Star Wars, The Martian, fandom year in review, and December ramble meme finale: so-called fanart
First of all, we got ender839's cookies today (they arrived days ago, but my parents were keeping them for us; I didn't tell them they were delicious cookies :P), and they are awesome. I'm having a chocolate teddy bear with my tea right now. Thank you so much for this marvelous holiday tradition, Carrie! ♥
Second of all, s nastupayuschim!
But mostly, this is a fannish post:
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So, Star Wars!
My thing with Star Wars: I'm not a hardcore fan. I was young enough that when I first saw the movie -- I think it was actually Empire Strikes Back, which remains my favorite of the original trilogy, because our ESL teacher at Hebrew Academy was showing movies to the class, but I joined in October rather than the beginning of the year, so I assume I missed A New Hope. Anyway, I saw the movies early enough (at 11) that they could be part of my cultural literacy, and that I loved them, but I've never been fannish about them. Han and C3PO were my favorites (although I liked Harrison Ford even better as Indy, I seem to recall -- another movie the ESL teacher showed us), I thought they were very fun movies, but that's about it.
But I hung around with enough people in high school and college for whom Star Wars *were* a kind of religion to be steeped in the fandom to a certain degree just by osmosis. I mean, TK, the guy who introduced me to B5, actually made a fan movie of Star Wars while we were at Lowell, with himself as Darth Vader and another guy as Luke, with a 90's-personal-computer-CGI lightsaber battle and everything. And when the re-released original trilogy was in theaters again in 1997, W -- who would quote from the trilogy in daily life, too, and address me as 'princess' (*eyeroll* -- although, to be fair, he also addressed me by the made-up-for-the-Magnum-Opus honorific which means "Mage (female)", so I really shouldn't complain) -- anyway, W would recite each line of dialogue in unison, or a little ahead of the actors. Those kinds of friends :) But I had my Lord of the Rings at this point, and one can only have One True Fandom.
When the prequels came out, B and I went to see The Phantom Menace in our little neighborhood theater. It was... OK? The kid was not too annoying, and the Darth Maul fight was pretty cool, and B found Sebulba funny enough that I actually got him a figurine of him. But it wasn't a great movie -- there was Jar-Jar, and the too-shiny too-CGI look, and it was just... not what I loved about Star Wars. By the time Attack of the Clones came out, in 2002, we already had L, so going to the movies was not so easy, and the more reviews of it I heard/read the happier I was we had skipped it. I finally watched it on TV at some point; we were stuck at home, I was doing something that prevented me from reading (folding laundry, maybe? this was when baby O was around already, so there was a lot of laundry to fold) and there was absolutely nothing else on, and I STILL wasn't sure that was the best use of my time. The rodents finally got to watch it in Israel last summer when we were visiting friends, and they concurred the dialogue was just as stupid as I'd told them it would be. Revenge of the Sith we did actually rent and watch and enjoy, but it was definitely too little too late for the prequels, and even that one bugged me, with what happened with Padme, and the stupid NOOOOO.
I forget how O got to be the fan of Star Wars that he is. I think he must've seen a snatch of the prequels or Clone Wars on TV, as I said, no, we can't start there, and tracked down the original movies for him. I do know that by Halloween 2009 (when he was in first grade) and for the next several years, all his Halloween costumes were Star Wars themed -- Darth Vader first, then some Clone Trooper commander that meant nothing to me. At one point he had, I think, a DOZEN lightsabers, in all the different colors they came in. And I think we have ~$1000 worth of Star Wars Lego at home, because that's his default present desire -- all the playsets. He not only builds them very methodically, he actually plays with them, too. And we must have at least 50 Star Wars figurines, including a whole bunch of Clone Troopers that are totally indistinguishable to me, but he knows all their names and where they come from and stuff. And he's read a whole bunch of different Star Wars books, novellizations of the movie and Clone Wars tie-in books and Expanded Universe books that continue the story. He has a Star Wars encyclopedia, too, and has read that, also. So, O is definitely our hardcore fan.
He was also the one who really wanted to see this movie right away -- he was so jealous of the people standing in line for the Thursday night showing, when we were out for our anniversary dinner. He said we absolutely had to see it before break was over, or Mr B (his sixth grade teacher that he's still friends with, because Mr B is a huge nerd, sponsors the middle school Comic Book club, that O goes to occasionally -- they'd bonded right away over O's Captain America hoodie that he wore on his first day of middle school -- and plays Clash of Clans, and so on) -- or Mr B would spoil him for everything. And the timing worked out, since we actually regretted not catching a movie last time we had a full day to kill in Hawaii before our flight, so everything fit.
We got trailers that were, like, nerd central -- for all the different flavors of nerds. Warcraft trailer (I'm assuming the movie will be really stupid, because it seems like game franchise movies generally are, but, ooh, pretty), Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (L wants to watch it in theaters, as do I, but she is concerned about the American version of the Wizarding World being a lot less good, because apparently the Muggles are called something really silly -- her Harry Potter club did a whole discussion of the EW spread a while back, and that was the general consensus), X-Men Apocalypse (O is excited for it, but based on the trailer, I don't think I'll enjoy this movie very much), Captain America: Civil War (O wants to watch this in theaters, but I'm deeply skeptical of that being a good idea... not enough Tony, for one, and too much Bucky for my taste...). Franchises aside, we also got a trailer for The 5th Wave (whatever; the only thing that got a reaction out of us was the "can you tell me what is the derivative of x?" bit at the very beginning), Gods of Egypt (this probably also will be really stupid, but the sand monsters and swooping shots were cool, so I assume we'll be watching this on Redbox), and Zootopia (I was sure this was going to be really boring and dumb, but the trailer, consisting of a single extended scene was actually really entertaining -- perfectly chosen for the mostly-adult audience, and everybody laughed).
As for the movie itself: as I said in the non-spoilery precis last post, I liked it a lot! My expectations were quite high, because I'd read all of the reviews on my flist, which were positive-to-glowing, and it didn't disappoint, although it also didn't surpass them, so I can't say I OMGLOVED it. It also doesn't tip me over into fannishness, at all, but I don't think anything is going to do that at this point. To paraphrase Nick Ryves, I've already got one one-man's-epic-mythology fandom :P
SPOILERS FROM HERE!
- Han was my favorite thing about the movie, which probably shouldn't be a surprise, since he's been my favorite thing about all the Star Wars movies. I loved all of the smirks, and the "14 parsecs"/"12 parsecs" exchange, and all the interactions with Chewie, and the too-brief scenes with Leia. (Although older!Leia was really weird to me... I'm used to older Harrison Ford, of course, but hadn't seen the other two in anything since the original trilogy, so that was a difference, of course. But I did think Mark Hamill had aged the best of the three of them, though he looked the least like his younger self.) And every time the Milennium Falcon was in flight, from the moment the tarp got pulled off it, I felt such a burst of nostalgia. I'm not a hardcore fan, like I said, but that ship definitely brings something out for me.
- I was spoiled for his death (though not how/when it happened), which I was happy about, because otherwise I would've been pretty pissed about That Scene. The rodents and B were NOT spoiled, but they all could see it coming pretty far off. O actually leaned over and whispered to me that Kylo Ren was going to kill Han as the scene was just starting. It makes sense, both from a narrative and from a logistic perspective, but... :((( Han... and Chewie flying the Falcon without him after... :((
- Kylo Ren... oh dear XD I'm actually not sure what emotion he's supposed to elicit, but L and I just found him faintly hilarious. L took to calling him Darth Wannabe and also Darth Snivellus, because she remarked, correctly, that he looks like a young Snape, and these are both pretty fitting names, I feel. He's just so... teenager-acting-out-embarrassing, you know? He doesn't think his given name is cool enough, so he calls himself "Kylo Ren" instead of Ben (because what super-villain is named Ben, right?), and he wears a mask he doesn't need because it makes him look cooler (Han telling him to take off the mask in a very parentally frustrated tone of voice was one of my favorite bits), and he has this extra-crazy lightsaber -- which he uses to trash his room ship in tantrums that are apparently so regular, the entire crew is used to them (the storm troopers turning and walking te other way while he was having hissy fit #2 was another of my favorite moments), and he talks to a partially melted skull/helmet of his grandfather, and, just, oh my god, dude XD I'm curious as to whether he's being set up for a redemption arc; I'm assuming he is, but I wonder if it's one he gets to walk away from, or if it will be a final expiating sacrifice sort of thing, as with Vader -- that seems more likely.
- O was annoyed that the future canon did not jive with the canon he is familiar from the Expanded Universe: that it was the wrong kid of Han and Leia's that went to the Dark Side, and that he had the wrong number of siblings -- none, apparently -- and the wrong name.
- L was annoyed that it was improbable that Rey would master the Force so quickly and, untaught, be such a challenge to Kylo Ren, or that he would leave her alone with a storm trooper when he already knew she had some Force gifts, but I pointed out that, well, he wasn't very good at the whole being evil thing, so...
