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Sep. 26th, 2012 06:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatI feel like Alexander and the Terrible No Good Horrible Day, albeit, to be fair, it falls more into death by tiny paper cuts day. Not melodramatic in the least. So won't bore with details. Myself or you. Some days are worth forgetting about. If I write about it, I won't forget it.
Has everyone seen Neil Gaiman's oral storytelling at The Moth? Best thing I've seen him write. It made me laugh. I like Gaiman's blog more than his fiction, which is odd. It's more emotional and resonates more - while his fiction distances me, and I feel as if I'm relating to characters from miles and miles away.
Flist (the five percent that is left, which is roughly 15 people) is commenting on the deadness of lj, so it's not just me then? This is reassuring. I was beginning to think half my flist had filtered me out. Nope. They just scampered off to tumblr, apparently. Which I don't understand. I've checked out tumblr. The appeal is completely lost on me. Can't follow it at all. But so is the appeal of Twitter and Facebook. Things haven't improved with new technology, they've just gotten more cluttered and busy. More meaningless babble and chatter, less content.
Not feeling fannish at all at the moment. Talked myself out of buying the DVDs to Once Upon a Time, because it's not like I watched the reruns when they aired this summer. One watch was enough for me apparently. I love the narrative style of the series. I love the twisty fairy tales. I find many of the supporting characters interesting, and do adore Rumple and Emma. But...there's something lacking, and the four characters that are the leads and get most of the focus are not that interesting: Regina, Snow White, Charming, and Henry. If we could just have a bit less of them...So the series, while highly entertaining and engrossing, does not quite have the same magic as Buffy did.
I miss Buffy. I know there are comics. But they didn't work for me for various reasons. I tried them, I tried hard to like them, but it is what it is. I also miss being fannish about something...but nothing quite clicks. Maybe that's a good thing? I do on occasion check out Mark Watches. While I do have issues with the person ( I think he's disingenuous in the extreme and understand completely why various people on my flist despise him), I do on occasion agree with him. His take on Killer in Me is not off the mark. He liked the episode better than I did, but most people did. And he is right - Whedon and his writers have an eerie pattern of punishing characters whenever they kiss or have sex. I'm guessing it has to do with the slasher horror trope that Whedon is obsessed with mocking and paying homage to. Because that does happen in the slasher horror movie trope. Kevin Williamson also mocked this trope in his Scream flicks. You have sex - you die. Usually right after the fact. When watching anything by Joss Whedon it is probably good to keep in mind that the man is a horror flick critic and obsessed with the genre. Well that and Westerns. Also superhero comic books. But you won't pick up on it, unless you've seen some of the films he's critiquing, read the comic books, and the Westerns - particularly during the 1980s and 1990s.
Has everyone seen Neil Gaiman's oral storytelling at The Moth? Best thing I've seen him write. It made me laugh. I like Gaiman's blog more than his fiction, which is odd. It's more emotional and resonates more - while his fiction distances me, and I feel as if I'm relating to characters from miles and miles away.
Flist (the five percent that is left, which is roughly 15 people) is commenting on the deadness of lj, so it's not just me then? This is reassuring. I was beginning to think half my flist had filtered me out. Nope. They just scampered off to tumblr, apparently. Which I don't understand. I've checked out tumblr. The appeal is completely lost on me. Can't follow it at all. But so is the appeal of Twitter and Facebook. Things haven't improved with new technology, they've just gotten more cluttered and busy. More meaningless babble and chatter, less content.
Not feeling fannish at all at the moment. Talked myself out of buying the DVDs to Once Upon a Time, because it's not like I watched the reruns when they aired this summer. One watch was enough for me apparently. I love the narrative style of the series. I love the twisty fairy tales. I find many of the supporting characters interesting, and do adore Rumple and Emma. But...there's something lacking, and the four characters that are the leads and get most of the focus are not that interesting: Regina, Snow White, Charming, and Henry. If we could just have a bit less of them...So the series, while highly entertaining and engrossing, does not quite have the same magic as Buffy did.
I miss Buffy. I know there are comics. But they didn't work for me for various reasons. I tried them, I tried hard to like them, but it is what it is. I also miss being fannish about something...but nothing quite clicks. Maybe that's a good thing? I do on occasion check out Mark Watches. While I do have issues with the person ( I think he's disingenuous in the extreme and understand completely why various people on my flist despise him), I do on occasion agree with him. His take on Killer in Me is not off the mark. He liked the episode better than I did, but most people did. And he is right - Whedon and his writers have an eerie pattern of punishing characters whenever they kiss or have sex. I'm guessing it has to do with the slasher horror trope that Whedon is obsessed with mocking and paying homage to. Because that does happen in the slasher horror movie trope. Kevin Williamson also mocked this trope in his Scream flicks. You have sex - you die. Usually right after the fact. When watching anything by Joss Whedon it is probably good to keep in mind that the man is a horror flick critic and obsessed with the genre. Well that and Westerns. Also superhero comic books. But you won't pick up on it, unless you've seen some of the films he's critiquing, read the comic books, and the Westerns - particularly during the 1980s and 1990s.
