Watching roundup (Knives Out, Grace and Frankie), and top 5 meme answers
Side note: I was amused to see that Knives Out was the "last film watched in theater" on the Covid lasts meme for, like, 80% of my flist :) Well, now I've seen it, too. So, Knives Out!
B, L, and I had fun with it as predicted. L pitched it to B as "The Westing Game meets Agatha Christie", except B has never read The Westing Game -- but it was one of the first books that I had liked as a kid that I successfully convinced L to read and that she also enjoyed a lot (and I reread it so I could discuss it with her), so I was happy to hear her say it. Anyway, the last movie we had watched at home all together, I think, was Death on the Orient Express, so slick-looking mysteries with a dose of humour and a lot of great actors are clearly the thing we should be watching as a family at this point. (Well, O sulked that he didn't want to watch it with us, for reasons I don't really understand -- possibly just wanting two hours without us -- and fiddled with his phone intermittently, but he was laughing in all the right places and clearly paying attention, so I think he enjoyed it as well.)
Although I typically don't avoid spoilers and sometimes outright seek them out, I made a point of going into this one unspoiled, figuring correctly it would be a lot of fun figuring out what was going on -- and indeed, L and I, and B to a lesser extent, really got into guessing things. MAJOR WHODUNIT SPOILERS from here I guessed that someone had switched the medicine bottles and stolen the antidote pretty much as soon as the "accidental overdose" scene happened. I did NOT guess that Marta had accidentally given Harlan the correct dosage anyway, but actually as soon as that was revealed, it instinctively made sense to me HOW that would've happened -- liquids do have different tension and you do end up getting a sort of muscle memory for it (from my time pipetting stuff in the lab), plus it wouldn't surprise me if the two bottles had slightly different weight to them (even if filled to the same level), so that explanation made perfect sense to me. We did not guess who it was that swapped the bottles (but, like, I'm not sure it even matters that much, because all the family people were awful). I also guessed (and I think L agreed with me?) that Blanc had known Marta had been involved in Harlan's death from the start (before the blooddrop on the shoe shot, even), because otherwise him deputizing her as Watson and having her traipse all over his crime scene made even less sense. L spotted what Marta was doing with the magnet and the security tape (although I don't think those little kitchen magnets are actually powerful enough to do that), and why Meg head the dogs barking (because the dogs don't like Ransom). I was taken in by Ransom "rescuing" Marta and getting her to tell him the truth -- and in retrospect the twist with what his reaction to her confession actually means is so cool and neatly done! And none of us had anticipated the housekeeper's involvement; B did guess that the phonecall from the hospital meant that Fran was dead, but none of us figured out how Marta was going to play it, so that was very neat (except for the barf). What L did anticipate was Benoit Blanc saying the case with the hole in the middle was like a doughtnut XD -- I do think sometimes she'd be very good at writing dialogue for clever movies and shows, as she's very good at predicting it XD Oh, and I think it was L who figured out Harlan's "blank" note to Linda was actually written in invisible ink, because they have their little games. In general, I thought it was pretty cool to have the mystery take place with several genre-savvy characters -- Harlan because he's a mystery writer (so of course he instantly came up with a convoluted plan for Marta to "prove" her innoncense) and Ransom because he spent a summer helping his grandfather do research.
So that's the whodunit part, but a large part of our enjoyment of the movie was everything else -- watching very good actors be (mostly) awful people at each other. B was bothered by Daniel Craig's accent, but I found it quite amusing, and had more fun watching him in this than as his rather dour Bond. Evil Captain America was kind of a trip, but Chris Evans seemed to be having a great time! It's been ages since I've seen Jamie Lee Curtis in anything, but I really enjoyed her here. The style of cutting between different people saying contradictory things in Blanc's interviews really worked for me, and the arguments-at-dinner / family crowd scenes in general. Everybody thinking Marta was from a different Latin American country was a GREAT running gag (although L was left wanting to know where she was really from, heh). Jacob "the Nazi child masturbating in the bathroom" was suitably punchable. On a warmer and fuzzier note, I really enjoyed the way the relationship between Harlan and Marta was shown; I believed they cared for each other and that Harlan would actually leave everything to her. Oh, and I thought Alan the accountant/lawyer person was great and added a lot to the fun. B liked the detective, which makes me wonder if he might actually enjoy Sorry to Bother You, although I do think I liked Lakeith Stanfield here more than there. (I completely failed to recognize Meg as Leah from Love, Simon, but that's not really surprising, given how bad I am at facial recognition out of context.)
And thematically, a thing I liked (which reminded me of Get Out a bit) was that the awful Thrombey family was awful across a professed political divide: hippie-dippie Joni, weeping for "children in cages" at dinner, is not only scamming Harlan, but she turns on Marta and demands her share just as quickly as the guy ranting about illegal immigration; it's "SJW" Meg who tells the family about Marta's mother's status; and who was it that was quoting from Hamilton in one of the early scenes?. I wasn't expecting that, so was pleasantly surprised.
The one thing I could've done without was the barfing. cw for barf? I am not emetophobic, but I do have a strong reaction to even the idea of throwing up; smell is the worst trigger, which fortunately I did not have to worry about here, but still, ick. I guess it's clever as a plot driver, and it's used to good effect when Marta entraps Ransom into confessing to what turns out to be Fran's murder, but EWW. And that scene in the car where she throws up into a soda fountain cup? O chose to voice the awful thought that had crossed my mind, that someone would subsequently try to drink from it, and all of us cringed through the rest of the scenes in that car, though fortunately nothing like that happened. cw
Anyway, great, really fun movie, A+ family watching experience. Now we just need to find something else we would all enjoy watching like that.
**
I also, as mentioned, watched 42 episodes of Grace and Frankie recently, which meant finishing off season 2, where I had stopped in December 2018 (when I say I'm bad at TV, this is the sort of thing I mean; I watched a bunch of episodes at that point because of ikel89, and then stopped when she stopped, and now picked it up again because of her XP) and getting through the end of season 5. Anyway, I continue to really enjoy the show -- it makes good pandemic bingeing, because the stakes are pretty low -- like, people are rarely in serious peril -- and hanging out with a large, weird family is kind of nice when I'm not seeing my extended family -- with the important distinction that they don't need anything from me and I can turn them off whenever I want.
Non-spoilery thoughts: The more I watch, the more I like Grace and Brianna, and even Robert grew on me. Meanwhile, Mallory became a good deal more interesting than she was in the first two seasons, as did Barry, much to my surprise. Coyote is also growing on me a bit, although I still don't find him too interesting. Bud continues to be a favorite. Meanwhile, Sol's failure modes continue to be very believable for his character, but I've been enjoying them, and him, less as the show went on. Frankie... just continues to be Frankie; my feelings about her and Bud have changed the least since I started watching. And somewhere along the way I developed a full-fledged ship on this show, but more on that in the spoilery section below.
spoilers for a sitcom
end of season 2: I had stopped at episode 11, where Frankie finds out her and Grace's friend Babe has terminal cancer (which ikel89 guessed as my stopping point, impressing me). Those following episodes actually ended up less of a bummer than I had expected, and Babe was fun in small doses.