- Speaking of Rey, she looked a lot like Padme, and also a bit like young Leia, too. There are a lot of theories about her being Luke's daughter; it definitely seems like she could/should be related to the Skywalkers, in any case).
- I'd skimmed enough reviews to have gotten the impression that the movie centered around a main trio: Rey, Poe, and Finn. So I was very surprised that it totally did not feel anything like a trio: I could see Poe having an equal role in a subsequent movie, but in this one he definitely wasn't a co-protagonist, an didn't get an arc of his own, unlike Finn and Rey. Which I was fine with, actually -- I didn't dislike him, but he was not as interesting or charming as the other two young people.
- I liked Finn the best of the newly introduced characters: the way he's motivated at first by just wanting to get out of something he'd never gotten a choice in, and the first taste of free will, he basically just tries lying to... well, EVERYONE, starting with Po about why he's helping him get away, and then Rey and Han, and how all that works out for him (him bargaining with BB-8 was pretty funny, and I loved Han calling him "big deal" after his boast). I also liked that ultimately he is willing to risk his own life, but not so much for ideals as for the sake of an individual person -- he volunteers to go to Starkiller Base to rescue Rey, and it's Han who has to point out the problem with lying about knowing anything about disabling the shields when the entire mission is then counting on his ability to do so: it's obviously not a great thing to do, in the greater scheme, but it was in character. Also, "sanitation" (and him therefore knowing where the trash compactor was) was another great bit. I also liked the part in the beginning where Finn thinks he needs to hlep Rey, but she not only takes care of her attackers herself, she then chases him down and lays him out when BB-8 tips her off to the jacket.
- Supreme Leader Snoke (or whatever he's called) -- where had he even come from, and what the hell was he? The name made it very difficult to take him seriously for me, and when he had the big dramatic "Bring. Her. To me." O whispered to me that he was talking like the sloth in the Zootopia trailer, which cracked me up and made it even harder to take seriously. Also, just the design did, too. He felt like he'd wandered in from a totally different movie (possibly, the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel, what with the holographic projection on a throne thing).
- BB-8 was adorable! and looked like a soccer ball rolling around -- so cute! And this seems as good a place as any to talk about the special effects -- I liked them a lot more than in the prequels. Things felt *solid*, and scuffed, and made noises, and showed wear-and-tear. I wasn't sure if CGI had just improved sufficiently so that it could do stuff like this, but aome said, when we were talking about the movie, that Abrams used a lot more models than the prequels did, and I guess that shows. Oh, and speaking of special effects, I liked the tentacly beasties.
- Yeah, the plot was a lot like the A New Hope, especially the climax (and the new weapon was just as Evil Overlord's List as the Death Star), but that's considerably better than the prequels did, so, whatever, I'm down with that.
Not about the movie itself, but, as we were leaving the theater, we saw a little girl with a lit-up red lightsaber, the Kylo Ren kind, and a young woman in a shirt with pink Rebel Alliance symbols on the sleeves. Nobody was dressed up, not that I was expecting them to be, but that was still a cute thing.
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In other sci-fi media news:
71. Andy Weir, The Martian -- it's been a while since I finished this book, but I'm finally writing it up. As I mentioned in comments on one of the previous posts, I didn't think it was that good as a novel, but, damn, I LOVED it as a story. Spoilers!
The not-great-as-a-novel bits first: the structure is inconsistent (which normally bugs me) and occasionally clunky. I know it was published as a serial online first, so I don't know if the bits that don't feel as good are things Weir added later, based on reader or editor feedback, or just something he eventually realized he had to include but wasn't planning on from the start, but either way, to me it's a weakness that partway through the novel we get Houston POVs all of a sudden, and flashbacks that are not in first-person and Hermes crew POVs, and then bits that are omniscient, too, the ones setting up for the disasters of the Hab explosion an the rover capsizing. Some of them, I think, were definitely necessary but needed to be MORE, and some I'm not sure even needed to be there -- I think there were other, less clunky ways to set up the foreshadowing with the Hab, for instnace. But whatever, not my book.
Let's go back to the things I liked, in the order I liked them:
- The engineering geekery! So The Martian was first recommended to me when I mentioned on a top 5 prompts meme that I wanted to read a story where science was the solution, not a problem because "man is not meant to meddle in such things", and it totally is that. Actually, it's even better than that, because it's ENGINEERING being the solution, and that's, frankly, even closer to my heart. I mean, Mark is both a scientist and an engineer, quite explicitly by job description, and his botanist glee over his potatoes was a joy to see, but the circumstances he finds himself in are definitely such that they call on him to use engineering more. And the engineering is so fun! Like, I love that it's all real science, of course (and apparently when professionals in the fields sent Weir corrections, he incorporated them into the final version of the book, which is awesome), but it's more than just that there are numbers and calculations behind the plot. Stuff works (and doesn't work) the way engineering really does: you have a complex system that you understand parts of really well, but it is TOO complex to be able to predict everything that could go wrong, so you try to troubleshoot things the best you can, and sometimes you hit on a solution, and sometimes your solution sort of works but induces a NEW problem, and sometimes what you thought was the problem turns out to be something else totally, and sometimes you accidentally do something just plain stupid and everything goes to hell -- like the thing with the drill short-circuiting his communication with Earth. This is, by far, BY FAR! the best depiction of engineering I've seen in media (and it's not a surprise that it comes from a working engineer, of course). Anyway, I loved everything about this! I didn't necessarily stop to work out the technical bits, but I definitely tried to follow most of them, and it was nice when we were in a field that I know enough about to be like, oooh, right, hydrazine, you do have a lot of hydrogen in that, but how's he going to... oh. :D
- Mark himself. One of the reasons I was a bit hesitant to pick up the book is that I'm usually all about character interaction and dialogue, so I wasn't sure how a book with a stranded protagonist who has NO ONE TO TALK TO would work for me. But Mark's log entries are so great! I loved his smartass style of narration (I told the rodents he was like Harry Dresden IN SPACE, if Harry were a botanist-engineer-astronaut rather than wizard, and O agreed with me after he read the book), and I also found it totally believable that he'd be keeping a log in his circumstances. I laughed at all the jokes and snark about NASA terminology, I laughed at his paraphrases of his conversations with NASA, and also at his actual conversations with NASA ("everything you type is being broadcast live all over the world." "Look! A pair of boobs! --> (.Y.)"), and the self-deprecating humour -- but the flashes of real emotion that come through occasionally were all the more powerful for the lighthearted everything else: I was very moved by the short passage where Mark sits down and weeps when he first gets in touch with NASA, and thought it was really, really well done how, amidst the banter and boob jokes he always, ALWAYS mentioned it was not the crew's fault he'd been left behind, every time he talked to NASA or Hermes. Mark was a great example of character building in, essentially, vacuum (dyswidt?). I read a quick Q&A with Weir at the end of my edition, and he said he basically had Mark say whatever he would've said in the circumstances, so I'm not surprised that Mark feels so much more ALIVE than anybody else in the book.
Which brings me to the parts I didn't like as much, or at least had quibbles with/would've liked to see done better:
- I liked the parts where the Hermes crew are acting as a crew -- in the flashback, and at the end -- maybe because we first got to see them all interacting in the flashback with Mark there, too. But there were, like, 1.3 actual personalities for the five of them, unfortunately. I think it was a good bunch, and given the climax, I think you absolutely had to have them -- but I think it would've made sense to introduce them earlier, then, a B plot running alongside Mark's A plot -- showing them grieving, showing what they felt when NASA finally did tell them Mark was alive -- basically have them be actual full-fledged characters with maybe their own minor arcs. I realize that's not the story Weir set out to tell, but as it is, there's a very clear dichotomy between Mark's line and everything else. Because as it is, Martinez has an actual personality (that I liked a lot, but I also couldn't swear that *I* wasn't sketching some of that in based on "hotshot pilot" archetypes), and Lewis had maybe a glimpse of one, outside of the 70s/disco thing, which worked as a running gag but NOT as the entirety of an actual character, but it's OK for her to be mostly in commander-mode more than the others, and I liked the glimpse of the person underneath that we got from her remark to Mark: "Oh, well if you won't let us, then-- Wait... wait a minute... I'm looking at my shoulder patch and it turns out I'm the commander. Sit tight. We're coming to get you." But, like: what does Johanssen get, besides being the girlier one, who's small and youngest and afraid of tattoo needles? Vogel's entire personality seems to consist of him being German. And Beck... other than liking, and then eventually sleeping with Johanssen, what is even there? If the scenes of them talking with their families were meant to flesh them out more, they definnitely didn't, because they were introducing a whole five OTHER characters that we did not know anything about and didn't get any feel for from a single scene. *sigh* Well, that's what fanfic is for, I guess, and I hear the movie improved things also?
