cimorene

I accidentally deleted the last William Morris book in my to-reread list from my phone and never got around to sending it back.

I started Walter Scott's The Talisman, because it's one of his few novels set in the middle ages, but there's some racism that's hard to swallow. There is a major Kurdish character, a knight under Saladin, who is... friends? With our Norman Scottish protagonist. The portrayal is not unsympathetic. I think Scott is doing his best to be even-handed, but like Catholicism, Islam just seems factually wrong and evil etc etc to him, and its adherents who are good guys are unfortunately misled. It's... hard to read. In retrospect, I'm surprised by how much he didn't dislike Judaism, in comparison.

Also started The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany. I read this as a teenager but remembered nothing. The narrative voice is quaint and charming. It's not really gripping me though.

No progress in Le Morte d'Arthur (Malory) or The Idylls of the King (Tennyson). The latter is more readable, comparatively, but I just don't really like reading verse. Also I did make some progress in The Faerie Queene (Spenser), and one verse narrative at a time is plenty.

Speaking of verse narratives, I still haven't made any more progress in the Wilson translation of Seneca's plays. (But the translations aren't in verse!) I might just have to skip Oedipus. I hate him for some reason.

I guess now I should actually reread all of Murderbot again, since I can't remember all the details and the show is starting to air. That should be comparatively quick though! I have the last Katherine Addison waiting and haven't gotten around to picking it up.

With all these things that I'm feeling decidedly unenthused about, I instead read the whole part of Jordanes' ancient history of the Goths that deals with wars with Asian invaders and then the entirety of Hervor's/Heidrek's saga, including the ancient poem called The Battle of the Goths and the Huns. (This is the only surviving medieval saga that deals with Gothic tribes in mainland Europe, and Jordanes' is the only other ancient source with relevance to Morris's The Roots of the Mountains.) I had made all the posts about that book which I had in mind when reading it, but yesterday I found a link on Tumblr to these two great essays about the context, history, and implications of the racism of Tolkien orcs/goblins by James Mendez Hodes (he doesn't mention Morris/ROTM or the specific borrowing from Jordanes alleged in Seaman's introduction to ROTM, but these links in the chain are immaterial to the argument): Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built for Racial Terror. content warnings: racism, colonialism/imperialism, cultural conflation, sexism, sexual violence, anger & Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth, Part II: They're Not Human. These essays totally opened my eyes to a missing link in my understanding of the background of the racist portrayal of the Dusky Men - one I wouldn't have missed if I'd reread Said's Orientalism, which I probably should've. The gender aspect of the ROTM Huns is riffing on the extreme cultural openness and intermarriage habits of the Mongols, whose invasions were much later - 13th century, long after the christianization and settlement of the germanic tribes and the fall of the Roman empire. (More on the Mongols' real culture and the stereotypes in western culture surrounding them in his posts!) So that gives me something else to research. Maybe I actually will eventually form a coherent theory of what is going on with all the gender roles in this book!

I watched a movie called Goodbye Charlie (1964) last night that was UNCANNILY similar to classic Popslash Explosion -era (ca. 1999-2001) Woke Up Magically with the Reproductive Physiology and Visible Secondary Characteristics Associated with Femininity fic (the fandom term for which used to be sex-or-gender swap-or-switch, and at some point progressed to genderfuck). This era in popslash was seminal to the development of modern media slash fandom and was probably the single strongest contributor to the next phase of development of this trope and its variants. (Citation needed, but source is that I was there reading in most of the major trending media slash fandoms of the time.)

SO ANYWAY this is the first movie I've found that is this close to the fandom template! A lot of people like to point to Star Trek's original series as the source of various tropes, but this is a exception. There is a classic episode of TOS where Kirk is trapped in a woman's body, but ( it doesn't fit ). I've always figured this one didn't have any real parallels in movie and tv! So I was pretty surprised to find even this much.

Here's a summary of Goodbye Charlie (1964, dir. Vincente Minnelli, starring Tony Curtis, Debbie Reynolds and Pat Boone), adapted from George Axelrod's 1959 play Goodbye, Charlie: ( Read more... )

But in spite of obvious differences, there are a lot of similarities to this particular early generation of gender-stuff fic:

The transformation serves the purpose of teaching a lesson related to gender (albeit not the same one as in fanfiction): check

Exploiting for humor scenes of the character in the "female" body participating at least briefly in objectification of other women: check

The affection and attraction between the transformed character and the BFF is addressed, resisted, and then develops past the resistance: check

The "female" body affects the transformed character by making them open to, curious about, and apparently happy to enjoy the actual transformation into a SUCCESSFUL feminine body inhabiter (ie recognized as a sexy woman by all who behold them, having mastered the art of... essentially... drag, ie the performance of glam hyper-femininity): check

A further transformation removes the inconveniences/impossibilities posed by romance with the transformed character: check (usually in slash this is a transformation back to their original body, but with a new awareness of gender and sexuality)

I love when you're reading fiction and someone is supposed to be doing something with genuine snobbery and the author earnestly but erroneously thinks they know what the snobby brand or product or whatever is, but they're completely wrong and they've actually named a kind of crappy middle class pretender.

Like Moleskine, which are overpriced crap notebooks with shockingly bad paper.

It's not fun to see three posts that are mostly about work in a week when I look back on my blog. For one thing, it's an unpleasant sign of how overwhelming it's become and how exhausting. For another, any week where I write about work three days is bound to be bad for my peace and equilibrium.

But also, I didn't really do nothing but resent work that week (or any week). It's just easier to post about my grievances and the bizarre things that happen, since they come together naturally in anecdote form.

