cimorene

i just remembered that that korean guy from my high school whom, along with his best friend, i like to compare to momokai... picked madonna as his favourite music when we did a presentation on it in 10th grade. yeah, he analysed "frozen" as a work of poetry. why didn't that seem gay to me at the time? ...maybe the momokai analysis = ~~even~~ more valid than i initially thought.

i've been thinking a lot about friendship lately (and i just read a very interesting post by almostnever about it here). i thought i spotted the back of shiroi_chi's head at school on thursday. i'm about 99% sure it wasn't her - i'm pretty sure she's still in lithuania. but the interesting part was the way my heart gave a little leap of joy even knowing it was not her. actually, when i was leaving campus a couple of weeks ago i ran into anglepoiselamp and we walked into town together and the effect was similar. it's just funny to me how very happy seeing my friends unexpectedly makes me, when it's not like it's at all difficult to see them on purpose. it's something about the familiarity of your friends in the midst of strangers, maybe. (hee! speaking of the joy caused by seeing friends unexpectedly, isilya just imed me from the airport, then signed off again in less than a minute, before i had a chance to even respond~~; kanske hon va 2 sekunder från att va en one-minute man~~. ♥! even though i talk to her every day practically.)

still rereading cj cherryh's foreigner saga, slowly because writing and watching things have been consuming my free time.

it's interesting how the chronology of these books had expanded and contracted in my mind. i remembered the first-time scene as occurring in book #3, inheritor - and i'm confident now that my memory of that is correct, i could never forget that scene: so frustratingly glossed and faded to black, but so exquisitely set up. i think the setup is a bit cliché, with the cold rain outside and the shared tent in an overall situation of some danger. but to tell the truth i'm not sure that that isn't because it was one of the most formative first-time scenes i ever read. not that i hadn't read plenty by then: i'd read plenty of adult sf, probably a decade's worth, before i was introduced to cherryh at 14 or 15 years of age. it's simply that this one made such a big impression, around the time i was getting into writing myself.

but while the first scene happens in book 3, the break in sexual tension (which was set up in the first chapter of bren pov in book 1, i do believe) occurs in book 2, and i had completely forgotten that; i don't know how, because reading it now was such a strong shock of recognition, it was like having forgotten you knew how to swim and being thrown into the water. i mean, this scene was as formative of my concepts of writing, of reading, of science fiction, and of romance woven into adventure as the other. i think the spacing is a large part of the genius of this arc - the early introduction, the quick break, and then the UST stretching out the same length of time again before it's resolved.

it actually reminds me of something i was thinking about criminal minds and csi recently, because the garcia/morgan het pairing in criminal minds was set up pretty firmly last season, but i suspect it's going to persist as UST for quite a while. this would follow the pattern of grissom/sara in csi, where sara's feelings were, i believe, introduced before the end of season 1. pardon the vagueness of my recollection, but i believe the first break occurs in season 2, when sara's depressed and makes some kind of declaration and really gets no answer at all; there are other developments in that relationship and they mostly come from sara's side, but after that s2 break it's mostly left inexplicit for probably at least another season or so.

also i've been thinking about the qualities this protagonist has, and many of the protagonists in adventure stories (particularly in sff, i believe) have, in common with mary sues. i remember last year reading two books of an annoyingly generic high fantasy trilogy (the godstalk series by pc hodgell) suffering mightily from mary sue syndrome, but most of my favourite protagonists could be legitimately compared to mary sues - take miles vorkosigan and fred saberhagen's dracula, the protagonists of my other two favourite series; take patricia c wrede's cimorene, possibly *cough* my favourite protagonist ever, or christopher in diana wynne jones's the lives of christopher chant. i'll probably write more about this later as my rereading of the saga progresses, because the mary sueness is going to intesify, ohyes.

i still love this series; i'm aware as i go of things that look different from how they used to at the same time as i'm aware that my affection for and familiarity with the material are preventing me from seeing it as i would if i could read it for the first time now. i'm pretty sure i would still love it, though. with as critical a gaze as i can manage, i still think it's brilliant. ♥ also, the cover of invader (a michael whelan painting) is one of my favourite covers ever.