- As for Houston... I'm not even sure. Ther are interesting points the "back on Earth" storyline makes -- the Chinese space agency reluctantly coming to help, the decision about whether to tell or not to tell the crew of Hermes, the pressure to skip tests to make the Iris probe quickly, the tough call (which I do believe was a tough call) between the Rich Purnell maneuver and a second probe. And, OK, the "Project Elrond" joke was pretty cute. But NONE of the characters back on Earth felt like full-fledged people, and all the scenes with them felt really flat, like movie script bits that were relying on something that just wasn't there -- an actor's facial expressions, voice, emotions -- to make the scene actually *connect*. I think either Houston needed to be an actual C plot with its own consistent POV character -- which probably would've been clunky, as the point was to show the breadth of people coming together to save Mark -- or it should've gone the other way and done, like, in-universe documents -- newspaper articles or talk show transcripts, minutes of meetings, emails between NASA people. Not that this isn't easy to do badly -- it totally is -- but this sort of bland-character-hopping just didn't work for me, even though there were a couple of characters I "recognized" as very much the kinds of people I know, Tim the snarky technician who says "you can never tell with managers" and Rich Purnell, who takes vacation in order to work on his own astrophysics problem rather than the one NASA is telling him to work on.
- The Hab canvas and Iris probe and Schiaparelli's sediment omniscient parts -- honestly, I don't think that added much that you couldn't get from Mark and NASA figuring out afterwards how the thing failed, and doing the foreshadowing some other way.
I was also kind of ambivalent about the ending -- meaning, the point where the book ended, with Mark aboard Hermes but still in space. There's still so much bad stuff that could've happened to them, especially given the extended mission and wear-and-tear on the spacecraft, and the fact that they'd had to BLOW A HOLE in it to maneuver closer to Mark. It does feel symmetric with the beginning, which starts right with Mark being left alone on Mars, so reuniting with the crew does make it feel like a nicely closed circle, but I would have liked to see them actually arrive back on Earth -- maybe in an epilogue or something, or a fake news clipping at least. Well, I guess that's the other thing fanfic is for :)
I was only a little ways into the book when I became pretty sure O would enjoy it as much as me. He really likes survival stories in general, and I was sure he'd enjoy Mark's POV. I even thought he might like the fact that there were all these numbers involved, because he does like counting stuff and thinking about things in the media he consumes from the logistics perspective. At first O was reluctant, but I showed him the first sentence ("I'm pretty much fucked.") and he was sold, as I suspected -- he said he'd expected it to be some kind of stuffy book, so the F-word in the first sentence reassured him it wasn't. He read it quite quickly, which was explained by him skimming a lot of the technical bits, but he liked all the things I'd expected him to like, like Mark's conversations with NASA, the thing about why Aquaman can control the whales, Martinez joking about cannibalism, and so on. I did have to nag him a bit to read the book rather than play with his tablet, but he finished it and said, "OK, fine, I liked it. Shut up!" (because I'd been telling him he'd like it). Now he says he doesn't want to see the movie because he expects the movie will ruin the book, but I told him everyone says it's a good adaptation.
And speaking of fanfic up there: I've not read through the entire Yuletide crop yet, but I did read a number of stories that I liked a lot:
- This one story is AMAZINGLY in character, especially for being 16k of Mark/everyone on Hermes porn: start a love train. The Mark voice is perfect (there are even geeky digressions!), the crew dynamic is really great, there are moments both poignant and funny, and it's surprisingly non-cracky for such a cracky premise. Just, damn!
- Another coda, with multiple POVs that actually makes the Hermes crew feel more like real characters: homesick at space camp (teen, with some het, but mostly just crew dynamics)
- And this somewhat multi-media coda is also really good, and funny: oh man! look at those cavemen go (Gen, Ares 3 crew)
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Fannish year in review meme:
2014 (and older ones linked from there)
1. Your main fandom of the year?
God, I don't even know -- this was a super-scattered year for me. The last several years, I'd gone on massive readthroughs or rereads of something, or I discovered a new fandom I was head-over-heels with. Not this year... And the fandoms I'm really into either didn't have any injections of new canon this year (RoL, Dragaera, e.g., even second/third tier ones like Dresden Files and Temeraire) or what new canon they had was... odd (the Cordelia book, or Age of Ultron, I suppose). The other important factor in this in past years has been getting a friend to pick up one of the fandoms I love, but that doesn't seem to have happened, either. There are books I enjoyed a lot, like Uprooted, but I'm not fannish about them in the same way. I guess if I use the metric of "read the most fic for", it's likely to be Rivers of London still -- I read a novel-length AU and some other stuff, and reread a number of my favorites.
2. Your favorite film watched this year?
Since I don't keep track of them the same way I do of books, I use this question to round up my movies for the year. Of which there was more than in the past this time around.
In theaters we watched Age of Ultron (which wasn't bad but definitely did not live up to my enjoyment of the first movie) and, unexpectedly, Spectre (the new James Bond movie; better than I'd expected after Casino Royale, but Craig is still not my Bond), and The Force Awakens (which, well, see above, but it was good and I liked it a lot!). My favorite of the movies watched in theaters was definitely Star Wars 7.
From Redbox we watched the last Hobbit movie (par for the course, I guess...), Mockingjay (which I thought was the weakest of the three, even accounting for the fact that I also like the book least), Into the Woods (not bad at all, considering I don't do musicals), Big Hero 6 (which was unexpectedly delightful), Night at the Museum 3 (unexpectedly poignant), Penguins of Madagascar (which had looked incredibly dumb in trailers and was, in fact, incredibly dumb, but in a fun way), Jupiter Ascending (incredibly dumb, but not in a fun way -- sorry, people who love it! it's just not my thing), Home (the Smekday adaptation, which was, I suppose, cute for a kids movie but made me weep as an adaptation), Tomorrowland (pretty fluff for a depressing day, basically), Inside Out (really great!), Jurassic World (oh god so dumb, and also without the emotional closure I wanted; yes, with the raptors), Man from U.N.C.L.E. (fun but a bit too stylized for my taste), Ant-Man (ridiculous, but surprisingly fun!).
I usually watch some movies on the plane, too, but I was so tired during most of my long-haul flights that I just slept, and on the flight back from France I chose to read and watch TV instead. I did catch the first 30 minutes of Cinderella, but wasn't gripped enough to continue.
In the "catching up on old movies" vein, we also watched Legally Blonde 2, which was not as bad as I'd expected, but definitely not nearly as good as the first movie, and Clue, so now I get all those references, but I'm not in love or anything.
And with ikel89 we watched RED and The Addams Family, which was also a lot of fun.
The new-to-me movies I really enjoyed were Ultron, Star Wars 7, Hobbit 3, Into the Woods, Big Hero 6, Inside Out, Ant-Man, and Clue. Of these, I think Big Hero 6 and Inside Out are best movies objectively, But Inside Out and Star Wars were the ones I enjoyed the most. And I think I have enough remove now to safely pronounce Inside Out my favorite movie of the year, much to my surprise.
3. Your favorite book read this year?
I answered in the December ramble meme about my top 3, but this is a slightly different question, so here I'm going to answer with the books that just filled me with glee, regardless of merit or flaws. That would be:
- Arika Okrent's In the Land of Invented Languages (a nonfic book! to my surprise)
- Naomi Novik's Uprooted (hadn't expected to like it after Blood of Tyrants, but there you go)
- Karen Healey's Guardian of the Dead (not a perfect first book by any means, but I really liked both what it was trying to do and what it did)
- Lia Silver's Prisoner (so much fun!)
- Andy Weir's The Martian (see above)
I think Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and the Craft Sequence books are actually better books than the ones up there, but they didn't click with me personally as cozily and pleasantly as those did.
4. Your favorite album or song to listen to this year?
The only new-to-me album I was listening to was the new disc from the Shaov concert, of which "Nash Soyuz" and "Odin Den' Dyadi Zhory" were my favorite songs.
5. Your favorite TV show of the year?
I didn't watch much new-to-me TV this year, but I never do. I finished season 1 of Angel, which I actually liked more than I'd been afraid I would, considering the main character. I also watched the Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell miniseries, which I started out loving and ended up liking OK (some very odd choices, I feel, with Stephen's storyline, and some other stuff that just plain didn't need changing). I liked both, but my actual favorite TV show of the year was Babylon 5, because this was the year we watched season 3 and the beginning of season 4 with the rodents, and that's when it gets really, really good :D
Oh, and I also watched some TV shows on planes, including rather a lot of Big Bang Theory (pretty funny), some Community (charming), and the first episode of White Collar (Matt Bomer sure is pretty).
6. Your favorite LJ community of the year?
This is so sad, but I don't think I've spent any time in any LJ community at all this year. OK, that's not entirely true, I did my Yuletide spectator sport thing in yuletide and yuletide_coal, but I was merely lurking there, so it's not the same.
7. Your best new fandom discovery of the year?
Let's see...
Canon I discovered this year which I do not need a fandom for: Max Gladstone's Craft sequence. I'm not surprised there are all of 3 works on AO3 for this series (all Yuletide fics, it would appear), because this seems like the sort of series that really does not accommodate fandom well -- too complex in terms of worldbuilding, too vast in terms of scale, the timeline too complicated, with books getting published in interstices.
