On awesomeness
The Cymothoa exigua proves that the world is on crack - and that it's freaking awesome crack.
I think this is the happiest-about-biology I've been since I learned that if you put a sponge (animal) in a mixer and then pour the sponge-smoothie into the ocean, it will get back together into a sponge again. Nicola Davies is officially my new favourite author.
***
”My young friend is something of an expert.”
”In archeology?”
”In explosives.”
<3<3<3 Doctor. <3<3 Ace too, for that matter. I started watching ”Battlefield” because Chrissie Stuart Angela Bruce was in it, and from that perpective I was not disappointed - Brigadier Bambera is just as badass as a woman who made brigadier in her 30s would have to be. But the episode is awesome in lots of other ways as well - like Ace blowing up an archeological site. :-) Also, people calling the Doctor Merlin! Jean Marsh as Morgaine, a villainess with style, no less! Ace having stuff going on with another girl that comes darn close to a slap-slap-kiss! (”They breed their children strong,” Morgaine comments, and I just about die with glee. How can there be so many awesome female characters at once? Isn't there some action TV law against it?) The Doctor being all papawolf! Winifred and Ancelyn sitting in a tree... (Sorry, got all five years old for a while there. I don't suppose there's any shipperfic? Or Ace/Shou Yuing shipperfic for that matter?)
Do you think if I wish for it enough, Steven Moffat will wake from his sleep one morning and go, "You know, I should ask Angela Bruce back on Doctor Who"?
***
I found a Mormon site of jokes. That was unexpected - I didn't realize Mormons had such self-distance. (Sorry, hoban_harper!) Some of them are pretty funny. I found this one cute, for instance:
Two elders were tracting in deepest Africa when they came across a large lion. The elders began to run. The slower of the two realized that he would not be able to out run the lion, he droped to his knees and prayed for heavenly father to convert the lion. When he open his eyes he saw the lion on his knees also and heard him say Father in heaven please bless this food I am about to consume.
***
BtVS newsletter su_herald had a link to prompts for discussion of Anne, which thrilled me until I realized that they meant the episode and not the character. Still, it gives me an excuse to talk about the character.
I talked to yetanothermask about Anne and had to remind her who Anne even was. I suppose she's a strange character to latch on to, with only five episodes under her belt - and I hadn't even seen all of them when I first fell for her.
Part of it is probably that I've spent so much time writing her in the Birthdayverse (along with Alonna, another vital guest star), but there's more to it than that. Most of all, it's that she has so much character development between episodes, yet it feels natural. When we first meet her as Chanterelle in ”Lie to Me”, she's a vampire-worshipping ditz. As Lily in ”Anne”, she has clued on to the fact that vampires are evil, but she's still clinging to people she sees as stronger, and it's not until the very end of the episode that she stands up for herself by pushing Ken off the ledge. Two and a half later, she has her first appearance as Anne in the Angel episode ”Blood Money” and is now a determined, competent young woman in charge of a teen shelter... and we believe the growth. Three years later still, Gunn chooses to see her again for his last day before the big fight, and it makes perfect sense that she's the one echoing Angel's epiphany (”if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do”):
Gunn: "What if I told you it doesn't help? What would you do if you found out that none of it matters? That it's all controlled by forces more powerful and uncaring than we can conceive, and they will never let it get better down here. What would you do?"
Anne: "I'd get this truck packed before the new stuff gets here."
It's no coincidence that this quote matched with Martin Luther's "If I knew that the world would end tomorrow I would still plant my apple tree today” was my default icon for a while (and the icon I use for the LJ version of this post). There aren't all that many characters in the slayerverse that I would honestly want to know, but I'd want to know Anne. By ”The Thin Dead Line”, she's definitely someone you can count on in a crisis.
In a sense, Anne represents the best of Buffy. I have issues with both the show and its protagonist, but Buffy at her best is the girl catching Angel's sword, the girl going ”I may be dead, but I'm still pretty,” the girl who got the entire graduation class to fight back. ”Can I be Anne?” Lily asks, holding up Buffy's name tag, and she does become Anne. She takes what she knows of Buffy (which is some, but not a lot), and she uses it as inspiration, not to imitate Buffy wholesale, but to be the best Anne she can be. Which is quite a lot: it's someone who literally saves lives every day, even in the face of zombie cops. At times, it's easy to forget that what the dual Scooby gangs are fighting for is life, life to keep going, and Anne keeps life going even at the worst of circumstances. Furthermore, she does it without superpowers, without schooling or a social network or any of those other things ordinary people count on, without even much physical or intellectual strength. She's just a girl, but she does all that she can do.
Which also kind of means that she represents the best of the audience. If Andrew is the audience as a parody, Anne is the audience as a homage, someone who starts as a silly Anne Rice romantic with her head in the clouds, and ends up saving the world a lot - one inch at a time.
***
I was going to write some stuff about slash too, but it's getting late and this post is already long enough, so that'll have to be some other time. :-) Besides, ending with my Anne love seems very fitting.