Season 3:
The whole vibrator business idea was fabulous, start to finish! I was amused by the business incubator episode, and really, really enjoyed Nick and his interactions with Grace -- I mean, this was fun in season 3, then blossomed in the honest-to-goodness ship I mentioned over the next two seasons. Like, Nick is terrible in many ways, but he is cheerfully unapologetic about it, and I do have my thing about cheerfully unapologetic assholes. Plus it doesn't hurt that he is played by Peter Gallagher, whom I've had a crush on for the last 25 years. And he and Grace genuinely seem to be a good match for each other and to have fun together -- the negotiations of their relationship bits never got old for me.
Meanwhile, a relationship I really, really don't get is Bud and Allison. I don't find Allison's "imaginary rashes" schtick funny, and completely fail to see what Bud sees in her. He's a handsome lawyer -- surely he could do better for himself? So anything that made their relationship more serious and permanent, I was really not a fan (although see season 5 for one exception).
I did enjoy Frankie and Brianna's relationship in this a lot, starting with Brianna wearing the terrible poncho as a peace offering, and Brianna and Mallory spending some time together, and even getting some bonding time with Grace. And Mallory actually taking the plunge on separating from Mitch was a pleasant surprise (and I was glad that it wasn't because Mitch was cheating, though she had her -- incorrect, as it turned out -- suspicions about that, because of course marriages fail for all sorts of reasons.
Robert and Sol were also in this season, and I enjoyed some of Robert's musical numbers, but honestly my favorite Robert moments involved him going funeral suit (for his mother) shopping with Grace, and finally managing to give her a spontaneous present. I'm glad that they've gotten to a place where they can actually be friends.
One storyline resolution that rang false for me -- I think the only one on this show so far, actually -- was the way the gun arc was handled. It made perfect sense to me that Frankie would be vehemently anti-gun, and that Grace would have one and be a responsible gun owner and crack shot, and that they would have conflict over this -- so far, so good (the officer was also hilarious). But I didn't think the resolution was fair to Grace at all. I didn't believe she would voluntarily agree to get rid of the gun just because she was no longer alone -- she and Frankie ARE vulnerable. And she had made a point of not caving in to Frankie's tantrums before, unlike Sol -- and this felt like that. It didn't seem at all fair that Frankie wanting to feel safe by climbing into bed with Grace was validated by the narrative, and Grace's way of feeling safe, by having a gun she knew how to use and used responsibly -- would not stand. It felt like authorial views swaying the narrative rather than letting the characters feel what they'd really feel, and that annoyed me (as a person who has never even held a firearm and has zero intention of ever owning one) :/
Season 4:
This was a strong season, but I found it a little *too* real, with the various serious health issues (Grace's knee surgery, Frankie's mini-stroke), and the accompanying worries about the two ladies from the kids, as well as the actions that followed. It was still funny and sweet, but there was more poignant stuff in addition to the plain feel-good stuff. Like, they were running into getting-older things that might not prove manageable, you know?
I liked the resolution with Santa Fe -- that Frankie hated it because she blended in there (because of the snakes) -- and I also liked the way Frankie's relationship with Jacob was handled. I have no strong feelings about Jacob, unlike Nick or, conversely, Allison, but I liked that he got to be a really good guy, but also humanly flawed -- understanding but not infinitely forgiving, keeping his own grudges and not endlessly patient. The end of their relationship was sad, but not something one could blame either of them for -- it was believable an nuanced, which was nice.
Grace and Frankie as a heist duo were AMAZING :D I also enjoyed learning more about Frankie's family past with the arc with her sister Teddy (whom it was hard to fault for not wanting anything to do with Frankie). And Grace's anguish at falling for the copper pipes scam was the thing I felt the most moved by this season. And then, of course, the kids talked Grace and Frankie into assisted living. I thought this was actually quite well done as an arc -- it made sense to me that the children would be worried for their physical ability to take care of themselves, and the house was in an unsafe situation -- and it also made sense that they would have to sell Grace and Frankie on it as being necessary for the other one's well-being. But it was painful to watch, given what we'd already seen of the place when they visited Arlene, and given howmuch the beach house had been a focal part of the show. The episode of them actually at the home was quite painful, and of course I cheered as they escaped in the golf card with the reclaimed blowtorch and liberated toaster.
And one of my favorite Nick moments comes from that last episode: when he comes to visit Grace (as she's hobbling along in yellow old lady sweats) and she breaks up with him (yet again), and he shouts that if this is another test, he'll just buy the whole complex and move in right next door. This was such a perfect Nick moment -- this mix of hubris an not giving a fuck about societal expectations and crazy determination and being willing to play by Grace's rules -- I think this was when I went from low-key enjoying the two of them to shipping it in earnest.
I found Sol's activism binge really tedious, and Robert's theater drama. The Roy drama was quite unexpected, but mostly it felt like the show just didn't know what else to do with them and was just churning up drama for the sake of drama.
Allison continued to annoy me, but I did appreciate that at least Coyote and the others were allowed to not like her. The failed "gender reveal" party was a hilarious disaster, and the "Lockdown" episode where Allison gives birth was pretty fun, too, although she was only incidental to the fun parts.
Season 5:
I actually made the same guess about who had bought the beach house that Grace did, and was sad when it proved not to be the case, but was happy that that storyline wrapped up within acouple of episodes (and apparently Karina G then continuing following Vybrant, which I found hilarious).
Of course Sol got a dog, and became one of those insufferably obsessive dog parents XD Robert's theater drama continues to be boring to me, and Peter the houseguest from hell was funny for a bit and then became just annoying. He is just so awful, with nothing redeemable or sympathetic about him that I can discern.
I still wish Bud were not involved with Allison the human wet blanket, but I do feel like they toned down her weirdness a bit this season, either because of viewer response (does anyone actually LIKE Allison?), or maybe the Watsonian explanation is that motherhood has mellowed her? Anyway, I still don't LIKE her, but the wedding was really lovely and moving -- Bud in his kippah, and everyone else wearing them, too (including Nick), the hippie granola rabbi (of course), and Frankie's pinata cake thing being a success.
I did not expect Joan-Margaret to return in a recurring role, but minded her less than I'd expected (less than I had in her first episode) in these small doses and in this context.
I was not a fan of the "Grace takes Ritalin" storyiline, and the fight with Brianna and Mallory in its wake was pretty rough. But I did really enjoy "The Crosswalk", with the reveal about Grace's real age and the triumphant slow-walk at the end.
As I said, by this season I was actively shipping Grace/Nick and rooting for them to get back together, so was really happy when they did. Nick being willing to roll with this partnership thing that takes Frankie into account was really nice, and just kind of inserting himself into the family. And then they got married!?!
And then, of course, there's the AU episode XD Coyote did not manage to stay sober, apparently, and Brianna didn't get with Barry, and Mallory never left Mitch... and Bud is a rabbinical student XD I'm not real sure how that one came about, but... OK? That Frankie would still be living with Robert and Sol and they would be trying to surreptitiously move away from her did seem completely plausible, LOL. Seeing this AU!Grace made me particularly sad, though, and it was a relief to see the real her. It's clear they've been good for each other, but I do feel like Grace has grown more than Frankie has as a result.