Canon I've discovered that has a fandom: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, book and show. Well, the fandom seems fairly limited to the show, and also is centered on characters I don't care about as much (John Childermass/John Segundus and Lady Pole seem to be where it's at), but at least there IS a fandom. That's already a pleasant surprise. Also, The Raven Cycle, although ditto -- fandom is all about Ronan/Adam and Gansey/Blue and random fluff, which is not what I'm looking for, but hey. Also, apparently I'm reading Captive Prince fic now (this is all ikel89's fault. Also, I'm not sure if The Martian actually has a fandom or if the timing just worked out with Yuletide, but there's been a nice crop of Yuletide fics, which I plan on reading through.
Canon I've discovered that I wish had a fandom: Lia Silver's Werewolf Marine books. They are so much fun, and there's a lot of room for side stories and different POVs! (and yes, I've read the fic/canon outtakes on AO3). Also Uprooted, but maybe Yuletide will deliver in that regard.
Canon I did not discover this year but which suddenly grew a fandom: The Goblin Emperor. I'm sure the Hugo controversy really helped there. But, yeah, I was happy to see it among the more popular Yuletide offerings/requests/stories, and am looking forward to reading all the Csethiro/Maia/Csevet stuff, in various combinations and gen, which I'd been wanting to see since I discovered the book last year. Although the stories I've seen so far are skewed in a somewhat different direction than where my interests lie. I'm still going to read them, but I haven't prioritized them as highly. Also, RoL seems to be taking off, which is a delight to see.
8. Your biggest fandom disappointment of the year?
The Cordelia book was not exactly a disappointment, but I'm not sure what it was... Age of Ultron would've been a disappointment if I hadn't read all the panning reviews on my flist, to discover that it wasn't as bad as I'd prepared myself for.
I think this is the winner in terms of disappointment, though: I finished Locke 2 and 3 to confirm that these books possess an uncanny ability to disappoint me again and again even while I really enjoy them -- like, I think it's a special brand of frustration that comes from the knowledge that Lynch is SO GOOD at writing exactly what I want to read (found family hijinks, Locke and Jean being bros, interesting side characters like the Salvaras or Dona V or Patience) and instead is spending all this time on joyless Sabetha and her strawman feminism and killing off the female characters who actually are interesting and/or likeable and fucking ships.
But that's disappointment in the canon. In terms of just general fannish disappointment, I have to give this to finding out that The Hanging Tree (RoL #6) wasn't going to be published in 2015 after all, and is pushed out more than 6 months. D:
9. Your fandom boyfriend of the year?
Morrolan still, esp. post Taltos reread. I also find myself liking Marcus Cole even more than originally in the B5 rewatch (and Lennier, though with Lennier I have to wilfully suppress what I know is coming). Among new to me characters, both DJ and Roy from the Werewolf Marines books (who are adorable in different ways), Mr Thornton from North and South (even though the book isn't really a romance, I did like him a lot for his integrity), and, because I like grumpy older men/dragons/whatever, Stone from The Cloud Roads. Also, it apparently doesn't matter how old Han Solo is, he is still my fandom boyfriend. :)
10. Your fandom girlfriend of the year?
This was an odd year for me in terms of female characters -- while there were some interesting new-to-me ones, they mostly weren't the kind I latch onto as grilfriend material. Except for Arabella Strange, probably, whom I did like a lot -- and on the show adaptation even more than in the book. I also really liked Agnieszka from Uprooted and could see that be a thing. And a tier or two below that, Cordelia Chase on Angel and two teenage girls from the YA books I've been reading this year: Auden from Along for the Ride and Lindsay from An Abundance of Katherines.
11. Your biggest squee moment of the year?
Learning there was going to be another Vorkosigan book probably. Also, reading Dream Thieves with ikel89 (and to a lesser extent, Captive Prince and Warchild), because it had been a while since we'd read something together, and following along as egelantier got to the good stuff on Babylon 5.
12. The most missed of your old fandoms?
Dragaera still. I mean, it never really had a fandom as such, but at least I could periodically catch up on the mailing list or chat with lunasariel, or read the 1-2 fics to come out of Yuletide (there was one fic in this year's Yuletide crop, and I read it, and it's good, but it deals with characters that are not my favorites/the ones I want fic about), but none of those things have been really around this year. At one point I got so desparate, I reread all the fic on AO3, including the one that was clearly Google translated and featured a NOTP.
13. The fandom you haven't tried yet, but want to?
Last year I said Max Gladstone and Angel the Series, and can now check off both of those. I also said Daniel Abraham's The Long Price Quartet, but that didn't happen, and will have to carry over to next year. Also, a recent conversation with etrangere reminds me I've been meaning to check out Coldfire for ages.
14. Your biggest fan anticipations for the New Year?
The Hanging Tree (RoL #6), which was pushed to June 2016 instead of late this year, waah.
Presumably Peace Talks (the next Dresden Files book) will also be some time in 2016, as will the last Temeraire book? And who knows when Vallista will be finished -- I can't figure out if Brust is working on it or on a different project. And then of course there is Kvothe #3, which I'm not even going to try to guess about.
I'm somewhat anticipating the Thorn of Emberlain (Locke #4), which was pushed to 2016 -- even though chances are that it will deliver more frustration than enjoyment, as that seems to be the way of Locke books for me.
Oh, and even though I'm not fandom-serious about these, it is nice to have these two to look forward to in early 2016: the conclusions of the Raven Cycle (late April) and the Captive Prince trilogy (February) -- because I read them close enough to the end of the year that I think the momentum won't have time to dissipate before that.
*
And wrapping up the December ramble meme with ikel89's prompt: doodle fanart of book of your choice
Which is evil, because I can't draw. So I pondered this for a long time, and eventually remembered that back when I was little -- this was actually sparked by a comment of ani_mama's on my "what do I collect post" -- my mother would draw me picture books where mice would be drawn as the Greek gods and heroes; these books were called "Myshi, bogi, i geroi" [mice, gods, and heroes] -- like "Mify, bogi, i geroi" [myths, gods, and heroes], the real book of Greek myths. Anyway, so I was like, I'll draw whatever characters I decide to do as mice! Because mice are one of the things I can actually draw, or at least have some practice drawing. When I was going through the "sketching outfits" phase, I didn't draw girl figures (or boy figures) -- I drew punky mice or mice in frilly dresses.
So then I started thinking about what book it should be fanart of, but was contemplating the One True Fandom shirt K had made for me, and figured I couldn't do any better than the Nine Walkers.
So then I was telling L about it, that I was going to draw the LotR people as mice, and something she asked made me realize that they shouldn't ALL be mice -- the different races should be different rodents -- I can kind of draw other rodents, too.
So:
Here's how I arrived at who was who:
me: The Hobbits should be hamsters. They're fuzzy and like to eat and are fairly useless. [<-- I don't actually mean this. About Hobbits, I mean. Hamsters are, indeed, fairly useless.]
me: And Gandalf will be a rat! Because he's smart, and gray.
me: And Legolas should be... something that jumps. A gerbil?
me: What should Gimli be? Something that lives underground.
L: A mole?
me: Ooh... except--
L: Moles aren't rodents, are they?
me: No... But some burrowing rodent. A suslik of some kind.
L: A prairie dog.
me: Yeah, a prairie dog.
me: What should the Men be? I was thinking beavers...
B: *comes in*
me: I'm going to draw the Fellowship of the Ring as rodents! The Hobbits will be hamsters, and Gandalf will be a rat, and Legolas will be a gerbil, because he jumps, and Gimli will be something that lives underground--
B: A mole?
me: I wish! But moles aren't rodents, so we're thinking prairie dog. But I don't know what the others should be. What do you think Boromir should be?
B: *in very affronted tones* A beaver!
me: Well, I was thinking that, but--
B: Of course a beaver! What else could he be.
me: *meekly* OK. But then, is Aragorn also a beaver?
B: *equally vehemently* No!
me: But they're both men?
B: Aragorn can be a capybara.
me: OK. So Hobbits are hamsters, Gandalf is a rat, gerbil Legolas, prairie dog Gimli, beaver for Boromir, and Aragorn is a capybara.
L: And who will be mice?
me: Oh, right... I don't have any mice. That's OK, I guess...
B: No! That's not right. You have to have mice.
me: I... guess Frodo can be a mouse? And Pippin and Merry? But Sam is definitely a hamster.
me: D'oh! Of course! Legolas is a SQUIRREL.
L also wanted me to draw Gollum as a bat, but I didn't have room for him, and also bats are not rodents.
And this concludes the December ramble meme, 2015.
Day 1: Vorkosigan Saga
Day 2: Raven Cycle poems
Day 3: San Francisco beyond tourist traps
Day 4: A book that changed/influenced my life
Day 5: Five good things I got from fandom
Day 6: Scene from a book I'd like illustrated/filmed
Day 7: Recs of a book, movie, TV show, and music
Day 8: Day(s) to relive
Day 9: Top 3 books of 2015
Day 10: Career stuff
Day 13: Canon that should have a bigger fandom
Day 15: Things I collect
Day 16: Wedding and honeymoon
Day 17: Dragaera
Day 18: Five things I'd change about canon
Day 19: Stuff I still want to check out
Day 29-30: most embarrassing moment of 2015 and best moment of the month
Day 31: this post
Second of all, s nastupayuschim!
