subdee

On second thought I said everything I really wanted to say about A Suitable Boy in a comment on the last post:

A Suitable Boy is full of memorable characters (I even remember all of their names, and that never happens.) But if I were Lata, I would not have chosen the husband she chose. The entire book is about why rational love is a better basis for marriage than romantic love, and even though I AGREE that it is I thought Lata was too extremely practical. Besides Lata and her family and her suitors and her families-in-law and the friends of all of the above, the book is about Hindu/Muslim tensions in post-colonial India. Overall it's excellent, but some parts are better than others.

Anything else I could say would be spoilers, so we'll leave it at that. I've been inspired by naljwrimo2006 to be slightly rambly in this entry, where by "rambly" I mean for once not posting a list. If you get bored and wander off you know who to blame.

I joined seldom_end, a fanfic community for YA fanatsy book series without large fandoms of their own. It's an orderly, talented community and it's made me want to read Garth Nix's Keys to the Kingdom series, but I don't know if I'll want to stay a member "when traffic picks up" (as hemlocke is confident it will). Most of the books being written for are unfamilar to me, and I'm more likely to write Stargate: Atlantis BDSM than I am to write teen lit fanfic.

It's just no fun deciding which tonal approach to use on a fanfic when the author's voice is right there competing with you. You know? Plus there's the always-horifying possibility of the original author reading something you've written, actually pretty likely if I go with my first instinct and write Delia Marshall Turner fic. She strikes me as the sort of author who'd have a livejournal account.

( delia marshall turrrrner who hasn't written anything in almost a decade )

In conclusion, these books would make great shoujo manga. Speaking of, I second octopedingenue's review of Koukou Debut. It's adorable. I don't think the leads have any real chemistry. What they do have, is Romantic Lead Anti-Chemistry. He's trendy and popular, she's an excitable former softball player with no fashion sense! He's perceptive, laconic and slightly callous, she's a dense, cheerful and energetic! They make a terrible couple, which is why it's so fascinating to watch them. Because Haruna is an athelete and physically stronger, there are also some really cute gender inversions, like the scene where she promises to protect him!!!! and Yoh looks at her like: o_O;;.

I'm caught up on all of Firefly & Serenity, Veronica Mars through the end of the first season, and Legend of the Galactic Heroes up to episode 62. The cliffhanger at the end of the first season of Veronica Mars is a killer. My sympathies to everyone who watched this show as it was coming out, I don't know how you stood it. (Logan! I missed the early episodes where you are popular and cruelly sarcastic, and only saw the later ones where you are needy and defensively sarcastic! Please be alright!!)

Legend of the Galactic Heroes episodes 50-62: ( Read more... )

Saw Underworld: Evolution with the gang on Friday. It was awful. F complained that the porn scene was gratuitous, but I loved it because for those five or however many minutes no one's heart was ripped out. Not a single lung was pierced! Blood did not flow copiously! Give me sex over decapitation any day.

I did come out of the theater wishing I'd seen the first Underworld. It looked so much less dumb.

( classwork )

Borders is doing buy three get one free on movies, manga, and fantasy books this week. I bought four of the things on this list (listerx is for animanga what LibraryThing is for books).

Joan D. Vinge, The Snow Queen: it's the second longest book I didn't like, but made myself finish anyway, after Little Women. There's a ton of cheese like there was in Catspaw, but it's a different, less satisfactory, flavor of cheese. ( Read more... )

You know what sucks? The cartoon based on Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks. I am still looking for that elusive thing, a cartoon based on a syndicated comic strip that does not suck. (Baby Blues is okay. Dogbert, however, sucks.)

( Syriana )

That took too long, so I’ll keep the rest short.

The Island
AKJSDH Why hadn’t I heard of this movie before? It’s out on DVD folks, go rent it. Adults in white tracksuits in a futuristic enclosed facility, living responsibility-free lives; their only purpose is to bide time until chosen to live on “The Island,” the last pollutant-free place on Earth. But is it really 2019? Is the planet really contaminated? Why is every aspect of life in the facility monitored? Most importantly, why are all of these adults acting like five year olds?

The technology driving this movie exists, sort of. But the second half forgets all that stuff in favor of being a disappointingly dumb action movie (lol guyz I think there weren’t enuf explosions, ½ of LA is still standing!). The Island is still worth seeing for Ewan McGreggor pretending to be a genius five-year-old, though. XDXD

The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley.
It took me two chapters to realize that I’d already read this book – in middle school, before I was keeping track of authors. My reaction is the same: aw, fluffy colonialists! That was the kindest, most “we’re good people at heart, even our prejudices are endearing” look at English people I have ever seen! (Homelanders. Whatever.)

The heroine, who is too tall and too independent and too poor to marry well despite her obvious intelligence and good sense, is sent to an outpost, where she falls in love with 1) the desert, and 2) a psychic desert prince who has gold eyes and is taller than her. A fun book. Vivian Vande Velde does teen fantasy kink romance better, though.