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no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 02:00 am (UTC)That's an interesting point about Neil Gaiman. I think for me he leads the ideal writer's life - a variety of interesting and successful projects, travel, and loyal followers, but I do think that for his actual writing he's more about the narrative than the characters, all his work is very much about the idea of storytelling and does seem a bit removed. Maybe he needs that extra connection, either of himself or actors delivering his words for his work to really soar?
no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 10:13 pm (UTC)That's my take as well. I think he should try writing in first person, limit the perspective. He gets too into the world and seems to lose the characters.
a lot of people seem to be into Teen Wolf which I'm not sure what to do with - it looks like a show people like in spite of the actual show.
Reminds me of the Star-Gate fans.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 06:32 am (UTC)I don't like the punishing of characters for being carnal, I also have a lot of issues with what I saw as arbitrary deaths in the series.
So, I guess I'll keep writing.
Shows I'm verging on becoming Fannish about-- Grimm, Sherlock, and believe it or not, Whitechapel. I also love Dexter, Game of Thrones and Copper.
But nothing is quiet making me as obsessed as Buffy, Angel, X-Files-- so I get where you're coming from....
no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 10:06 pm (UTC)Most supernatural/paranormal flicks are either: Boy fights monsters (with the occasional twist that Boy is a Monster fighting Monsters (Angel) ), or Girl is in love with monsters who keep saving her (Beauty and the Beast meets the Vampire - see TVD, TrueBlood, Being Human, Hex, sigh...so many) or the procedural buddy show - where guy and gal investigate supernatural happenings.
You can find these things on tv always.
But not Buffy. I have yet to see another tv show that's like it. Lots of Angel and X-Files and La Femme Nikita rip-offs though.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 10:16 pm (UTC)I mean-- by now, they could have done Sypernatural as a Gay couple-- rather than brothers; it's 2012!
Or have Grimm be about the mother,(played my Mary Mastrionatonio) an older woman , who's absolutley kick-ass.
I'm watching Coppers right now, and the story could have been about the Black doctor/forensic guy--
There's so many stories that are not being told...
no subject
Date: 2012-09-28 02:49 am (UTC)I have hope...with little things. At least Once Upon A Time has a woman as the kick-ass/sardonic/world-weary hero - protecting her son. (Usually it's a guy.) Which is actually one of the many reasons I prefer Once to Grimm. (Although I get why others prefer Grimm...I'm not really a horror fan. Blood and guts gets to me after a bit, along with spider monsters.)
Grimm would have grabbed my interest if the wife was the Grimm or the cop hunting monsters, and the guy was the one who didn't know about it.
They should have flipped the genders.
Copper is rather good and at least we have the Black doctor/forensic guy - but I agree, why not make him more the central character? As opposed to Kevin? In a way he is sharing the stage with Kevin and Morehouse. It seems to be a series divided into those three points of view. But why not have a woman be one of them?
And why not have Supernatural be two sisters? Or a Thelma and Louise?
Why two white guys who are brothers? Like that's never been done before? Granted...Kripke has put a female heroine at the center of Revolution...but the show lacks something.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 02:32 pm (UTC)I liked TKIM better than you did, but what interests me about MW is that he seems to like S7 much better than I remember most people liking it at the time. Of course, it was the run from Get it Done through Empty Places which caused the biggest controversy, so maybe I'm premature.
no subject
Date: 2012-09-27 10:00 pm (UTC)I know people who hated Same Time Same Place because of how Buffy related to Spike in the episode. And quite a few fans despised Showtime, Him, and Bring on the Night. (And *cough*LMTP/GiD*cough*).
My least favorite episodes were Help (Azura Sky's character grated), Showtime, Storyteller (not a fan of Andrew or Tom Lenk (who is a bit like nails running down chalkboard)), Empty Places,
Dirty Girls (which was cluttered), First Date (dumb and they chickened out - rumor has it that originally Xander was supposed to have been killed in this episode and come back as the First, but the writers talked Whedon out of it), End of Days (also cluttered - too much going on), and Touched (too sappy and slow, the pacing came to a dead stop).