Book and TV Meme's continued
Mar. 16th, 2013 07:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. Raining and light snow flurries all day. Decided today that my difficulty with life is I have to live with spiders, also mosquitoes, cockroaches, and parrots, but mainly its the spiders. I know they have their uses. But would much rather live in a world without them. A world without spiders, roaches, mosquitoes and parrots...human or otherwise...hmmm.
Book Meme continues...and continues to feel impossible.
Day 26 – A book that changed your opinion about something
The Fault in Our Stars - you ever read something that just gave you a different perspective? Or epiphany of sorts? Made you see things from another point of view? Well it was like that and for more than one thing.
Hard to explain to people who haven't read the book. And I doubt this will happen for anyone else. Nor am I certain I can explain it to anyone who read it. Not sure I understand it myself...it was an ethereal thing not a tangible thing, not something one can put into words and explain. Not all things are. That's the trouble with life and why we require metaphors, even if they, more often than not get lost in translation.
Oh...another book that sort of did this is The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell.
And oddly...50 Shades of Grey - what it changed my mind about was how I view others taste. The next time you judge someone's taste harshly, consider for a moment the number of people who judge yours. And get over your nasty self. ;-) Seriously, we all have our guilty pleasures...
And...Babylonian, Greek, Roman, Celtic and Egyptian Mythology sort of destroyed my religious beliefs. Actually mythology in general did that.
Day 27 – The most surprising plot twist or ending
Day 28 – Favorite title
Day 29 – A book everyone hated but you liked
Day 30 – Your favorite book of all time
2. TV Meme Day 29 - Current TV show obsession
Once Upon a Time - although I think that should be obvious by now.
There are better written tv series on - but I rarely get obsessed with well-written/well-executed stories or tv series, mainly because they rarely focus on my story-kinks or what thrills me.
But... It's hard to explain to others why we love what we love - isn't it? I've almost given up.
OUAT has several things that hit me where I live:
* Fairy Tales and Oral narratives - this I studied obsessively in school, I minored in "epic, myth and folklore" or cultural anthropology and considered becoming a cultural anthropologist. As long as I can remember fairy tales have bewitched me. This show is subverting and changing many of them, it's also commenting on how Disney subverting many of the tales to begin with...Plus it's playing with the pop culture stories and myths of my childhood such as Peter Pan and Frankenstein...and Alice in Wonderland. Mashing them together in lovely cross-overs.
* Lots of psychological and philosophical metaphors and small details
* Female heroes in traditional male roles - Emma the lead is a bounty hunter/sheriff/bail bondsman.
* Parent/Child relationships, Family relationships, repetition of mistakes and learning from them. Particularly mother/daughter and mother/son. We rarely see these from a female perspective on tv. Too much emphasis on father/son. Although OUAT has that as well.
* Memory issues - or how memory affects personality and changes/alters personality. Who are we really? Are we our memories? I'm obsessed with how memory and the loss of it - affects people. That's why I watched Dollhouse, actually - my obsession with memory issues. Huge Story Kink.
* Flipping the gaze from male to female, flipping the gender roles and subverting them, fridging the male ingenue instead of the female one.
* I think OUAT handles some of the same themes and ideas that Joss Whedon attempted to play with in Dollhouse far more adeptly and in far more interesting manner and far less, cliche and male centric one. It's odd, but OUAT, which is far from perfect, seems to cover what intrigued me about Dollhouse, minus what squicked or turned me off of that series including the lead. These themes are the idea of how our fantasies often reflect who we are, what memory means, how taking someone's memory from them and implanting a new memory changes who they are, and what the reprecussions of doing that are and how they affect everyone concerned.
* I actually love the lead character - this is rare for me and a must for me to become obsessed with a tv series. Actually I like or love to hate most of the characters now. They are growing on me.
* The narrative structure is fascinating...it's that rare series that you can watch multiple times and pick up something new upon each rewatch (something new that won't make you want to hurl or run from the room).
* It's not overly violent or misanthropic, it also isn't horror...which is a delightful change of pace. I've become weary of horror or anti-hero stories.
There's so much in this series to play with, to wrap one's head around, and I find it compelling. And as time wears on...more and more people on my flist are becoming equally interested in it. I've seen four or five metas on OUAT this week alone. Plus some good fanfic. This is the only series outside of Farscape, Doctor Who, and Buffy/Angel that I can see myself reading fanfic or writing it for.
