books, movies, stuff
Jul. 20th, 2012 11:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aamcnamaraHey! I'm back from London!
Have a massive media report:
The Hunger Games (movie): Does a better job than the book in showing how, exactly, Katniss becomes an unwitting figurehead for revolution. Good on them! I agree with--who was it, Keffy?--whoever was talking about how it's skeevy that the Hard-Working Virtuous District 12 people are all wearing distinctly gendered clothes and the Decadent Immoral Capitol people have the gender-blurry-ness.
The Muppet Movie (the new one): This is a weird case in which the advertising for this movie was way better than the movie itself, but the advertising was so good that this left a lot of room at the lower end, and the movie was fairly average. Some good jokes, a number of bad ones, a whole lot of implausible stuff (some lampshaded and some not). I am side-eyeing the persistent characterization of the Moopets (they're evil! and "trailer trash"! and willing to screw over the Muppets to make a profit! and all darker colors than the Muppets!). Uh. Overall, fine, I guess? I'm glad I waited to watch this until I could do so for free when I had nothing better to do.
Thor (movie, the one that's an Avengers prequel, no I haven't seen Avengers): Now this is a movie I would never ever have watched if it were not free on an airplane. Fairly entertaining fluff superhero movie. I was into the part where the human protagonist was a female scientist; obviously she hooks up with Thor (gah, heteronormativity!), but in the meantime she's awesome and science-y. Also? I think I have kind of always wanted to be Loki.
Reflections, Diana Wynne Jones' essay collection: Read this. No, seriously, read it. I read it all the way through in one go, which may not be the ideal way to read it--there are some anecdotes that get repeated several times--but oh, man. Like getting hit over the head with the Awesome stick. Writers talk a lot about Craft and Getting It To Work but they rarely talk about Getting The Ideas To Work. DWJ talks about ideas. She talks about how ideas interact, narrative balance and weight displaying ideas, how various folk tales and fairy-stories and ballads contributed to the narrative and shape of Fire and Hemlock…a wonderful and badly needed counterpoint to a lot of what's been going on lately in my head.
The Dragonfly Pool, Ibbotson: Not my favorite of hers. This one has a lot of similarities to Journey to the River Sea, which I adore, probably because this is also a non-magical Eva Ibbotson book for children. Like some of the non-fantasy Eva Ibbotson books for teens, this book is set in World War II--except the nasty British aristocratic family is just as much a villain of the piece as Hitler. Slight whiplash because it's all Spunky Kids Have Adventures but also Nazis Take Over Small Fictional European Country and…at a certain point I am just confused. But she does quiet whimsy very well.
How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe, Yu: If you start reading this book, you know pretty much what you are going to get: a metafictional novel about science fiction, growing up and changing relationships with your parents, time travel/time in general, etc. And it is a pretty good metafictional etc., etc. But I am not sure what more I can say, because for the people who like this sort of thing, it is exactly the sort of thing they would like, and I feel like this is a very particular sort of thing.
The Alchemy of Stone, Sedia:I wanted lesbian automaton Slightly less biased response: excellent world built up here. Alchemists v. machinists in a steampunk city! Also, gargoyles and automatons and miners, who are all oppressed/dehumanized in various ways. I quite liked this book, and I would have liked it better if I had seen more signaling for the twist at the end--but you can't have everything. In any event I am glad I have this. It's not the sort of thing I will probably reread, but I'm glad I got around to reading it in the first place.
Rosemary and Rue, McGuire: Urban fantasy, shenanigans, etc. The sort of book that gets less complicated as it goes on, which is not my favorite kind of book.
Once a Princess, Sherwood Smith: I have complicated feelings! I read Crown Duel when I was a kid and imprinted heavily on it, so seeing the world of Sartorias-Deles through the eyes of portal-fantasy-from-modern-times kind of weirded me out. At the same time, if I had found this as a kid, it's quite possible I would have loooooved the idea of getting to actually go there (although the romance stuff would have bored me to tears, but that happens a lot). But I am curious to see where this goes and I will probably read the second book. So.
