the candles are lit as if by themselves.
Apr. 20th, 2012 09:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
damkiannaSeriously, without OUaT, there is no structure in my life! D: Still plugging away on auction fic, and on the zombie story; and to give me something productive to switch to when blocked, I am also in the middle of a zillion Alia icons. (Okay, not a zillion, but like a hundred and fifty so far, at least, which is practically a ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
ladiesbigbang project all by itself.) I am almost done with the first season of LFN, and have, somewhat to my surprise, devoured Season 1 of The Borgias, which no one who knows me IRL - not even me, honestly - would ever expect me to watch. And yet. I concede I fastforwarded through some stuff; I don't usually care about the sex a whole lot, and there is torture and rape and poisoning and drowning and hanging and knifing and skinning and ripping-in-half-with-entrails-everywhere, any one individual bit of which is enough to make me cry like a sad, sad person.
But! I find myself really, really loving Lucrezia and her mother, and also really into Giulia Farnese. (I also like Caterina Sforza, who IRL was amazingly awesome and whom I am hoping will have a larger role as time passes, but she has already shown up once in armor so I am already a fan.) The climactic parts of the first season involve Lucrezia in a much more central way than I would ever have expected at the beginning, and I am basically watching this as though it is about her with a little Jeremy Irons on the side. And she and Giulia have tremendous ladyslash happening (they have already kissed! as part of ~kissing lessons for Lucrezia, which, we all know how those end, amirite) which really doesn't hurt at all. Lucrezia just gives me so many feelings! She is such a sweetheart and she and Cesare are darling and vaguely incestuous, and she and Giulia are so gorgeous! And then all these terrible things happen to her, her asshole rapist husband and her asshole murderer brother-who-isn't-Cesare, and she handles it and finds ways around it and flees her husband's estate with Giulia and saves Rome from French invasion! I have just barely started Season 2, and they have fridged Paolo and Lucrezia is growing sharper and dropping chandeliers on people but still basically amazing, and Giulia is in charge of solving economic injustice while making fussy old men look ridiculous. I mean, for real, my heart is going to explode from all my feelings right now. ♥♥♥♥♥ Atrocious things will no doubt happen to everyone, because that is what happens in this show; but in my head Lucrezia and Giulia begin pulling the strings and basically rule Rome and also make out a lot, the end.
And there are other ladies, too! Vannozza is pretty fantastic, and there is complexity to be mined between her and Giulia; Vittoria is new and has had only like two eps to even be in, but she is introduced while crossdressing as a dude and then has a threesome with Giulia (and the pope, he's there too) and then saves the day with plaster cannons! And Ursula Bonadeo - I can only wonder what the fandom's reaction was, I haven't looked for any comms or anything, but I love that she stuck to her guns and became a nun despite Cesare's best efforts, like, yeah, she's super in love with him, but she's still going to do what she thinks is right, dammit. \o/ Given all the awful shit that happens, I can't precisely rec the show, because ... well, I don't precisely enjoy it; I have to do some skipping around to get through most of the episodes without bursting into tears. And of course everything is coated with historical racism and sexism. But! If you are able to bypass or handle the triggery content, it's not a bad way to spend a few hours, particularly if you are into this recent explosion of ~edgy historical drama shows.
I also bought the e-book of Libba Bray's novel A Great and Terrible Beauty, and, uh, the only word in there that expresses how I feel so far is "terrible". D:
Let's start with the minor stuff: in a very subjective way, the writing style just isn't my thing. There are a lot of short sentences, which obvs. is not something that appeals to me, partly because it tends to make things feel choppy to my mind; and there's not very much about how Gemma is feeling, or what she's thinking, even though it's in first person. I mean, every now and then she reacts to things, sure, but - I don't know. Take this:
"It was my mother's," I say. Everyone is looking at me, waiting. Finally, I bow to the silent pressure and hand over the necklace.