*
I'm going to do the top 5 meme answers in posts like these (we'll see how many, but starting with:
Top 5 meme answers (fannish edition, part 1 of 2):
For
thisbluesprit, who does not ask easy questions:
Top 5 characters -- this is super hard, as I am definitely a character-driven reader/fan, and tend to imprint on characters hard and never let go of them. So narrowing it down to 5 is very hard, and I decided to kind of try this without repeating favorite tropes too much, as there are specific types I invariably fall hard for.
1. Havelock Vetinari (Discworld) -- ikel89 makes fun of me for having "despot" as a favorite character type, and, like, guilty as charged. And nobody does "tyrant" better than Vetinari. The thing I love about Vetinari -- besides the competence kink, obviously -- is that he is good for Ankh-Morpork despite not being a good person in the normal, moral sense of the word. I have a very definitely weakness for characters like that, and he typifies it.
2. Boromir (Lord of the Rings) -- one of my other favorite types is what I called "the Beleaguered Warrior" when I was making SoulCollage cards [LJ link] (with essentially favorite archetypes). Hector of Troy actually predates Boromir on this, but Boromir took over in prominence as soon as I read LotR at 13.
3. Esmeralda Weatherwax (Discworld) -- I tried to avoid repeating fandoms, too, but couldn't NOT have Granny on the list. Badass, unstoppable old ladies are definitely a type with me, and Granny is an excellent example of it. She also reminds me quite a bit of my great-grandmother (the one L is named after), and I really feel the way about her the way I do about a family member.
4. Duv Galeni (Vorkosigan Saga) -- whom ikel89, who just met him in Brothers in Arms, has been calling my "librarian boyfriend". Which is fair. I did say, on a long-ago meme [LJ link], that Duv is the character I would marry, and I stand by that. Duv has that combination of brains, snark, and capacity for unexpected violence that's really interesting to me, and he's also one of those Ravenclaw types I love a lot. He is also an example of something I find very interesting personally: a character who straddles cultures and can see both of them the clearer for it, which is something I both appreciate as relatable and enjoy reading about.
5. Morrolan e'Drien (Dragaera) -- I waffled over including him, because a lot of the things I love about Morrolan are actually similar to the things I love about Galeni, but NOT including himwould be an act of denial, considering I've spent the last 9 years obsessed with Dragaera, which for me means "obsessed with Morrolan", because it's definitely a One True Character fandom for me. Morrolan checks the gentleman scholar box for me, competence kink, the nerd/violence dichotomy I mentioned with Duv, as well as the straddling cultures thing. So, yeah, let's just go with that.
**
For deeplyunhip:
Top 5 villains on television (interpret "villain" how you will)
I'm choosing to interpret "villain" pretty strictly and so not include characters who, over the course of canon, transcend their villain-hood (like, e.g. Spike on Buffy), or who have more complicated trajectories (e.g. Londo on Babylon 5).
1. Azula (Avatar: the Last Airbender) -- she ended up being my favorite character on the show, and she is amazing (I don't love the end of her arc, but I love everything else). She was also the first great female example of The Dragon I encountered; it's a type I almost always love, and was wondering if I'd love it if the Dragon were female. Turns out, I do!
2. Ares (Xena: Warrior Princess) -- look, nowhere did this say these had to be QUALITY TV shows. This is another case where the villain was my favorite character on the show, and in fact the principal reason I kept watching. I do like the character as written, but I will also be honest here: Kevin Smith (RIP) in black leather was absolutely a big part of the appeal.
3. Servalan (Blake's 7) -- yeah, a newcomer, and from a canon that I haven't even finished yet, but I'm putting her at #3 because, while she is not my FAVORITE character on the show (at this point), she's a close #2. I think I really enjoy female villains who are villainous in a way that, how to phrase it, would work just as well if they were male, and (with a few departures that I'm going to choose to ignore as bad writing) Servalan works on that level for me. While wearing absolutely amazing outfits. (OK, the outfits probably would change if she were a male villain. But I'm sure they would still be equally over the top.)
4. Emperor Cartagia (Babylon 5) -- B5 has a lot of villains I love, including two I seriously considered for this spot, Mr Morden and Bester. But Cartagia, despite having much more limited screentime than either of the other two, really, really made an impression on me. He is SUCH an effective example of a villain who is totally insane but no less terrifying for that (which isnot a type that works forme very often; e.g. Sherlock's Moriarty absolutely didn't). Cartagia, though. Brr!
5. Montgomery Burns (The Simpsons) -- I waffled between Mr Burns and Niska from Firefly for the last spot, but Mr Burns is just too iconic to pass up. I mean, how often do I steeple my fingers and go "Excellent" or "Smithers, release the hounds." (quite often, is how)
**
For monkiainen:
Top 5 Characters in any media that you feel should be appreciated more
This was also one I had to ponder a while, because I don't always know which characters are properly appreciated or not (so this is skewed a bit towards fandoms I've been active in), and I also avoided cases where I know a character was unappreciated in one part of fandom or timeframe but then became very popular (e.g. it seemed like a lot of ASOIAF fandom hated Sansa Stark at one point, but westerosorting appreciated her a lot).
Also, these are ranked not necessarily by how much I love the character but by how underappreciated I feel they are, relative to how much I like them. If that makes any sense XD
1. Ron Weasley (Harry Potter) -- Ron is one of my favorite characters in the books, second only to Dumbledore, I think, but I feel like fandom tends to ignore him or make him the bad guy in a lot of Harry/Hermione and Harry/Draco fic. But what gives Ron the top spot on this list is that I felt like the movies, unfortunately, underappreciated him too, turned him into comic relief and gave a lot of his brave and clever actions and lines to other characters. For shame!
2. Jayne Cobb (Firefly) -- look, Jayne is a legit pretty awful person and I am not surprised if people don't like him. But he is also my favorite Firefly character, and there's a lot more nuance to him that is easy to miss and just dismiss him as a dumb thug. (He is absolutely a thug, and not the sharpest tool in the shed compared to people like Simon or Zoe. But he's a pretty interesting character, too.) I do know that Jayne has his fans, but I'm always pleasantly surprised to meet a Firefly fan who considers him a favorite.
3. Mark Pierre Vorkosigan (Vorkosigan Saga) -- I love Mark a lot -- actually, a lot more than Miles, whom I enjoy as a protagonist but whose well-being I'm not particularly invested in, outside of wanting the people who love him, whom I love, to be happy. But Mark I want to be happy and fulfilled and have everything he wants, because talk about being dealt a shitty hand in life and managing to do something with it, with a lot of effort (and support from understanding loved ones, and a ton of therapy). I don't think Mark is disliked in fandom, but I do feel like he tends to get lost in all of Miles's flash-bang, and Cordelia's awesomeness, but he is one of my very favorite characters in this fandom.
4. Xander Harris (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) -- there is a lot of very legitimate criticism to be leveled at Xander, but I feel like with that comes a tendency to dismiss him as just all-around The Worst. And I actually like Xander, his flaws and all (for the most part) -- the denial of responsibility, the less-than-stellar calls he makes, some of which he has no right to make at all. I think the show mostly does not excuse these mistakes, and they make him a very plausibly flawed human. Xander was actually my first favorite on BtVS, though he was subsequently eclipsed by other characters, and I continued to appreciate his role as the Heart of the Scoobies -- it's actually pretty refreshing to have a guy in that role, and a regular guy at that.