I have lots of shorter anecdotes throughout the week about things like by-play observed among passers-by on the street, and things I humorously forgot due to ADHD, and hundreds of things the cats do that I just tell Wax. At the time of wanting to tell someone about these little tidbits, though, I don't think about blog posts. I'll just include five other things from this week to make myself feel better.

§ The local business owners had one of their little events, in this case an event called "Kärringkväll" (Swedish) or "Akkainilta" (Finnish), in which all the small businesses in the town stay open late (usually they close at five or six because they're so small) and offer deals aimed specifically at women. As a result, somebody actually came and swept all the gravel off the sidewalks in the center part of downtown! It collects there all winter, with more being added every time there's fresh ice on the sidewalks, so when it finally melts (it isn't all melted from the streets and driveways and lawns yet, but most of it is worn off the sidewalks, where it melts faster) there are piles and piles of it. Regular nasty road dust of gasoline, microplastic, and carcinogens settles along the roads and gets stuck to the snow all winter, trapped with the gravel, which gets ground into dust and sand from being walked and driven on, and they have accumulated a truly incredible amount of airborne black nastiness by the time of the spring thaw. So we're about two weeks now into this period of extreme airway irritation, which continues usually until well after Easter.

§ Met a beagle outside when I was walking, and got to pet it! It jumped up at me with that flattering and so relatable doggy excitement (I was excited too obvs), and the owner gave me permission to pet it. It left a cute little paw print on the knee of my jeans.

§ My sister recently had bunion surgery on one foot and has started working from home again. In celebration (she felt too anxious to ask for time off when she wasn't working lol) she bought plane tickets for her and my BIL to visit us for two weeks at the end of August!

§ There's definitely a leak in the roof. The melt made this clear. It's not a huge emergency one, but it's made a stain. We were planning to have it fixed soon, anyway. We don't really know who to hire, though. However, a couple weeks ago we were out walking and met an old schoolmate of Wax's, and exchanged greetings, and as we were leaving, we noticed that his house was pretty recently remodeled, including the roof, and it looked good. So our current hope is to see him outside again so that we can ask if they can recommend whoever did theirs. This means walking more, and specifically down the part of our street a few blocks away near the top of the hill.

§ I have been thinking some more about how incredibly wrong the voices sound in historical fiction a lot of the time, and it's always because it's a period where I'm familiar with the literature written in that era and the characters sound wrong. (Why I love Catriona Macpherson's Dandy Gilver and haven't liked any other recent mysteries set in that era that I've looked at.) It's an easy fix, albeit clearly not one everyone is interested in - you just have to read a lot of stuff written in the period. When you're talking about the 19th century onward in the anglophone countries and reading in English, this task is trivially easy; as you go further back, or try to cross language barriers, it gets harder of course, but there's not much excuse for failing at Victorian England, IMO, and far less for failing at the period between WW1 and 2. ( Read more... ) Anyway, all of these thought processes have been bubbling for years, and I recently decided to look for some more novels from between the two wars from different genres, to get a wider sample of the sound. So far I've been a bit frustrated by my attempts to narrow by publication date (you can't filter by it at Project Gutenberg, for instance, but their transcriptions are much more easy to read than the scans at archive.org), but I've also had a bunch of fun and bemusing encounters with books that I haven't finished. Edwardian romances, for example. Yikes, and yet, haha. And now I've started the first of EM Benson's Mapp and Lucia books, which I had heard of because of the tv series without quite knowing what they were about, and the beginning has a whole section that's like a client I would make fun of on This Old House, remodeling a historical house pretentiously and removing original features that didn't look olde timey enough, then building a new wing with a fake Tudor fireplace and refusing to put electricity in it and covering the floor with rushes. I can practically see Kevin O'Connor politely asking if she's sure and explaining why electric lighting is so popular and convenient in living areas, and then saying "Well, if you're sure! You like it, and we like decisions!" with his eyebrows in his hairline.

- "Hey, this pseud rings a faint bell. What do I know about them? ... Wait a second... hey, Wax, is this the person who took all their fic offline and made an entire password-protected website where you had to join a mailing list and then solemnly swear you were not Anish Kapoor, were not associated with Anish Kapoor, and were not going to in any way leak the contents to Anish Kapoor in order to get the password? And the reason was because the Anish Kapoor in question was accused of stalking them?"

"Hmm... I think so, yeah."

- The last time I was here there was this quaint little coffee shop au where nobody is an alien or in space at all and I read a couple but it wasn't my thing. Since then apparently hundreds of new writers have written takeoffs of it, some of them spinning off their own sub-aus as if it was the fucking cthulhumythos and not a contemporary restaurant setting. They don't all use the same tags. They don't all use any tags at all. It's impossible to filter them out. Sometimes there's almost a whole page of results filled with them.

- Enough time has passed for there to be fanfiction for this fandom that originated in the 1990s by people who clearly don't know what answering machines are or how they work.

- A notable fan writer wrote this one piece of meta that an army of young enthusiastic writers have since taken as gospel. This new fanon doesn't appear naturally, as if it were canon information; it's celebrated in ways both twee and uncomfortably fetishizing. And occasionally it appears normally as well. But that's not the majority.

- I see that cultural sea change since the 2000s has converted the annoying plurality fanon from "overcoming his internalized homophobia" to "he's a wise queer elder who is so queer that it retroactively renders him out and flamboyant in canon from their perspective" here in this fandom too.

- As fanon goes, one of the most pointless as well as one of the most baffling is just pretending one of the principal characters had a tail in canon too. I'm reminded of that Pros writer who only wrote independent (of each other) aus where Illya had glasses and a ponytail and a history of CSA. This is definitely less weird, but the fact that it's a whole bunch of different writers is maybe weirder. But I mean, fine. Fine! It's not like it changes anything, right? I can just read these and ignore any mentions of the - "He flipped his tail against the floor". Nope.

