Ever Bethany

(I keep trying to like things as I go through my LJ feed. Yikes.)

Facebook and Tumblr do create such a laziness. "Can't be bothered to comment, but if I like it they'll know I've seen it and appreciate it~"

on me right now:
I'm here on LJ again probably by grace of pulling the reins in on my SuitDistracted blog. I get a bit obsessive, and so when I was exhausting myself trying to keep up with it in the perfect way to acquire new followers, I realized I had to let it go.

Guess what? People still find it and follow it, when I haven't posted a thing in days.
And there have been over 4000 likes or reposts of that silly MCR .gif I originally posted ages ago. It blew up again today, hitting a new pocket of fangirl blogs. (Seriously. How many pockets of MCR fangirls do you HAVE, Tumblr? How are they not all already friends?)

I am interning for an agent and though it seemed like a huge deal to decide to even apply, it's totally fun and no big sweat, and I read a manuscript that the agent ended up signing and it is too bad about how long it will be before I can tell you more than that.

We Skyped with my brother Dan on Christmas morning, at his in-laws, and he is suuuuuuuper adorable with his little wifey, though she was waiting to have her wisdom teeth pulled the next day, poor thing. But they are totally cute, and it is ridiculous. It also is somehow...nicer, than him being off over there alone with just extended family.

And I watched Princess Mononoke with my 3 youngest sibs over the holiday, too, which they'd never seen. And oh...my heart.

I think that is actually my favorite movie. It's a bit unusual for Miyazaki--he has heroines, but his POV character is a guy. And yet...his animation is a bit delicate. I think he's supposed to be of a tribe that is slighter, of different stock. The people you meet up with in the West, when he leaves his home town, are speaking more brash Japanese, have a meatier physicality. San may also be of a different people, but she is square--no sheltered child but grown up tough and athletic.

The trifecta of characters and their interactions is so subtle, and it's not something I really appreciated fully when I first watched it. In fact, watching it with subtitles this time felt fresh--I may have not seen it with them more than once before. I was sorrowful about the way San and Ashitaka don't get together at the end as a teenager.

As an adult, I am sorrowful from the moment Ashitaka leaves his tribe, who say they are dying out, and he was to be their chief, no doubt also meant to raise a family to keep their people alive for another generation. The ambiguous ending with the humans is nice. The fact that the visible, tactile magic has disappeared--that's sorrowful. And yet well-handled--I hate it when a writer thinks they can fundamentally change the world at the end of the story, so it's our world, and have that feel right.

Instead, it's just turned to something less obvious. The world doesn't change that much.

We watched the beginning of Nausicaa today--until the DVD failed us. There are scratches on it more typical of being left reading-side-down and left to scrape against something, rather than much use. Which is sad.

But this was my first time rewatching it, and the gorgeousness of some of the images is just fantastic. Miyazaki's way of thinking outside the frame...

It's interesting, too, to see in his first original film, basically, all the characteristics of a Miyazaki film.

A strong, somewhat enigmatic woman of ideals. A woman in power with a compelling air on the other side of the conflict. Monster-movie monsters that become sympathetic, and a detailed attention to the life of common people in the created worlds.

And that ecological world-building like in my favorites, Mononoke, Spirited Away.

Also some style characteristics used later in similarly themed Mononoke--flashback sequences with a dream-like horror to them.

***
Having given up on this DVD, I went to watch Black & White, which the mysoju.com version was not loading, and I went to dramacrazy.com and...

There's a GORGEOUS version. And it's the one that's not subtitled. The others are all in 240p definition. T____T

Practically inhumane, I say.

I speak two whole words of Mandarin, and I think my tones are wrong...

Several more of the people on my F-List have come around to sense and read some of Megan Whalen Turner's work, so I've been skipping around making verbal parries about Tricksters, and love of rascals, and all sorts of things. Golden days, really!

rhinemouse  made some excellent, excellent points over at her post about characters Smarter Than Everyone Else
including:

"It's partly because, when a character is portrayed as Smarter Than Everybody Else In The Room, I empathize with Everybody Else and not Mr. Smarter."