I know about show-don't-tell, okay, but this just feels so flat to me. It says Gemma feels some pressure, evidently, but what kind? To what extent? Does she fidget as everyone stares at her, or does she hold defiantly still, a little angry at them even for asking? Does she look back at them, or is she looking at the ground, embarrassed? It's like she's just reporting the actions - I said stuff; everybody looked at me; I gave in and handed over the necklace. Like, why even put the thing in first person if you aren't going to use that POV to make me feel anything? This could swap to limited third ("It was my mother's," she says. Everyone is looking at her, waiting. Finally, she bows to the silent pressure and hands over the necklace.) and you'd hardly have to change a thing. IDEK, I don't find it engaging.
And, much much more importantly, it's faily. I would be way more willing to slog through a writing style I didn't care for if the content were excellent, but I am not finding that to be the case. I mean, some things, I might be able to characterize as legit intentional ignorance - would a British girl during the time period mistakenly term a language spoken by Rroma/Walking People "Romanian"? Quite possibly. But there's allowing your characters to be ignorant and there's allowing your narrative to be ignorant, and I'm not sure Bray manages to find the line, particularly when she's discussing India or portraying characters who are not white. A cursory Google suggests to me that Gemma's "hot dry plains" are more in Bray's head than they are in the (hilly) area around Mumbai, and I am cringing at the idea that Kartik's brother died/was consumed to save Gemma's lovely white mother the ~indignity of getting killed by the dark cloud, cringing at the specter of Kartik doing the same for Gemma. (I am somewhat spoiled for the third book; now and then I go on sprees and read all the one-star reviews on Goodreads that I can find.) If this shit were happening in a deliberate attempt to mimic books like The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, that ... wouldn't be a good thing, precisely, but at least it would be knowingly done - at least the author would be consciously portraying the main characters as racist. But so far it seems mostly like she just didn't think about it much, if at all. Blegh.
Also, finally and belatedly signed up for Pottermore. Mostly it's filling me with a sort of nostalgic fondness; I care about JKR's character notes insofar as they are historical documents, background on what she had in her head while she wrote. I mean, I'm sure there are people who consider them canon - we're going to end up with a canonicity system like the one they use for the Star Wars Holocron, if we don't have one already - but there's probably plenty of people who are going to ignore them, too. I suspect I will continue to pick and choose as I always have. The big question on my mind is less how much will be revealed re: Doris Crockford's shady past, and more how the hell I ended up in Gryffindor.I wanted Hufflepuff, dammit.
ladiesbigbang project all by itself.) I am almost done with the first season of LFN, and have, somewhat to my surprise, devoured Season 1 of The Borgias, which no one who knows me IRL - not even me, honestly - would ever expect me to watch. And yet. I concede I fastforwarded through some stuff; I don't usually care about the sex a whole lot, and there is torture and rape and poisoning and drowning and hanging and knifing and skinning and ripping-in-half-with-entrails-everywhere, any one individual bit of which is enough to make me cry like a sad, sad person.But! I find myself really, really loving Lucrezia and her mother, and also really into Giulia Farnese. (I also like Caterina Sforza, who IRL was amazingly awesome and whom I am hoping will have a larger role as time passes, but she has already shown up once in armor so I am already a fan.) The climactic parts of the first season involve Lucrezia in a much more central way than I would ever have expected at the beginning, and I am basically watching this as though it is about her with a little Jeremy Irons on the side. And she and Giulia have tremendous ladyslash happening (they have already kissed! as part of ~kissing lessons for Lucrezia, which, we all know how those end, amirite) which really doesn't hurt at all. Lucrezia just gives me so many feelings! She is such a sweetheart and she and Cesare are darling and vaguely incestuous, and she and Giulia are so gorgeous! And then all these terrible things happen to her, her asshole rapist husband and her asshole murderer brother-who-isn't-Cesare, and she handles it and finds ways around it and flees her husband's estate with Giulia and saves Rome from French invasion! I have just barely started Season 2, and they have fridged Paolo and Lucrezia is growing sharper and dropping chandeliers on people but still basically amazing, and Giulia is in charge of solving economic injustice while making fussy old men look ridiculous. I mean, for real, my heart is going to explode from all my feelings right now. ♥♥♥♥♥ Atrocious things will no doubt happen to everyone, because that is what happens in this show; but in my head Lucrezia and Giulia begin pulling the strings and basically rule Rome and also make out a lot, the end.
