cahn

Animated movie of Babylon 5 with many of the old actors who are still alive. I think my verdict is: I am glad we have this movie; I don't think it's a good place to start watching B5; I liked it a lot; a few parts dragged and a few parts I really loved.

-I liked most of the new voice actors who were brought in to replace those who aren't still alive. G'Kar's was particularly great, and I really liked Sinclair's too. Delenn's was the exception -- I felt like she was never able to quite pull it off.

-I felt like a lot of the humans didn't look very much like their live-version selves, specifically because their faces were drawn as elongated from what they actually were in real life. I felt like this was most pronounced for Lochley, who has what I would call a reasonably square-shaped face that became quite elongated in animation, and I would never have recognized her had it not been that I had the subtitles on. I also didn't really recognize Sheridan, which annoyed me, but there's a specific reason there: Bruce Boxleitner reminds me of someone I knew who died not long before I started watching B5, and I suppose it would have been hard to make a drawing that wasn't considerably more detailed that reminded me of this person.

-Something I was surprised about is that the movie doesn't make any move towards dealing with any of the complexities that were left behind by the series. (LENNIER, AHEM.) It clearly did not want to get into that; it just wanted to be its own thing, and possibly spawn more stories. Which is great! I wanted some more complexity, but I can see how at this point, the former made more sense.

( The rest of my thoughts are spoilers. )

-Also!! This movie is eligible for Yuletide, isn't it?? Yeah! ALL THE ALT UNIVERSE FIC, I WANT IT

So, I just finished S4 of B5 and started S5, and there are lots of exciting and interesting and moving things going on, but, well, this particular rant is because it's just sort of happened that I have somehow got really intensely involved in Delenn's relationships (mostly in the sense of yelling OH DELENN NO (1) at her (and at ase and selenak when available)) and, uh, late S4 and early S5 happened and then my yelling started getting a lot more "...she just said WHAT??"

( Spoilers, I guess, for Delenn's relationships through 5x02. )

We finally watched this after many many delays (and then I was super behind on posting, so...). Some great stuff, some... weird stuff.

( Cut. )

I actually do things besides watch WoT? But I am sort of enjoying this idea of actually being more-or-less caught up on a current fandom, which is never the case, and may not be the case for a couple of weeks after this week anyway because of moving from music-planning season into music-rehearsal/performance season, wheeeeee. (Also, tangentially, after failing hard at attending virtual Worldcon last year because I was busy with RMSE, I was amused to see that Worldcon has managed to be at what I expect will be exactly the busiest week/weekend of the year for me both with Yuletide and Christmas -- I may or may not actually get to see any of the Hugos, whereas last year I was able to block off what in a normal non-GRRM-infested year would have been more than enough time to see the entire thing, sigh. I will be quite shocked if I manage to attend any panels.)

( Ep 5 )

Argh, I have been swamped lately but just to say

-we finished She-Ra S5 (and thus the entire thing) a couple of weeks ago and both E and I loooooved it, although I feel like the ending was kind of compressed and not very big on the explaining bit of worldbuilding

-still really liking crocheting though the amount of yarn we have (and the number of things in my ravelry queue, yeah, I have one of those now) is growing at an alarming rate, and also it's a good thing pulling out crochet stitches is fun because I've been doing a lot of that (lately more because I don't like the way something has been going rather than because my stitches are actively wrong or badly done, which I guess is progress?)

-I realized just this week that Easter is in a month; fortunately for me my ward does not make a big deal of Easter but I should make sure Something happens and probably make my kids make a video or something, which means I need to have a Plan by the end of this weekend, blargh (there are certainly advantages to having a music coordinator who can do music, but I have often thought they might be better served by having a music coordinator who... can plan in advance and doesn't hate coordinating, lol)

...so... I recently seem to have got over my problem with watching anything, and while this is not exactly making me into a TV/movies/opera powerhouse, at least I am watching more than the -- was it zero? Oh, no, I watched Hamilton, that was it, and that took me a month -- the almost-zero of last year after April or so. Right now it is She-Ra (2018 reboot) which I'm really liking! I've now watched S1.

