What A Friend We Have in Wednesday
Mar. 10th, 2021 09:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bI Finally Finished Reading About Fictional Thomas Cromwell's Cromwell Problems
. . . and I cried my eyes out.
It's not that Cromwell and his family are particularly loveable or anything like that. It's just a stupidly immersive book about people who used to be alive, and I'm a sucker for that thing where someone is about to get their head chopped off and they see some sky in a puddle or something and you suddenly remember for the millionth time that everyone who ever lived had a childhood and a body.
What I'm Reading Now
I am embarrassed to say that I didn't manage to finish The Dark Forest in time for book club, even though I had over two weeks; first there was the Tom Crom Chronicles to finish, then I just kept picking up other books that happened to be better. I may eventually run out of books that I want to read more than I want to read The Dark Forest, but there's also a real chance that I might not.
The Damnation of Theron Ware is one of a series of "Belt Revivals" - nice crisp paperback reprints of late 19th and early 20th century realist fiction by Belt Publishing. It couldn't have happened to a more deserving book - Harold Frederic's 1896 tale of an earnest young preacher who may or may not be succumbing to the temptations of Higher Criticism is amazingly fresh and very funny - but did Belt Publishing really just copy-paste the Project Gutenberg text without changing any of the ALL CAPS back to italics? All internal evidence points to yes.
The other problem with this book is that the protagonist's name sounds just enough like "Thurston Moore" that I now have two lines of "Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone" stuck in my head on a stable loop. It's not a song I've ever had any special fondness for or thought about for years, yet here we are.
Heyyyyyy, Adora
I'm still watching She-Ra Original Flavor. Some of the differences between it and (the objectively much better) New She-Ra are interesting, and some are obviously the result of one being a witty labor of love and the other being a literal toy commercial produced as quickly and cheaply as possible in a time when cheapness went a lot further than it does today.
The characters in Original are all drawn to be at least ten years older than their reboot counterparts - even Original Hordak, with his Dick Cheney head and chronic snort, has a stronger midlife vibe than his slender emo do-over. The writing is another story - for the most part, you can't really say that they're "written as" children or adults or much of anything but a series of quips and expositions.
Adora starts the show already a force captain in the Horde, and the Original Horde starts out as a lot more successful at dominating the countryside and enslaving villagers than its reboot version. The Rebellion is more of a genuinely underground rebellion, not just a coalition of independent magical city-states declaring war on the Fright Zone. I have to say, I like the potential of a slightly more grown-up, already Horde-leadership Adora with more to feel guilty about, and I think Stevenson and co. had the chops to make it interesting if they'd chosen to. (Original does absolutely nothing with it, of course).
Of all the disappointments lurking here for fans of the New Ra, the biggest is probably Catra. In the new show she's a tough, angry Horde orphan unhealthily obsessed with her treacherous friend Adora, and the fact that she's a feline human or humanoid feline, with ears and a tail, informs her movements but isn't dwelt on too much. In Original, she's a regular person in a leotard who can magically turn into a giant cat by pulling down her cat visor, voiced by. . . I guess what you'd get if you told a hyper six-year-old, "Ok, now you're a cat! Be a really mean cat! Rawr!" In practice her voice sounds more like a cross between Miss Piggy and a parrot. But not like an extra-smart parrot that's eerily good at mimicry, just a normal working parrot that hasn't had much practice. That's in her human form; when she's a cat she just roars and growls. Can I recommend this show to fans of the new She-Ra? Absolutely not. Am I going to watch all 93 episodes out of sheer inertia? It remains to be seen.
What I Plan to Read Next
Maybe The Dark Forest, maybe not.
. . . and I cried my eyes out.
It's not that Cromwell and his family are particularly loveable or anything like that. It's just a stupidly immersive book about people who used to be alive, and I'm a sucker for that thing where someone is about to get their head chopped off and they see some sky in a puddle or something and you suddenly remember for the millionth time that everyone who ever lived had a childhood and a body.
What I'm Reading Now
I am embarrassed to say that I didn't manage to finish The Dark Forest in time for book club, even though I had over two weeks; first there was the Tom Crom Chronicles to finish, then I just kept picking up other books that happened to be better. I may eventually run out of books that I want to read more than I want to read The Dark Forest, but there's also a real chance that I might not.
The Damnation of Theron Ware is one of a series of "Belt Revivals" - nice crisp paperback reprints of late 19th and early 20th century realist fiction by Belt Publishing. It couldn't have happened to a more deserving book - Harold Frederic's 1896 tale of an earnest young preacher who may or may not be succumbing to the temptations of Higher Criticism is amazingly fresh and very funny - but did Belt Publishing really just copy-paste the Project Gutenberg text without changing any of the ALL CAPS back to italics? All internal evidence points to yes.
The other problem with this book is that the protagonist's name sounds just enough like "Thurston Moore" that I now have two lines of "Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone" stuck in my head on a stable loop. It's not a song I've ever had any special fondness for or thought about for years, yet here we are.
Heyyyyyy, Adora
I'm still watching She-Ra Original Flavor. Some of the differences between it and (the objectively much better) New She-Ra are interesting, and some are obviously the result of one being a witty labor of love and the other being a literal toy commercial produced as quickly and cheaply as possible in a time when cheapness went a lot further than it does today.
The characters in Original are all drawn to be at least ten years older than their reboot counterparts - even Original Hordak, with his Dick Cheney head and chronic snort, has a stronger midlife vibe than his slender emo do-over. The writing is another story - for the most part, you can't really say that they're "written as" children or adults or much of anything but a series of quips and expositions.
Adora starts the show already a force captain in the Horde, and the Original Horde starts out as a lot more successful at dominating the countryside and enslaving villagers than its reboot version. The Rebellion is more of a genuinely underground rebellion, not just a coalition of independent magical city-states declaring war on the Fright Zone. I have to say, I like the potential of a slightly more grown-up, already Horde-leadership Adora with more to feel guilty about, and I think Stevenson and co. had the chops to make it interesting if they'd chosen to. (Original does absolutely nothing with it, of course).
Of all the disappointments lurking here for fans of the New Ra, the biggest is probably Catra. In the new show she's a tough, angry Horde orphan unhealthily obsessed with her treacherous friend Adora, and the fact that she's a feline human or humanoid feline, with ears and a tail, informs her movements but isn't dwelt on too much. In Original, she's a regular person in a leotard who can magically turn into a giant cat by pulling down her cat visor, voiced by. . . I guess what you'd get if you told a hyper six-year-old, "Ok, now you're a cat! Be a really mean cat! Rawr!" In practice her voice sounds more like a cross between Miss Piggy and a parrot. But not like an extra-smart parrot that's eerily good at mimicry, just a normal working parrot that hasn't had much practice. That's in her human form; when she's a cat she just roars and growls. Can I recommend this show to fans of the new She-Ra? Absolutely not. Am I going to watch all 93 episodes out of sheer inertia? It remains to be seen.
What I Plan to Read Next
Maybe The Dark Forest, maybe not.