5. Gimli (Lord of the Rings) -- I feel less strongly about this one, and I think there's maybe been a Dwarf Appreciation revival with the Hobbit movies? But anyway, I thought the movies -- which I generally love -- choosing to turn Gimli into basically comic relief was one of the worst calls Peter Jackson had made, and I'm still grumpy about that. The Dwarves were always my favorites in the book, and there's so much more to Gimli than the movies showed or that the (early movie) fandom took away.
**
For asthenie_vd:
top 5 books and/or tv shows you enjoyed even though they turned out nothing like you expected them to be before you started reading/watching
This ended up being all books, because I guess I'm less likely to start watching a TV show without clear expectations of what I'm getting? Or, like, I wasn't sure what I was going to get with Farscape (started watching thanks to
eglantiere's insistent recs :) or The Good Place (started watching for Hugo homework), but I didn't have clear expectations for either of those. I was surprised by both and enjoyed both, but I couldn't point to why. Anyway, so:
Ranking is impacted not only by how much I like the thing, but also by how different it was from my expectations. Somehow...
1. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte) -- this is the clearest example of the thing you're asking about, because everything I got about this book by cultural osmosis suggested this was going to be some epic romance with Heathcliff the Byronic hero. The reality turned out to be much different, and much more palatable to me personally: Heathcliff an absolutely awful person, and pathetic, and not so much romance as two awful people being self-destructive and mutually destructive while destroying everyone decent around them. No romance at all, in fact, and Heathcliff is no kind of hero at all. And I also didn't expect how funny this book was in places. All in all, I enjoyed it a lot more than I'd expected to, and am consequently even more mad that somehow this has become a symbol of Great Doomed Romance on par with Romeo and Juliet? (which is also NOT what R&J is about, but I still dislike R&J, whereas I really appreciated Wuthering Heights).
2. Machineries of Empire series by Yoon Ha Lee -- I picked up the series because the blurbs were stressing the point of it being math-based science fiction, and I was intrigued by that aspect of it. The thing is, the best path towards enjoying the Hexarchate books, in my experience (which includes myself and the various friends I've recced/gifted these books to) is to forget the "math-based sci-fi!" and thus NOT TRY TO UNDERSTAND THE MATH. It's not MEANT to be math-based "hard" sci-fi -- the math is basically space magic, like the Force, and once I accepted that, I could stop worrying about trying to make sense of it (that's not what it's FOR) and could just enjoy the space magic shenanigans, which are very cool, and the awesome characters, and the cool space battles. So, yeah, this ended up being one of my favorite genre series of the last decade, but for reasons completely different from the reason I picked them up for.
3. The Goblin Emperor (Katherine Addison, aka Sarah Monette) -- the surprise in this case was pretty much entirely due to my previous familiarity with the author's earlier work, under a different pen name (which, I totally understand why the publisher asked her to pick a different one for TGE). I quite enjoyed Monette's Melusine tetralogy, but these were dark, dark books, with a lot of terrible things happening to the protagonists and everyone being shades-of-grey at best. I was NOT expecting something as... fluffy (or hopepunk, if you prefer) as The Goblin Emperor, but really enjoyed it anyway. I do think the crossover audience for TGE and the Melusine books is pretty small, though.
4. North and South (Elizabeth Gaskell) -- this was a book I read pretty much purely for the title for "antonyms in the title" square of a long-ago Reading Bingo. Based on the short description, I expected something like Jane Austen (though consulting the time period would've possibly adjusted thoseexpectations a bit). Anyway, I did NOT expect the novel to be as socially progressive as it was (for the most part), or so concerned with labor strikes and such. Those were not my favorite part of the book, so it's not that I liked the book BECAUSE of these unexpected elements, but I did like it, and I was susprised.
5. The Poppy War (R.F.Kuang) -- what I knew about the book when I embarked on it had to do with the grim spoilery stuff in the third part. I had NOT expected the modern prose (which I liked a lot), or the very Relevant To My Interests magic school book that constitutes the first third of the novel, and which unsurprisingly ended up being my favorite part.
**
For
grayswandir:
Top 5 SF novels
I'm choosing to interpret SF narrowly as science fiction (as opposed to fantasy), and also following Locus in deeming N.K.Jemisin's The Fifth Season/Broken Earth series to be fantasy rather than SF, although I probably think of it as SF myself. Also, I decided not to limit myself to standalones, because that would require leaving off too many books that I love. So, with all those numerous caveats:
1. Roadside Picnic (the brothers Strugatsky) -- This was the book I spent the summer I turned 10 inhabiting pretty much full time, forcing my grandmother to act as a secondary character to my protagonist. I think just for that I can't put it anywhere else on this list but at the top. It's also a book that terrified me at the time, and would probably do so again. And a damn fine novel. (I can't vouch for the English translation, though.) While I'm on the subject of Strugatsky, I'm also very fond of One Billion Years before the End of the World (mysteriously translated as Definitely Maybe in English. This is the one I consier a much more interesting take on Three-Body Problem.)
2. Memory (Lois McMaster Bujold, Vorkosigan Saga) -- definitely NOT a stand-alone, but it is SO GOOD. It's actually not my favorite Vorkosigan book (that would be A Civil Campaign; also not a standalone, although I read it as one and still loved it), it's too painful a bookfor that, but it packs a hell of a punch, and it forces characters to change and grow (painfully, but in a necessary way).
3. Too Like the Lightning/Seven Surrenders (Ada Palmer, Terra Ignota) -- cheating here by going with two books, but they were meant to be one and got chopped in half, so. This is my favorite sci-fi series of the last decade, and I continue to be super impressed by the world this book introduces and the way in which it does it. I love its weird structure and its weird prose and am just in awe of it as an achievement.
4. Caves of Steel (Isaac Asimov, Robots series) -- the above are skewed towards more modern books, because as I think about it, I guess a lot of what classic sci-fi I've read was short stories (all my favorite Bradbury, e.g.), or didn't make enough of an impression that I still remember much about them. But the Lije/Daneel books sure did. I no longer have a clear memory of which of the first two books I preferred back in the day -- I liked them both a lot -- so I'm just going to go with the first one. (Also, ikel89 read it recently and live-blogged it at me, which proves that it holds up pretty well :D)
5. Raven Stratagem (Yoon Ha Lee, Machineries of Empire) -- going with book 2 although I like all three of the novels in the trilogy, because this one felt like the most satisfying novel to me. There's a really cool thing about the structure, and this novel deepens and makes richer the world introduced in the first book. And it has a scene that made me write the most complicated poem I've ever attempted (*waves to
extrapenguin* :), which has to count for something, too.
This list is missing a lot of "important" SF books I've read, like LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, or Leckie's Anicllary books that I like a lot, but these are the ones that stuck with me in an emotional way.
OK, this is getting a bit long and scattered, so I think I'll pause here and leave for next time quotes (Morrolan, Dragaera, and in general) and favorite character pairings. I think I'll just add those to the non-fannish answers, to keep numbers about even.
P.S. Feel free to give me more top 5's to answer, here, or at the previous post.
*
And lastly, via
bearshorty: the news that not only is Peace Talks (the next Dresden Files book) coming out this year, but so is a SECOND Dresden Files book, just a few months later. It's been quite a dry spell, so I'm looking forward to it, and need to give O the good news, too. And there's a pretty cool book trailer for Peace Talks here.
