oh, so that's where it is
Went to see sis, and finally found all that snow that people keep talking about.
For the last couple of days, the national news has been insisting that the whole country has been brought to a standstill by the heaviest snow for twenty years, or something.
Where I live, the weather's looked like this (save a couple of inches of snow one night that were melted by morning):
Turns out when they said the whole country, what they actually meant was "selected bits of the south of England". Funny how often that happens. Not so grim up North, anyway (for now, at least; the snow seemed to be following us home for a lot of the way), which I'm kind of glad about, as while snow is very pretty and I love looking at it, I do hate being cold and wet :/
Anyway. Oxford looked lovely, even if it was so icy from the snow melting and refreezing that I nearly went arse over tit more than once, and it was awesome to see sis :D
Fandom-y things...
+ Finished Victory of Eagles over the weekend, and am very impressed. It wasn't, though, a particularly enjoyable read for a lot of the way through - not that it wasn't good, it was, it just wasn't pleasant. For one thing, Temeraire and Laurence's relationship is (understandably) incredibly strained all the way through, and the strength and heart of that is so important in the novels that when it struggles, or is negatively impacted, the reader really feels it. For another, Laurence spends the whole book (again understandably) incredibly withdrawn and flat - which is a very impressive and skilful depiction of a man standing at the nexus of so, so many conflicting and converging pressures, and who has had to make decisions (and now live with their awkward and complex consequences) that by his own moral compass are as difficult and grey and murky as can be. But it's draining and tiring to read. It also made the book very monotonous, at least for the first two thirds or so, although eventually (pretty much exactly at the point where I was starting to think that it really needed to happen or I was going to get bored), there were a couple of turning points in Laurence's character development that switched things up a bit. That said, though, I am really impressed by the depth and complexity of Novik's treatment of ideas of honour and duty and responsibility in a series that's otherwise light-hearted. And there were loads of things that were enjoyable, even if they emerged out of the depressing plot. By necessity, you see so much more of the dragons in VoE (a lot of it is actually told from Temeraire's 3rd person POV), and Novik's characterisation is as good with them as it is with the humans; she also does a lot more with the dragon-rights plot, which I do find really interesting. I also enjoyed the contrasts she sets up between different characters' relationships with Laurence, seeing the different things that each character gives to him and takes from him - and seeing too the different effects what he has done has had on them, which again does a lot to break out of and extend beyond the quite self-centred (and definitely self-pitying) introspection of Laurence's perspective. And even though I was sort of craving some feel-good factor, I liked that it didn't have an easy ending, even if it does mean I'll now be hanging on for a book 6 that may or may not ever get written. Argh, these books need a bigger fandom! There is so much about them that I want to ramble with people about :D
+ I still don't know what I think about this Takarazuka thing. I don't know much about Takarazuka, but I suspect if I did I'd probably be a huge fan - and if I knew nothing about the AA games I'd be unreservedly wanting to watch this. Musicals + crossdressing? Two of my favourite things. But as a fan of the games, it doesn't really appeal to me. I am kind of entertained, from a P/E fangirl perspective, that in Leona Clyde they seem to have cobbled together a love interest by taking part of the dynamic and circumstances of Phoenix's relationship with Edgeworth and changing the genders (and adding a dash of 1-5 for good measure), but it also just exposes that it is fairly blatantly heterosexualising (shut up it is so a word) a strikingly non-heterosexual (not queer, just non-heterosexual) series. Which I don't really like, although I've no doubt it's just a function of adapting it through the different generic conventions of Takarazuka, rather than anything more sinister (and of course, the inherent genderfuck in it is an interesting counterpoint to that). And I'm kind of mystified as to how to approach it generally. You can't treat it as an extension or missing plot of canon, because that would fuck the continuity over royally. But if you look at it as an adaptation, well, tbh, I'm not really sure what the changes made to the story (as I understand it, which could be very poorly) add to the games, or whether they comment interestingly on them. There seems to be continuity of character and spirit, sort of, but not much