- Somehow this never bothered me very much at the time, but now that I'm reading this stuff again twenty-five years post finale, I'm turned off by this whole huge subgenre of the fandom based on an alternate interpretation. I definitely used to read these, but I find them fundamentally uninteresting now.

- Some new writers: "What if this character had this personality trait that they actually clearly are shown to have in canon but I apparently didn't notice, but instead of being thoughtfully expressed in a way conditioned by their environment and upbringing and the society they are from, it was expressed exactly the way it is in modern teenagers, and also used the same terminology they use about it on Tumblr?"

- Over time I had forgotten that a huge portion of work in this fandom is just written in an au version of canon where everything is just the same except it's not a comedy and there's no magical realism, which is a bit like getting an au version of a chili dog from a fast food drive through that is just a hotdog bun without anything in it, which once happened to my aunt, or a hamburger that is just a beef patty in a bun without any of the toppings, which once happened to my dad. If only there were some way to filter that out.

I found this hilarious statement in one of the prefaces to R. Austin Freeman's Thorndyke mysteries:

In appearance he is handsome and of an imposing presence, with a symmetrical face of the classical type and a Grecian nose. And here I may remark that his distinguished appearance is not merely a concession to my personal taste but is also a protest against the monsters of ugliness whom some detective writers have evolved.

These are quite opposed to natural truth. In real life a first-class man of any kind usually tends to be a good-looking man.

Amazing. This is the guy responsible for the CSI subgenre of detective fiction: all his stories revolve around science, logic, trace analysis, etc. He's even got other forewords where he humbly explains that he made sure everything that happens is physically possible and all the clues are laid before the reader in the spirit of fairness!

He just thinks it's a scientific truth that the Ancient Greeks were right and people who are truly great at anything at all will just naturally happen to be beautiful. I guess there you have the state of Popular Science, late Victorian edition (his writing is Edwardian and ends around 1940, but this means, of course, that Freeman's worldview was mostly shaped by a late Victorian upbringing).

This is a topic which nearly every private detective mystery writer has to at least brush by, so many of them choose to turn and address it directly with varying degrees of meta. I saved a couple of examples, though, as interesting or representative:

‘Wäre es nicht besser –’

‘That the murderer should remain undiscovered? On the face of it, yes. But none of us has the right to assess the value of a human existence. All must be held valuable, or none. The death of Christ and the death of Socrates,’ Fen added dryly, ‘suggest that our judgements are scarcely infallible . . . And the evil of Nazism lay precisely in this, that a group of men began to differentiate between the value of their fellow-beings, and to act on their conclusions. It isn’t a habit which I, for one, would like to encourage.’

Karl was silent for some moments before replying. ‘Veilleicht haben Sie recht,’ he said at last. ‘But I am glad he is dead.’ His voice sank to a whisper. ‘I am glad this man is dead.’

— Edmund Crispin, Swan Song

Roger laughed lightly. ‘Oh, I know it’s the right thing to say, “Who am I to take the responsibility of judging you? No, it is not for me to do so. I will hand you over to the police, which means that you will inevitably be hanged. It’s a pity, because my personal opinion is that your case is not murder, but justifiable homicide; and I know that a jury, directed by a judge with his eye on the asinine side of the law, would never be allowed to take that view. That’s why I so much regret having myself to place a halter round your neck by handing you over to the police. But how is such a one as me to judge you?” That’s what they always say in storybooks, isn’t it? But don’t you worry, Alec. I’m not a spineless nincompoop like that, and I’m not in the least afraid of taking the responsibility of judging a case on its own merits; in fact, I consider that I’m very much more competent to do so than are twelve thick-headed rustics, presided over by a somnolent and tortuous-minded gentleman in an out-of-date wig. No, I’m going to follow this up to the bitter end, and when I’ve got there I’ll take counsel with you as to what we’re going to do about it.’

— Anthony Berkeley, The Layton Court Mystery

‘Tell me, Ridley: do you think that if a thoroughly objectionable person is murdered, the murderer deserves to get away with it?’

The porter considered. ‘I don’t think so, sir, no. There’s other ways of dealing with objectionable persons than by murder.’

— Edmund Crispin, The Case of the Gilded Fly

Golden Age detective novels from the 1920s and 30s occasionally betray an obviously widespread societal meme, because the casualness and briefness with which it's invoked imply that it would be easily recognized and understood by the audience: that jazz isn't "real" music.

Take this representative example from Bats in the Belfry by the prolific and popular Golden Age author, ECR Lorac (Edith Caroline Rivett), wherein a young woman thinks that a stuffy old uncle has done his best for her because he's "done what he could to teach her to read, to appreciate literature and despise trash, to listen to music as well as to jazz, and to speak English instead of schoolgirl slang."

This is interesting because this is exactly what a certain large subset of people thought was witty to say, and other people would sincerely and angrily say, about rap music in the 1990s.

Of course, it's not like it was a secret at the time that this claim was just racism, but there were always plenty of people who didn't know it, like other things that are well-known to be just racism like the 'blue lives matter' movement, or welfare cuts, or "bad neighborhoods".

But the point is that jazz not only sounds completely different from rap to the neophyte (I'm aware this is ignoring the musical traditions that connect them and plenty of sophisticated music analysis), with the main feature that connects them being their Black roots and their associations with Black culture; jazz has also now attained a venerable status as a genre, spoken of in the same breath as classical music.

