nor so wide as a church door

Well, first things first: I CAN HAS JOB. (That is, verbatim, how I relayed the news to my sister.) A few days of waiting around, flopping back and forth between "... it could happen?" and "Oh, forget it, you're going to be weeding for the rest of your life," and then suddenly there was a phone call. Well, more accurately, there was a phone call to my house while I was not there, and then to the cell that I had left on the table when I went away from the house, which meant that in the end, I had to call the guy back to get the news.

Clearly the job was my reward for buckling down and dialing without pausing to throw up first. :D

So now I may very well spend at least the next few years getting paid to do things I'm pretty sure I already love to do. I start on July 12th. \o/! There's still a part of me that's staring down at my phone and thinking, "... what just happened."

In more fannish news, I can't help but be pleased as punch that the A:TLA movie is getting bad reviews. I mean, I'm pretty sure most of them are because there was some pretty severe Adaptation Decay, but it's still sort of cruelly satisfying. I love A:TLA a truly unreasonable amount, despite how much the dialogue sometimes hurts me, and having a movie that was so ... I don't even know what - disrespectful? in a racist way? - do well would be horribly ragemaking. Please keep being bad, reviews.

Also on an A:TLA note, I finally saw the finale! I will have to do some rewatching - I skipped a few filler episodes (like Ember Island Players, for example) because, quite frankly, I am a terrible and impatient person and I really really wanted to see the end. I don't have many deep thoughts, and it's been a while since the thing aired, but, idk, just in case: ( spoiler cut! ) Point is, I liked it, despite the continued anviltastic qualities of the dialogue, and I am still incredibly overinvested in it. Good thing I have my ladiesbigbang fic to keep me occupied. My sister and I mapped troop movements the other day, it was very exciting. :D

And, of course, I read tfv's post on Twilight fans. Okay, yes, I have problems with Twilight, some bigger than others, but I'm not exactly in a great position to tell people it's not okay to love problematic source. Despite their various issues, I am still enormously in love with Harry Dresden; with Buffy; with Firefly; with ST:TNG. Fandom means a pretty ridonkulous amount to me, and when it comes down to it, I can't begrudge anybody the opportunity to fall in love with a source. (Although I still think offering RPattz your bleeding neck is probably a bad idea.)

The blush of new fandom love continues, but, as always, that meta-issues portion of my brain is ticking away. The list of Cliché Bingo prompts that I saved is so, so useful for unloading fic bunnies that would otherwise clog up my mind, and, bonus, it makes me think about things.

For example: ( Avatar: TLA and its parade of Dead Moms. )

I love Katara and Suki, and I absolutely adore Toph; but it seems pretty obvious that once you look past the main set of characters, the women tend to get the short end of the stick. The way things look at the start of the series, it seems like Azula is likely to become ... uh, a Fire Lady regnant, I guess; and, IIRC, nobody in-universe indicates that this situation is unusual. I was pleased, and surprised, and expecting to find that this had happened before. But when I was noodling around on the A:TLA wiki, trying to put together a series-wide AU for the genderswap prompt, it was all Fire Lord this, Fire Lord that, and, oh, yeah, they were married to somebody whose article is a stub/doesn't exist. The swap gave me four generations of Fire Ladies and female generals, and ... a couple dudes they were married to who didn't do much.

Granted, the Kyoshi Warriors are awesome, and make me very happy; Kyoshi in general makes me very happy, too, and so does Yangchen. But I still kind of wish Azula had been named for her grandmother, the iron-fisted Fire Lady who commissioned the Great Gates of Azula, you know? Sigh.

And then, of course, the impending movie makes me kind of ill. That is just not what Katara looks like, and that is not Sokka, never mind totally unsmiling white!Aang; Dev Patel, on the other hand, would be a ridiculously great Sokka, so why he's playing Zuko is beyond me. I'm sure Nicola Peltz and Noah Ringer are decent actors, and I bet Jackson Rathbone is happy to be playing someone who gets to have actual facial expressions; but if there's any movie that fandom absolutely should not have to do an ideal chromatic recast for, it's TLA. (People like this absolutely boggle my mind. When you are unironically echoing character!Stephen Colbert, you need to take a good hard look at yourself. And that's one of the least obnoxious F!Secrets on the topic.)