96

Title: Safekeeping
(1/3)
Pairing: Kotetsu/Barnaby
Summary: Some time after Lunatic has been apprehended, a NEXT scientist makes a troubling discovery about the extent of Yuri Petrov's powers. Kotetsu handles it all considerably well. Barnaby really doesn't.
Author's note (on spoilers): This has a speculative plot element I've thought about since ep. 16 that probably will never be canon, but it's compliant with the entire series and contains a few spoilers.
Overall Rating: M?

One of these days I'm gonna figure out how to write short reviews, but it's not today. This post concerns the book, not the movie. I have yet to see the film but from what I've read the two are so drastically different that if you've only seen the movie and want to read the book you should be advised to avoid spoilers (and vice versa). But there are no big spoilers here.

I have been noticing and resenting the common attitude among media consumers that one of the biggest crimes a story can commit is "taking itself too seriously." I can hardly claim not to have ever said this, but I think it's a lazy way to dismiss the quality of something. This type of preference I'm sure partly makes The Avengers the most popular of the Marvel films because it can't go three minutes without trying to make us laugh (at least it succeeds very well at doing so), but it makes me feel increasingly like I'm trying to watch a movie in a classroom where there's always that one guy who can't let a dramatic moment go without making some crack about it.

Don't get me wrong: Finding unexpected or unintentional humor in something is a great thing. I've had readers of my own writing say they were amused in places where I hadn't really intended it to be funny, but it didn't bother me that people came away with something I didn't put into it. It's the implication that certain topics or genres don't merit much drama that has a feel of laughing at the material rather than with it. It projects one's own inability to be invested in the story (because of its failures or their own preferences or a low amount of sympathy for fictional people or for whatever reason) as this unacceptability for anything to be unusual without automatically being comical. What I would rather people be praising about stories that "don't take themselves too seriously" is instead that they manage some levity without compromising our compassion for the characters. There are some humorous moments in Seth Grahame-Smith's Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter and it flirts well with the expectations we bring to a vampire story, but the first thing you need to know is that it's not a parody. It is Abe Lincoln's heroic and tragic life, played straight, with vampires on the side. And I don't want to build it up, dammit, but I was not prepared for good it is.

( Judge us not equally, Abraham. We may all deserve hell, but some of us deserve it sooner than others. )

(Some very random things because I don't update enough.)

-I only recently realized that Chris Hemsworth and Liam Hemsworth are brothers (talk about a "duh" moment, I'd even seen them in pics hanging out together). I feel like I'm the only person who thinks Liam is hotter but that's probably just because my mental image of him is with brown hair like he had it in Hunger Games. Neither of them hit my type that hard anyway. Instead of swooning over Thor it's more like I want him to give me a bear hug.

-I'm starting to realize that I have this totally humbug aversion to pretty much any character in anything who is "the comic relief character," who barely ever utters a line that isn't supposed to be funny. I was like this even when I was a kid and would have this slight annoyance with all of the wise-cracking sidekick characters in every Disney movie (I may well have been the only child in the universe who thought Genie was an obnoxious attention whore); I think it was ingrained in me to feel that that character was "something for the kids" and I somehow felt pandered to by them and never got over that even when I was no longer a kid.
Recently it bothered me that this is basically what they did with Effie Trinket, cause in the book the humor of that character feels more like it's Katniss condescending to her rather than us somehow laughing with her in such a bizarre grim context (there were a good number of moments in the film that managed to be darkly funny, and I liked that, but...) "That table is mahogany!" became so meme for a while and it didn't get a laugh out of me at all. This makes me feel incredibly low on the fun scale, but I guarantee you that for all the humor that goes over my head there are lines and bits from movies I find extremely funny that nobody else really gets. *Kanye shrug* And BTW, I did read The Hunger Games (just the first one, not the whole series yet), I may or may not write some actual commentary about it one of these days.

-Everyone on Tumblr is freaking out about the Tiger & Bunny dub cast announcement and I can't care because I find most dub actors to be tolerable at best and have never been able to have opinions about them. Like, I'm happy when Steven Blum's voice shows up in something I watch out of pure nostalgia, but I don't think he's good. But I tend to be that asshole who is hardly ever impressed with actors, so.

