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some number of things make a post
1) So to make a long and boring story short, on Thursday and Friday I thought I had medication side effects and on Saturday it became obvious that I had a cold and as it turns out being sick sucks and is boring. It was the first time in a while that I got the crushing fatigue aspect of being sick, which was frustrating and ruined my fun weekend plans (did not see Pacific Rim AND did not get to play board games), but I am sufficiently over it now to be going back to work. Partly from sheer boredom.
2) Thanks to the above I have listened to the first 11 or 12 episodes of Welcome to Night Vale, and it's... odd. I mean, obviously the podcast itself is deliberately and performatively odd, but also my reaction to it. I will probably like it better if I go and read a lot of fic and get really invested in Cecil and Carlos, but on the strength of the thing itself it's just falling into the nonplussed area in my brain where absurd humor goes, because I keep trying to make it make sense, and it strenuously resists sense-making.
I mean, I can't build an interior model of Cecil. I can't see how his mind works, or how anyone's mind works in Night Vale. It doesn't make sense. It also doesn't have any embarrassment squick to it, unlike a lot of the humor that makes me cringe, so instead it just... baffles me, on whatever level. I keep listening to it like maybe this time I will understand. But probably what I should do is stop now and go read fic. Please feel free to tell me which fic I should go read.
3) Then I was seized by a fit of longing for Castle, which, not-coincidentally, I got hooked on while stuck home with the flu for most of a week. That's a good show and I like it and it makes me happy, you guys. The ladies have shiny hair and generally don't die! People are generally not revealed to have suffered mind-numbing levels of trauma for stupid reasons!
So then I started trying to figure out how to do a Teen Wolf Castle AU, and my brain locked up on which way to cast it: Stiles the goofy mystery writer and his grumpy detective muse Derek, or Derek the grumpy serious mystery writer and Stiles his (seemingly) happy-go-lucky muse. Either way, Allison is in Espo's place as the Army veteran sniper detective, which makes me incredibly happy.
4) So then I did the logical thing and finally started watching Elementary. THIS IS ALSO A GOOD SHOW WHICH MAKES ME HAPPY. I am three episodes in and ♥ ♥ ♥
But I do suspect that, like Castle, it's going to be a show where I get what I want from the show and I can just sit and watch it and feel happy because, look! Joan and Sherlock being Joan and Sherlock! Look at how much Jeff Davis is not in charge of this show! This pleases me. ♥
5) So yeah, last night's Teen Wolf. It was actually... pretty good? Like, a good episode of Teen Wolf, not breaking the curve or anything, but after the last several weeks that was really confusing and I'm not sure what to do with it.
So I had not been following speculation about any of this stuff and apparently fandom called a lot of it, good work fandom!
a) THE SHERIFF FINDING OUT. Not believing Stiles's explanation (OH STILES, OH MY GOD ALL OF THE FEELS) and then seeing Scott! And the Darach! and then TOTALLY NOT DYING AND COMING BACK SAFE AND SOUND AND NOW EQUIPPED WITH ALL THE KNOWLEDGE SO HE CAN BE AWESOME IN SEASON 3B. Seriously, he's not allowed to die. I feel like the show understands that that is a hard limit.
I am assured of this.
b) LYDIA IS A BANSHEE! Oh my God they just retroactively redeemed EVERY horror-movie scream from Lydia and explained everything that was going on with her! Or, uh, a bunch of it. Ooh, can she raise other dead people than Peter? I would enjoy that. START WITH ERICA AND BOYD, LYDIA.
c) JENNIFER IS THE DARACH! Okay so we knew from the second she and Derek hooked up that she was going to die or turn out to be evil or both, right? There was no narrative logic to "Jennifer is a nice lady and she and Derek live happily ever after and go on ski trips and talk about books and have the cutest babies." So given that, I really prefer the choice where she is (so far) alive and has her own agency.
And I like this variety of evil--I like that she has a plan, and it's not even, like, a totally evil-for-the-sake-of-evil plan. The alphas are bastards! They killed her! They killed a lot of people! They should be stopped! Sacrificing 12-15 innocent (okay, and Harris) people to make yourself a super-powered werewolf killer is an evil way to go about that, but on the villainous sociopathy scale of this show I'd have to say she comes in well to the sane side of Gerard, Kate, and Matt. She and Peter could maybe arm-wrestle. Sacrificing innocent people for the sake of the greater good is a legit moral quandary that reasonable people can actually have and I'm not saying she's RIGHT or anything, but at least there's a coherent argument to be made for her actions.