Anyway, the pattern makes it even clearer, doesn't it? It's the exact same preposterous criticism.

Last week we watched the new Dungeons and Dragons movie, which was a pretty fun time although I wouldn't say I loved it, and I remembered that I saw people were writing fanfic for it, so I checked that out. There's not really all that much of it yet; it's not taking off with a bang the way summer movie fandoms sometimes do.

I realized through browsing this fic more, though, and mulling it over, that Regé-Jean Page's heroic paladin side character was the best character as well at the most funny and engaging part of the plot, and that his character's VERY SPECIFIC schtick is... kind of the same as Fraser's (due South): an impossibly, perfectly altruistic and impossibly, perfectly beautiful hero dedicated to helping any and everyone... who is also incredibly literal at all times.

This latter characteristic is a popular type of humor with robots, aliens, etc, eg Spock or Data, but I can't think of any previous examples besides Fraser where it was combined with the Too Perfect Handsome Hero type eg Steve Rogers or Clark Kent (another source of narrative tension and humor on its own, since you get a constant stream of 'Is this guy real?' reactions). Part of the deal with a perfect hero's comedy is that the narrative bends around them because they have sorta been parachuted in from another genre - like legend or folk tale - in which it's nearly impossible for them to lose. You get a lot of comedy mileage from this with the people around them, ie the Rays or the questing party in this new movie, but it does make the character kinda overpowered, from a Dungeon Master perspective. In other words, I conjecture that he couldn't be in more of the film because the writers wanted more uncertainty about the outcome.

I saw a couple of people on my dlist here post that they'd updated their fandom info and I thought, what a good idea! So last night I skimmed through my DW profile and made some minor changes, then updated my trusty

Ten Things I Assume You Know About Me If You Read My Journal

(That isn't required reading; I'm not, like, mad about it. I just refer to these things without footnotes or background info.)

But I got to thinking about my fandom belonging and my fandom interests, which have changed a lot from the community-based, almost... club-like vibe of lj communties. I still imbibe a lot of visual stimulus from Tumblr daily, but I'm trying to move more interaction here to Dreamwidth, because that's where the interaction happens. Working on having conversations here, and so on. Not so much, necessarily, about fannish interests - fandoms, I mean - but perhaps that's mostly my few fandom interests/the fewer opportunities on dw to talk about them now. And there's more about meta, which interests me perhaps more anyway, because my interest (such as it is!) in reading fanfiction this year has been like...:

↳ Comb through my Highlander bookmarks, recs, and old journal entries in search of other references to check out, and attempt to find up-to-date links to things; fail for the most part. Go through the Highlander fics on AO3. Post updated recs.

↳ Read Steve/Eddie Stranger Things fic all summer, going slowly more and more crazy because it's all written by British teenagers and it's no longer cool to use betas, or apparently even proofreaders, and everybody insists on putting modern British slang in and calling sweatshirts "sweaters", which is a big problem because there's an iconic sweatshirt in canon so it shows up in almost every fic and I just want to get a Tumblr megaphone and make a PSA about what a sweater was in 1980s America to these dweebs who are too young to have learned how to Google apparently... oh, I also posted recs for that in the summer though! Here

↳ Brief 1-week tour of Our Flag Means Death, primarily modern AUs, after the show came out. Cute, but getting twee-er by the minute.

↳ Brief 3-4 week period of intermittently checking the AO3 tag for The Sandman (TV) after it came out. Going through all the stages of grief and then relaxing in a warm bath of surreal amusement because the only part of this incredible and humongous universe that is producing fanfiction is characterization-agnostic wish-fulfillment schmoopangst about Dream and Hob Gadling, the immortal English peasant, and the occasional bit of hilaribble kinkfic about The Corinthian.

↳ I think there was a period in there where I discovered by accident that people write slash about TinTin, which I've never read nor watched, but I was so curious that I had to go looking, but then I had to try to block the trauma from my brain.

↳ Just the last week or two I've been going back through The Dark Is Rising fic because usually I expect a good supply of new Will/Bran fic every Yuletide, but this year there wasn't that much.

On Tumblr, though, your stance to fanfic or fanworks isn't important: you can reblog things just because they're pretty! Or to put it another way, the whole fannish personality can flourish there, not just like... fandoms (media fandoms). I'm a fan of Glass Onion and I'm also a fan of bauhaus lighting, for example! A fan of cats and a fan of dogs! All those things can be shuffled together on equal footing on Tumblr:

Hannibal is evergreen

Black Sails is still the best show I've ever seen

Everything Everywhere All At Once gifsets currently abound

Basically full time Interview with the Vampire fan there, even though I haven't really tried to read any fanfiction - it doesn't necessarily seem to need it? Although I do still think AUs could be really funny

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Favorite TV watched:

1. Interview with the Vampire 2. Derry Girls (but that was the final season) 3. What We Do in the Shadows 4. Moon Knight 5. Our Flag Means Death

Favorite Film watched:

1. Glass Onion 2. Everything Everywhere All At Once (I didn't like any more enough to put on this list really, but The Lost City was fun)

( Read in 2022: )

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( Knitting Year in Review: )

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Yesterday

waxjism baked two cakes! One is a mascarpone-strawberry mousse cake and the other is a maple walnut bundt cake.

(I said, "You're like that meme about how the quality of fanfic doesn't matter*, but all by yourself!")

I also commented that this technically-a-cheesecake (because it's made with mascarpone) (even though it's still mostly composed of whipping cream like a mousse cake) had been made possible by the universal availability of lactose-free dairy products in Finland, and

septembriseur asked why that was true. Wax and I didn't know for sure, so she googled it and ended up skimming somebody's thesis on the subject, lol.

