(no subject)

[meganbmoore]

 1.  Links to English translations of Jin Yong's wuxia novels, including amazon links where applicable, and mobi downloads.  WARNING:  Clicking on other authors' pages might just make you sad that you can't read, say The Bride With White Hair, and other such novels.

2. Snakes and snake gods/goddesses/etc. in East and west Asian mythology.  Includes a brief summary of how the" White Snake" legend has evolved over the centuries.

3.  NBC put out a "Women of Revolution" trailer focusing on Charlie, Nora and Rachel.  A lot of it is stuff from previous episodes, but there's also a bit of new footage:

I need to remember not to go anywhere near the main LJ comm when the episode with one of the new scenes airs.

4.  This appears to be a self-published author's self-congratulatory attempt at career suicide.  (Warning for a lot of woman-hating language, and jokes about hitting women.) 

5.  The middle post in this tumblr exchange is a hilarious diatribe about how Elementary fandom is unfairly mean to Sherlock fandom.  Now, I generally find "look at my fandom/character/etc, now look at yours, now look at mine again, SEE HOW MINE IS SO INHERENTLY SUPERIOR?" posts to be obnoxious in general, and the one that started the exchange is no exception.  But really, claiming that Elementary fandom is mean to the Sherlock fandom is a bit much.  Sherlock fen were accusing anyone even thinking about watching Elementary of being homophobic, of betraying ACD's vision, of having no taste, etc., before Elementary was even FILMING, and it hasn't stopped.  (Most Sherlock fen I know like both shows, and I don't see why people who only watch one can't just ignore the other.  I generally find it very easy to do.)  My favorite part of the post is about how Sherlock fandom obviously has redeeming value because it has over 20k more fic at AO3.  Of course it does.  It's a hugely popular slash fandom that's been around for years, while Elementary is still airing its first season.

6. Yesterday, I watched Colombiana, a movie that was simultaneously made just for me, and not as good as I was expecting.  I have no idea how it slipped under my radar.  Trailer:

Part of me couldn't help comparing it to Revolution, as both have the main character being sent on a long journey by their dying father to find the super-dangerous uncle they've never met.  Not that the two have anything else in comon at all.

Comments

[dorothean]

Ooh, I'd like to see Zoe Saldana being an action heroine. Do you remember if there are any sexual violence triggers in Columbiana?

[meganbmoore]

Nothing that pinged me. I do remember wondering if it was going to go there a couple times (including once when she was a child), but it didn't, and was more my expecting it because of other things than the movie itself.

[dorothean]

Thanks!

[chaila]

Oh Hugh Howley. I was right in the middle of reading his book and figuring out the history of its publication when that blog post happened. He's apparently rich now and has a multi-million dollar movie deal, so he probably couldn't destroy his career even if he wanted to. I want to be interested in it because it really is an example of a huge success in self-publishing, but now I just feel like he's an asshole. Also, I thought the book was overrated. So. :/

OMG that Sherlock/Elementary post was hilarious! For all the reasons you say and the other posts say, but also. . . yeah I'm sure if Elementary fandom spent its time constructively making lists of the gross things that Sherlock the show and its slash fandom does, its slash fandom would be more than happy to politely listen and be educated and adjust its approach to be less gross, and everyone would get along. WTF. And HAHA riiiiight fic quantity is a solid sign of show quality, AHAHA. It's actually my experience that LACK of fic is a solid indicator of a good show, and a lot of fic means the show is weak in a lot of ways.

[meganbmoore]

LOLS...I hadn't heard of the book until you mentioned it today, and have seen it mentioned several times since. (Which possibly means it just hadn't been mentioned in a context that I noticed before then.)

Elementary fans actually have done that though? In one ear and out the other. I generally take a fandom only a few years old and with tons of fic to mean one of 2 things: there are 2 white dudes that fandom ships, or there's a fandom woobie (usually one who treats women horribly) who fandom believes will be redeemed if a woman is essentially sacrificed to him. (Not taking into account, of course, canons with large casts.)

[mfirefly10]

I LOVED that Revolution trailer. Like...thank you NBC people for realizing that this show is all about the ladies. Or at least should be :)


Colombiana! Loved that movie. Though I did find it a bit odd to see Michael Vartan as her love interest. Like...just not something I would've ever thought of but it worked okay, I guess.

[meganbmoore]

Vartan's character was just so RANDOM. It's like they had half the script completed, and someone went "Wait, where are the white dudes who aren't random FBI agents with 5 whole lines? Where is the romantic subplot all movies with female leads must have?" so they tossed him in. Like, there was nothing wrong or obnoxious about the character or anything, he just kinda came out of nowhere.

I feel REvolution's writers think it's mostly about the ladies? Or at least, mostly about Charlie and Rachel, with Miles as their guard dog. I know some people view Miles as the main character, but it's Charlie's goals and actions that propel the majority of the plot, and Miles (in the main plotline, at least) is largely reactive, his actions usually dictated by the decisions made by the women in his life. I feel that most of his actions pretty much go:

CHARLIE/NORA/RACHEL: I am going to do this thing.
MILES: You should not do this thing. It's dangerous and you'll get killed.
C/N/R: Nope, still doing it. You can come, get back to drinking yourself to death, or see if bashing me over the head and tying me to a chair does any good.
MILES: Fine, I'll just loom menacingly over your shoulder and kill anyone who messes with you.

