Pushing Daisies: Season 1, eps 1-9 (complete)

When he was 9 years old, Ned learned that he had the ability to bring the dead back from life with a touch when he saved his dog, Digby, after Digby was hit by a truck.  But when his mother died on the 9th birthday of Chuck (short for Charlotte Charles), he learned two rules about his gift.  The first was that if he left the dead alive for more than a minute, someone else died.  He learned this because Chuck's father dropped dead in the yard a minute after he brought his mother back.  The second was that a second touch from him made the revived person dead again forever.  He learned this when his mother kissed him goodnight that same night.

At the graveyard where their parents were being buried, Ned and Chuck had their first and only kiss ever.  With anyone. 

And then Chuck went to live with her aunts Lilly and Vivian, former performing swimmers who had become shut-ins after developing social phobias, and Ned was sent off to private school by his father.  Eventually, Ned opened a pie shop and hired Olive, a petite blonde who was hopelessly in love with him, much to his cluelessness, and became the partner of Emerson, a private investigator who learned about Ned's ability.  Ned never heard from Chuck again until she was found dead in the ocean, and Emerson wanted to solve her murder for the reward money.  Unable to "redead" Chuck after the minute had passed as he normally did, Ned let her live (at the expense of the funeral director's life) and Chuck becomes Emerson's second partner, against his will, and gets to live life for the first time.

The series follows the Rules of Comedy in that all of the characters would be annoying or unlikable as real people, but are absolutely darling as fictional characters.  Except that, normally, I'm still annoyed, but I'm not here.  (Mind you, my absolute love for Anna Friel may have helped some, here.)  The first few episodes are a little too caught up in the show's cleverness, but it gets better.  Unfortunately, there's an extremely annoying narrator the whole time who not only never goes away, but seems to actually become even more prominent as the season goes on.  The romance between Ned and Chuck is often a little too trite, especially when dealing with the "omg no touching ever ever ever" aspect, but is charming overall.  Most of the cases are absurd, but the show knows that and plays them as such.

The show is very fun, but I'm not sure how long they can keep the gimmick going.  There were, though, a couple of interesting (though somewhat expected) twists in the final episode that I'm sure they'll get some mileage out of.

( a few spoilers )

Also, Emerson knits when he's stressed or anxious or annoyed.  He and Gwendal from Kyo Kara Maoh should bond.

Because putting your rapist behind bars means no HEA.

So, reading the comments in this post at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, I came across this comment:

My absolute worst two hates are: heroine falls in love with her rapist and/or a man treats her badly; and when everyone in the story is lying to the hero (including the heroine) and they end up happily together anyway

No shit! I wrote a manuscript where the “hero” raped the heroine (masked in his eyes as “well, her words said no but I knew she really wanted it"). She prosecuted him in the end. I was told it would never get published because there was no HEA. Dude! Depends on the viewpoint. The heroine was ecstatic that he was tried and convicted!

Granted, the poster then states that this was 30 years ago, but still!  Color me depressed.

The original post, though dealing mostly with romance novels, focuses on things you love and hate in fiction, and has some interesting reponses.

One other comment included this:

I love Jim Butcher. I have #1 sitting right here next to me to re-read. I love the voice in the books, the way they are told and bring you into the story. Simon R. Green does it well too. But you need a really strange bend to your mind to enjoy his stuff. I am bent.

Which made me realize that most of the people I know who read Simon R. Green are also into US comics and/or anime/manga.  Similar insanity, maybe?

Lots of interesting comments, and some discussion on the "in love with your rapist/kidnapper" bit.

ETA:  As it has been pointed out that HEA isn't a universal term, it means "Happily Ever After."  This is normally interpretted as "people make it out alive and lovers get to be together."  I'm all for this version of it when it's fitting, I (like the commenter) interpret it as "the character achieves his/her goals and makes the difference he/she wanted" interpretation, which can include the normal one, but doesn't have to.

ETA 2:  Still reading the comments, i would wonder if I wrote this one, except I know I didn't:

( cute for length )

Gintama Vol 4

( This has, like, half the fodder for all the Kagura/Okita vids on youtube... )

I abuse the strike through HTML.

Between the two rounds of friending memes, a few people I met here and there, and several people who have found me...somewhere (Yeah, I dunno, had an anime/manga person friending me every few days for a couple weeks there. No objections to that, of course, but if you have me friended and I haven't friended you back, it's because I can't quite figure out why you have me friended.) my f-list has...grown as I have collected underlings flunkies followers a harem new friends.  ANYWAY!

No proper intro post because I'm lazy but here are two questions I get asked a lot:

Question 1. Do you like every female character ever?
Answer:  No.  I just find it difficult to bother sticking with something if I don't, unless I've been promised sooper dooper extra amazing things.

Question 2: OMG how do you read so much?
Answer:  My job requires me to spend most or all of my shift sitting in front of a computer every day, listening to slight variations of recordings of the same script over and over and over again.  I read non-stop both because I enjoy it, and because it maintains my sanity.

Random other bits:

I have ADD.  I haven't required medication to function "normally" since my mid-teens, but it does still result in extreme fixation on things at times.

As a general rule, most of my prose reading is various fantasy genres.  This year, though, I've been reading a lot of mysteries and YA.

I have been reading manga a little bit more rabidly than normal lately because my backlog of manga got so big.  Int heory, I will slow down a bit shortly.  My US comics have been neglected this year because Marvel and DC keep making me mad.  I am also generally more of a shounen fan than a shoujo fan.  Despite this, I've had a good string of discovering good shoujo lately and have been reading a lot of that.  A lovely little title called Comic, however, may have cured me of the "try new shoujo" bug.  I have also been reading a lot of Clamp, Kaori Yuki, and You Higuri this year.  Be impressed I still have a functioning brain left.

In conclusion, I may or may not be attempting to motivate myself to write a steampunk novel about about a blind swordwoman assassin who also writes penny dreadfuls.

Hmm...this did basically end up a normal intro post, didn't it?