This is ramble (okay, rant) about why I may be responding as I am to Wonder Woman: 1984 (liked it okay) and Discovery, especially S3 (kind of hate it). I am socially on the left but increasingly find my responses to pop culture out of step with some of the more prominent left-leaning responses. To wit, Wonder Woman is being panned and most of the ( Read more... )

I like vampire lit for much the same reason I like science fiction: both change the premises of our life experience and, thus, challenge our usual cultural and psychological assumptions. Vampire lit, in particular, lends itself to upending commonplaces about gender and family structure. It's often been noted that vampire reproduction is ( Read more... )

When I first heard of Fray, the futuristic Buffyverse graphic novel, I didn't seek it out because I didn't see the point of reading what sounded like a retread of Buffy themes without the characters I'd come to care about. In terms of my own experience as a reader, that judgment had some foundation.

Fray reads very much like season 1 of Buffy set ( Read more... )

On the basis of several friends' recommendations, I have been watching True Blood and have gotten up to just about episode 7 of season 1, which will be the frame for this commentary. It is, of course, impossible to watch True Blood without comparing it to Buffy. And with Buffy swirling in my mind again for the first time in a few years, all I can ( Read more... )

Thank you, Soseki Natsume-sensei for reminding me of what it's like to get lost in a really well-written book--and it feels like it's been a very long time. Kokoro, written in 1914, is a collection of three connected novellas, detailing the lives of a university student and a melancholy older man he assumes as a mentor. The translator's (Edwin ( Read more... )

This is my very first fan fic, written before I discovered LJ, which I somehow managed never to post on my journal. It’s a revision of a fic I’ve had on BFA for a while.

“The Way We Live Now”
Fandom: Buffy/AngelSpike/Dru ( Read more... )

This is a response to yma2's challenge to write a brief fic in response to the prompt "jaded." She asked for a "writing sample," which is what this is: fast, unbeta'ed, Buffy future fic, spoilers through Angel S5, Spike & Dawn, PG for brief reference the AR, 500 words. Dawn's thinking in her dorm room.

( Jaded )

I know this meme was going around a while ago. So here I am a bit behind the times. I picked it up from astrogirl2 (as usual), with whom I agree that it might be the best meme ever ( Read more... )

(Besides simultaneously being on Crichton’s mind in “Promises ( Read more... )

I’m feeling tetchy today, so apologies in advance. It strikes me that a lot of things I’ve been reading have been contradicting my personal theory of narrative, so I want to take a moment to defend that theory ( Read more... )