A lot of the stuff he does is the traditional male hero stuff, but little of it is by his own choice, save for things he sees as a natural next step in making sure someone else's (usually Charlie's) goals are achieved. even with the rebels, he's probably been training them and leading raids for months now, but would ditch them in a second if Charlie and Nora said they were through.

[mfirefly10]

YES! The randomness of his existence and that romance was very jarring. Not terrible, mind you, but kind of unnecessary.


lol, you nailed Miles' relationships with the women in his life :) And honestly, how anyone can think he's more of a main character than Charlie is BEYOND me. This whole thing has been her journey since Day 1 and Miles is just along for the ride :)

[shiegra]

best summary

[shiegra]

Man, I really ship Jason/Charlie. I didn't realize that until now. Angry broken kids who are just socially isolated to potentially form a fascinatingly unhealthy attachment! They form this weird quiet space around each other, where it's so much about their own personal motivations, decisions, betrayals etc. I really wanna see more of that for Charlie in particular. Besides, though the word is now all but meaningless, I think they have fantastic chemistry. Kissessss!!!!!!!!

There's also the fact that in the lead up to Elementary's official release (not sure how aware of this you are) Sherlock fans were going into every Elementary tag (including ones fans created specifically to get away from them, at which point they hunted them down and followed them to the new tags to keep spamming them INCREDIBLY ugly shit, especially about Lucy Liu) to spew misogynistic, racist and homophobic bile, which feeds into those 'my fandom: better than ur fandom' joke posts coming from Elementary fandom. I generally agree with you, but I have to admit I feel like they earned that 'FUCK YOU.'

Like, even beyond the 'your show is homophobic because it doesn't contain homophobic queerbaiting!' and the flounces over ~~~~canon~~~~. (My two cents are that I have never seen an adaptation less invested or interested in the spirit of Sherlock Holmes than Sherlock. And the whole 'cures a dominatrix lesbian - who trounced him in the book and was never romantically interested in him - by beating her at her own game, making her fall in love with him, making her beg, and then at a later date swanning in to save her from Scary Brown Men In Turbans' doesn't even begin to cover Sherlock's problems. Literally, he beat her because she fell so in love with him her sooper sekrit password for sensitive information was his name. Moffat thought that was clever.)

[meganbmoore]

Yup, I saw all of that with Elementary and Sherlock fen on tumblr. I actually actively avoided anything Elementary related for months because of it, until a couple people told me about the elementasquee tag.

Have you seen BTS and convention/event pics of JD Pardo and Tracy Spiridakos? They're always smiling and giggling together. (She also looks like she could fit in his pocket, and I admire the show for not filming things to emphasize that TS is actually kind of small, physique-wise, which most shows would emphasize every chance they got.) I never thought I'd say this about a developing relationship between two people, but I actually want to see Charlie and Jason discuss their fathers, as both of their fathers put a lot of effort into controlling and isolating them "for their own good." Ben used guilt and Danny and ignorance to attempt to tie Charlie to their village and keep her from venturing out into the world (though, as we've learned since, he had good reasons to try to make sure no one ever knew his kids even existed) and Neville used abuse and the military to make Jason "strong," but the end result seems to have made him as ignorant of the world outside the militia, just like Charlie was ignorant of the world outside her village. (I'm also fairly certain that the Nevilles joined up with the militia soon after it was formed, and Jason hasn't known anything else since his early teens, and never had an idea that there was a bad side until the year or so that they were looking for Ben, and then never saw any of it without being under his father's watchful eye until he was sent to follow Charlie. Which is why I really have no issues with his developing awareness/independence being filtered through her.)

Another thing is that, while we the audience know that Jason has been beaten, tortured, imprisoned and almost exiled to protect Charlie (and who knows what Tom did to him after he got Charlie off the train) Charlie doesn't know any of that (though I'm sure she at least somewhat realizes that he threw her off the train to save her) and he shows no inclination of throwing it in her face. It's obvious to us that Jason is half in love with Charlie, but he hasn't made any overtures or insinuations (the closest he's come is mild flirting before she knew he was militia) or any "I lost everything to protect you!" or any such that we'd normally get with these plotlines, and the only open acknowledgement of it in the show is when Tom and Miles have been "Oh God WHY!?!?" about it, and he completely gets that Charlie has good reasons not to trust him. And Charlie is understandably confused because, hey, cute guy who's always nice to and protective of her (and treats her with respect) but who's also betrayed her more than once, and she physically gravitates towards him whenever they're together, and she and Miles both seem to know that, whatever other issues they may have with him, he can be relied to not physically harm her or do anything that might.

If that kiss really is in the next episode or two, as seems to be the case, then I'm pretty sure it's either a hallucination or part of some deception (like he's been captured and she's pretending to be his girlfriend and there are lockpicks in her hair or something) because while I can see some "Thank goodness you're alive/we didn't die/I don't want to abandon you while you're half dead and might not be able to make it out and I have to finish the mission, but we'll never talk about this again" kissing at this stage, I think there's are too many issues to be worked out yet for them to be at the happy smily giggly kissing that that looks to be. (what whatever the context for the kissing is, Charlie tops and, like most kissing in the show so far, it appears to be initiated by the female half of the equation, and that's what's important.)

[shiegra]

Whoop. Sorry for ranting all over you. I'm trying to cut down on that.

I haven't! I've been avoiding fandom and therefore fandom resources pretty vociferously, especially after some recent posts. I love and agree with all this though.

[yifu]

English translation of Liang Yusheng's Legend of the White-Haired Demoness.