-I don't understand how Godiva is one of those pricey brands of chocolate or how people think it's that good. It tastes like weird milky nothingness. If somebody said, "Surprise! You won all this free Godiva chocolate!" I would say thanks and then find a rodent to feed it to, or possibly a dog because I'm not convinced it's actually chocolate and the dog should be just fine. And this is stuff that costs five dollars a bar.
Brought to you by my annoyance that only Godiva was on sale at the fine chocolate section at Meijer today.

Somehow this has turned into one of those annoying unpopular opinion posts.

In case some of you didn't know, I have serious issues with this show's fandom. I don't know how there's something about it that attracts the only one that is actually so bad that I usually can't stand to participate in it at all, but for some reason it does. I feel like I'm alone in this aversion, but nothing about a lot of the reactions to this episode changed my mind.

Anyway. ( The Other Woman )


Pick a meme, pick both, or pick none~

Ask me my Top Five Whatevers. Fannish or literary or otherwise. Any top fives. Doesn't matter what, really! Fandoms, ice cream flavours, cartoon moments, women in my fandoms, OTPs, ideal holiday destinations, goals for the future, celebrity crushes, books I wish would be made into movies, love songs. And I will answer them all in a new post (or in comments). Possibly with pictures.

And stealing this from taragel...

So if you found out I'd written a book....what kind of book would you expect it to be? Romance? YA? Mystery? Something completely different? What style/tone/characteristics do you think it would display? Funny? Sexy? Angsty?
(I don't know if people will go for this one but since I actually have a novel in the works it could be fun to see what people might guess.)

Title: Trading Cards
(one-shot, 3170 words)
Characters: Cassie & Rob
Summary: Every detective has a type of case that's particularly tough for them to deal with. They don't always talk about the reasons why.
Timeline/Spoilers: In The Woods (pre-Operation Vestal)
Rating: R
Warnings: Non-graphic descriptions of rape and murder of a teenager.
A/N: I've had a few different ideas for fics for this series and this really wasn't the one I expected to get out there first, but y'know, I guess something devoid of the cracky tropes and AU premises running around my head is a good place to start. I can't tell you how excited and nervous I am about writing for this canon, which has so little fandom activity for it that even using a word like "canon" in its vicinity feels kind of weird. *hides* I have other fandom projects in the way right now but I do really really hope to write more for DMS in the future.
Because the LJ readership is so small and this is a short one, this isn't beta'd, but anyone who might be willing to offer that service in the future can feel free to tell me so ;)
Also: I don't remember if it's mentioned in the book whether Rob was sent to any kind of therapist (and I think probably not) but I imagine one might have been involved at least immediately after the Knocknaree incident, so I took liberty with it.


( You get nightmares often? )

Recently a couple little fancasts for Tana French's books have popped up on Tumblr, only some of which have been even remotely congruous to the descriptions of the characters or of the fact that the novels are set in Ireland or just of my image of them. Since the current theme at picspammy is "Crime and Law Enforcement" I figured it would be fitting to stop whining and do my own. I had a hard time narrowing down how many characters I would do and settled on sticking to the guards and, hypocritically enough, I've managed to only cast half of the characters who would ideally be played by Irish actors with Irish actors. But hey, no yankees.

Meme the first:

Comment to this post, and I will list seven things I want you to talk about. They might make sense or they might be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.

flowrs4ophelia gave me...

The 80s. I am often irritated with the stigma against the 80s that has always been in my generation. Especially the common statement that the music sucked, as if all of the popular (and unpopular) music that was made in all of ten years can be encapsulated by crappy new wave. The most regrettable thing about the 80s was a lot of the fashion, but that's fashion for you.

James "Sawyer" Ford. I don't know what I can say about Sawyer that I haven't probably already flailed about on teh LJ except that he's probably the one character I would keep in if I ever wrote that pan-fandom crossover craziness based on Lost that I'm pretty sure I've talked about before. And his love of reading continues to amuse me throughout the show. I like to imagine that he's never actually bought a novel in his life but has always been incapable of being in the same room as a book without picking it up and reading from page one and on until someone demands his attention.

your dream house. I don't really have one. Living on the beach would be pretty cool, but that'll never happen. Or, you know, a hobbit hole would be awesome.