And there are other ladies, too! Vannozza is pretty fantastic, and there is complexity to be mined between her and Giulia; Vittoria is new and has had only like two eps to even be in, but she is introduced while crossdressing as a dude and then has a threesome with Giulia (and the pope, he's there too) and then saves the day with plaster cannons! And Ursula Bonadeo - I can only wonder what the fandom's reaction was, I haven't looked for any comms or anything, but I love that she stuck to her guns and became a nun despite Cesare's best efforts, like, yeah, she's super in love with him, but she's still going to do what she thinks is right, dammit. \o/ Given all the awful shit that happens, I can't precisely rec the show, because ... well, I don't precisely enjoy it; I have to do some skipping around to get through most of the episodes without bursting into tears. And of course everything is coated with historical racism and sexism. But! If you are able to bypass or handle the triggery content, it's not a bad way to spend a few hours, particularly if you are into this recent explosion of ~edgy historical drama shows.
I also bought the e-book of Libba Bray's novel A Great and Terrible Beauty, and, uh, the only word in there that expresses how I feel so far is "terrible". D:
Let's start with the minor stuff: in a very subjective way, the writing style just isn't my thing. There are a lot of short sentences, which obvs. is not something that appeals to me, partly because it tends to make things feel choppy to my mind; and there's not very much about how Gemma is feeling, or what she's thinking, even though it's in first person. I mean, every now and then she reacts to things, sure, but - I don't know. Take this:
"It was my mother's," I say. Everyone is looking at me, waiting. Finally, I bow to the silent pressure and hand over the necklace.
I know about show-don't-tell, okay, but this just feels so flat to me. It says Gemma feels some pressure, evidently, but what kind? To what extent? Does she fidget as everyone stares at her, or does she hold defiantly still, a little angry at them even for asking? Does she look back at them, or is she looking at the ground, embarrassed? It's like she's just reporting the actions - I said stuff; everybody looked at me; I gave in and handed over the necklace. Like, why even put the thing in first person if you aren't going to use that POV to make me feel anything? This could swap to limited third ("It was my mother's," she says. Everyone is looking at her, waiting. Finally, she bows to the silent pressure and hands over the necklace.) and you'd hardly have to change a thing. IDEK, I don't find it engaging.
And, much much more importantly, it's faily. I would be way more willing to slog through a writing style I didn't care for if the content were excellent, but I am not finding that to be the case. I mean, some things, I might be able to characterize as legit intentional ignorance - would a British girl during the time period mistakenly term a language spoken by Rroma/Walking People "Romanian"? Quite possibly. But there's allowing your characters to be ignorant and there's allowing your narrative to be ignorant, and I'm not sure Bray manages to find the line, particularly when she's discussing India or portraying characters who are not white. A cursory Google suggests to me that Gemma's "hot dry plains" are more in Bray's head than they are in the (hilly) area around Mumbai, and I am cringing at the idea that Kartik's brother died/was consumed to save Gemma's lovely white mother the ~indignity of getting killed by the dark cloud, cringing at the specter of Kartik doing the same for Gemma. (I am somewhat spoiled for the third book; now and then I go on sprees and read all the one-star reviews on Goodreads that I can find.) If this shit were happening in a deliberate attempt to mimic books like The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, that ... wouldn't be a good thing, precisely, but at least it would be knowingly done - at least the author would be consciously portraying the main characters as racist. But so far it seems mostly like she just didn't think about it much, if at all. Blegh.
Also, finally and belatedly signed up for Pottermore. Mostly it's filling me with a sort of nostalgic fondness; I care about JKR's character notes insofar as they are historical documents, background on what she had in her head while she wrote. I mean, I'm sure there are people who consider them canon - we're going to end up with a canonicity system like the one they use for the Star Wars Holocron, if we don't have one already - but there's probably plenty of people who are going to ignore them, too. I suspect I will continue to pick and choose as I always have. The big question on my mind is less how much will be revealed re: Doris Crockford's shady past, and more how the hell I ended up in Gryffindor.