Superior Saturday, Nix: I stopped reading these with Lady Friday so now I am going back and reading the end of the series. Fun, fairly slight. I find it more difficult to sympathize with Arthur now that he's like seven feet tall and has random urges to oppress people and doesn't have asthma any more, but--most of the time he's still just a kid, and Suzy Turquoise Blue continues to be awesome, so there are upsides. For the sake of completeness I probably would read Lord Sunday no matter what, but I am curious to see how Nix wrapped it all up.
Chime, Billingsley: Okay! So here is a book that I heard a reading from at WisCon and went "oh, well, eh, looks fine" and picked it up at random on the strength of that, and then I read it, and turns out it gets more complicated and awesome as it goes on! I described it yesterday as YA Victorian fantasy set in a swamp, which is true; it's not quite steampunk, I don't think, or maybe just on the edges of it--on the edges of industrialism, certainly.
The Game of Triumphs, Powell:Hey I can visualize settings of books set in London now A liiittle bit too much coincidence in the plot setup for me, but an interesting magic system. I think I saw a second book of this when I was at the library--I might well grab it next time I'm there.
Homestuck: Okay so--I have lots of thoughts and feelings and opinions about this. I knew it was awesome for a good long while because a ton of my friends said so, I didn't read it for a long time, then I read through the entirety of the archives over the past week. (I am addicted to narrative.)
The thing about Homestuck is that it starts out slowly. Like, really slowly. You get a few hundred pages of "four random kids who are kind of caricatures playing a video game!" and then eventually you get a bunch of other characters who are trolls showing up in their chatlogs for a few more hundred pages...and eventually you figure out what their deal is, and you get lots of time-travel screwiness, and paradox clones, and video games creating universes, and alternate selves (dream selves! future selves! past selves! selves from doomed timelines!), and trying to save the universe from a transdimensional demon and also a basically-unbeatable villain they helped create...
Partly I think this comes from the format: webcomics generally start out slowly and add in more complexity as they go along--Homestuck has a kind of modular plot, if you squint you can see where more stuff could have been hooked on or left out--because webcomics are not generally written and drawn out entirely ahead of time and then revised and then eventually presented to the public the way that fiction is. Webcomics start, and then if people are interested then they keep going, and get more complicated.
Which I have been thinking about because with Whisper-Trail, I've gotten 15,000 words in and realized that I don't have enough plot to fill up a whole book--so I have put a whole bunch of notecards up in my room, and figured out scenes I want to go back and add to the beginning so that there are more threads of plot going along through the whole thing, and etc., etc. But with a webcomic, you can't do that. You just keep going along, and maybe you can go back and insert some incidents (especially if you have time travel involved, cough) but you can't really change what you've already done.
...which in turn made me think of Cat Valente's post about GHOSTPIGS MOTHERFUCKERS. Wanting people to start with the GHOSTPIG is totally legitimate in fiction, but not so much with webcomics. When you want to read an awesome webcomic, do you go scroll through first pages of webcomics until you find one that grabs you right away with the ghostpigs? Well--no. Probably your friend messages you and goes "You've gotta read this webcomic! It has GHOSTPIGS!" And then even if you have to read through some pages of other stuff first, you eventually get to the ghostpigs and you go "Oh wow, yeah, ghostpigs!" And then you make fanart and write fic and dress up as the ghostpigs.
And I'm wondering if we'll start to see more fandom-driven fiction in this evolving fiction marketplace--that is, if some self-published author will get a word-of-mouth fandom, maybe posting chapter-by-chapter, and through that, fuel market for more books, et cetera et cetera. Yes, this is basically how best-sellers work, but I don't think I've seen any that come up specifically through fandom activity. (Whereas webcomics pretty much only become popular through fandom.) And what will that mean for all those classes and workshops and blog posts giving advice about How To Craft Fiction?