Don/Peggy. This is one of those pairings I "ship" more in the sense that one of them can just...accidentally sneeze on the other and I'd be like THIS IS AWESOOOOME (I'm really only slightly exaggerating). Even when I feel it's too limiting to say that it's a completely 100% platonic relationship, if Don was to somehow grow into a person who could make a relationship like that work romantically and they were to fall in love and get married it would probably have to happen in a way that's an afterthought to all the other ways they more transparently love each other. And anyway...I just don't know yet if Peggy would ever go for it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald. I liked The Great Gatsby but I have almost no memory that would serve to help me explain why other than that I liked the writing style. (I'm useless at book reviews, seriously. I rarely hate books.)

marriage. I'll get married sooner or later but I'm just not excited about actually having a wedding and putting my personal life on parade so that everybody can gush at me with supposedly universal sentiments about emotions that I don't really think are universal at all? A lot of my friends pretty much agree that it's not really crossing any threshold you shouldn't have already crossed if you're that committed to someone and that it's basically just a good excuse to have a big party and yes, weddings are lots of fun, but the mere thought of being the center of attention at one just makes we want to crawl into a hole. Probably the biggest reason I'm so hostile to the idea of getting married is because as soon as I do, the questions about when I'm getting married will turn into the unexplainably socially acceptable harassment about when I'm going to have children, which is ten times more of a sore spot. And then if you make the case to me about it being financially practical, I point you to the fact that that isn't something everyone who's in a committed relationship is able to enjoy in my country, sooo.

McCoy/Chapel. This is probably my favorite Star Trek pairing that admittedly has very little basis in canon. I have this thing for characters having unrequited (or otherwise ~not-meant-to-be crushes) that make them miss out on the possibility of what's right in front of them, so I wish there were more (or any) fics that actually explored Chapel going from having the Spock crush to finally starting to uh, notice McCoy. My favorite McChapel fic which is unrelated to that but still amazing is this one.


Meme the second (snagging this from pikasafire):



The RULES:
Give me a fandom/pairing and I will make you a mini fanmix of between 3-6 songs! (It would be cool to leave a couple to choose from, but whatever. If I really like the idea it may end up longer and in a separate post.)

Fandoms I feel fanmixy about:
Star Trek XI, Sherlock, Battlestar Galactica, Tiger & Bunny, Mad Men, Harry Potter, Dublin Murder Squad. Cracky/crazy crossover ideas welcome.

So I saw The Hunger Games and I had lots of feelings but I feel unqualified to talk about them because I thought I didn't really want to read the books and I guess I'm gonna have to. No warnings about Mockingjay are needed, I already know it pissed off a lot of people. Assumptions that I will dislike the ending of something just because most people did make me kind of prickly anyway.
But yeah, I'm getting slightly annoyed about the huge number of people that don't think the world was fleshed out enough/weren't able to take for granted that a dystopia like that would even be possible, like the movie needed to be heavy on pithy exposition-heavy conversations for anybody to read between the lines. Please to be looking up "hegemony" in a dictionary/studying more history. Sure, you probably have to suspend disbelief to an extent, but nobody ever makes that complaint about Brave New World, do they? For the most part I could see some younger audiences having some trouble grasping the politics rather than just accepting that Villains Are Evil, but maybe that isn't giving them enough credit.
And then there's the Team Peeta/Team Gale bullshit that I think probably comes from a confirmation-biased readership that wouldn't have expected a romance and wouldn't see this series as a romance if it had been written by a male. I like both characters enough? Can I just be Team Cinna?
As you can see, I have nothing to say about The Hunger Games.

I am in St. Louis right now and my sister and I are probably going to the Science Center today to check out the Star Trek exhibition. Woo!

If you read this, leave me a one-word comment about your day that starts with the third letter of your LJ USERNAME. Only one word please. Then repost so I can leave a word for you!

Also, very un-dire situation: My .gif bank seems to have way more in the pissed-off/unhappy category than gifs of flails. So if anyone could just spam me with gifs of ~happiness~ that would be awesome (none of this girl please, agh what the hell is that one even from, I'm so sick of her face).

So, Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy. Is it not as good or about the same if you already know who the mole is?
I've heard this film is so confusing they were actually handing out these sort of cheat sheets at screenings though. LOL

Also, come on, there's got to be a Sherlock k-meme going on somewhere? I found one but it looked pretty dead.

It's slowly but surely beginning to sink in for me that Benedict Cumberbatch is going to be in the next Star Trek. I hope he gets a super-gritty role, doesn't necessarily look pretty and acts his ass off. Whatever happens, he's probably going to be a much cooler bad guy then Nero.