This is a catch-all post
Don't worry though, I'll at least put off for another day my 9384928403289 word essay on how Kim Nam-gil and I are destined for wedded bliss on the astral plane.
1) The BBC's modern day Sherlock Holmes reboot, one episode (A Study in Pink) out of a total of three (!!!!! DDDD:) aired.
Yeah, sorry, RDJ. I guess Moffat's version hit my fandom kink buttons more? Because I enjoyed this so much more than the latest movie. I may or may not have been seal clapping with joy the whole way through.
Now that I think about it, I bet a lot of my enjoyment had to do with Sherlock's characterization as a self-confessed "high functioning sociopath." I do love my sympathetic sociopath characters: Nick from Demon's Lexicon, Spike from BtVS, Bidam from Queen Seonduk, Dexter Morgan... :X IDK, I just find this character archetype interesting.
And is it just me, or does the new Sherlock Holmes actor not look uncannily like Colin Morgan? I swear to god, they could be brothers. O.O Also, apparently the actor's name is Benedict Carlton Cumberbatch. It's like something straight out of Dickens or Harry Potter, I swear.
2) The King and the Clown
A great Joseon dynasty period movie about two minstrels/clowns, Jang-seng (he of the scarred face), and Gong-gil (he of the androgynous beauty). The mad king comes into the movie later and dominates the plot with his erratic, childlike, homicidal whims, but the movie starts and ends with the dynamic between the two clowns.
I was curious from the beginning if the close bond between the clowns was one of a romantic nature of not, since the movie doesn't shy away from homosexuality, but by the end I had decided (other people have read the text differently) it was platonic. And I loved it for that. There's a moment towards the beginning of the movie when Jang-seng tries to cheer up Gong-gil by pulling him into a comedy skit they often perform of two blind friends reuniting, which ends with the two blind men embracing. And then you realized this was Jang-seng's way of tricking Gong-gil into a hug. It was so sweet I nearly died; the movie is a beautiful platonic love story.
TBH my fandom experience is probably 95% ship oriented, but at the same time I have a deep conflicting ambivalence towards the fandom tendency to sexualize all close relationships. It's part of the reason I really disliked the incest pairings in FMA and Firefly fandoms, and am not overly fond of it in SPN either. It sometimes feels like a reification of sexual romance over other equally powerful expressions of love.
Actually, one of the aspects of Inception that pleased me the most was the fact that Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page were not romantic interests, despite being the male and female leads. I really just like to see moving platonic relationships sometimes.
Which leads me to, ironically, the opposite of that. (LOL IDK, I like different things from my source material that I do from my fic reading material)
3) Someone on my flist posted Arthur/Eames Inception slash \o/ Dull Boy, by sparky77
4) I read an interesting article on Language Log today, about how there doesn't really exist a way for Chinese people to textually represent casual spoken Cantonese, which I had no idea. Apparently text messaging Hong Kong teenagers have created an ad hoc amalgam of Roman letters, Arabic numerals, mathematical symbols, and traditional Mandarin characters to represent their mother tongue. The end result being that, "If we really want to, we can type Chinese, but English is a lot easier to type."
(Random aside: Language Log is a funny blog for me because I follow it as an RSS feed on DW, which means I don't see who the posters are to come to know and recognize each writer's style/point of view. So twice a day I read interesting to neutral academic articles from it, and then every once in a while there will be a completely batshit frothing rant about Barack Obama or the word vuvuzela or some shit. And I have no idea if it's just one crazy guy who got posting access somehow or what.)
5) So I just watched episode 9 of Bad Guy (aaaahhhh how does Kim Nam-gil just totally gut me with just the expression in his eyes?? IDEK :O) and started thinking about Korean revenge dramas as a genre, and why they're so popular that they actually do constitute a genre in and of themselves. And then I thought about that for about two seconds. LOL, gee, Korean culture as a whole enjoys escapist fantasy about enacting revenge on someone who has wronged you. I wonder why.
1) The BBC's modern day Sherlock Holmes reboot, one episode (A Study in Pink) out of a total of three (!!!!! DDDD:) aired.
Yeah, sorry, RDJ. I guess Moffat's version hit my fandom kink buttons more? Because I enjoyed this so much more than the latest movie. I may or may not have been seal clapping with joy the whole way through.
Now that I think about it, I bet a lot of my enjoyment had to do with Sherlock's characterization as a self-confessed "high functioning sociopath." I do love my sympathetic sociopath characters: Nick from Demon's Lexicon, Spike from BtVS, Bidam from Queen Seonduk, Dexter Morgan... :X IDK, I just find this character archetype interesting.
And is it just me, or does the new Sherlock Holmes actor not look uncannily like Colin Morgan? I swear to god, they could be brothers. O.O Also, apparently the actor's name is Benedict Carlton Cumberbatch. It's like something straight out of Dickens or Harry Potter, I swear.
2) The King and the Clown
A great Joseon dynasty period movie about two minstrels/clowns, Jang-seng (he of the scarred face), and Gong-gil (he of the androgynous beauty). The mad king comes into the movie later and dominates the plot with his erratic, childlike, homicidal whims, but the movie starts and ends with the dynamic between the two clowns.
I was curious from the beginning if the close bond between the clowns was one of a romantic nature of not, since the movie doesn't shy away from homosexuality, but by the end I had decided (other people have read the text differently) it was platonic. And I loved it for that. There's a moment towards the beginning of the movie when Jang-seng tries to cheer up Gong-gil by pulling him into a comedy skit they often perform of two blind friends reuniting, which ends with the two blind men embracing. And then you realized this was Jang-seng's way of tricking Gong-gil into a hug. It was so sweet I nearly died; the movie is a beautiful platonic love story.
TBH my fandom experience is probably 95% ship oriented, but at the same time I have a deep conflicting ambivalence towards the fandom tendency to sexualize all close relationships. It's part of the reason I really disliked the incest pairings in FMA and Firefly fandoms, and am not overly fond of it in SPN either. It sometimes feels like a reification of sexual romance over other equally powerful expressions of love.
Actually, one of the aspects of Inception that pleased me the most was the fact that Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page were not romantic interests, despite being the male and female leads. I really just like to see moving platonic relationships sometimes.
Which leads me to, ironically, the opposite of that. (LOL IDK, I like different things from my source material that I do from my fic reading material)
3) Someone on my flist posted Arthur/Eames Inception slash \o/ Dull Boy, by sparky77
4) I read an interesting article on Language Log today, about how there doesn't really exist a way for Chinese people to textually represent casual spoken Cantonese, which I had no idea. Apparently text messaging Hong Kong teenagers have created an ad hoc amalgam of Roman letters, Arabic numerals, mathematical symbols, and traditional Mandarin characters to represent their mother tongue. The end result being that, "If we really want to, we can type Chinese, but English is a lot easier to type."
(Random aside: Language Log is a funny blog for me because I follow it as an RSS feed on DW, which means I don't see who the posters are to come to know and recognize each writer's style/point of view. So twice a day I read interesting to neutral academic articles from it, and then every once in a while there will be a completely batshit frothing rant about Barack Obama or the word vuvuzela or some shit. And I have no idea if it's just one crazy guy who got posting access somehow or what.)
5) So I just watched episode 9 of Bad Guy (aaaahhhh how does Kim Nam-gil just totally gut me with just the expression in his eyes?? IDEK :O) and started thinking about Korean revenge dramas as a genre, and why they're so popular that they actually do constitute a genre in and of themselves. And then I thought about that for about two seconds. LOL, gee, Korean culture as a whole enjoys escapist fantasy about enacting revenge on someone who has wronged you. I wonder why.