And regardless of the absolute evil of her actions and plans, Jennifer's evil plan doesn't really have anything to do with Derek. If it turns out she's Paige then he plays a role in her supervillain origin story, but that's all; she isn't honeytrapping him or even using him especially to advance her goals. Her feelings for him might actually be perfectly sincere, and her enemies are his enemies. She's not what he (probably, unless I turn out to actually be right that he knew all the time that she was a hideous goopy Darach thing and just didn't care, a la the Jasmine-and-Conor reveal in Angel) thought she was, but she's not actively out to betray him. That's more than I expected from that narrative arc--both in terms of not being gratuitously constructed around more manpain for Derek and in terms of giving her independent not-dude-centered motivations--and I like it.
d) DEREK'S FACE, THOUGH. First, the scene with Jennifer: I was completely jerked out and thought Oh, that's Tyler Hoechlin when Derek looked all soft and relaxed and happy, because it was so jarringly alien to see Derek happy, which is sad and awesome. And not a bad argument for the possibility that Jennifer was using virgin sacrifice roofie powers to cloud his mind, but for a second there Derek was so happy he literally seemed to be a different person! And secondly, Derek at Cora's bedside. I don't know what the hell is going on with Cora or who she really is or etc., but DEREK HAVING FEELINGS ABOUT HIS (PUTATIVE) BABY SISTER, OKAY, YES, I'M IN.
e) Stiles's everything! The intriguing rift between Ethan and Aiden! STILES'S EVERYTHING. TEAM HUMAN FIGHTING OVER WHO FINDS THE BODIES. Scott, uh, running around being the protagonist, whatever! ALLISON AND ISAAC WEARING BLACK AND DOING SOME FUNKY POACHING. Melissa being EVERYONE'S friend on the inside. ♥ ♥ ♥
So in conclusion they will probably ruin it all next week but right now I am actually feeling all warm and fuzzy toward my show. Oh show. You got me.
2) Thanks to the above I have listened to the first 11 or 12 episodes of Welcome to Night Vale, and it's... odd. I mean, obviously the podcast itself is deliberately and performatively odd, but also my reaction to it. I will probably like it better if I go and read a lot of fic and get really invested in Cecil and Carlos, but on the strength of the thing itself it's just falling into the nonplussed area in my brain where absurd humor goes, because I keep trying to make it make sense, and it strenuously resists sense-making.
I mean, I can't build an interior model of Cecil. I can't see how his mind works, or how anyone's mind works in Night Vale. It doesn't make sense. It also doesn't have any embarrassment squick to it, unlike a lot of the humor that makes me cringe, so instead it just... baffles me, on whatever level. I keep listening to it like maybe this time I will understand. But probably what I should do is stop now and go read fic. Please feel free to tell me which fic I should go read.
3) Then I was seized by a fit of longing for Castle, which, not-coincidentally, I got hooked on while stuck home with the flu for most of a week. That's a good show and I like it and it makes me happy, you guys. The ladies have shiny hair and generally don't die! People are generally not revealed to have suffered mind-numbing levels of trauma for stupid reasons!
So then I started trying to figure out how to do a Teen Wolf Castle AU, and my brain locked up on which way to cast it: Stiles the goofy mystery writer and his grumpy detective muse Derek, or Derek the grumpy serious mystery writer and Stiles his (seemingly) happy-go-lucky muse. Either way, Allison is in Espo's place as the Army veteran sniper detective, which makes me incredibly happy.
4) So then I did the logical thing and finally started watching Elementary. THIS IS ALSO A GOOD SHOW WHICH MAKES ME HAPPY. I am three episodes in and ♥ ♥ ♥
But I do suspect that, like Castle, it's going to be a show where I get what I want from the show and I can just sit and watch it and feel happy because, look! Joan and Sherlock being Joan and Sherlock! Look at how much Jeff Davis is not in charge of this show! This pleases me. ♥
5) So yeah, last night's Teen Wolf. It was actually... pretty good? Like, a good episode of Teen Wolf, not breaking the curve or anything, but after the last several weeks that was really confusing and I'm not sure what to do with it.
