the deep moans round with many voices

Dear Yuletide Writer,

Hi, and thank you in advance for writing a story for me! I'm pretty easy to please -- unless you write a story that's only a long sex scene, I'll be thrilled just to get a fic in one of the fandoms I asked for. *grin* But I realize that's not terribly helpful, so here's the (very!) long version. (I am sorry for the tl;dr, but I like to talk about things I love and I figure more details are better than fewer.)

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( General Information )

Okay. On to specific fandoms.

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( The Lions of Al-Rassan )

( Lucifer )

( The Dispossessed )

( Mysterious Skin - TRIGGER WARNING )

And that is that.

*stares blankly at her Ilgamuth-meets-Rabadash fic*

This was meant to be a quick comment!fic sort of thing. Except it's 4,000 words now. It is turning into a proper war story. I just. Seriously. WTF???

...

Hey, rthstewart, would you mind horribly if this turns into an accidental Mini-Bang fic for the Narnia Big Bang and you don't get to see it until February? Because I think it might end up that long by the time it lets me finish the expansions.

(The problem, you see, is that the end of the story is all detailed scenes and whatnot, taking place over a single day in Tashbaan, but the beginning was this massively compressed thing that covered a couple months in about three paragraphs. And trying to match those two aspects is turning those paragraphs into lots and lots and lots of detailed scenes, with Rabadash's companions showing up as proper OCs and so on and so forth. *headdesk* I have incurable running-on-at-the-word-processor disease, I really, really do.)

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In other writing news, I opened the files for "Friends and Neighbors" and for "Secrets" ch. 15, and ended up writing a hundred words or so of "Secrets" tonight, in which Ginny and Susan Ward snipe at each other.

The problem with chapter 15, of course, is that I want to match it up to "First You Have to Get There," in which both Susan and Daphne Rumluck are clearly Ginny's friends. Except in "Secrets," Ginny and Daphne loathe each other (which is Ginny's fault at the outset, Daphne's fault later on for not letting it drop, and ultimately makes both of them look unpleasant -- very intentional on my part, btw), and Ginny and Susan dislike each other (which is, again, Ginny's fault but exacerbated by Susan later on, and makes them both look extremely petty). I have gotten Ginny and Daphne to a sort of armed truce, which, given that Ginny and Apple (Daphne's cousin) have mended their fences, is a reasonable setup for slightly barbed friendship three years later, but Ginny and Susan are proving less tractable.

*thwaps them both*

I just want to get through this so I can write Ginny and Xanthe Delaflor being all cute and awkward and friends and saying goodbye at the end of term, and then I can get to the Hogwarts Express and the dramatic reveal of Percy's secret ~girlfriend~, which Ginny has been sitting on for quite a while now. *grin*

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I have not signed up for Yuletide yet. I am still mulling over my fourth request. Three are continuing on from last year -- The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay, Lucifer the comics series by Mike Carey et al, and The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin (subset of the Hainish Cycle, but I only really want fic about Anarres and Urras and the people of those two planets, so) -- but I switch out any fandom I get a story in, and I'm not sure yet which fourth tiny fandom of my heart to ask for.

Probably I will end up asking for some movie with Joseph Gordon-Levitt in it, since that seems to be the theme of my year. *wry* But give me a day or two to pretend I am not quite that shallow.

Today I did something that I think I have never done before. I went to see a movie on its opening day.

Of course, I went to see said movie at a 2:20pm afternoon matinee while most of Ithaca was down on the Commons for the first day of the Apple Harvest Fest, so it's not like I was fighting for a ticket or a seat, but still. This is not something I do.

The movie in question is 50/50. It stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Watching everything he's ever acted in includes new movies too, you know. *wry*

Anyway, there was some kind of trouble with the projection system, such that between each preview a horrible grinding and screeching noise came from the left front corner of the theater. When the film itself started, the screeching noise became continual instead of only lasting a couple seconds. After a minute and a half, I went out to the lobby to find a staff member and notify them of the issue. When I came back to the theater, the sound had cut out completely.