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1124032.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).
B, L, and I had fun with it as predicted. L pitched it to B as "The Westing Game meets Agatha Christie", except B has never read The Westing Game -- but it was one of the first books that I had liked as a kid that I successfully convinced L to read and that she also enjoyed a lot (and I reread it so I could discuss it with her), so I was happy to hear her say it. Anyway, the last movie we had watched at home all together, I think, was Death on the Orient Express, so slick-looking mysteries with a dose of humour and a lot of great actors are clearly the thing we should be watching as a family at this point. (Well, O sulked that he didn't want to watch it with us, for reasons I don't really understand -- possibly just wanting two hours without us -- and fiddled with his phone intermittently, but he was laughing in all the right places and clearly paying attention, so I think he enjoyed it as well.)
Although I typically don't avoid spoilers and sometimes outright seek them out, I made a point of going into this one unspoiled, figuring correctly it would be a lot of fun figuring out what was going on -- and indeed, L and I, and B to a lesser extent, really got into guessing things. MAJOR WHODUNIT SPOILERS from here I guessed that someone had switched the medicine bottles and stolen the antidote pretty much as soon as the "accidental overdose" scene happened. I did NOT guess that Marta had accidentally given Harlan the correct dosage anyway, but actually as soon as that was revealed, it instinctively made sense to me HOW that would've happened -- liquids do have different tension and you do end up getting a sort of muscle memory for it (from my time pipetting stuff in the lab), plus it wouldn't surprise me if the two bottles had slightly different weight to them (even if filled to the same level), so that explanation made perfect sense to me. We did not guess who it was that swapped the bottles (but, like, I'm not sure it even matters that much, because all the family people were awful). I also guessed (and I think L agreed with me?) that Blanc had known Marta had been involved in Harlan's death from the start (before the blooddrop on the shoe shot, even), because otherwise him deputizing her as Watson and having her traipse all over his crime scene made even less sense. L spotted what Marta was doing with the magnet and the security tape (although I don't think those little kitchen magnets are actually powerful enough to do that), and why Meg head the dogs barking (because the dogs don't like Ransom). I was taken in by Ransom "rescuing" Marta and getting her to tell him the truth -- and in retrospect the twist with what his reaction to her confession actually means is so cool and neatly done! And none of us had anticipated the housekeeper's involvement; B did guess that the phonecall from the hospital meant that Fran was dead, but none of us figured out how Marta was going to play it, so that was very neat (except for the barf). What L did anticipate was Benoit Blanc saying the case with the hole in the middle was like a doughtnut XD -- I do think sometimes she'd be very good at writing dialogue for clever movies and shows, as she's very good at predicting it XD Oh, and I think it was L who figured out Harlan's "blank" note to Linda was actually written in invisible ink, because they have their little games. In general, I thought it was pretty cool to have the mystery take place with several genre-savvy characters -- Harlan because he's a mystery writer (so of course he instantly came up with a convoluted plan for Marta to "prove" her innoncense) and Ransom because he spent a summer helping his grandfather do research.
So that's the whodunit part, but a large part of our enjoyment of the movie was everything else -- watching very good actors be (mostly) awful people at each other. B was bothered by Daniel Craig's accent, but I found it quite amusing, and had more fun watching him in this than as his rather dour Bond. Evil Captain America was kind of a trip, but Chris Evans seemed to be having a great time! It's been ages since I've seen Jamie Lee Curtis in anything, but I really enjoyed her here. The style of cutting between different people saying contradictory things in Blanc's interviews really worked for me, and the arguments-at-dinner / family crowd scenes in general. Everybody thinking Marta was from a different Latin American country was a GREAT running gag (although L was left wanting to know where she was really from, heh). Jacob "the Nazi child masturbating in the bathroom" was suitably punchable. On a warmer and fuzzier note, I really enjoyed the way the relationship between Harlan and Marta was shown; I believed they cared for each other and that Harlan would actually leave everything to her. Oh, and I thought Alan the accountant/lawyer person was great and added a lot to the fun. B liked the detective, which makes me wonder if he might actually enjoy Sorry to Bother You, although I do think I liked Lakeith Stanfield here more than there. (I completely failed to recognize Meg as Leah from Love, Simon, but that's not really surprising, given how bad I am at facial recognition out of context.)
And thematically, a thing I liked (which reminded me of Get Out a bit) was that the awful Thrombey family was awful across a professed political divide: hippie-dippie Joni, weeping for "children in cages" at dinner, is not only scamming Harlan, but she turns on Marta and demands her share just as quickly as the guy ranting about illegal immigration; it's "SJW" Meg who tells the family about Marta's mother's status; and who was it that was quoting from Hamilton in one of the early scenes?. I wasn't expecting that, so was pleasantly surprised.
The one thing I could've done without was the barfing. cw for barf? I am not emetophobic, but I do have a strong reaction to even the idea of throwing up; smell is the worst trigger, which fortunately I did not have to worry about here, but still, ick. I guess it's clever as a plot driver, and it's used to good effect when Marta entraps Ransom into confessing to what turns out to be Fran's murder, but EWW. And that scene in the car where she throws up into a soda fountain cup? O chose to voice the awful thought that had crossed my mind, that someone would subsequently try to drink from it, and all of us cringed through the rest of the scenes in that car, though fortunately nothing like that happened. cw
Anyway, great, really fun movie, A+ family watching experience. Now we just need to find something else we would all enjoy watching like that.
**
I also, as mentioned, watched 42 episodes of Grace and Frankie recently, which meant finishing off season 2, where I had stopped in December 2018 (when I say I'm bad at TV, this is the sort of thing I mean; I watched a bunch of episodes at that point because of ikel89, and then stopped when she stopped, and now picked it up again because of her XP) and getting through the end of season 5. Anyway, I continue to really enjoy the show -- it makes good pandemic bingeing, because the stakes are pretty low -- like, people are rarely in serious peril -- and hanging out with a large, weird family is kind of nice when I'm not seeing my extended family -- with the important distinction that they don't need anything from me and I can turn them off whenever I want.
Non-spoilery thoughts: The more I watch, the more I like Grace and Brianna, and even Robert grew on me. Meanwhile, Mallory became a good deal more interesting than she was in the first two seasons, as did Barry, much to my surprise. Coyote is also growing on me a bit, although I still don't find him too interesting. Bud continues to be a favorite. Meanwhile, Sol's failure modes continue to be very believable for his character, but I've been enjoying them, and him, less as the show went on. Frankie... just continues to be Frankie; my feelings about her and Bud have changed the least since I started watching. And somewhere along the way I developed a full-fledged ship on this show, but more on that in the spoilery section below.
spoilers for a sitcom
end of season 2: I had stopped at episode 11, where Frankie finds out her and Grace's friend Babe has terminal cancer (which ikel89 guessed as my stopping point, impressing me). Those following episodes actually ended up less of a bummer than I had expected, and Babe was fun in small doses.