So I had not been following speculation about any of this stuff and apparently fandom called a lot of it, good work fandom!
a) THE SHERIFF FINDING OUT. Not believing Stiles's explanation (OH STILES, OH MY GOD ALL OF THE FEELS) and then seeing Scott! And the Darach! and then TOTALLY NOT DYING AND COMING BACK SAFE AND SOUND AND NOW EQUIPPED WITH ALL THE KNOWLEDGE SO HE CAN BE AWESOME IN SEASON 3B. Seriously, he's not allowed to die. I feel like the show understands that that is a hard limit.
I am assured of this.
b) LYDIA IS A BANSHEE! Oh my God they just retroactively redeemed EVERY horror-movie scream from Lydia and explained everything that was going on with her! Or, uh, a bunch of it. Ooh, can she raise other dead people than Peter? I would enjoy that. START WITH ERICA AND BOYD, LYDIA.
c) JENNIFER IS THE DARACH! Okay so we knew from the second she and Derek hooked up that she was going to die or turn out to be evil or both, right? There was no narrative logic to "Jennifer is a nice lady and she and Derek live happily ever after and go on ski trips and talk about books and have the cutest babies." So given that, I really prefer the choice where she is (so far) alive and has her own agency.
And I like this variety of evil--I like that she has a plan, and it's not even, like, a totally evil-for-the-sake-of-evil plan. The alphas are bastards! They killed her! They killed a lot of people! They should be stopped! Sacrificing 12-15 innocent (okay, and Harris) people to make yourself a super-powered werewolf killer is an evil way to go about that, but on the villainous sociopathy scale of this show I'd have to say she comes in well to the sane side of Gerard, Kate, and Matt. She and Peter could maybe arm-wrestle. Sacrificing innocent people for the sake of the greater good is a legit moral quandary that reasonable people can actually have and I'm not saying she's RIGHT or anything, but at least there's a coherent argument to be made for her actions.
And regardless of the absolute evil of her actions and plans, Jennifer's evil plan doesn't really have anything to do with Derek. If it turns out she's Paige then he plays a role in her supervillain origin story, but that's all; she isn't honeytrapping him or even using him especially to advance her goals. Her feelings for him might actually be perfectly sincere, and her enemies are his enemies. She's not what he (probably, unless I turn out to actually be right that he knew all the time that she was a hideous goopy Darach thing and just didn't care, a la the Jasmine-and-Conor reveal in Angel) thought she was, but she's not actively out to betray him. That's more than I expected from that narrative arc--both in terms of not being gratuitously constructed around more manpain for Derek and in terms of giving her independent not-dude-centered motivations--and I like it.
d) DEREK'S FACE, THOUGH. First, the scene with Jennifer: I was completely jerked out and thought Oh, that's Tyler Hoechlin when Derek looked all soft and relaxed and happy, because it was so jarringly alien to see Derek happy, which is sad and awesome. And not a bad argument for the possibility that Jennifer was using virgin sacrifice roofie powers to cloud his mind, but for a second there Derek was so happy he literally seemed to be a different person! And secondly, Derek at Cora's bedside. I don't know what the hell is going on with Cora or who she really is or etc., but DEREK HAVING FEELINGS ABOUT HIS (PUTATIVE) BABY SISTER, OKAY, YES, I'M IN.
e) Stiles's everything! The intriguing rift between Ethan and Aiden! STILES'S EVERYTHING. TEAM HUMAN FIGHTING OVER WHO FINDS THE BODIES. Scott, uh, running around being the protagonist, whatever! ALLISON AND ISAAC WEARING BLACK AND DOING SOME FUNKY POACHING. Melissa being EVERYONE'S friend on the inside. ♥ ♥ ♥
So in conclusion they will probably ruin it all next week but right now I am actually feeling all warm and fuzzy toward my show. Oh show. You got me.