This is because of ase, partially as recompense for how -- months ago -- she was all "Hey, I'm watching She-Ra and I really like it!" and then I subjected her to a really long rant about how MUCH I loved She-Ra as a child (though I didn't watch many of the cartoons, as we had music lessons on Saturday mornings) and how my mom at my insistence got me some really really large percentage of the action figures (I give my mom a hard time sometimes. But sometimes she was like, you know what, I'm going to give my child something cool and it's going to be awesome -- and it was awesome!) and they were So Great, much better than Barbie or My Little Pony, because each one had a little gimmick (She-Ra herself had the double costume, Angela had wings that would flap, Glimmer had a glow-in-the-dark wand...). Just like the He-Man toys! also the fact that each one had a little shiny different-colored rhinestone as part of her costume and so this was one of the ways I could get shinies in my life through TOYS clearly had nothing to do with it, also see here Crystal Swift Wind, which I pestered my mom for a Lot even though I already had Original Swift Wind Um. She-Ra was a big part of my child life, that's all I'm saying.

So anyway, once my weird video-antipathy started clearing up, I started watching it, and hilariously I pinged ase after watching the pilot to be like "hey, what a cool origin story they came up with!" and it turned out that apparently it's the same origin story as in the original which I have been unspoiled for for... thirty-five years?? This is what happens when I don't watch enough cartoons :P Anyway, it's still a cool origin story and props to Larry DiTillio and J. Michael Straczynski for it :D It's really well done! Just everything is well done, the character interactions are great, the stories have a good blend of character work and tension and humor, it's got a whole bunch of Tropes I like. It's a kids' show, there are topics about Not Abandoning Friends and Working Together and Stuff but they never get too overpowering.

The one thing where I was shaking my fist a little was -- you will laugh -- Castapella: I remember nothing about Castapella in the original cartoon, but I (of course) had the action figure, and she has a cool shiny rotating disk on her back! I loved that rotating disk! WHY DOESN'T CASTAPELLA HAVE A SHINY DISC ON HER BACK. Maybe it will come in a later season. (Probably they just realized it looks totally dumb. Non-80's me concedes that it does look totally dumb. I don't care!!)

All the characters are just super great. I can't tell you how cool it is to be watching something where there are so many women of all different kinds that they're just... themselves. I love them all, and how all of them are so different (and better in ensemble than apart, which is awesome), but I do have a favorite: by the time we were done with the Mermista-centric episode (1x5) I was the biggest fan of Mermista (and of course my love for her just continued to grow). (I didn't have the Mermista action figure, and looking at pictures on google I am nearly 100% sure that this was... because... her action figure didn't have a rhinestone on it, so I didn't particularly want it. Lol, my child self was so predictable. I guess much like my adult self.) She is such a snarky unimpressed delight :D Also I have a pretty large fondness for Scorpia and am really pleased whenever her low-attention-span cuddly self (but she did attend Force Captain training!) is on screen :D
( One spoiler for S1. )

It's like frothy really good candy for me -- really fun and delicious and if I watch too much of it at once I can get a little tired of it? but if I pace myself a bit it's super awesome.

The absolute best thing about it, though, is that E LIKES IT. You guys, this is the FIRST audiovisual media she has ever, in her life, asked for more of!! I mean, it's got: a) swords b) robots c) magic d) lots of fights with swords and robots and magic, so it was basically made for her. But I am soooooo excited about this mostly because I really want her to watch more TV to get more of a sense as to how social interactions and conversations and things like that work, and also to be honest because it's really cool to for the first time share a fandom with her :D (In principle she likes some books that I do, but in practice she doesn't want to talk about them, whereas she is more interested in talking about She-Ra.)

(Though we were talking about Entrapta at dinner last night and D, who has not watched any of it, objected to the names: "With a name like Entrapta she has to be evil!" Which, uh, she is not at that episode yet, so he may have spoiled it for E, who has not yet learned tropes like that. And anyway at that point I told him about Castaspella's name and he had to agree that Entrapta wasn't the worst name :) )

And when Adora raises the sword and says for the first time, "For the honor of Grayskull!" I just. I JUST.

I am having SO MANY FEELINGS about Nirvana in Fire right now. I just finished episode 27, so I'm exactly halfway through. (Don't spoil me! :) ) I took a while to ramp up but now I'm at the point where I'm sneaking ten minutes here and there whenever I can watch because it's sooooo good.

Basically, this is a complicated drama with a ton of characters and a ton of subplots all of which I think turn out to be related at the end?? The big drama is the fight for who is going to rule after the Emperor; at the beginning there is the Crown Prince but also Prince Yu, who is competent and powerful, and both are vying for the ascendancy. They both find out that the man who wins the fight for the throne will need to have Mei Changsu (henceforth MCS) on his side. MCS is the head of a powerful martial arts sect (despite not being very strong or martial-arts-oriented himself) and is a master strategist.

...so that's the beginning.