But mostly, this is a fannish post:
*
So, Star Wars!
My thing with Star Wars: I'm not a hardcore fan. I was young enough that when I first saw the movie -- I think it was actually Empire Strikes Back, which remains my favorite of the original trilogy, because our ESL teacher at Hebrew Academy was showing movies to the class, but I joined in October rather than the beginning of the year, so I assume I missed A New Hope. Anyway, I saw the movies early enough (at 11) that they could be part of my cultural literacy, and that I loved them, but I've never been fannish about them. Han and C3PO were my favorites (although I liked Harrison Ford even better as Indy, I seem to recall -- another movie the ESL teacher showed us), I thought they were very fun movies, but that's about it.
But I hung around with enough people in high school and college for whom Star Wars *were* a kind of religion to be steeped in the fandom to a certain degree just by osmosis. I mean, TK, the guy who introduced me to B5, actually made a fan movie of Star Wars while we were at Lowell, with himself as Darth Vader and another guy as Luke, with a 90's-personal-computer-CGI lightsaber battle and everything. And when the re-released original trilogy was in theaters again in 1997, W -- who would quote from the trilogy in daily life, too, and address me as 'princess' (*eyeroll* -- although, to be fair, he also addressed me by the made-up-for-the-Magnum-Opus honorific which means "Mage (female)", so I really shouldn't complain) -- anyway, W would recite each line of dialogue in unison, or a little ahead of the actors. Those kinds of friends :) But I had my Lord of the Rings at this point, and one can only have One True Fandom.
When the prequels came out, B and I went to see The Phantom Menace in our little neighborhood theater. It was... OK? The kid was not too annoying, and the Darth Maul fight was pretty cool, and B found Sebulba funny enough that I actually got him a figurine of him. But it wasn't a great movie -- there was Jar-Jar, and the too-shiny too-CGI look, and it was just... not what I loved about Star Wars. By the time Attack of the Clones came out, in 2002, we already had L, so going to the movies was not so easy, and the more reviews of it I heard/read the happier I was we had skipped it. I finally watched it on TV at some point; we were stuck at home, I was doing something that prevented me from reading (folding laundry, maybe? this was when baby O was around already, so there was a lot of laundry to fold) and there was absolutely nothing else on, and I STILL wasn't sure that was the best use of my time. The rodents finally got to watch it in Israel last summer when we were visiting friends, and they concurred the dialogue was just as stupid as I'd told them it would be. Revenge of the Sith we did actually rent and watch and enjoy, but it was definitely too little too late for the prequels, and even that one bugged me, with what happened with Padme, and the stupid NOOOOO.
I forget how O got to be the fan of Star Wars that he is. I think he must've seen a snatch of the prequels or Clone Wars on TV, as I said, no, we can't start there, and tracked down the original movies for him. I do know that by Halloween 2009 (when he was in first grade) and for the next several years, all his Halloween costumes were Star Wars themed -- Darth Vader first, then some Clone Trooper commander that meant nothing to me. At one point he had, I think, a DOZEN lightsabers, in all the different colors they came in. And I think we have ~$1000 worth of Star Wars Lego at home, because that's his default present desire -- all the playsets. He not only builds them very methodically, he actually plays with them, too. And we must have at least 50 Star Wars figurines, including a whole bunch of Clone Troopers that are totally indistinguishable to me, but he knows all their names and where they come from and stuff. And he's read a whole bunch of different Star Wars books, novellizations of the movie and Clone Wars tie-in books and Expanded Universe books that continue the story. He has a Star Wars encyclopedia, too, and has read that, also. So, O is definitely our hardcore fan.
He was also the one who really wanted to see this movie right away -- he was so jealous of the people standing in line for the Thursday night showing, when we were out for our anniversary dinner. He said we absolutely had to see it before break was over, or Mr B (his sixth grade teacher that he's still friends with, because Mr B is a huge nerd, sponsors the middle school Comic Book club, that O goes to occasionally -- they'd bonded right away over O's Captain America hoodie that he wore on his first day of middle school -- and plays Clash of Clans, and so on) -- or Mr B would spoil him for everything. And the timing worked out, since we actually regretted not catching a movie last time we had a full day to kill in Hawaii before our flight, so everything fit.
We got trailers that were, like, nerd central -- for all the different flavors of nerds. Warcraft trailer (I'm assuming the movie will be really stupid, because it seems like game franchise movies generally are, but, ooh, pretty), Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (L wants to watch it in theaters, as do I, but she is concerned about the American version of the Wizarding World being a lot less good, because apparently the Muggles are called something really silly -- her Harry Potter club did a whole discussion of the EW spread a while back, and that was the general consensus), X-Men Apocalypse (O is excited for it, but based on the trailer, I don't think I'll enjoy this movie very much), Captain America: Civil War (O wants to watch this in theaters, but I'm deeply skeptical of that being a good idea... not enough Tony, for one, and too much Bucky for my taste...). Franchises aside, we also got a trailer for The 5th Wave (whatever; the only thing that got a reaction out of us was the "can you tell me what is the derivative of x?" bit at the very beginning), Gods of Egypt (this probably also will be really stupid, but the sand monsters and swooping shots were cool, so I assume we'll be watching this on Redbox), and Zootopia (I was sure this was going to be really boring and dumb, but the trailer, consisting of a single extended scene was actually really entertaining -- perfectly chosen for the mostly-adult audience, and everybody laughed).
As for the movie itself: as I said in the non-spoilery precis last post, I liked it a lot! My expectations were quite high, because I'd read all of the reviews on my flist, which were positive-to-glowing, and it didn't disappoint, although it also didn't surpass them, so I can't say I OMGLOVED it. It also doesn't tip me over into fannishness, at all, but I don't think anything is going to do that at this point. To paraphrase Nick Ryves, I've already got one one-man's-epic-mythology fandom :P
SPOILERS FROM HERE!
- Han was my favorite thing about the movie, which probably shouldn't be a surprise, since he's been my favorite thing about all the Star Wars movies. I loved all of the smirks, and the "14 parsecs"/"12 parsecs" exchange, and all the interactions with Chewie, and the too-brief scenes with Leia. (Although older!Leia was really weird to me... I'm used to older Harrison Ford, of course, but hadn't seen the other two in anything since the original trilogy, so that was a difference, of course. But I did think Mark Hamill had aged the best of the three of them, though he looked the least like his younger self.) And every time the Milennium Falcon was in flight, from the moment the tarp got pulled off it, I felt such a burst of nostalgia. I'm not a hardcore fan, like I said, but that ship definitely brings something out for me.
- I was spoiled for his death (though not how/when it happened), which I was happy about, because otherwise I would've been pretty pissed about That Scene. The rodents and B were NOT spoiled, but they all could see it coming pretty far off. O actually leaned over and whispered to me that Kylo Ren was going to kill Han as the scene was just starting. It makes sense, both from a narrative and from a logistic perspective, but... :((( Han... and Chewie flying the Falcon without him after... :((
- Kylo Ren... oh dear XD I'm actually not sure what emotion he's supposed to elicit, but L and I just found him faintly hilarious. L took to calling him Darth Wannabe and also Darth Snivellus, because she remarked, correctly, that he looks like a young Snape, and these are both pretty fitting names, I feel. He's just so... teenager-acting-out-embarrassing, you know? He doesn't think his given name is cool enough, so he calls himself "Kylo Ren" instead of Ben (because what super-villain is named Ben, right?), and he wears a mask he doesn't need because it makes him look cooler (Han telling him to take off the mask in a very parentally frustrated tone of voice was one of my favorite bits), and he has this extra-crazy lightsaber -- which he uses to trash his room ship in tantrums that are apparently so regular, the entire crew is used to them (the storm troopers turning and walking te other way while he was having hissy fit #2 was another of my favorite moments), and he talks to a partially melted skull/helmet of his grandfather, and, just, oh my god, dude XD I'm curious as to whether he's being set up for a redemption arc; I'm assuming he is, but I wonder if it's one he gets to walk away from, or if it will be a final expiating sacrifice sort of thing, as with Vader -- that seems more likely.
- O was annoyed that the future canon did not jive with the canon he is familiar from the Expanded Universe: that it was the wrong kid of Han and Leia's that went to the Dark Side, and that he had the wrong number of siblings -- none, apparently -- and the wrong name.
- L was annoyed that it was improbable that Rey would master the Force so quickly and, untaught, be such a challenge to Kylo Ren, or that he would leave her alone with a storm trooper when he already knew she had some Force gifts, but I pointed out that, well, he wasn't very good at the whole being evil thing, so...
- Speaking of Rey, she looked a lot like Padme, and also a bit like young Leia, too. There are a lot of theories about her being Luke's daughter; it definitely seems like she could/should be related to the Skywalkers, in any case).