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and Elementary FTW :)
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And omg Elementary! I just watched the one where Sherlock gets kidnapped. SO MANY FEELINGS ABOUT SHERLOCK'S FEELINGS. <3_______<3
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I will say that episode 13 explained a few of my questions about the economics and demographics of the town (in particular, what (some) people do for money and how the town replaces its population.) I still haven't figured out how large Night Vale is or how it interacts with the rest of the world, or what its economy is like.
The part about the size of the town is still bugging me, though. Seriously, what does 'town' or 'small' town mean in this context? Obviously large enough to have an elementary school and a high school (with a football team).
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FWIW, though, I grew up in what I would generally characterize as a small town, but it had a population of ten thousand, a high school with a football stadium, a middle school, and three or four elementary schools.
Fic Rec
http://archiveofourown.org/works/774987
You probably have found this already. But you recc'd the first one on your blog months ago, and I've been grateful ever since then. I would also respectfully suggest that there's a lot of merit in posting chapter-by-chapter, and this format might be very well suited to... say, wolf-verse stories??
*bats eyes innocently*
Re: Fic Rec
And, well, I don't post WIPs, but I do serialize completed stories over 100,000 words, so I expect I will be posting the next wolf-verse story chapter by chapter over the course of about a week. :)
Re: Fic Rec
Re: Fic Rec
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I can only hope that TPTB can see themselves being trampled by a huge mob of angry fangirls if they harm the Sheriff, and only beat him up a little.
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And, yeah. Seriously the sheriff had better be okay, no other outcome is even remotely acceptable.
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I love Welcome to Night Vale, but I've somehow managed to accept that Night Vale just doesn't have a ton of hard internal logic and go with it. That actually might make it better for me, since I'm such a wuss about horror that if it actually made sense, it might freak me out. Instead, I just find it--hmm, charming is maybe not *quite* the right word, but it's in the ballpark (in the dog park??).
Re: Teen Wolf, I just finished the one where Stiles gets in a car accident and switches universes, and combining that with the main other long TW story I can recall really, really liking (the one where Stiles is a cop and Derek is a slave) I have LEARNED A THING, which is that apparently I like Derek/Stiles when Stiles is super-competent and Derek is a helpless woobie. WHY IS THERE NO COMMON AND SEARCHABLE TAG FOR THIS? I am too scared of the 63498231 AO3 stories to just wade in.
VVC SOON!
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Hmmm. There's another one where Derek is a slave but I actually kind of got bored and wandered off in the middle of it because it was all about respecting Derek as a person and working to free enslaved werewolves and not, you know, the interesting slavefic dynamics. That was frustrating. *g*
VVC SO SOOOOOOOON. :D :D :D
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Someone said on tumblr that Scott seems to be in a completely different genre show than the rest of the cast, which I think just might explain why he is sometimes just bizarre as a main character.
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But do I understand you hadn't watched Elementary before now? Wow! For some reason I thought you had.
And: have you watched Orange is the New Black yet? Inquiring minds want to know!
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Strangely, I had not watched Elementary until this week! It had definitely been on my little list of Things To Watch Next, and I'd seen an awful lot of GIFs, but I am just now experiencing the wonderfulness of the show. And in about four hours I'll be introducing Iulia to it as well! :D
I haven't seen Orange Is the New Black! It set off my deeply embarrassing instinctive "But I don't wanna watch a show about girls" reaction. /o\ Also I am busy catching up on Welcome to Night Vale and Elementary and oh God I have to stop watching new things when I still haven't finished with the wolf-verse. But I feel like I ought to be watching OItNB, because I've heard only excellent things about it.
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Dooooo check out OITNB. I would be happy to show you in person... ;) I like it SO much. I think maybe getting into it without the expectation that it's a fannish thing will help with the "show about girls" thing. At least it did for me—by the time I realized I was watching something very unlike my normal male-centric, fannish-oriented show, I was already hooked. It does strike me as right up your alley, in the "fuck you, she's awesome" vein, for what that's worth. It's a show made up of 98% women, chock full of characters of color, and it's about women's stories—it passes the Bechdel test in nearly every scene. Just sayin'. *g*
I've tried with Night Vale. It makes me laugh, but I just don't—get it. I guess the "it makes me laugh" reaction isn't enough for me to want to continue? I do think it's quite clever though.