Anyway, here's that long post about the sociology and market dynamics of Finnish lactose-free dairy that nobody really exactly wanted, but it is potentially interesting! And it makes the rest of the world where lactose-free dairy is hard to come by seem egregiously inconvenient by comparison.

*. I hate that meme because it's spreading even further the Compulsory Positivity message that readers universally love everything regardless of quality. To be clear: people do love the things that they love regardless of quality: your favorite thing isn't necessarily identical with the thing you earnestly judge to be the best written. And most of us enjoy reading a variety of types of things, some of them because they seem mind-blowingly good and others because they the author is skilled or simply enthusaistic about some of the same things we are, like tropes and genre conventions or pastiche styles or kinks. But the fact that people usually like or also like things that might not be dubbed 'good' by them or someone else doesn't mean that they like all things, even bad ones, or that they don't think anything is bad, or that they're equally happy to see everything. Personally, even if I'm desperate enough to still open them, my reaction to going to check a fandom tag and finding all the new fics haven't been betaed is disappointment. I would be too embarrassed to post a cake that hadn't been proofread, and rightly so.)

House of the Dragon continues entertaining me, but at this point I'd say it's not that much above the quality of latter-season Game of Thrones, either. It's definitely jumped beyond any possibilty of plausibly spackling or fanwanking its narrative into cohesion and logic, or many of its important characters and plot points. I'm increasingly fascinated (as well as frustrated obviously though - we had to pause the last episode because we were both yelling about how bad and badly-judged the scene was, and then after Wax wanted to unpause it I still had to rant for another few minutes) by just how it chooses to be bad, because all this unbelievable psychology, missing and inconsistent characterization, and overdramatic and implausible soap opera trash is built on the skeleton of a story from the books that wasn't implausible in and of itself in any way! I feel like even at the basic outline stage of this more fleshed-out plot, there remained a perfectly clear and plausible route to the story being coherent and believable and compelling. And then they just didn't... do... that.

The actual scene-level writing, as opposed to the... underlying story or detailed outline or whatever you call it... is still mostly pretty good: better than Rings of Power, anyway, which has inexcusably bad dialogue in multiple ways. As far as I recall, there's only been one "Wow, that's just completely not what that word actually means!" on House of the Dragon, whereas I stopped keeping count of Rings of Power's offenses in the "That's not what that means/That's not how Tolkien characters talk" column.

I saw a post on Tumblr mocking Rings of Power's low-rent-ness, saying something like - paraphrasing - 'They didn't even hire any name actors, they didn't bother buying any wigs, and they aren't even filming in New Zealand, so where did they manage to use up their billion-dollar budget when the special effects are also so bad that they are just printing scale armor pattern on fabric shirts instead of making actual armor costumes?' After I got done laughing because

they really didn't hire any name actors, and

there hasn't been any even remotely plausible in-verse explanation (or worldbuilding, e.g. more background characters sharing the style) for the random short hair on Elrond and Celebrimbor and Galadriel's brother, which mostly feels jarring and weird, so the suggestion that they were just saving money on wigs struck me as no less plausible than anything else I've thought of,

I paused and said, "Didn't they though? Then where did they?" So we googled it and no, yes, they DID actually film in New Zealand.

The costumes are not cheaply executed, or badly executed, on Rings of Power, as I've said at length before. The scale armor is a case where the Númenorean regent is wearing a sort of ceremonial scaled armor parade outfit, and she's got physical scaled armor gauntlets and a chest piece, and then under them she's just wearing a long-sleeved shirt that inexplicably appears to have had scales painted on it. It probably escaped most people's notice while watching actually, but it's more an example of terrible decision-making behind the costumes, because... the reason there's no scales on the armor there is that it's physically impossible for scales to go around the curve of the armpit! They'd have to have chunks cut out of them to let the arm bend or else they'd have to get super tiny! And that's why the actual scales she's wearing aren't there, not any issue of cost - it wouldn't be possible to make them go there, but then, given that it also wouldn't be possible for the Númenoreans or anyone else to make scale armor where the scales just carry right through the armpit unbroken, why did they try to make it look like they had? Again: an army of skilled craftspeople carrying out some very bad orders. A complete lack of appropriate judgement, knowledge, and logic in the decision-making department.

The special effects aren't actually bad, either. I think they're mostly in the setting, though. There aren't a lot of fantasy creatures or characters or a lot of magic on Rings of Power. They're probably simply passing mostly unremarked because it's easier for good CGI to be mistaken for practical effects when it's used to make backgrounds. But on the other hand, I'm not sure if you could really use a billion dollars that way? I mean, surely there should be some dragons or something in there for that price? But idk.

Speaking of dragons, the dragon CGI on House of the Dragon remains incredible. I love the dragon execution and the dragon characterization, for that matter. I'm amused to see reactions emerging to House of the Dragon on Tumblr, including those disturbing cases where you just read a text post pithily and scathingly critiquing some purportedly vast trend of wrong reactions. Apparently there's a faction of angry anti-Daemon/Rhaenyra shippers contending that he is not a feminist icon - if the reaction post is to be believed anyway - prompting a wave of sarcasm. It's hard to parse at this level whether they are ultimately reacting to earnest contentions from some third group that Daemon actually is a feminist icon, which is laughable but not unbelievable. I mean, there's always SOMEONE earnestly shouting anything. Including that Daemon obviously doesn't want Rhaenyra to be free, because if he liked independent women he would prefer his first wife, who is hot and hates him and spends her time hunting on her country estate in leather armor, to Rhaenyra. (This was one of the wrong reactions that I actually saw with my own two eyes.) Babes. Hannibal didn't want Will to be "free" in the sense of a healthy, happy, and self-actualized professional psychologist; he wanted him to be "free" to commit murder. Hope this helps!