She goes on to make a much more profound point, about what mostly else makes her not *like* (even if she is interested) in these characters, but sadly, I am not going to address any sort of moral ambiguity and my rationale for enjoying it. [Yet. yet?]


It made me realize that this is exactly the same reason I love them.



:cue great clashing, crashing sound:

Why, yes, I do identify with being the Smartest One in the Room.
No, not really.

In fact, I've spend most of my life tagging along with my brother, or having him tagging along with me, and feeling inferior. He's not so much smarter as more adept at expressing his knowledge, of acquiring actual facts and trivia that I only remember as broad-strokes, pieces that become part of a weave of understanding in abstract terms.

What I identify with is having only intelligence as a weapon, of prizing it as my best possession. Being quick on the uptake, sensitive to nuance. What I long for, that they have, is being quick on the draw, shameless about using it to their advantage.



Robert Downey, Jr. makes both of the above characters more identifiable to me because he talks like several of my relatives, with the same brittle gloss of wit and obvious core of insecurity. People who take this to an extroverted place, instead of, like me, creating the characters to say the outrageous things I think would be funny to say.

A lot of these characters also have physical expertise, a martial art or something similar. I think a common trait, though, is that it's one honed with grace and effort, discipline, not a brute capability. Smaller, or lankier, or less traditionally athletic than is ideal, is probably how they view themselves.

Spiderman, for example. He gets powered up, sure, but he still uses his wit to compensate for his view of himself, and if he and Superman collided in mid-air, Superman's not the one going down like a ton of bricks. (More like tumbling like a rag-doll. To be kind of cruel.)


This is what separates them from a Gary Stu, really.

There's an illusion of effortless to them, but I can see through it--because even if I have no outward resemblance, my internal landscape is very similar.




Okay, this still sounds like an epically egotistical statement. And unlike these guys, I can't just pull it off, so I guess I'll just have to apologize...

Nah.


Curious, though. Characters you've found quite lovable when they struck other people sour?
Am I completely alone in being all, "Ahahah, sheeple, TAKE THAT FOR BEING THE MAJORITY and sneering at our verbal subtlety!"



[I also really identify with the characters like Magus and the Minister of War who are more reserved, can keep up, but are left to clean up messes from these sparklingly brilliant characters. I crush on them all the harder for it.]

Nostalgia is a funny thing.

It's not many months since I skipped forward to check out the end of Inuyasha, completely bored with the sameness of every episode/chapter/arc and then wrote my first fanfic. But this week at the library I caught sight of Vol. 3 and thought, "Awww, Inuyasha!"

It really is the perfect "back when I didn't know better" childhood manga. Too bad I don't have that excuse..


I also scored a copy of Quidditch Through the Ages in the book sale.
It is such a patent piece of fandom I am very pleased to be able to look it over at  my leisure. It promises to be funny in it's uncompromising conceit, and ripe for open-to-a-random-page breaks from reality.

Lately I've been doing pretty good about not seeking out more things to distract me from writing and spinning.
But I just discovered something I missed because of it.

T'heck with it, I'm pretty psyched anyhow!

LIVE ACTION "WALLFLOWER" SHOW!


I have, like, 10 episodes to catch up on.
BLISS.


Okay, let me explain.

  Wallflower is a comic by a manga artist who realized suppressing her inner Goth and absurd sense of humor weren't making her stories any better.
   Wallflower is the answer to super-sweet makeover comics, that denies none of it's heritage, either.



The girl refuses to be made over except temporarily, under strong bribery. She likes horror flicks, skeleton models, and torture.
The guys she's bunkered up with are mostly immune to her lack of charm, but love her cooking. AND they are the beauties of the school, a type she has always hated and doesn't really get used to.
And one of them is constantly being kidnapped by obsessive fans.


Yes. THE GUY.

<3
It doesn't matter that Japanese TV isn't that good, I'll take more of this story any way I can get it...