I think this is the happiest-about-biology I've been since I learned that if you put a sponge (animal) in a mixer and then pour the sponge-smoothie into the ocean, it will get back together into a sponge again. Nicola Davies is officially my new favourite author.
***
”My young friend is something of an expert.”
”In archeology?”
”In explosives.”
<3<3<3 Doctor. <3<3 Ace too, for that matter. I started watching ”Battlefield” because Chrissie Stuart Angela Bruce was in it, and from that perpective I was not disappointed - Brigadier Bambera is just as badass as a woman who made brigadier in her 30s would have to be. But the episode is awesome in lots of other ways as well - like Ace blowing up an archeological site. :-) Also, people calling the Doctor Merlin! Jean Marsh as Morgaine, a villainess with style, no less! Ace having stuff going on with another girl that comes darn close to a slap-slap-kiss! (”They breed their children strong,” Morgaine comments, and I just about die with glee. How can there be so many awesome female characters at once? Isn't there some action TV law against it?) The Doctor being all papawolf! Winifred and Ancelyn sitting in a tree... (Sorry, got all five years old for a while there. I don't suppose there's any shipperfic? Or Ace/Shou Yuing shipperfic for that matter?)
Do you think if I wish for it enough, Steven Moffat will wake from his sleep one morning and go, "You know, I should ask Angela Bruce back on Doctor Who"?
***
I found a Mormon site of jokes. That was unexpected - I didn't realize Mormons had such self-distance. (Sorry, hoban_harper!) Some of them are pretty funny. I found this one cute, for instance:
Two elders were tracting in deepest Africa when they came across a large lion. The elders began to run. The slower of the two realized that he would not be able to out run the lion, he droped to his knees and prayed for heavenly father to convert the lion. When he open his eyes he saw the lion on his knees also and heard him say Father in heaven please bless this food I am about to consume.
***
BtVS newsletter su_herald had a link to prompts for discussion of Anne, which thrilled me until I realized that they meant the episode and not the character. Still, it gives me an excuse to talk about the character.
I talked to yetanothermask about Anne and had to remind her who Anne even was. I suppose she's a strange character to latch on to, with only five episodes under her belt - and I hadn't even seen all of them when I first fell for her.
Part of it is probably that I've spent so much time writing her in the Birthdayverse (along with Alonna, another vital guest star), but there's more to it than that. Most of all, it's that she has so much character development between episodes, yet it feels natural. When we first meet her as Chanterelle in ”Lie to Me”, she's a vampire-worshipping ditz. As Lily in ”Anne”, she has clued on to the fact that vampires are evil, but she's still clinging to people she sees as stronger, and it's not until the very end of the episode that she stands up for herself by pushing Ken off the ledge. Two and a half later, she has her first appearance as Anne in the Angel episode ”Blood Money” and is now a determined, competent young woman in charge of a teen shelter... and we believe the growth. Three years later still, Gunn chooses to see her again for his last day before the big fight, and it makes perfect sense that she's the one echoing Angel's epiphany (”if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do”):
Gunn: "What if I told you it doesn't help? What would you do if you found out that none of it matters? That it's all controlled by forces more powerful and uncaring than we can conceive, and they will never let it get better down here. What would you do?"
Anne: "I'd get this truck packed before the new stuff gets here."
It's no coincidence that this quote matched with Martin Luther's "If I knew that the world would end tomorrow I would still plant my apple tree today” was my default icon for a while (and the icon I use for the LJ version of this post). There aren't all that many characters in the slayerverse that I would honestly want to know, but I'd want to know Anne. By ”The Thin Dead Line”, she's definitely someone you can count on in a crisis.
In a sense, Anne represents the best of Buffy. I have issues with both the show and its protagonist, but Buffy at her best is the girl catching Angel's sword, the girl going ”I may be dead, but I'm still pretty,” the girl who got the entire graduation class to fight back. ”Can I be Anne?” Lily asks, holding up Buffy's name tag, and she does become Anne. She takes what she knows of Buffy (which is some, but not a lot), and she uses it as inspiration, not to imitate Buffy wholesale, but to be the best Anne she can be. Which is quite a lot: it's someone who literally saves lives every day, even in the face of zombie cops. At times, it's easy to forget that what the dual Scooby gangs are fighting for is life, life to keep going, and Anne keeps life going even at the worst of circumstances. Furthermore, she does it without superpowers, without schooling or a social network or any of those other things ordinary people count on, without even much physical or intellectual strength. She's just a girl, but she does all that she can do.
Which also kind of means that she represents the best of the audience. If Andrew is the audience as a parody, Anne is the audience as a homage, someone who starts as a silly Anne Rice romantic with her head in the clouds, and ends up saving the world a lot - one inch at a time.
***
I was going to write some stuff about slash too, but it's getting late and this post is already long enough, so that'll have to be some other time. :-) Besides, ending with my Anne love seems very fitting.