At any rate, Homestuck is a fun read, and I will probably keep up with it. It's also using a whole bunch of cool technology things, like having little animations in addition to the still-image panels, and also longer flash animations with music and little games where you pick stuff up/solve puzzles/kill monsters and so on. Serious tw:flashing, though, seriously. So many flashing animations!
Have a massive media report:
The Hunger Games (movie): Does a better job than the book in showing how, exactly, Katniss becomes an unwitting figurehead for revolution. Good on them! I agree with--who was it, Keffy?--whoever was talking about how it's skeevy that the Hard-Working Virtuous District 12 people are all wearing distinctly gendered clothes and the Decadent Immoral Capitol people have the gender-blurry-ness.
The Muppet Movie (the new one): This is a weird case in which the advertising for this movie was way better than the movie itself, but the advertising was so good that this left a lot of room at the lower end, and the movie was fairly average. Some good jokes, a number of bad ones, a whole lot of implausible stuff (some lampshaded and some not). I am side-eyeing the persistent characterization of the Moopets (they're evil! and "trailer trash"! and willing to screw over the Muppets to make a profit! and all darker colors than the Muppets!). Uh. Overall, fine, I guess? I'm glad I waited to watch this until I could do so for free when I had nothing better to do.
Thor (movie, the one that's an Avengers prequel, no I haven't seen Avengers): Now this is a movie I would never ever have watched if it were not free on an airplane. Fairly entertaining fluff superhero movie. I was into the part where the human protagonist was a female scientist; obviously she hooks up with Thor (gah, heteronormativity!), but in the meantime she's awesome and science-y. Also? I think I have kind of always wanted to be Loki.
Reflections, Diana Wynne Jones' essay collection: Read this. No, seriously, read it. I read it all the way through in one go, which may not be the ideal way to read it--there are some anecdotes that get repeated several times--but oh, man. Like getting hit over the head with the Awesome stick. Writers talk a lot about Craft and Getting It To Work but they rarely talk about Getting The Ideas To Work. DWJ talks about ideas. She talks about how ideas interact, narrative balance and weight displaying ideas, how various folk tales and fairy-stories and ballads contributed to the narrative and shape of Fire and Hemlock…a wonderful and badly needed counterpoint to a lot of what's been going on lately in my head.
The Dragonfly Pool, Ibbotson: Not my favorite of hers. This one has a lot of similarities to Journey to the River Sea, which I adore, probably because this is also a non-magical Eva Ibbotson book for children. Like some of the non-fantasy Eva Ibbotson books for teens, this book is set in World War II--except the nasty British aristocratic family is just as much a villain of the piece as Hitler. Slight whiplash because it's all Spunky Kids Have Adventures but also Nazis Take Over Small Fictional European Country and…at a certain point I am just confused. But she does quiet whimsy very well.
How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe, Yu: If you start reading this book, you know pretty much what you are going to get: a metafictional novel about science fiction, growing up and changing relationships with your parents, time travel/time in general, etc. And it is a pretty good metafictional etc., etc. But I am not sure what more I can say, because for the people who like this sort of thing, it is exactly the sort of thing they would like, and I feel like this is a very particular sort of thing.
The Alchemy of Stone, Sedia:
Rosemary and Rue, McGuire: Urban fantasy, shenanigans, etc. The sort of book that gets less complicated as it goes on, which is not my favorite kind of book.
Once a Princess, Sherwood Smith: I have complicated feelings! I read Crown Duel when I was a kid and imprinted heavily on it, so seeing the world of Sartorias-Deles through the eyes of portal-fantasy-from-modern-times kind of weirded me out. At the same time, if I had found this as a kid, it's quite possible I would have loooooved the idea of getting to actually go there (although the romance stuff would have bored me to tears, but that happens a lot). But I am curious to see where this goes and I will probably read the second book. So.
