damkianna | rising, rising, and blowing away.

The school observed the moment of silence the other day for the victims of the Arizona shooting; I am not in a brainspace where I can be coherent about super heavy things, and Jon Stewart said pretty much everything I have been thinking anyway, so. I will leave it at that and move on to somewhat more shallow things.

Actually, I will segue with a middling thing: I think I got the closest I have ever come to an actualfax panic attack in my life, and it was over having my arm trapped inside the body of my sweatshirt and not being able to get it back through the sleeve. /o\ I mean, I knew I was pretty claustrophobic, and I am really wiggy about restraints - if I am ever handcuffed, I will probably flip my lid completely - but, wow, brain. That was SPECIAL. D:

And now, the shallows. My mother was deeply intrigued by the preview commercials for The Cape, so we all sat down together to watch the pilot. Wow, is that ever two hours I am never going to get back. Okay, I'll be fair; an hour and fifty minutes. The first, oh, two minutes were really promising, and there were maybe four genuinely funny exchanges, and of course Richard Schiff was gold, and Summer Glau is always awesome.

The rest ... yikes. I don't know, maybe it really is me, but the pacing seemed TERRIBLE - like The Event, except possibly even worse. If they wanted to get to the superheroing that badly, they could've dumped us into the middle of it and filled in with a few select flashbacks; hell, they could even have turned the reason for his estrangement from his family into something of a mystery, at least for a little bit. But instead they chose to, like, fast-forward through his transition from ordinary cop to The Cape, and the result was just. o.O wat.

I liked the opening scene, with his kid's feet in his face; that was cute. I liked him arriving at the station; inoffensive, perfectly decent opener, and I had SUCH HOPES for Donna.

And then the next fifty-seven minutes happened. Donna said her handful of lines and then got shot in the head; Faraday's black friend turned out to be a traitor working for the bad guy, so he acquired a Magical Negro mentor to replace him; there was a bizarre interlude with bank robberies committed by ~~poor lost~~ circus performers; and then suddenly he was all encaped and Batman-voicing at his son about how much the kid's father, Vince Faraday, who is SOMEONE ELSE, PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BENEATH THE CAPE, loved him. Orwell jumped right on the bandwagon to be his Barbara Gordon after about fifteen seconds of conversation, his wife and son had a tremendously faily fight about how she was using her maiden name and thereby ~erasing~ Faraday, and somewhere in there he fought a chef assassin and tied him up in his own apron strings.

I can handle a cracky plot for the sake of characters I like, but they crammed so much stuff in there that there was barely any room for anybody to display some personality. I mean, here's hoping it was just an attack of pilotitis, and now that they're done explaining how everybody got where they are, they'll take the time to actually tell a story; but I'm not holding my breath. :/ Anyway, what all this boils down to is that I have not in any way started writing a fic where Donna is The Cape instead. Nope nope. That would be ridiculous. :D

Also, saw Tangled, which I basically adored. I mean, of course I have a couple of complaints, I'm me; but overall, I liked it WAY more than I expected to. I still think it was shitty to change the title, and I really don't understand why they bothered, because it starts out with Eugene outright saying that it's not his story, it's Rapunzel's - and, generally speaking, it was. So trying to dress it up like it was something else was pretty dumb. o.O

But! I loved Rapunzel's paintings, and the way she used her hair, and the frying pan, and her little chameleon, and the city, and the floating lanterns, and Eugene's backstory (he is basically G Callen); and I am SUCH a sucker for self-esteem issues and hostage situations and self-sacrifice, I cannot even. **hearteyes** I do feel like the voice-acting faltered just a touch during the climactic scene of stabbery and hair-cutting, because I know there was at least one point where I felt like laughing instead of like crying. But that is a very minor issue.

I don't know what to say about Gothel; I think it would have been really easy to make her sympathetic and yet still wrong, instead of evil and manipulative and wrong, and I think that might have added a little something. I mean, a choice between freedom + true love + family + kingdom and isolation + manipulation by a creeper who's using you for your hair isn't really that much of a choice, and it makes Rapunzel's growth as a person during the first part of the movie a little less meaningful to the overall scheme of the story. But, yes, picky. It wasn't, like, Toy Story 3 or WALL-E or anything, but it was sweet and engaging and I LOVE RAPUNZEL, SHE IS AWESOME. Now I want post-movie fic of her learning how to run her kingdom. :D

The next chapter of ItO is on track for Sunday, and I am trying to think of things I could do for

halfamoon, though, knowing me, I will need to start early because they'll all be 20k words long. Oh, and: I have a meeting with the school headmaster tomorrow at noon, at which he just might maybe offer to make me full-time. **crosses fingers**