On House of the Dragon I think we've now definitely observed the Magically Disappearing Patriarchy, a term coined by The Fandomentals in their reviews of latter-season Game of Thrones.

It's interesting that so much of the portrayal of Westeros in this show is (obviously) taken from Tudor England, both visually and thematically, but it's so much more sexist that a ruling queen is completely unthinkable, and yet at the same time so much less sexist when it comes to the power and authority of the king's wife.

Looking at The Rings of Power's visual design, you've got beautiful sets and beautifully made costumes beautifully lit and shot.

But you've also got multiple whole environments whose visual style had to be invented. The culture of Númenor couldn't look like Gondor, or like Rivendell or Mirkwood, or like dwarf and hobbit stuff. The Harfoots, who are supposed to evolve into hobbits later, needed a new look, admittedly. But whoever was in charge of creating the original visual designs for new cultures on this show just did a... bad... job. Like, they would look fine - or even fantastic - on the stage, their construction is good, etc, but... they don't have a clear and unified logic that makes sense. They don't fit neatly into the worldbuilding. They don't bear basically... any scrutiny.

And it is clear, looking at the cultures they've tried to visually invent here, that they were trying to take their inspiration from the visual design behind the Lord of the Rings movies. Númenor features clothes and jewelry that are obviously nearly direct ripoffs of Alphonse Mucha designs, and settings that combine massive medieval stonemasonry in gray like you'd appropriately have found in Gondor and Rohan with near eastern motifs (mostly Moorish-looking), but lots of (mostly CGI) interiors in pale white and gold tones with Greek and Roman lines (their moodboard for this was certainly mostly pre-Raphaelite, particularly John Wiliam Godward and Lawrence Alma Tadema, but with Mucha for the women). Attempts have been made to bring some Greek feeling - I'm thinking they were probably actually aiming for Minoan Crete inspiration because that would fit into conceptualizing Númenor as Atlantis. There are moments that suggest Crete, and there are lots of images that suggest Byzantium, but overall there just... isn't a cohesive picture, unlike LOTR and The Hobbit's work on elves and dwarves.

The visual antecedents of dwarves are clearly Viking and Celtic (with some hints of the ancient near east in the stonework, presumably because dwarves are symbolically the jews). The thing is, Viking and Celtic iconography already had so much in common that the creation of a coherent dwarf imagery from them was pretty organic. Númenor has, instead, a bunch of pieces that don't really fit.

The problems with the Harfoots' visual design are on a whole other level. It's like they're actually designed for the stage, or perhaps for a children's tv show, and intended to adhere to a much lower level of realism with no logic whatsoever. For example, we see a lot of characters played by Black actors whose hair is shown in styles that could only be achieved with a lot of work because of the nature of their fragile kinky-curly hair - styles that have to be painstakingly teased into shape and treated with conditioners and so on - and which are laughably unsuitable to their surroundings, while they're shown asymmetrical and full of plant garnishes to simulate unkemptness (white Harfoot characters have their hair actually rather unkempt, or rather done up but then with pieces mussed up), styles that there's no way they have the time and resources to maintain at the level of technology and the lifestyle they're shown to lead. Actually nomadic people at a similar level of technology would have practical hairstyles that would look very, very different. I think we're also maybe supposed to think their culture is somehow so far back in the... timeline of cultural development... that their society hasn't yet invented the concepts of washing or being tidy, because they show lots of garments that have fastenings that nobody ever has fastened. (This is a common criticism of many portrayals of the middle ages, as you've probably heard - that everyone was dirty and nobody ever washed, among other inaccuracies.) Their portrayal is kind of like... a bunch of charming elementary-aged children who have been running wild all summer, except they're using it for adults. This seems of a piece with everything else about the Harfoots on the show, which is just as horrible from a plot/concept/fictional society perspective.

Current Mood: Art Nouveau, Preraphaelites,
Current Music: Minoan Crete, Byzantium, Celtic Knots, Viking

I'm not the first person to mention how not only is all the hair on House of the Dragon bad - except Alicent's (some of the time) - but especially every single person who's wearing a half ponytail, which is so many people, and all of the Targaryens at almost all times, that it's basically the Targaryen Style. And it's so bad! It's way too simple for almost every context we see it in and it doesn't even look good! But it's not just them. We see this travesty of a style on other people too.

It is a great example of what Wax assures me is generally the case with Stephen King - and of course is fairly common in horror in general: that the stories are about real-life horrors. It is about bullying, and the little gang of teenagers is entirely made up of marginalized people. There's a fat kid, a black kid, a Jewish kid, an abused (female) kid, a hyper/annoying/ADHD kid (Richie), a small 'sickly' (overprotected by hypochondriac stifling mother) kid, and a kid with a stutter.

I was thinking about this recently watching some interviews with the cast of Stranger Things, which draws a large portion of its pastiche and references and genre from Stephen King, and an interviewer said something about how fun the sort of weirdly up-beat tone is when the kids are going into battle against eldritch horrors and diving into the hell dimension and shit. Maya Hawke said that she actually had thought about this a fair amount, because reading the script you'd think it looked scary as fuck and potentially hopeless and that ther character should be really terrified, but the writer/creator/director Duffer brothers always respond to her questions with something like "Nah, you're... you're pretty confident."

