera: a source text which simultaneously cries out for and repels fanfic.

my parents gave me the phantom of the opera for channukah, so i watched the extras this weekend, and the movie last night.  or the night before.  i can't really remember.  it made me think again how on the one hand it (the movie, and probably the musical) is an ideal candidate for fanfiction, because it doesn't make very much sense.  it could benefit from spackle.  and while the novel makes more sense in that it doesn't leave out huge chunks of explanation and, well, it's a novel and not a musical, it's also a confused novel that, as alw said in the extras from the dvd, doesn't exactly know what it wants to be.  the musical benefits, at least, from being more focused and cohesive. 

so it cries out for fanfiction, but on the other hand i'm not surprised that the only things i can find worth reading are one and one quarter fanfics by jennaria, and this not for lack of dogged effort on several occasions.  it wants to be spackled, but it doesn't lend itself particularly well to spackling: the phantom is simulataneously the villain and the most sympathetic character, but the cosmetic rewrites that people attempt with so little skill simply can't fly in the face of a character who canonically is an insane murdering stalker.  a successful fixit, from the popular phantom/christine point of view, is going to have to either alter canon drastically (so that he isn't a stalker) or else daringly resist all those impulses to apologise for his actions.  owning or rejecting murder--you have to do one or the other; "he did murder that guy once, but other than that he's sweet" or "he promised not to do it again" just looks silly.

it is kind of sad, though.  i mean, the film (and indeed the story too) are so cheesy and delightfully silly and wonderful, they don't need fanfiction, but a) it would be hot and b) it would rid me of this niggling sense that there was an attempted moral about how sexual attraction = serial killers while innocent and pure CHILDISH REMINISCENT OF CHILDHOOD HAVE WE TALKED ABOUT THEIR CHILDHOOD ENOUGH YET love = as cool as marrying into the nobility when you're an orphaned opera dancer.  and i don't think i'm down with the whole sex is bad moral thing.  as tim gunn would say, it awakens my inner feminist.

and in kind of related news?  google leads to bad, bad places like bodice-ripper covers with the heads of the phaaaaantom and christine, as played by gerard butler and emmy rossum, photoshopped onto them.  there aren't enough faces and palms in the world. 

beginning to learn finnish

dude, while looking for a missing squeegee i just discovered two bottles of nail polish, a missing green suede belt and a whole bottle of xanax.  i'm not actually feeling anxious right now, though.  except for how i can't find the squeegee.

yesterday was my first encounter with trying to learn finnish and my second attempt to get a textbook that really should have been at akademiska bokhandeln and wasn't.  the book i can order, the finnish, not so much.  i found japanese a lot easier.  i have never had such a discouraging first day of language learning, because i've never studied a language i had much trouble pronouncing.  (other than how i still can't roll Rs as spanish and swedish both require.) of course this could be because japanese and spanish aren't particularly difficult to pronounce, but i was cracking wax up for twenty minutes practicing short and long vowel sound words with my "cute little accent". 

i am telling myself not to despair yet because it's perfectly possible that i will learn to pronounce finnish fairly well, and i just won't be able to quite hear the difference between certain sounds until after the first lesson. 

also yesterday my relatively simple to-do list involved stopping at the copy machine in the central building for my faculty, ekonomiska statsvetenskapliga fakultet, to run off a single copy of one sheet of paper.  little did i know the ( horrors that were in store for me. )