Season 3:
The whole vibrator business idea was fabulous, start to finish! I was amused by the business incubator episode, and really, really enjoyed Nick and his interactions with Grace -- I mean, this was fun in season 3, then blossomed in the honest-to-goodness ship I mentioned over the next two seasons. Like, Nick is terrible in many ways, but he is cheerfully unapologetic about it, and I do have my thing about cheerfully unapologetic assholes. Plus it doesn't hurt that he is played by Peter Gallagher, whom I've had a crush on for the last 25 years. And he and Grace genuinely seem to be a good match for each other and to have fun together -- the negotiations of their relationship bits never got old for me.
Meanwhile, a relationship I really, really don't get is Bud and Allison. I don't find Allison's "imaginary rashes" schtick funny, and completely fail to see what Bud sees in her. He's a handsome lawyer -- surely he could do better for himself? So anything that made their relationship more serious and permanent, I was really not a fan (although see season 5 for one exception).
I did enjoy Frankie and Brianna's relationship in this a lot, starting with Brianna wearing the terrible poncho as a peace offering, and Brianna and Mallory spending some time together, and even getting some bonding time with Grace. And Mallory actually taking the plunge on separating from Mitch was a pleasant surprise (and I was glad that it wasn't because Mitch was cheating, though she had her -- incorrect, as it turned out -- suspicions about that, because of course marriages fail for all sorts of reasons.
Robert and Sol were also in this season, and I enjoyed some of Robert's musical numbers, but honestly my favorite Robert moments involved him going funeral suit (for his mother) shopping with Grace, and finally managing to give her a spontaneous present. I'm glad that they've gotten to a place where they can actually be friends.
One storyline resolution that rang false for me -- I think the only one on this show so far, actually -- was the way the gun arc was handled. It made perfect sense to me that Frankie would be vehemently anti-gun, and that Grace would have one and be a responsible gun owner and crack shot, and that they would have conflict over this -- so far, so good (the officer was also hilarious). But I didn't think the resolution was fair to Grace at all. I didn't believe she would voluntarily agree to get rid of the gun just because she was no longer alone -- she and Frankie ARE vulnerable. And she had made a point of not caving in to Frankie's tantrums before, unlike Sol -- and this felt like that. It didn't seem at all fair that Frankie wanting to feel safe by climbing into bed with Grace was validated by the narrative, and Grace's way of feeling safe, by having a gun she knew how to use and used responsibly -- would not stand. It felt like authorial views swaying the narrative rather than letting the characters feel what they'd really feel, and that annoyed me (as a person who has never even held a firearm and has zero intention of ever owning one) :/
Season 4:
This was a strong season, but I found it a little *too* real, with the various serious health issues (Grace's knee surgery, Frankie's mini-stroke), and the accompanying worries about the two ladies from the kids, as well as the actions that followed. It was still funny and sweet, but there was more poignant stuff in addition to the plain feel-good stuff. Like, they were running into getting-older things that might not prove manageable, you know?
I liked the resolution with Santa Fe -- that Frankie hated it because she blended in there (because of the snakes) -- and I also liked the way Frankie's relationship with Jacob was handled. I have no strong feelings about Jacob, unlike Nick or, conversely, Allison, but I liked that he got to be a really good guy, but also humanly flawed -- understanding but not infinitely forgiving, keeping his own grudges and not endlessly patient. The end of their relationship was sad, but not something one could blame either of them for -- it was believable an nuanced, which was nice.
Grace and Frankie as a heist duo were AMAZING :D I also enjoyed learning more about Frankie's family past with the arc with her sister Teddy (whom it was hard to fault for not wanting anything to do with Frankie). And Grace's anguish at falling for the copper pipes scam was the thing I felt the most moved by this season. And then, of course, the kids talked Grace and Frankie into assisted living. I thought this was actually quite well done as an arc -- it made sense to me that the children would be worried for their physical ability to take care of themselves, and the house was in an unsafe situation -- and it also made sense that they would have to sell Grace and Frankie on it as being necessary for the other one's well-being. But it was painful to watch, given what we'd already seen of the place when they visited Arlene, and given howmuch the beach house had been a focal part of the show. The episode of them actually at the home was quite painful, and of course I cheered as they escaped in the golf card with the reclaimed blowtorch and liberated toaster.
And one of my favorite Nick moments comes from that last episode: when he comes to visit Grace (as she's hobbling along in yellow old lady sweats) and she breaks up with him (yet again), and he shouts that if this is another test, he'll just buy the whole complex and move in right next door. This was such a perfect Nick moment -- this mix of hubris an not giving a fuck about societal expectations and crazy determination and being willing to play by Grace's rules -- I think this was when I went from low-key enjoying the two of them to shipping it in earnest.
I found Sol's activism binge really tedious, and Robert's theater drama. The Roy drama was quite unexpected, but mostly it felt like the show just didn't know what else to do with them and was just churning up drama for the sake of drama.
Allison continued to annoy me, but I did appreciate that at least Coyote and the others were allowed to not like her. The failed "gender reveal" party was a hilarious disaster, and the "Lockdown" episode where Allison gives birth was pretty fun, too, although she was only incidental to the fun parts.
Season 5:
I actually made the same guess about who had bought the beach house that Grace did, and was sad when it proved not to be the case, but was happy that that storyline wrapped up within acouple of episodes (and apparently Karina G then continuing following Vybrant, which I found hilarious).
Of course Sol got a dog, and became one of those insufferably obsessive dog parents XD Robert's theater drama continues to be boring to me, and Peter the houseguest from hell was funny for a bit and then became just annoying. He is just so awful, with nothing redeemable or sympathetic about him that I can discern.
I still wish Bud were not involved with Allison the human wet blanket, but I do feel like they toned down her weirdness a bit this season, either because of viewer response (does anyone actually LIKE Allison?), or maybe the Watsonian explanation is that motherhood has mellowed her? Anyway, I still don't LIKE her, but the wedding was really lovely and moving -- Bud in his kippah, and everyone else wearing them, too (including Nick), the hippie granola rabbi (of course), and Frankie's pinata cake thing being a success.
I did not expect Joan-Margaret to return in a recurring role, but minded her less than I'd expected (less than I had in her first episode) in these small doses and in this context.
I was not a fan of the "Grace takes Ritalin" storyiline, and the fight with Brianna and Mallory in its wake was pretty rough. But I did really enjoy "The Crosswalk", with the reveal about Grace's real age and the triumphant slow-walk at the end.
As I said, by this season I was actively shipping Grace/Nick and rooting for them to get back together, so was really happy when they did. Nick being willing to roll with this partnership thing that takes Frankie into account was really nice, and just kind of inserting himself into the family. And then they got married!?!
And then, of course, there's the AU episode XD Coyote did not manage to stay sober, apparently, and Brianna didn't get with Barry, and Mallory never left Mitch... and Bud is a rabbinical student XD I'm not real sure how that one came about, but... OK? That Frankie would still be living with Robert and Sol and they would be trying to surreptitiously move away from her did seem completely plausible, LOL. Seeing this AU!Grace made me particularly sad, though, and it was a relief to see the real her. It's clear they've been good for each other, but I do feel like Grace has grown more than Frankie has as a result.
*
I'm going to do the top 5 meme answers in posts like these (we'll see how many, but starting with:
Top 5 meme answers (fannish edition, part 1 of 2):
For
thisbluesprit, who does not ask easy questions:
Top 5 characters -- this is super hard, as I am definitely a character-driven reader/fan, and tend to imprint on characters hard and never let go of them. So narrowing it down to 5 is very hard, and I decided to kind of try this without repeating favorite tropes too much, as there are specific types I invariably fall hard for.