Day 30 - Saddest character death.
Book Meme continues...and continues to feel impossible.
Day 26 – A book that changed your opinion about something
The Fault in Our Stars - you ever read something that just gave you a different perspective? Or epiphany of sorts? Made you see things from another point of view? Well it was like that and for more than one thing.
Hard to explain to people who haven't read the book. And I doubt this will happen for anyone else. Nor am I certain I can explain it to anyone who read it. Not sure I understand it myself...it was an ethereal thing not a tangible thing, not something one can put into words and explain. Not all things are. That's the trouble with life and why we require metaphors, even if they, more often than not get lost in translation.
Oh...another book that sort of did this is The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell.
And oddly...50 Shades of Grey - what it changed my mind about was how I view others taste. The next time you judge someone's taste harshly, consider for a moment the number of people who judge yours. And get over your nasty self. ;-) Seriously, we all have our guilty pleasures...
And...Babylonian, Greek, Roman, Celtic and Egyptian Mythology sort of destroyed my religious beliefs. Actually mythology in general did that.
Day 27 – The most surprising plot twist or ending
Day 28 – Favorite title
Day 29 – A book everyone hated but you liked
Day 30 – Your favorite book of all time
2. TV Meme Day 29 - Current TV show obsession
Once Upon a Time - although I think that should be obvious by now.
There are better written tv series on - but I rarely get obsessed with well-written/well-executed stories or tv series, mainly because they rarely focus on my story-kinks or what thrills me.
But... It's hard to explain to others why we love what we love - isn't it? I've almost given up.
OUAT has several things that hit me where I live:
* Fairy Tales and Oral narratives - this I studied obsessively in school, I minored in "epic, myth and folklore" or cultural anthropology and considered becoming a cultural anthropologist. As long as I can remember fairy tales have bewitched me. This show is subverting and changing many of them, it's also commenting on how Disney subverting many of the tales to begin with...Plus it's playing with the pop culture stories and myths of my childhood such as Peter Pan and Frankenstein...and Alice in Wonderland. Mashing them together in lovely cross-overs.
* Lots of psychological and philosophical metaphors and small details
* Female heroes in traditional male roles - Emma the lead is a bounty hunter/sheriff/bail bondsman.
* Parent/Child relationships, Family relationships, repetition of mistakes and learning from them. Particularly mother/daughter and mother/son. We rarely see these from a female perspective on tv. Too much emphasis on father/son. Although OUAT has that as well.
* Memory issues - or how memory affects personality and changes/alters personality. Who are we really? Are we our memories? I'm obsessed with how memory and the loss of it - affects people. That's why I watched Dollhouse, actually - my obsession with memory issues. Huge Story Kink.
* Flipping the gaze from male to female, flipping the gender roles and subverting them, fridging the male ingenue instead of the female one.
* I think OUAT handles some of the same themes and ideas that Joss Whedon attempted to play with in Dollhouse far more adeptly and in far more interesting manner and far less, cliche and male centric one. It's odd, but OUAT, which is far from perfect, seems to cover what intrigued me about Dollhouse, minus what squicked or turned me off of that series including the lead. These themes are the idea of how our fantasies often reflect who we are, what memory means, how taking someone's memory from them and implanting a new memory changes who they are, and what the reprecussions of doing that are and how they affect everyone concerned.
* I actually love the lead character - this is rare for me and a must for me to become obsessed with a tv series. Actually I like or love to hate most of the characters now. They are growing on me.
* The narrative structure is fascinating...it's that rare series that you can watch multiple times and pick up something new upon each rewatch (something new that won't make you want to hurl or run from the room).
* It's not overly violent or misanthropic, it also isn't horror...which is a delightful change of pace. I've become weary of horror or anti-hero stories.
There's so much in this series to play with, to wrap one's head around, and I find it compelling. And as time wears on...more and more people on my flist are becoming equally interested in it. I've seen four or five metas on OUAT this week alone. Plus some good fanfic. This is the only series outside of Farscape, Doctor Who, and Buffy/Angel that I can see myself reading fanfic or writing it for.
Day 30 - Saddest character death.
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Date: 2013-03-17 12:04 am (UTC)