As usual, I shall now ramble on in a way that will probably make no sense if you haven't watched it:)

( Mild spoilers, nothing terrible I think )

1. So, for the first time in my life, I was faced in the 2015 Hugos with choices that follow the voting paradox. I never, in my heart, really believed in nontransitive voting preferences before; of course one likes peach pie better than blueberry, and blueberry better than apple (the example Martin Gardner gave where I first learned about this paradox), because fresh peach pie is obviously The Best Pie and better than any other pie. It would be silly to like apple pie better than peach pie. (In my opinion. D ranks them differently. But he was very sweet and made me a peach pie for my birthday. <3 And I'm not saying apple pie isn't wonderful too :) )

But: I liked No Award better than Three-Body Problem for the Hugo, 3BP better than Ancillary Sword for the Hugo, AS better than The Goblin Emperor for the Hugo... and TGE better than No Award. (Note that this does not correlate with how well I liked the book or how well I thought it was written; TGE wins easily on both those counts.) So, I dunno. I ended up voting them all under No Award, because I am a crotchety grumpy sort of person who feels The Hugos Are Not What They Used To Be And Darn Kids Get Offa My Lawn, but it was a very close thing. Probably if I'd had another day I would have switched them all above No Award, and if I'd had two more days back under.

2. I had Lots of Opinions about Fringe S5, and then sprocket noted that it was Walter fanfic, and then I got All My Opinions out about it here. (It's honestly a little uneven, because I was writing it while watching the episodes, only later going back to try to make it into a coherent whole. And... that's as good a metaphor for Fringe as any other, I think.)

Okay... so... I have finished Season 4 and I have MANY FEELINGS about it.

My principal thought is that it reminds me of writing a fic -- only it reminds me of that part of writing the fic where I'm really excited about all these ideas I'm having, because they're really awesome ideas, and they're starting to gel but they are still a little all over the place, and the characters! Right then, the characters are basically vehicles to tell the story-- they get moved hither and yon as the plot demands. Usually my beta dings all of these things (I... think maybe everyone who's ever betaed for me has dinged me on this to a certain extent, though they may have phrased it differently? but in particular hiiii sprocket, you're awesome), and they get at least slightly better.

So, yeah. I felt like a lot of Season 4 didn't get betaed. And yet it had so many great things going on! ( In which I say lots of random things about Season 4, including Denethor, the failed attempt at Padawan, the alternate Extended Seasons in my brain, and Nimoy. )

luzula asked about first fictional crushes, "assuming you've had any." (I'm going to assume "fictional" refers not only to books.)

Ahahahaha. In fact I make a new fictional crush every year or so. My first fictional crushes, I think, were Sherlock Holmes, Spock, and MacGyver. (As a kid, I tended to crush less on literary characters, because I'd more identify with them -- Will Stanton, Ged, Peter Pevensie -- than actually crush on them.) Uh, yeah: when I was a kid, I was guaranteed to fall for any character with analytical problem-solving skills, ideally with an unemotional exterior hiding a deep capacity for friendship, if not love. Nowadays I tend to go for either quiet unselfconscious competency and integrity -- Simon Illyan, Costis -- or lots of shades of moral grey (Cary Agos, Nicholas Rush, Garak). Not sure what this dichotomy says about me. (I do note that the moral-grey characters tend to be from TV and movies, whereas in books I'm almost always drawn to the competent ones. It's hard to do moral-grey in books in a way that makes me fall for the character. I do crush on TV/movie competent characters as well, though!)

MacGyver was clearly the biggest crush. (And Murdoc, the assassin who is obsessed with MacGyver. Yup, I had a crush on him too, although not the same kind -- I mean, MacGyver was the kind of guy you'd want to date, and Murdoc was, well, not.) I can't believe I am admitting this in public... somewhere between elementary and high school, I wrote -- years before I had ever heard the term "fanfiction" -- an angsty MacGyver epic that was many thousands of words long (twenty thousand? forty thousand? It was Many Double-Spaced Pages, that's all I'm saying). Yes, complete with self-insert who all the other characters thought was incredibly smart and attractive etc., although even at the time I drew the line at constructing the self-insert as a major love interest. However, there, uh, may have been a noble angsty self-sacrificing revealing death scene reminiscent of Eponine's. (I had read and watched Les Mis at that point, and it showed.) There was even a time-travel super-conspiracy involved, in which Murdoc turned out to be Tragically Misunderstood (or even better, Tragically Intentionally Misunderstood For the Good of Mankind). This was epic, I tell you.

(There may even be a copy of this great work extant somewhere in my parents' house, but no one except my sister -- who was the intended audience, at the time -- is ever going to be allowed to see it.)