1. Havelock Vetinari (Discworld) -- ikel89 makes fun of me for having "despot" as a favorite character type, and, like, guilty as charged. And nobody does "tyrant" better than Vetinari. The thing I love about Vetinari -- besides the competence kink, obviously -- is that he is good for Ankh-Morpork despite not being a good person in the normal, moral sense of the word. I have a very definitely weakness for characters like that, and he typifies it.
2. Boromir (Lord of the Rings) -- one of my other favorite types is what I called "the Beleaguered Warrior" when I was making SoulCollage cards [LJ link] (with essentially favorite archetypes). Hector of Troy actually predates Boromir on this, but Boromir took over in prominence as soon as I read LotR at 13.
3. Esmeralda Weatherwax (Discworld) -- I tried to avoid repeating fandoms, too, but couldn't NOT have Granny on the list. Badass, unstoppable old ladies are definitely a type with me, and Granny is an excellent example of it. She also reminds me quite a bit of my great-grandmother (the one L is named after), and I really feel the way about her the way I do about a family member.
4. Duv Galeni (Vorkosigan Saga) -- whom ikel89, who just met him in Brothers in Arms, has been calling my "librarian boyfriend". Which is fair. I did say, on a long-ago meme [LJ link], that Duv is the character I would marry, and I stand by that. Duv has that combination of brains, snark, and capacity for unexpected violence that's really interesting to me, and he's also one of those Ravenclaw types I love a lot. He is also an example of something I find very interesting personally: a character who straddles cultures and can see both of them the clearer for it, which is something I both appreciate as relatable and enjoy reading about.
5. Morrolan e'Drien (Dragaera) -- I waffled over including him, because a lot of the things I love about Morrolan are actually similar to the things I love about Galeni, but NOT including himwould be an act of denial, considering I've spent the last 9 years obsessed with Dragaera, which for me means "obsessed with Morrolan", because it's definitely a One True Character fandom for me. Morrolan checks the gentleman scholar box for me, competence kink, the nerd/violence dichotomy I mentioned with Duv, as well as the straddling cultures thing. So, yeah, let's just go with that.
**
For deeplyunhip:
Top 5 villains on television (interpret "villain" how you will)
I'm choosing to interpret "villain" pretty strictly and so not include characters who, over the course of canon, transcend their villain-hood (like, e.g. Spike on Buffy), or who have more complicated trajectories (e.g. Londo on Babylon 5).
1. Azula (Avatar: the Last Airbender) -- she ended up being my favorite character on the show, and she is amazing (I don't love the end of her arc, but I love everything else). She was also the first great female example of The Dragon I encountered; it's a type I almost always love, and was wondering if I'd love it if the Dragon were female. Turns out, I do!
2. Ares (Xena: Warrior Princess) -- look, nowhere did this say these had to be QUALITY TV shows. This is another case where the villain was my favorite character on the show, and in fact the principal reason I kept watching. I do like the character as written, but I will also be honest here: Kevin Smith (RIP) in black leather was absolutely a big part of the appeal.
3. Servalan (Blake's 7) -- yeah, a newcomer, and from a canon that I haven't even finished yet, but I'm putting her at #3 because, while she is not my FAVORITE character on the show (at this point), she's a close #2. I think I really enjoy female villains who are villainous in a way that, how to phrase it, would work just as well if they were male, and (with a few departures that I'm going to choose to ignore as bad writing) Servalan works on that level for me. While wearing absolutely amazing outfits. (OK, the outfits probably would change if she were a male villain. But I'm sure they would still be equally over the top.)
4. Emperor Cartagia (Babylon 5) -- B5 has a lot of villains I love, including two I seriously considered for this spot, Mr Morden and Bester. But Cartagia, despite having much more limited screentime than either of the other two, really, really made an impression on me. He is SUCH an effective example of a villain who is totally insane but no less terrifying for that (which isnot a type that works forme very often; e.g. Sherlock's Moriarty absolutely didn't). Cartagia, though. Brr!
5. Montgomery Burns (The Simpsons) -- I waffled between Mr Burns and Niska from Firefly for the last spot, but Mr Burns is just too iconic to pass up. I mean, how often do I steeple my fingers and go "Excellent" or "Smithers, release the hounds." (quite often, is how)
**
For monkiainen:
Top 5 Characters in any media that you feel should be appreciated more
This was also one I had to ponder a while, because I don't always know which characters are properly appreciated or not (so this is skewed a bit towards fandoms I've been active in), and I also avoided cases where I know a character was unappreciated in one part of fandom or timeframe but then became very popular (e.g. it seemed like a lot of ASOIAF fandom hated Sansa Stark at one point, but westerosorting appreciated her a lot).
Also, these are ranked not necessarily by how much I love the character but by how underappreciated I feel they are, relative to how much I like them. If that makes any sense XD
1. Ron Weasley (Harry Potter) -- Ron is one of my favorite characters in the books, second only to Dumbledore, I think, but I feel like fandom tends to ignore him or make him the bad guy in a lot of Harry/Hermione and Harry/Draco fic. But what gives Ron the top spot on this list is that I felt like the movies, unfortunately, underappreciated him too, turned him into comic relief and gave a lot of his brave and clever actions and lines to other characters. For shame!
2. Jayne Cobb (Firefly) -- look, Jayne is a legit pretty awful person and I am not surprised if people don't like him. But he is also my favorite Firefly character, and there's a lot more nuance to him that is easy to miss and just dismiss him as a dumb thug. (He is absolutely a thug, and not the sharpest tool in the shed compared to people like Simon or Zoe. But he's a pretty interesting character, too.) I do know that Jayne has his fans, but I'm always pleasantly surprised to meet a Firefly fan who considers him a favorite.
3. Mark Pierre Vorkosigan (Vorkosigan Saga) -- I love Mark a lot -- actually, a lot more than Miles, whom I enjoy as a protagonist but whose well-being I'm not particularly invested in, outside of wanting the people who love him, whom I love, to be happy. But Mark I want to be happy and fulfilled and have everything he wants, because talk about being dealt a shitty hand in life and managing to do something with it, with a lot of effort (and support from understanding loved ones, and a ton of therapy). I don't think Mark is disliked in fandom, but I do feel like he tends to get lost in all of Miles's flash-bang, and Cordelia's awesomeness, but he is one of my very favorite characters in this fandom.
4. Xander Harris (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) -- there is a lot of very legitimate criticism to be leveled at Xander, but I feel like with that comes a tendency to dismiss him as just all-around The Worst. And I actually like Xander, his flaws and all (for the most part) -- the denial of responsibility, the less-than-stellar calls he makes, some of which he has no right to make at all. I think the show mostly does not excuse these mistakes, and they make him a very plausibly flawed human. Xander was actually my first favorite on BtVS, though he was subsequently eclipsed by other characters, and I continued to appreciate his role as the Heart of the Scoobies -- it's actually pretty refreshing to have a guy in that role, and a regular guy at that.