Superior Saturday, Nix: I stopped reading these with Lady Friday so now I am going back and reading the end of the series. Fun, fairly slight. I find it more difficult to sympathize with Arthur now that he's like seven feet tall and has random urges to oppress people and doesn't have asthma any more, but--most of the time he's still just a kid, and Suzy Turquoise Blue continues to be awesome, so there are upsides. For the sake of completeness I probably would read Lord Sunday no matter what, but I am curious to see how Nix wrapped it all up.
Chime, Billingsley: Okay! So here is a book that I heard a reading from at WisCon and went "oh, well, eh, looks fine" and picked it up at random on the strength of that, and then I read it, and turns out it gets more complicated and awesome as it goes on! I described it yesterday as YA Victorian fantasy set in a swamp, which is true; it's not quite steampunk, I don't think, or maybe just on the edges of it--on the edges of industrialism, certainly.
The Game of Triumphs, Powell:
Homestuck: Okay so--I have lots of thoughts and feelings and opinions about this. I knew it was awesome for a good long while because a ton of my friends said so, I didn't read it for a long time, then I read through the entirety of the archives over the past week. (I am addicted to narrative.)
The thing about Homestuck is that it starts out slowly. Like, really slowly. You get a few hundred pages of "four random kids who are kind of caricatures playing a video game!" and then eventually you get a bunch of other characters who are trolls showing up in their chatlogs for a few more hundred pages...and eventually you figure out what their deal is, and you get lots of time-travel screwiness, and paradox clones, and video games creating universes, and alternate selves (dream selves! future selves! past selves! selves from doomed timelines!), and trying to save the universe from a transdimensional demon and also a basically-unbeatable villain they helped create...
Partly I think this comes from the format: webcomics generally start out slowly and add in more complexity as they go along--Homestuck has a kind of modular plot, if you squint you can see where more stuff could have been hooked on or left out--because webcomics are not generally written and drawn out entirely ahead of time and then revised and then eventually presented to the public the way that fiction is. Webcomics start, and then if people are interested then they keep going, and get more complicated.
Which I have been thinking about because with Whisper-Trail, I've gotten 15,000 words in and realized that I don't have enough plot to fill up a whole book--so I have put a whole bunch of notecards up in my room, and figured out scenes I want to go back and add to the beginning so that there are more threads of plot going along through the whole thing, and etc., etc. But with a webcomic, you can't do that. You just keep going along, and maybe you can go back and insert some incidents (especially if you have time travel involved, cough) but you can't really change what you've already done.
...which in turn made me think of Cat Valente's post about GHOSTPIGS MOTHERFUCKERS. Wanting people to start with the GHOSTPIG is totally legitimate in fiction, but not so much with webcomics. When you want to read an awesome webcomic, do you go scroll through first pages of webcomics until you find one that grabs you right away with the ghostpigs? Well--no. Probably your friend messages you and goes "You've gotta read this webcomic! It has GHOSTPIGS!" And then even if you have to read through some pages of other stuff first, you eventually get to the ghostpigs and you go "Oh wow, yeah, ghostpigs!" And then you make fanart and write fic and dress up as the ghostpigs.
And I'm wondering if we'll start to see more fandom-driven fiction in this evolving fiction marketplace--that is, if some self-published author will get a word-of-mouth fandom, maybe posting chapter-by-chapter, and through that, fuel market for more books, et cetera et cetera. Yes, this is basically how best-sellers work, but I don't think I've seen any that come up specifically through fandom activity. (Whereas webcomics pretty much only become popular through fandom.) And what will that mean for all those classes and workshops and blog posts giving advice about How To Craft Fiction?
At any rate, Homestuck is a fun read, and I will probably keep up with it. It's also using a whole bunch of cool technology things, like having little animations in addition to the still-image panels, and also longer flash animations with music and little games where you pick stuff up/solve puzzles/kill monsters and so on. Serious tw:flashing, though, seriously. So many flashing animations!