of a continuity of theme or ideas (the presentation of het romance in the games is usually done in quite a specific way, for specific purposes, but that could be a whole other post by itself :3), which is what I look for in adaptations (although that is a personal thing). I don't really see why a straightforward-ish adaptation of one of the simpler cases wouldn't have worked just as well (because I actually really am sold on the idea of PW as a musical; I think generally the way it's structured, and how it plots and characterises, would lend itself really well to musical adaptation). I guess what I'm trying to say is not, I am not excited about them because I am a fan - but rather, the fact that I'm a fan isn't what makes me excited about them. I don't know if that distinction makes any sense outside my head. I would really like to see it, because I think it would be fun and pretty and entertaining and (probably inadvertently) sexy and will have a lot of the things I like about the AA games in it. But I'm not excited about seeing it in the same way and for the same reasons I'm excited about, say, Gyakuten Kenji. Idk, I feel like I've got a lot of almost certainly far too srs bsns tl;dr stored up about this, but tbh it's all kind of getting arrested at the level where my brain is swooning over Girlshoe ¬_¬
+ I am feeling very ficcish at the moment. I want to finish the Klavier/Daryan genderswap that I've been playing with for ages, and also maybe write some meta about genderswap, because it is interesting me muchly at the moment. I've got an idea for a light-hearted Zack/Tseng fic (it makes sense in my head ¬_¬) half-drafted, because I want to poke at Zack's character a bit. And I want to write some Temeraire fic, probably something about Granby, who's having a difficult time in the background of VoE in a similar and yet very different way to Laurence, but that goes relatively unexplored - which when it's a character I like, exerts an inexorable pull on me towards fic :D But I suspect all that's going to come of this is just another handful of unfinished fics :/ I wish I was better at concentrating on one thing for any kind of sustained or useful period of time.
Last night, after staying up past the natural point of tiredness to watch Match of the Day and then falling into very restless sleep, I dreamed that I was a tabloid reporter (or possibly paparazzo) trying to find evidence to prove that Steven Gerrard and Fernando Torres were having a secret affair. I think all these years in fandom have finally turned my brain.
For the last couple of days, the national news has been insisting that the whole country has been brought to a standstill by the heaviest snow for twenty years, or something.
Where I live, the weather's looked like this (save a couple of inches of snow one night that were melted by morning):
Turns out when they said the whole country, what they actually meant was "selected bits of the south of England". Funny how often that happens. Not so grim up North, anyway (for now, at least; the snow seemed to be following us home for a lot of the way), which I'm kind of glad about, as while snow is very pretty and I love looking at it, I do hate being cold and wet :/
Anyway. Oxford looked lovely, even if it was so icy from the snow melting and refreezing that I nearly went arse over tit more than once, and it was awesome to see sis :D
Fandom-y things...
+ Finished Victory of Eagles over the weekend, and am very impressed. It wasn't, though, a particularly enjoyable read for a lot of the way through - not that it wasn't good, it was, it just wasn't pleasant. For one thing, Temeraire and Laurence's relationship is (understandably) incredibly strained all the way through, and the strength and heart of that is so important in the novels that when it struggles, or is negatively impacted, the reader really feels it. For another, Laurence spends the whole book (again understandably) incredibly withdrawn and flat - which is a very impressive and skilful depiction of a man standing at the nexus of so, so many conflicting and converging pressures, and who has had to make decisions (and now live with their awkward and complex consequences) that by his own moral compass are as difficult and grey and murky as can be. But it's draining and tiring to read. It also made the book very monotonous, at least for the first two thirds or so, although eventually (pretty much exactly at the point where I was starting to think that it really needed to happen or I was going to get bored), there were a couple of turning points in Laurence's character development that switched things up a bit. That said, though, I am really impressed by the depth and complexity of Novik's treatment of ideas of honour and duty and responsibility in a series that's otherwise light-hearted. And there were loads of things that were enjoyable, even if they emerged out of the depressing plot. By necessity, you see so much more of the dragons in VoE (a lot of it is actually