The one thing that Stranger Things is about more than anything else is trauma, but there's other stuff. Season 1: runaways, absent parents, bullies. Season 2: Specifically PTSD symptoms (apart from just trauma again); bad parenting; gaslighting/denial (or rather, not listening to children); institutional/government malfeasance; domestic abuse. Season 3: White supremacy and misogyny, fascism; cults; but also I think Russian espionage maybe... almost as itself: potentially both the Cold War and the contemporary issue of election interference. Season 4: Trauma and child abuse and bullying again, institutional incompetence and government corruption/coverups, Satanic Panic and witch hunts.

It's not as coherently or deliberately about things as Stephen King typically is, which is probably partly because it's got a lot more of its focus on producing nostalgia-pastiche. But it's also on the larger level about a generation of traumatized children who are growing up terrorized by certain knowledge that their world is on fire and many encounters with potentially apocalyptic danger and doom, while day-to-day life carries on with a nightmarish assumption of mundanity and often a complete lack of acknowledgement of their trauma or oftentimes the danger that they're in. And on that level, the existential threats to the American children of the 80s - nuclear war, the AIDs epidemic - pale in comparison to the existential threats facing the American children of today: climate change and its escalating natural disasters, white supremacist and christofascist takeover of the US being attempted, school shootings, and now (since the release of Stranger Things 3) the global pandemic and children being forced back to school in spite of it and without comprehensive air filtration and circulation or mask and vaccine mandates.

Last Night in Soho: I guess I read a lackluster review of this at some point? Or a lackluster headline maybe, because it was completely different from what I expected. Actually, I guess I would rate it pretty highly. It's not, uh, lighthearted like the Pegg-Frost Wright movies, really at all - classic horror and haunting, really, with a touch of that 'Is she really losing it or not?' kind of struggle. And I guess I was mostly okay with the ending, although I really wanted ( Read more... )

The Sandman (all except the new bonus episode): I was really happy to see this after being so excited to watch it, and I enjoyed myself and appreciated a lot of the performances and the set design that went into it. And especially the raven-training. However, relucantly, I have to agree more or less with Gavia Baker-Whitelaw's review, Netflix’s ‘Sandman’ struggles to recreate the creepy, immersive atmosphere of the comics. I ultimately felt kind of underwhelmed - it wasn't stylized enough. It didn't make use of the film medium in the way that the comic made use of its medium; it didn't achieve enough surrealism and hyperrealism and dreaminess and that kind of thing. I wanted to see more adventurous direction and photography, like... Hannibal, or the early Brian Fuller-related episodes of American Gods (visually, I mean, I'm not saying the script needed to depart more from the events of the comic), or something directed by Park Chan-Wook. Or even like, Stranger Things 4, which had killer editing and direction and camera angles and photography. I am glad that it was so faithful to the events of the comics and I think for the most part, the script is good; the cast all felt really good, some of them phenomenal, and at points the visual design was sublime; in fact there were some shots that really felt like they were what I kinda was hoping for, and then in between it sort of fell back into... Gavia compared it to The Umbrella Academy, and... yeah. So I'm still into it and I'm still awaiting the next seasons (it hasn't officially been renewed, but it probably will, since it did so well on release) with anticipation.

Underworld: Yeah, I'd never seen Underworld until yesterday, and it was hilarious. A fun time. Not nearly as cool or iconic as Blade; Underworld is trying extremely hard and is very clearly trying to imitate the coolness of other things, like Blade and the Matrix. The costumes are... well. Kate Beckinsale's iconic leather corset over a vinyl catsuit and tremendous Demonia platform boots would fit in perfectly at a goth club, but it's even less believable for its intended purpose (vampire parkouring around hunting werewolves) than the average superhero outfit. There's some really great locations and sets, though! The sets: not necessarily great in a BELIEVABLE way, or even a really great world-building way, but definitely looked cool on film. A lot of gray and blue filter on everything, which got rather oppressive. Young Michael Sheen is adorable and his forehead is hilarious. The plot is also hilarious. The voiceover is awful, but Wax says it was added because test audiences weren't following some of the transitions and implied backstories, so I guess needs must. The CGI werewolves were as awful and disturbing as I always find CGI werewolf concepts, but I've seen later ones that looked worse, so I guess they can have partial points for that. Oh! And this movie is a great example of the betrayal by a trusted mentor trope I posted about a few months ago. The twist wasn't exactly completely unpredictable to the audience, but at least the protagonist's surprise was convincing.

Day Shift: this is the new vampire movie on Netflix that people are talking about. Jamie Foxx is the protagonist, Snoop Dogg is his friend, and a younger Franco brother is the nerdy union rep who has to tag along on his vampire-hunting mission because he's on probation with the vampire-hunting union. This concept is, obviously, good enough to be funny without even writing the story. And the movie is a comedy, not like, just a pulpy B-movie like a lot of vampire stuff. There are a lot of typical comedy beats, not all vampire-related. But on the other hand, this movie has a huge structural problem, akin to building a house like... on mud without a foundation. The story doesn't know whether it thinks that vampires are inherently evil predators and enemies of humanity or not. This reminded me unavoidably of a recent conversation in princessofgeeks's journal about the racist problem of orcs and monster races in Tolkien (and subsequent fantasy). Inherently evil humanoid enemy species in fantasy/sf are generally considered problematic nowadays, for obvious reasons. But this isn't typically necessarily relevant to all classic horror humanoid monsters like vampires, werewolves, etc, which tend to be portrayed in classic horror as intelligent but consciously and explicitly predators who see humans as legitimate prey - in a sense, they dehumanize themselves (or you could say they dehumanize the rest of humanity). That's a whole different can of worms.