- I'd skimmed enough reviews to have gotten the impression that the movie centered around a main trio: Rey, Poe, and Finn. So I was very surprised that it totally did not feel anything like a trio: I could see Poe having an equal role in a subsequent movie, but in this one he definitely wasn't a co-protagonist, an didn't get an arc of his own, unlike Finn and Rey. Which I was fine with, actually -- I didn't dislike him, but he was not as interesting or charming as the other two young people.
- I liked Finn the best of the newly introduced characters: the way he's motivated at first by just wanting to get out of something he'd never gotten a choice in, and the first taste of free will, he basically just tries lying to... well, EVERYONE, starting with Po about why he's helping him get away, and then Rey and Han, and how all that works out for him (him bargaining with BB-8 was pretty funny, and I loved Han calling him "big deal" after his boast). I also liked that ultimately he is willing to risk his own life, but not so much for ideals as for the sake of an individual person -- he volunteers to go to Starkiller Base to rescue Rey, and it's Han who has to point out the problem with lying about knowing anything about disabling the shields when the entire mission is then counting on his ability to do so: it's obviously not a great thing to do, in the greater scheme, but it was in character. Also, "sanitation" (and him therefore knowing where the trash compactor was) was another great bit. I also liked the part in the beginning where Finn thinks he needs to hlep Rey, but she not only takes care of her attackers herself, she then chases him down and lays him out when BB-8 tips her off to the jacket.
- Supreme Leader Snoke (or whatever he's called) -- where had he even come from, and what the hell was he? The name made it very difficult to take him seriously for me, and when he had the big dramatic "Bring. Her. To me." O whispered to me that he was talking like the sloth in the Zootopia trailer, which cracked me up and made it even harder to take seriously. Also, just the design did, too. He felt like he'd wandered in from a totally different movie (possibly, the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel, what with the holographic projection on a throne thing).
- BB-8 was adorable! and looked like a soccer ball rolling around -- so cute! And this seems as good a place as any to talk about the special effects -- I liked them a lot more than in the prequels. Things felt *solid*, and scuffed, and made noises, and showed wear-and-tear. I wasn't sure if CGI had just improved sufficiently so that it could do stuff like this, but aome said, when we were talking about the movie, that Abrams used a lot more models than the prequels did, and I guess that shows. Oh, and speaking of special effects, I liked the tentacly beasties.
- Yeah, the plot was a lot like the A New Hope, especially the climax (and the new weapon was just as Evil Overlord's List as the Death Star), but that's considerably better than the prequels did, so, whatever, I'm down with that.
Not about the movie itself, but, as we were leaving the theater, we saw a little girl with a lit-up red lightsaber, the Kylo Ren kind, and a young woman in a shirt with pink Rebel Alliance symbols on the sleeves. Nobody was dressed up, not that I was expecting them to be, but that was still a cute thing.
*
In other sci-fi media news:
71. Andy Weir, The Martian -- it's been a while since I finished this book, but I'm finally writing it up. As I mentioned in comments on one of the previous posts, I didn't think it was that good as a novel, but, damn, I LOVED it as a story. Spoilers!
The not-great-as-a-novel bits first: the structure is inconsistent (which normally bugs me) and occasionally clunky. I know it was published as a serial online first, so I don't know if the bits that don't feel as good are things Weir added later, based on reader or editor feedback, or just something he eventually realized he had to include but wasn't planning on from the start, but either way, to me it's a weakness that partway through the novel we get Houston POVs all of a sudden, and flashbacks that are not in first-person and Hermes crew POVs, and then bits that are omniscient, too, the ones setting up for the disasters of the Hab explosion an the rover capsizing. Some of them, I think, were definitely necessary but needed to be MORE, and some I'm not sure even needed to be there -- I think there were other, less clunky ways to set up the foreshadowing with the Hab, for instnace. But whatever, not my book.
Let's go back to the things I liked, in the order I liked them:
- The engineering geekery! So The Martian was first recommended to me when I mentioned on a top 5 prompts meme that I wanted to read a story where science was the solution, not a problem because "man is not meant to meddle in such things", and it totally is that. Actually, it's even better than that, because it's ENGINEERING being the solution, and that's, frankly, even closer to my heart. I mean, Mark is both a scientist and an engineer, quite explicitly by job description, and his botanist glee over his potatoes was a joy to see, but the circumstances he finds himself in are definitely such that they call on him to use engineering more. And the engineering is so fun! Like, I love that it's all real science, of course (and apparently when professionals in the fields sent Weir corrections, he incorporated them into the final version of the book, which is awesome), but it's more than just that there are numbers and calculations behind the plot. Stuff works (and doesn't work) the way engineering really does: you have a complex system that you understand parts of really well, but it is TOO complex to be able to predict everything that could go wrong, so you try to troubleshoot things the best you can, and sometimes you hit on a solution, and sometimes your solution sort of works but induces a NEW problem, and sometimes what you thought was the problem turns out to be something else totally, and sometimes you accidentally do something just plain stupid and everything goes to hell -- like the thing with the drill short-circuiting his communication with Earth. This is, by far, BY FAR! the best depiction of engineering I've seen in media (and it's not a surprise that it comes from a working engineer, of course). Anyway, I loved everything about this! I didn't necessarily stop to work out the technical bits, but I definitely tried to follow most of them, and it was nice when we were in a field that I know enough about to be like, oooh, right, hydrazine, you do have a lot of hydrogen in that, but how's he going to... oh. :D
- Mark himself. One of the reasons I was a bit hesitant to pick up the book is that I'm usually all about character interaction and dialogue, so I wasn't sure how a book with a stranded protagonist who has NO ONE TO TALK TO would work for me. But Mark's log entries are so great! I loved his smartass style of narration (I told the rodents he was like Harry Dresden IN SPACE, if Harry were a botanist-engineer-astronaut rather than wizard, and O agreed with me after he read the book), and I also found it totally believable that he'd be keeping a log in his circumstances. I laughed at all the jokes and snark about NASA terminology, I laughed at his paraphrases of his conversations with NASA, and also at his actual conversations with NASA ("everything you type is being broadcast live all over the world." "Look! A pair of boobs! --> (.Y.)"), and the self-deprecating humour -- but the flashes of real emotion that come through occasionally were all the more powerful for the lighthearted everything else: I was very moved by the short passage where Mark sits down and weeps when he first gets in touch with NASA, and thought it was really, really well done how, amidst the banter and boob jokes he always, ALWAYS mentioned it was not the crew's fault he'd been left behind, every time he talked to NASA or Hermes. Mark was a great example of character building in, essentially, vacuum (dyswidt?). I read a quick Q&A with Weir at the end of my edition, and he said he basically had Mark say whatever he would've said in the circumstances, so I'm not surprised that Mark feels so much more ALIVE than anybody else in the book.
Which brings me to the parts I didn't like as much, or at least had quibbles with/would've liked to see done better:
- I liked the parts where the Hermes crew are acting as a crew -- in the flashback, and at the end -- maybe because we first got to see them all interacting in the flashback with Mark there, too. But there were, like, 1.3 actual personalities for the five of them, unfortunately. I think it was a good bunch, and given the climax, I think you absolutely had to have them -- but I think it would've made sense to introduce them earlier, then, a B plot running alongside Mark's A plot -- showing them grieving, showing what they felt when NASA finally did tell them Mark was alive -- basically have them be actual full-fledged characters with maybe their own minor arcs. I realize that's not the story Weir set out to tell, but as it is, there's a very clear dichotomy between Mark's line and everything else. Because as it is, Martinez has an actual personality (that I liked a lot, but I also couldn't swear that *I* wasn't sketching some of that in based on "hotshot pilot" archetypes), and Lewis had maybe a glimpse of one, outside of the 70s/disco thing, which worked as a running gag but NOT as the entirety of an actual character, but it's OK for her to be mostly in commander-mode more than the others, and I liked the glimpse of the person underneath that we got from her remark to Mark: "Oh, well if you won't let us, then-- Wait... wait a minute... I'm looking at my shoulder patch and it turns out I'm the commander. Sit tight. We're coming to get you." But, like: what does Johanssen get, besides being the girlier one, who's small and youngest and afraid of tattoo needles? Vogel's entire personality seems to consist of him being German. And Beck... other than liking, and then eventually sleeping with Johanssen, what is even there? If the scenes of them talking with their families were meant to flesh them out more, they definnitely didn't, because they were introducing a whole five OTHER characters that we did not know anything about and didn't get any feel for from a single scene. *sigh* Well, that's what fanfic is for, I guess, and I hear the movie improved things also?