told from Temeraire's 3rd person POV), and Novik's characterisation is as good with them as it is with the humans; she also does a lot more with the dragon-rights plot, which I do find really interesting. I also enjoyed the contrasts she sets up between different characters' relationships with Laurence, seeing the different things that each character gives to him and takes from him - and seeing too the different effects what he has done has had on them, which again does a lot to break out of and extend beyond the quite self-centred (and definitely self-pitying) introspection of Laurence's perspective. And even though I was sort of craving some feel-good factor, I liked that it didn't have an easy ending, even if it does mean I'll now be hanging on for a book 6 that may or may not ever get written. Argh, these books need a bigger fandom! There is so much about them that I want to ramble with people about :D
+ I still don't know what I think about this Takarazuka thing. I don't know much about Takarazuka, but I suspect if I did I'd probably be a huge fan - and if I knew nothing about the AA games I'd be unreservedly wanting to watch this. Musicals + crossdressing? Two of my favourite things. But as a fan of the games, it doesn't really appeal to me. I am kind of entertained, from a P/E fangirl perspective, that in Leona Clyde they seem to have cobbled together a love interest by taking part of the dynamic and circumstances of Phoenix's relationship with Edgeworth and changing the genders (and adding a dash of 1-5 for good measure), but it also just exposes that it is fairly blatantly heterosexualising (shut up it is so a word) a strikingly non-heterosexual (not queer, just non-heterosexual) series. Which I don't really like, although I've no doubt it's just a function of adapting it through the different generic conventions of Takarazuka, rather than anything more sinister (and of course, the inherent genderfuck in it is an interesting counterpoint to that). And I'm kind of mystified as to how to approach it generally. You can't treat it as an extension or missing plot of canon, because that would fuck the continuity over royally. But if you look at it as an adaptation, well, tbh, I'm not really sure what the changes made to the story (as I understand it, which could be very poorly) add to the games, or whether they comment interestingly on them. There seems to be continuity of character and spirit, sort of, but not much of a continuity of theme or ideas (the presentation of het romance in the games is usually done in quite a specific way, for specific purposes, but that could be a whole other post by itself :3), which is what I look for in adaptations (although that is a personal thing). I don't really see why a straightforward-ish adaptation of one of the simpler cases wouldn't have worked just as well (because I actually really am sold on the idea of PW as a musical; I think generally the way it's structured, and how it plots and characterises, would lend itself really well to musical adaptation). I guess what I'm trying to say is not, I am not excited about them because I am a fan - but rather, the fact that I'm a fan isn't what makes me excited about them. I don't know if that distinction makes any sense outside my head. I would really like to see it, because I think it would be fun and pretty and entertaining and (probably inadvertently) sexy and will have a lot of the things I like about the AA games in it. But I'm not excited about seeing it in the same way and for the same reasons I'm excited about, say, Gyakuten Kenji. Idk, I feel like I've got a lot of almost certainly far too srs bsns tl;dr stored up about this, but tbh it's all kind of getting arrested at the level where my brain is swooning over Girlshoe ¬_¬
+ I am feeling very ficcish at the moment. I want to finish the Klavier/Daryan genderswap that I've been playing with for ages, and also maybe write some meta about genderswap, because it is interesting me muchly at the moment. I've got an idea for a light-hearted Zack/Tseng fic (it makes sense in my head ¬_¬) half-drafted, because I want to poke at Zack's character a bit. And I want to write some Temeraire fic, probably something about Granby, who's having a difficult time in the background of VoE in a similar and yet very different way to Laurence, but that goes relatively unexplored - which when it's a character I like, exerts an inexorable pull on me towards fic :D But I suspect all that's going to come of this is just another handful of unfinished fics :/ I wish I was better at concentrating on one thing for any kind of sustained or useful period of time.
Last night, after staying up past the natural point of tiredness to watch Match of the Day and then falling into very restless sleep, I dreamed that I was a tabloid reporter (or possibly paparazzo) trying to find evidence to prove that Steven Gerrard and Fernando Torres were having a secret affair. I think all these years in fandom have finally turned my brain.