In the world of Day Shift, the fact that there's a union means that vampire hunting is legally sanctioned; being a vampire is a death sentence. We're shown both classic villain scenery-chewing from vampires and weird, apparently non-verbal monstrous vampires with tons of zombieriffic/goblinlike horror makeup, inhumanly screeching and growling and hissing instead of speaking... However, ( Read more... )

(Wax): Locke & Key: Wax watched the new season of this, even though the previous seasons were so unbearably bad. This show is based on comics written by Stephen King's son Joe Hill, like the earlier show Nos4a2, in which Zachary Quinto plays some kind of magical demon who steals the souls of children and locks them up in... his... magical Christmasland where no one ages? I think? Anyway, Locke & Key has been a mid-level production values, very low-level dialogue and spotty acting show from the beginning, kind of... not quite as mind-bendingly stupid as Nos4a2, but unfortunately it's got a huge ensemble cast of family characters who are all incredibly stupid, all the time, which is what drives the plot. It would only take a couple of them acting with average or better common sense to completely eliminate their problems, and as it is, their collective stupidity is more than enough to have killed all of them many times. There are a lot of fun concepts and settings and episodes in this world, but they're ruined by the fact that it's impossible to feel sympathy for any of the characters.

(Wax): Resident Evil (tv): Wax has just started this today. Uh, gotta love evil lesbians, I guess? I'm not really a fan of this genre and I can't say I'm enjoying it, but it doesn't seem to be unforgivably stupid or anything. And it's true, they DO have a very diverse cast.

This makes the fifth (?) fic I've opened (and then immediately closed) where the author notes at the beginning admit that the author hasn't watched any of canon.

I habitually read only complete works, and there are SO many new authors who mark their work as complete when it's actually the first part of a WIP. I refreshed my memory because I was kinda like, HOW can you make this mistake?! - and there isn't a checkbox that explicitly asks whether it's a complete work; rather there's a ticky box for a multi-part work, and the intention is that you click that box and then leave the default ? if you don't know how many you're going to write. I was tearing my hair out at too great a rate until I composed the following missive a few days ago, which is now pinned to the top of my notes app, and I now leave it as a comment on every one of these I encounter:
This is a good start!

But since it's a work in progress, this should say it's chapter 1/?, not 1/1. Right now it's mislabeled as a finished story. When you post the first chapter of a longer story, you should tick the box for "This work has multiple chapters" and then a box will appear that lets you type the estimate for the total number if you know, or just a ? if you don't. Then until you post the last chapter it will automatically be sorted as a work in progress!

ealgylden noted on my last post on the subj., the combination of young British newbies (which seem to make up the majority of the fandom for some reason) and young new-to-fandom Don't Bother With Betas Culture has resulted in the larger body of work in Stranger Things fandom - the unfiltered pool, if you will - being thoroughly permeated with blithe, unaware Britishisms. It's incomprehensible to me how someone can get old enough to write fanfiction without consuming enough international media to notice that Americans don't have "mums" or go "to hospital", but it's far beyond that. Sweatshirts are sweaters. Sneakers are trainers. Friends are mates. People are drinking the wrong kinds of beer. At this point I'd rather read an unexplained British AU than another one of these regionalization tragedies.

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Cimorene

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attempting to read roundup & meta rec
1964 'Woke Up Woman' trope/ proto-genderfuck movie
They're mostly undeserved markup but they don't even cost enough to be truly snobby with all of that
Five OTHER things I've thought about this week...
Some awkward moments while rereading old fandoms that you haven't looked into in some years
Inescapably reminiscent of that fantastic painting of the judgment of Phryne
Gervase Fen and Roger Sheringham on the private detective taking the law into their own hands
And in retrospect it's an attack that sounds so peculiar it doesn't even register as funny at first
D&D:HAT & a character type that I absolutely love
The Fannish Personality (Where I am Right Now, Fannishly)
2022 in Review
TWO CAKES?!: link: the sociology and market dynamics of Finnish lactose-free dairy products
House of the Dragon going fully Bad and Rings of Power's mysteriously vanishing budget
Magically Disappearing Patriarchy in Ye Olde Westeros
Visually Rings of Power does fine at more of the same, but falls apart when it comes to invention
More medieval hair ranting
Stephen King, Stranger Things, and what the horror genre is really about
Watched recently
Interacting with Stranger Things (Steve/Eddie) fandom
Maybe the "mum" issue is just spelling. They never read, so they assume it's spelled the same?

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multi-fannish American queer cat & bunny owner in Finland

Entries tagged with meta

attempting to read roundup & meta rec

1964 'Woke Up Woman' trope/ proto-genderfuck movie

They're mostly undeserved markup but they don't even cost enough to be truly snobby with all of that

Five OTHER things I've thought about this week...

Some awkward moments while rereading old fandoms that you haven't looked into in some years

Inescapably reminiscent of that fantastic painting of the judgment of Phryne

Gervase Fen and Roger Sheringham on the private detective taking the law into their own hands

And in retrospect it's an attack that sounds so peculiar it doesn't even register as funny at first

D&D:HAT & a character type that I absolutely love

The Fannish Personality (Where I am Right Now, Fannishly)

Ten Things I Assume You Know About Me If You Read My Journal

2022 in Review

TWO CAKES?!: link: the sociology and market dynamics of Finnish lactose-free dairy products

House of the Dragon going fully Bad and Rings of Power's mysteriously vanishing budget

Magically Disappearing Patriarchy in Ye Olde Westeros

Visually Rings of Power does fine at more of the same, but falls apart when it comes to invention

More medieval hair ranting

Stephen King, Stranger Things, and what the horror genre is really about

Watched recently

Interacting with Stranger Things (Steve/Eddie) fandom

Maybe the "mum" issue is just spelling. They never read, so they assume it's spelled the same?