i don't hardly know her, but i think i can love her
meinterrupted posted yesterday about watching Justice League/Justice League Unlimited, and that reminded me that AV Club is doing weekly recaps* and they're in ...well, they call it the first season of JLU as if it were a different show, but really it's the same show with an expanded roster (interestingly enough, Teen Titans did the same thing in its last season, which makes sense, since the completion of the Trigon arc in s4 really felt like the end of the show for the main team, though I still want good Robin/Raven and Robin/Raven/Starfire fic whenever I think of it; and Young Justice did, as well, much more successfully than TT in some ways), and I said to her that as much as I ended up enjoying Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes before it got unceremoniously cancelled, A:EMH never reaches the giddy heights that JL/JLU does, and I do think that the season 2 (JL) finale absolutely matches some of the later stuff that happens, possibly because of how the ramifications spool out through the rest of the show.
*(As an aside, is there anything better or more hilarious than watching Batman fans argue on the internet? And I mean specifically Batman fans, not just superhero or comics fans [though those arguments also have their charms]. It's like all of internet fandom in one very tightly-wound, nerdy microcosm.)
And I think that that is what A:EMH never really managed - while they did do some serialized story-telling (skrull!Steve! Red Hulk!), they didn't really do well with the emotional payoffs of most of it (though I still totally want Steve/Madame Viper fic). And I don't think that's simply because it was aimed at kids - even if you argue that B:TAS and JL/JLU were aimed at older teens/adults, Teen Titans, for all its silliness, absolutely paid off its emotional arcs (at least for Robin and Raven and Starfire), as did Young Justice, and, stepping outside the DCU, look at how well Avatar: The Last Airbender did it, and that show was aimed at 7-year-olds.
I haven't watched the show that replaced A:EMH except for that one episode, so I don't know if they're going to manage it there, but it's interesting to me how even when the DC comics are full of DO NOT WANT, they manage to do really well with the animated stuff, while Marvel has never quite scaled those heights (though possibly they did with X-Men: Evolution? I don't recall. And I still need to watch Spectacular Spider-man).
Anyway, now I kind of want to do a JL/JLU rewatch in my copious free time. Sadly, half the episodes disappeared when my old external hard drive disappeared.
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What I'm reading Wednesday:
What I've just finished
I read the last two Kane Chronicles books: The Throne of Fire and The Serpent's Shadow, and enjoyed them, though I did wonder if they couldn't have been edited and combined into one book somehow. Possibly this is just a result of my reading them seamlessly back to back (i.e., I have the omnibus edition of the trilogy, so I read them as if they were one book), but I feel like maybe that would have worked better? I don't know. I think sometimes my sense of pacing is really skewed on the Kindle/iPad, because I can't always tell where I am in a book, so endings either feel really rushed or strangely protracted.
ANYWAY. Aside from that, I did like the books and also The Son of Sobek, the short story in which Carter Kane meets Percy Jackson (♥PERCY♥) and possibly sets up a future team-up for them. (Is it true Riordan is also planning a Norse mythology series? AND THEN EVERYBODY COULD TEAM UP TO FIGHT BAD GUYS? Because I would dig a super-crossover like that a lot.) Mostly, I'm glad I bought it because it teased The House of Hades, which I have to wait until OCTOBER to read. fucking cliffhangers.
I also read Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which I enjoyed but which I think might have been better if it'd been shorter.
What I'm reading now
Cold Steel by Kate Elliott, the third of the Spiritwalker trilogy. I appreciate how it just jumps right into the action - the first book definitely had a slow start full of exposition, but now we're just roaring along.
I also started the Pacific Rim novelization, but now I am wondering if I should just write the story in my head without looking for Raleigh backstory in canon. I haven't decided. Maybe I will write the story and then read the novelization.
What I'm reading next
I don't know! I have a ton of books to read, and a break from ones with due dates, so it could be anything.
Speaking of ebooks, sort of, I have been unable to get Calibre to hook up with my iPad to let iBooks (or Stanza, but since it's no longer supported, I think I'm just going to give up adding anything new to it) access my library. It is really annoying. I put the IP address in as directed, and it just keeps timing out. So I guess I will stick with dropboxing books into iBooks, even though part of me would like to have access to EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE AT ALL TIMES.
My life is the hardest, guys. You don't even know. *sigh*
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