5. Gimli (Lord of the Rings) -- I feel less strongly about this one, and I think there's maybe been a Dwarf Appreciation revival with the Hobbit movies? But anyway, I thought the movies -- which I generally love -- choosing to turn Gimli into basically comic relief was one of the worst calls Peter Jackson had made, and I'm still grumpy about that. The Dwarves were always my favorites in the book, and there's so much more to Gimli than the movies showed or that the (early movie) fandom took away.
**
For asthenie_vd:
top 5 books and/or tv shows you enjoyed even though they turned out nothing like you expected them to be before you started reading/watching
This ended up being all books, because I guess I'm less likely to start watching a TV show without clear expectations of what I'm getting? Or, like, I wasn't sure what I was going to get with Farscape (started watching thanks to
eglantiere's insistent recs :) or The Good Place (started watching for Hugo homework), but I didn't have clear expectations for either of those. I was surprised by both and enjoyed both, but I couldn't point to why. Anyway, so:
Ranking is impacted not only by how much I like the thing, but also by how different it was from my expectations. Somehow...
1. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte) -- this is the clearest example of the thing you're asking about, because everything I got about this book by cultural osmosis suggested this was going to be some epic romance with Heathcliff the Byronic hero. The reality turned out to be much different, and much more palatable to me personally: Heathcliff an absolutely awful person, and pathetic, and not so much romance as two awful people being self-destructive and mutually destructive while destroying everyone decent around them. No romance at all, in fact, and Heathcliff is no kind of hero at all. And I also didn't expect how funny this book was in places. All in all, I enjoyed it a lot more than I'd expected to, and am consequently even more mad that somehow this has become a symbol of Great Doomed Romance on par with Romeo and Juliet? (which is also NOT what R&J is about, but I still dislike R&J, whereas I really appreciated Wuthering Heights).
2. Machineries of Empire series by Yoon Ha Lee -- I picked up the series because the blurbs were stressing the point of it being math-based science fiction, and I was intrigued by that aspect of it. The thing is, the best path towards enjoying the Hexarchate books, in my experience (which includes myself and the various friends I've recced/gifted these books to) is to forget the "math-based sci-fi!" and thus NOT TRY TO UNDERSTAND THE MATH. It's not MEANT to be math-based "hard" sci-fi -- the math is basically space magic, like the Force, and once I accepted that, I could stop worrying about trying to make sense of it (that's not what it's FOR) and could just enjoy the space magic shenanigans, which are very cool, and the awesome characters, and the cool space battles. So, yeah, this ended up being one of my favorite genre series of the last decade, but for reasons completely different from the reason I picked them up for.
3. The Goblin Emperor (Katherine Addison, aka Sarah Monette) -- the surprise in this case was pretty much entirely due to my previous familiarity with the author's earlier work, under a different pen name (which, I totally understand why the publisher asked her to pick a different one for TGE). I quite enjoyed Monette's Melusine tetralogy, but these were dark, dark books, with a lot of terrible things happening to the protagonists and everyone being shades-of-grey at best. I was NOT expecting something as... fluffy (or hopepunk, if you prefer) as The Goblin Emperor, but really enjoyed it anyway. I do think the crossover audience for TGE and the Melusine books is pretty small, though.
4. North and South (Elizabeth Gaskell) -- this was a book I read pretty much purely for the title for "antonyms in the title" square of a long-ago Reading Bingo. Based on the short description, I expected something like Jane Austen (though consulting the time period would've possibly adjusted thoseexpectations a bit). Anyway, I did NOT expect the novel to be as socially progressive as it was (for the most part), or so concerned with labor strikes and such. Those were not my favorite part of the book, so it's not that I liked the book BECAUSE of these unexpected elements, but I did like it, and I was susprised.
5. The Poppy War (R.F.Kuang) -- what I knew about the book when I embarked on it had to do with the grim spoilery stuff in the third part. I had NOT expected the modern prose (which I liked a lot), or the very Relevant To My Interests magic school book that constitutes the first third of the novel, and which unsurprisingly ended up being my favorite part.
**
For
grayswandir:
Top 5 SF novels
I'm choosing to interpret SF narrowly as science fiction (as opposed to fantasy), and also following Locus in deeming N.K.Jemisin's The Fifth Season/Broken Earth series to be fantasy rather than SF, although I probably think of it as SF myself. Also, I decided not to limit myself to standalones, because that would require leaving off too many books that I love. So, with all those numerous caveats:
1. Roadside Picnic (the brothers Strugatsky) -- This was the book I spent the summer I turned 10 inhabiting pretty much full time, forcing my grandmother to act as a secondary character to my protagonist. I think just for that I can't put it anywhere else on this list but at the top. It's also a book that terrified me at the time, and would probably do so again. And a damn fine novel. (I can't vouch for the English translation, though.) While I'm on the subject of Strugatsky, I'm also very fond of One Billion Years before the End of the World (mysteriously translated as Definitely Maybe in English. This is the one I consier a much more interesting take on Three-Body Problem.)
2. Memory (Lois McMaster Bujold, Vorkosigan Saga) -- definitely NOT a stand-alone, but it is SO GOOD. It's actually not my favorite Vorkosigan book (that would be A Civil Campaign; also not a standalone, although I read it as one and still loved it), it's too painful a bookfor that, but it packs a hell of a punch, and it forces characters to change and grow (painfully, but in a necessary way).
3. Too Like the Lightning/Seven Surrenders (Ada Palmer, Terra Ignota) -- cheating here by going with two books, but they were meant to be one and got chopped in half, so. This is my favorite sci-fi series of the last decade, and I continue to be super impressed by the world this book introduces and the way in which it does it. I love its weird structure and its weird prose and am just in awe of it as an achievement.
4. Caves of Steel (Isaac Asimov, Robots series) -- the above are skewed towards more modern books, because as I think about it, I guess a lot of what classic sci-fi I've read was short stories (all my favorite Bradbury, e.g.), or didn't make enough of an impression that I still remember much about them. But the Lije/Daneel books sure did. I no longer have a clear memory of which of the first two books I preferred back in the day -- I liked them both a lot -- so I'm just going to go with the first one. (Also, ikel89 read it recently and live-blogged it at me, which proves that it holds up pretty well :D)
5. Raven Stratagem (Yoon Ha Lee, Machineries of Empire) -- going with book 2 although I like all three of the novels in the trilogy, because this one felt like the most satisfying novel to me. There's a really cool thing about the structure, and this novel deepens and makes richer the world introduced in the first book. And it has a scene that made me write the most complicated poem I've ever attempted (*waves to
extrapenguin* :), which has to count for something, too.
This list is missing a lot of "important" SF books I've read, like LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, or Leckie's Anicllary books that I like a lot, but these are the ones that stuck with me in an emotional way.
OK, this is getting a bit long and scattered, so I think I'll pause here and leave for next time quotes (Morrolan, Dragaera, and in general) and favorite character pairings. I think I'll just add those to the non-fannish answers, to keep numbers about even.
P.S. Feel free to give me more top 5's to answer, here, or at the previous post.
*
And lastly, via
bearshorty: the news that not only is Peace Talks (the next Dresden Files book) coming out this year, but so is a SECOND Dresden Files book, just a few months later. It's been quite a dry spell, so I'm looking forward to it, and need to give O the good news, too. And there's a pretty cool book trailer for Peace Talks here.
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1124032.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).