Wicked
The story of Elphalba, the Wicked Witch of the West. I liked it but had a strange niggling sensation of not-rightness. The Land of Oz was never meant to be given the realistic political treatment. Look at the map! A desert on the west side of a mountain range, when the wind blows east? Draining a swamp leads to water shortages at higher elevations? Not Right. It was strange beyond words to read about Animal Oppression as a political distraction from reduced farm yields. (Pretty funny to see Elphalba crusade for Animals on the one hand, hate Tiktok creatures on the other, though. *g* everyone has a blind spot.)

By the end of the book the author had gotten so far away from Wicked Witch’s normal characterization that when Dorothy finally showed up, he could only get Elphalba to follow the script by making her temporarily insomniac and delusional. XD

Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler.
I don’t want to finish this book. It’s pretty squick – ten year old girl vampire sleeps with man in his twenties, numerous others – but more than that it’s...too rational. A fantasy story forced to be a sci fi story. There are two problems with this:

1) like in Wicked, there are certain things that make more sense when they are not explained.
2) The writing style. Basically it consists of pages and pages and pages of ten-year-old amnesiac vampire protagonist working things out in her head. This is quintessential Octavia E. Butler; but in a story without aliens or cults or dystopian future societies, it is also more than I can take.

Of the boy --> girl variety, if only because no one ever writes it the other way around. XD I love genderswitch. Ranma ½ was my first fandom. These two things are not unrelated.[1]

1. Naruto, Oh Baby, Oh Baby by The Badifc Fairy.

Parody, but the sort of parody that’s still good if you’re completely serious about it (where by “completely serious” I mean “willing to read mpreg”). This story wins on three levels:
a. There are canonical, sensible, plot-related reasons for turning Naruto into an OOC pregnant girl!
b. The story is fun enough to hold the reader’s interest until those reasons are revealed.
c. The author enjoys making fun of Sasuke’s pain. (Who doesn’t?)

2. Full Metal Alchemist, Eliza AU, nekokoban and harukami.
I like this one because if you make Ed a girl in disguise and then move her in with Roy, you are well on your way to But She’s my Ward! I’d be Taking Advantage! awkwardness. Which line is crossed by the third fic in series XD. It’s also a mostly serious -- but also very funny -- look at exactly which things would change if Ed were a girl. If you like FMA and like genderswitch you’ll probably have already heard of this one, but the series is disconnected and not archived anywhere that I’ve found so here is an (incomplete) index: ( cut for length )


3. Yami no Matsuei, bookverse story by mistressrenet

Not technically genderswitch, or even focusing on gendeswitched characters. But I thought I’d include this one because 1) I like it and 2) Yami no Matsuei does canon genderswitch AU, how cool is that? Also, because the mangaka had the good sense to make Tsuzuki the girl and not Hisoka. (The problem with making Hisoka the girl – what most people writing Yami genderswitch do -- is that it’s a fundamental part of his character that he looks like a girl, is treated like a girl, and has a girl’s name, but IS NOT A GIRL. That and YnM reverses traditional top/bottom roles but anyway moving on.)

4. Sayuki, Ranma ½ fusion by emungere

Aaaaand finally a Ranma-esque fic. Uses the premise and not the characters, so you do not need to know anything about Ranma ½ to read it. Hakkai/Gojyo, smutty. Very, very smutty.

This completes the genderswitch AU cycle, gagfic --> serious exploration of gender boundaries --> he is practically a girl anyway --> pr0n. Because pr0n is the fanfic equilivent of Rome, all roads lead to it.

***

[1]Yes, let's talk about fandom origins! Ranma 1/2 was gignatic, but I don't think that's the biggest reason I was in it. GWing and Sailor Moon and DBZ and CCS and Rurouni Kenshin were equally huge, at the time. Access to sources -- ie CCS and Ruroken not having domestic releases -- wasn't the issue either, because ahaha I never did read Ranma or watch the anime. I think it really was the genderswitch. (That, and the crossovers and AUs and fusions. XD)

Claiming Ranma 1/2 as first fandom dates me older than I actually am. That's because what I mean by "fandom" is really more like "read lots of fanfic on nearly-defunct personal websites". There weren't many people still writing at the time that I was reading. I did join two Yahoo!groups -- one for an author who rarely updated (beckytailweaver) and one for an author who'd stopped posting publically (team7) -- but I never replied to or posted anything and that was the extent of my participation. XD So there was no interaction, either online or off, for maybe three years.

Which really explains a lot.

P.S. I have this bizzare desire to finish an impossibly long RPG over break. It's bizzare because I haven't played videogames for two and a half years (since starting college), and because I was never a big RPG fan in the first place. I mostly played platformers and racing games. I wasn't into anime when I was into video games, right, and I've always seen RPGs as an extention of anime fandom.

( Here're my RPG stats )