- As for Houston... I'm not even sure. Ther are interesting points the "back on Earth" storyline makes -- the Chinese space agency reluctantly coming to help, the decision about whether to tell or not to tell the crew of Hermes, the pressure to skip tests to make the Iris probe quickly, the tough call (which I do believe was a tough call) between the Rich Purnell maneuver and a second probe. And, OK, the "Project Elrond" joke was pretty cute. But NONE of the characters back on Earth felt like full-fledged people, and all the scenes with them felt really flat, like movie script bits that were relying on something that just wasn't there -- an actor's facial expressions, voice, emotions -- to make the scene actually *connect*. I think either Houston needed to be an actual C plot with its own consistent POV character -- which probably would've been clunky, as the point was to show the breadth of people coming together to save Mark -- or it should've gone the other way and done, like, in-universe documents -- newspaper articles or talk show transcripts, minutes of meetings, emails between NASA people. Not that this isn't easy to do badly -- it totally is -- but this sort of bland-character-hopping just didn't work for me, even though there were a couple of characters I "recognized" as very much the kinds of people I know, Tim the snarky technician who says "you can never tell with managers" and Rich Purnell, who takes vacation in order to work on his own astrophysics problem rather than the one NASA is telling him to work on.
- The Hab canvas and Iris probe and Schiaparelli's sediment omniscient parts -- honestly, I don't think that added much that you couldn't get from Mark and NASA figuring out afterwards how the thing failed, and doing the foreshadowing some other way.
I was also kind of ambivalent about the ending -- meaning, the point where the book ended, with Mark aboard Hermes but still in space. There's still so much bad stuff that could've happened to them, especially given the extended mission and wear-and-tear on the spacecraft, and the fact that they'd had to BLOW A HOLE in it to maneuver closer to Mark. It does feel symmetric with the beginning, which starts right with Mark being left alone on Mars, so reuniting with the crew does make it feel like a nicely closed circle, but I would have liked to see them actually arrive back on Earth -- maybe in an epilogue or something, or a fake news clipping at least. Well, I guess that's the other thing fanfic is for :)
I was only a little ways into the book when I became pretty sure O would enjoy it as much as me. He really likes survival stories in general, and I was sure he'd enjoy Mark's POV. I even thought he might like the fact that there were all these numbers involved, because he does like counting stuff and thinking about things in the media he consumes from the logistics perspective. At first O was reluctant, but I showed him the first sentence ("I'm pretty much fucked.") and he was sold, as I suspected -- he said he'd expected it to be some kind of stuffy book, so the F-word in the first sentence reassured him it wasn't. He read it quite quickly, which was explained by him skimming a lot of the technical bits, but he liked all the things I'd expected him to like, like Mark's conversations with NASA, the thing about why Aquaman can control the whales, Martinez joking about cannibalism, and so on. I did have to nag him a bit to read the book rather than play with his tablet, but he finished it and said, "OK, fine, I liked it. Shut up!" (because I'd been telling him he'd like it). Now he says he doesn't want to see the movie because he expects the movie will ruin the book, but I told him everyone says it's a good adaptation.
And speaking of fanfic up there: I've not read through the entire Yuletide crop yet, but I did read a number of stories that I liked a lot:
- This one story is AMAZINGLY in character, especially for being 16k of Mark/everyone on Hermes porn: start a love train. The Mark voice is perfect (there are even geeky digressions!), the crew dynamic is really great, there are moments both poignant and funny, and it's surprisingly non-cracky for such a cracky premise. Just, damn!
- Another coda, with multiple POVs that actually makes the Hermes crew feel more like real characters: homesick at space camp (teen, with some het, but mostly just crew dynamics)
- And this somewhat multi-media coda is also really good, and funny: oh man! look at those cavemen go (Gen, Ares 3 crew)
*
Fannish year in review meme:
2014 (and older ones linked from there)
1. Your main fandom of the year?
God, I don't even know -- this was a super-scattered year for me. The last several years, I'd gone on massive readthroughs or rereads of something, or I discovered a new fandom I was head-over-heels with. Not this year... And the fandoms I'm really into either didn't have any injections of new canon this year (RoL, Dragaera, e.g., even second/third tier ones like Dresden Files and Temeraire) or what new canon they had was... odd (the Cordelia book, or Age of Ultron, I suppose). The other important factor in this in past years has been getting a friend to pick up one of the fandoms I love, but that doesn't seem to have happened, either. There are books I enjoyed a lot, like Uprooted, but I'm not fannish about them in the same way. I guess if I use the metric of "read the most fic for", it's likely to be Rivers of London still -- I read a novel-length AU and some other stuff, and reread a number of my favorites.
2. Your favorite film watched this year?
Since I don't keep track of them the same way I do of books, I use this question to round up my movies for the year. Of which there was more than in the past this time around.
In theaters we watched Age of Ultron (which wasn't bad but definitely did not live up to my enjoyment of the first movie) and, unexpectedly, Spectre (the new James Bond movie; better than I'd expected after Casino Royale, but Craig is still not my Bond), and The Force Awakens (which, well, see above, but it was good and I liked it a lot!). My favorite of the movies watched in theaters was definitely Star Wars 7.
From Redbox we watched the last Hobbit movie (par for the course, I guess...), Mockingjay (which I thought was the weakest of the three, even accounting for the fact that I also like the book least), Into the Woods (not bad at all, considering I don't do musicals), Big Hero 6 (which was unexpectedly delightful), Night at the Museum 3 (unexpectedly poignant), Penguins of Madagascar (which had looked incredibly dumb in trailers and was, in fact, incredibly dumb, but in a fun way), Jupiter Ascending (incredibly dumb, but not in a fun way -- sorry, people who love it! it's just not my thing), Home (the Smekday adaptation, which was, I suppose, cute for a kids movie but made me weep as an adaptation), Tomorrowland (pretty fluff for a depressing day, basically), Inside Out (really great!), Jurassic World (oh god so dumb, and also without the emotional closure I wanted; yes, with the raptors), Man from U.N.C.L.E. (fun but a bit too stylized for my taste), Ant-Man (ridiculous, but surprisingly fun!).
I usually watch some movies on the plane, too, but I was so tired during most of my long-haul flights that I just slept, and on the flight back from France I chose to read and watch TV instead. I did catch the first 30 minutes of Cinderella, but wasn't gripped enough to continue.
In the "catching up on old movies" vein, we also watched Legally Blonde 2, which was not as bad as I'd expected, but definitely not nearly as good as the first movie, and Clue, so now I get all those references, but I'm not in love or anything.
And with ikel89 we watched RED and The Addams Family, which was also a lot of fun.
The new-to-me movies I really enjoyed were Ultron, Star Wars 7, Hobbit 3, Into the Woods, Big Hero 6, Inside Out, Ant-Man, and Clue. Of these, I think Big Hero 6 and Inside Out are best movies objectively, But Inside Out and Star Wars were the ones I enjoyed the most. And I think I have enough remove now to safely pronounce Inside Out my favorite movie of the year, much to my surprise.
3. Your favorite book read this year?
I answered in the December ramble meme about my top 3, but this is a slightly different question, so here I'm going to answer with the books that just filled me with glee, regardless of merit or flaws. That would be:
- Arika Okrent's In the Land of Invented Languages (a nonfic book! to my surprise)
- Naomi Novik's Uprooted (hadn't expected to like it after Blood of Tyrants, but there you go)
- Karen Healey's Guardian of the Dead (not a perfect first book by any means, but I really liked both what it was trying to do and what it did)
- Lia Silver's Prisoner (so much fun!)
- Andy Weir's The Martian (see above)
I think Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and the Craft Sequence books are actually better books than the ones up there, but they didn't click with me personally as cozily and pleasantly as those did.
4. Your favorite album or song to listen to this year?
The only new-to-me album I was listening to was the new disc from the Shaov concert, of which "Nash Soyuz" and "Odin Den' Dyadi Zhory" were my favorite songs.
5. Your favorite TV show of the year?
I didn't watch much new-to-me TV this year, but I never do. I finished season 1 of Angel, which I actually liked more than I'd been afraid I would, considering the main character. I also watched the Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell miniseries, which I started out loving and ended up liking OK (some very odd choices, I feel, with Stephen's storyline, and some other stuff that just plain didn't need changing). I liked both, but my actual favorite TV show of the year was Babylon 5, because this was the year we watched season 3 and the beginning of season 4 with the rodents, and that's when it gets really, really good :D
Oh, and I also watched some TV shows on planes, including rather a lot of Big Bang Theory (pretty funny), some Community (charming), and the first episode of White Collar (Matt Bomer sure is pretty).
6. Your favorite LJ community of the year?
This is so sad, but I don't think I've spent any time in any LJ community at all this year. OK, that's not entirely true, I did my Yuletide spectator sport thing in yuletide and yuletide_coal, but I was merely lurking there, so it's not the same.
7. Your best new fandom discovery of the year?
Let's see...
Canon I discovered this year which I do not need a fandom for: Max Gladstone's Craft sequence. I'm not surprised there are all of 3 works on AO3 for this series (all Yuletide fics, it would appear), because this seems like the sort of series that really does not accommodate fandom well -- too complex in terms of worldbuilding, too vast in terms of scale, the timeline too complicated, with books getting published in interstices.
Canon I've discovered that has a fandom: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, book and show. Well, the fandom seems fairly limited to the show, and also is centered on characters I don't care about as much (John Childermass/John Segundus and Lady Pole seem to be where it's at), but at least there IS a fandom. That's already a pleasant surprise. Also, The Raven Cycle, although ditto -- fandom is all about Ronan/Adam and Gansey/Blue and random fluff, which is not what I'm looking for, but hey. Also, apparently I'm reading Captive Prince fic now (this is all ikel89's fault. Also, I'm not sure if The Martian actually has a fandom or if the timing just worked out with Yuletide, but there's been a nice crop of Yuletide fics, which I plan on reading through.
Canon I've discovered that I wish had a fandom: Lia Silver's Werewolf Marine books. They are so much fun, and there's a lot of room for side stories and different POVs! (and yes, I've read the fic/canon outtakes on AO3). Also Uprooted, but maybe Yuletide will deliver in that regard.
Canon I did not discover this year but which suddenly grew a fandom: The Goblin Emperor. I'm sure the Hugo controversy really helped there. But, yeah, I was happy to see it among the more popular Yuletide offerings/requests/stories, and am looking forward to reading all the Csethiro/Maia/Csevet stuff, in various combinations and gen, which I'd been wanting to see since I discovered the book last year. Although the stories I've seen so far are skewed in a somewhat different direction than where my interests lie. I'm still going to read them, but I haven't prioritized them as highly. Also, RoL seems to be taking off, which is a delight to see.
8. Your biggest fandom disappointment of the year?
The Cordelia book was not exactly a disappointment, but I'm not sure what it was... Age of Ultron would've been a disappointment if I hadn't read all the panning reviews on my flist, to discover that it wasn't as bad as I'd prepared myself for.
I think this is the winner in terms of disappointment, though: I finished Locke 2 and 3 to confirm that these books possess an uncanny ability to disappoint me again and again even while I really enjoy them -- like, I think it's a special brand of frustration that comes from the knowledge that Lynch is SO GOOD at writing exactly what I want to read (found family hijinks, Locke and Jean being bros, interesting side characters like the Salvaras or Dona V or Patience) and instead is spending all this time on joyless Sabetha and her strawman feminism and killing off the female characters who actually are interesting and/or likeable and fucking ships.
But that's disappointment in the canon. In terms of just general fannish disappointment, I have to give this to finding out that The Hanging Tree (RoL #6) wasn't going to be published in 2015 after all, and is pushed out more than 6 months. D:
9. Your fandom boyfriend of the year?
Morrolan still, esp. post Taltos reread. I also find myself liking Marcus Cole even more than originally in the B5 rewatch (and Lennier, though with Lennier I have to wilfully suppress what I know is coming). Among new to me characters, both DJ and Roy from the Werewolf Marines books (who are adorable in different ways), Mr Thornton from North and South (even though the book isn't really a romance, I did like him a lot for his integrity), and, because I like grumpy older men/dragons/whatever, Stone from The Cloud Roads. Also, it apparently doesn't matter how old Han Solo is, he is still my fandom boyfriend. :)
10. Your fandom girlfriend of the year?
This was an odd year for me in terms of female characters -- while there were some interesting new-to-me ones, they mostly weren't the kind I latch onto as grilfriend material. Except for Arabella Strange, probably, whom I did like a lot -- and on the show adaptation even more than in the book. I also really liked Agnieszka from Uprooted and could see that be a thing. And a tier or two below that, Cordelia Chase on Angel and two teenage girls from the YA books I've been reading this year: Auden from Along for the Ride and Lindsay from An Abundance of Katherines.
11. Your biggest squee moment of the year?
Learning there was going to be another Vorkosigan book probably. Also, reading Dream Thieves with ikel89 (and to a lesser extent, Captive Prince and Warchild), because it had been a while since we'd read something together, and following along as egelantier got to the good stuff on Babylon 5.
12. The most missed of your old fandoms?
Dragaera still. I mean, it never really had a fandom as such, but at least I could periodically catch up on the mailing list or chat with lunasariel, or read the 1-2 fics to come out of Yuletide (there was one fic in this year's Yuletide crop, and I read it, and it's good, but it deals with characters that are not my favorites/the ones I want fic about), but none of those things have been really around this year. At one point I got so desparate, I reread all the fic on AO3, including the one that was clearly Google translated and featured a NOTP.
13. The fandom you haven't tried yet, but want to?
Last year I said Max Gladstone and Angel the Series, and can now check off both of those. I also said Daniel Abraham's The Long Price Quartet, but that didn't happen, and will have to carry over to next year. Also, a recent conversation with etrangere reminds me I've been meaning to check out Coldfire for ages.
14. Your biggest fan anticipations for the New Year?
The Hanging Tree (RoL #6), which was pushed to June 2016 instead of late this year, waah.
Presumably Peace Talks (the next Dresden Files book) will also be some time in 2016, as will the last Temeraire book? And who knows when Vallista will be finished -- I can't figure out if Brust is working on it or on a different project. And then of course there is Kvothe #3, which I'm not even going to try to guess about.
I'm somewhat anticipating the Thorn of Emberlain (Locke #4), which was pushed to 2016 -- even though chances are that it will deliver more frustration than enjoyment, as that seems to be the way of Locke books for me.
Oh, and even though I'm not fandom-serious about these, it is nice to have these two to look forward to in early 2016: the conclusions of the Raven Cycle (late April) and the Captive Prince trilogy (February) -- because I read them close enough to the end of the year that I think the momentum won't have time to dissipate before that.
*
And wrapping up the December ramble meme with ikel89's prompt: doodle fanart of book of your choice
Which is evil, because I can't draw. So I pondered this for a long time, and eventually remembered that back when I was little -- this was actually sparked by a comment of ani_mama's on my "what do I collect post" -- my mother would draw me picture books where mice would be drawn as the Greek gods and heroes; these books were called "Myshi, bogi, i geroi" [mice, gods, and heroes] -- like "Mify, bogi, i geroi" [myths, gods, and heroes], the real book of Greek myths. Anyway, so I was like, I'll draw whatever characters I decide to do as mice! Because mice are one of the things I can actually draw, or at least have some practice drawing. When I was going through the "sketching outfits" phase, I didn't draw girl figures (or boy figures) -- I drew punky mice or mice in frilly dresses.
So then I started thinking about what book it should be fanart of, but was contemplating the One True Fandom shirt K had made for me, and figured I couldn't do any better than the Nine Walkers.
So then I was telling L about it, that I was going to draw the LotR people as mice, and something she asked made me realize that they shouldn't ALL be mice -- the different races should be different rodents -- I can kind of draw other rodents, too.
So:
Here's how I arrived at who was who:
me: The Hobbits should be hamsters. They're fuzzy and like to eat and are fairly useless. [<-- I don't actually mean this. About Hobbits, I mean. Hamsters are, indeed, fairly useless.]
me: And Gandalf will be a rat! Because he's smart, and gray.
me: And Legolas should be... something that jumps. A gerbil?
me: What should Gimli be? Something that lives underground.
L: A mole?
me: Ooh... except--
L: Moles aren't rodents, are they?
me: No... But some burrowing rodent. A suslik of some kind.
L: A prairie dog.
me: Yeah, a prairie dog.
me: What should the Men be? I was thinking beavers...
B: *comes in*
me: I'm going to draw the Fellowship of the Ring as rodents! The Hobbits will be hamsters, and Gandalf will be a rat, and Legolas will be a gerbil, because he jumps, and Gimli will be something that lives underground--
B: A mole?
me: I wish! But moles aren't rodents, so we're thinking prairie dog. But I don't know what the others should be. What do you think Boromir should be?
B: *in very affronted tones* A beaver!
me: Well, I was thinking that, but--
B: Of course a beaver! What else could he be.
me: *meekly* OK. But then, is Aragorn also a beaver?
B: *equally vehemently* No!
me: But they're both men?
B: Aragorn can be a capybara.
me: OK. So Hobbits are hamsters, Gandalf is a rat, gerbil Legolas, prairie dog Gimli, beaver for Boromir, and Aragorn is a capybara.
L: And who will be mice?
me: Oh, right... I don't have any mice. That's OK, I guess...
B: No! That's not right. You have to have mice.
me: I... guess Frodo can be a mouse? And Pippin and Merry? But Sam is definitely a hamster.
me: D'oh! Of course! Legolas is a SQUIRREL.
L also wanted me to draw Gollum as a bat, but I didn't have room for him, and also bats are not rodents.
And this concludes the December ramble meme, 2015.
Day 1: Vorkosigan Saga
Day 2: Raven Cycle poems
Day 3: San Francisco beyond tourist traps
Day 4: A book that changed/influenced my life
Day 5: Five good things I got from fandom
Day 6: Scene from a book I'd like illustrated/filmed
Day 7: Recs of a book, movie, TV show, and music
Day 8: Day(s) to relive
Day 9: Top 3 books of 2015
Day 10: Career stuff
Day 13: Canon that should have a bigger fandom
Day 15: Things I collect
Day 16: Wedding and honeymoon
Day 17: Dragaera
Day 18: Five things I'd change about canon
Day 19: Stuff I still want to check out
Day 29-30: most embarrassing moment of 2015 and best moment of the month
Day 31: this post