Fortunately about thirty seconds after that, somebody got to the projection booth and fixed the problem. (Mostly. The noise came back twice later on, but only for about two seconds' duration each time.)

The point of this is that I effectively missed the first five minutes of the film -- in which we are first introduced to the rather nebbishy Adam, his somewhat highstrung girlfriend Rachel, and his boorish friend and coworker Kyle -- which is annoying. But it's not insurmountable; 50/50 is not the most subtle film in the world, and the characters and relationships are pretty easy to parse even without those first scenes.

Hmm. I have read a few reviews of the film (I like to have some idea of what I'm letting myself in for when I sign away an hour and forty minutes of my life) and by and large I agree with them. This is a pretty good story, pretty well acted -- nothing great, a bit sitcom-ish at first, awkward in its handling of Rachel, but deeper and truer than it might seem at the start, and sweet without getting cloying.

Tangentially, I was pleasantly surprised by Anna Kendrick, whom I had never seen before. This has nothing to do with her acting skills. (I am pretty sure she was in, um, something where she got praised for good work fairly recently -- oh, what's it... right, Up in the Air -- so I knew from hearsay that she could act.) It has to do with her physical appearance. She is average-looking in a way that leading actresses so rarely are allowed to be. By which I mean she's thin and pretty and has nice hair, but she also has a nose with actual character, plus the kind of facial structure that makes me think "rabbit" or maybe "squirrel." She's not cookie-cutter. She looks like a real person. Men can do that all the time and still be considered handsome and sexy. Women are much more restricted by narrowly defined beauty stereotypes. So I am cheered by Anna Kendrick's existence and career. May she have many more roles for decades to come!

So yeah. I liked the movie. There were a few points where I had to hide behind a shield of interlaced fingers lest my sympathetic embarrassment squick overcome me, but overall that was eleven dollars (eight for the ticket, three for bus fare) well spent. :-)

Things I have learned about myself over the years:

1. I vastly prefer action movies or serious arthouse flicks to comedies (romantic or otherwise).

2. I have a sympathetic embarrassment squick.

3. Shockingly enough, those first two points are related.


...

This reflection brought to you twenty minutes into watching (500) Days of Summer. Awkward flirting, a young man being a dick to a young woman because she doesn't want to date anyone, and drunken karaoke. *flinch*

(My one consolation is that it's Tom's friend being a dick to Summer, not Tom himself, though he was pretty awful in his own right with the whole "You know what I need" thing when she asked if he needed any supplies at work. Still. That conversation is way too close to my own life for comfort.)

ETA: Am now at the one hour mark, in the middle of the awful blind date, and we are back to drunken karaoke. I think this is a pretty good movie, but ye gods, it is just one painfully awkward moment after another, and it's done with enough realism (even the bizarro moments have emotional realism) that I cannot write it off as farce and try to disengage my empathy. Ow, flinch, ow, flinch, ow. (Yeah, okay, some parts are damn funny, but they're not the parts that stick with me.)

Tom can't figure out where he went wrong. This is because he's too close to the issue and has stupid assumptions to boot. I can tell you exactly where he screwed up. He went wrong from the beginning, when he lied and said he was okay with casual and being just friends, and then assumed that the kiss meant Summer wasn't serious about her "let's not get serious" schtick, instead of saying, "Hey, so what exactly do you mean by 'friends' and 'not serious,' because this is not what I use those words to mean, and also I really like you, so please don't lead me on." Honesty and clear communication are key, and romantic love will not magically grow just because one person in a relationship wants it to.

Somehow over the last twelve years, while I remembered enjoying the movie, and the party scenes, and the refreshing assumption that teens can be smart even when they're being stupid and/or shallow (because hey, teenagers), I forgot how flat-out funny 10 Things I Hate About You is.

I was in the teen movie target demographic when it was released (I was 17 in 1999), but so far as I can recall, the only teen movies* I actually saw in high school were Clueless and 10 Things. Possibly both were on the recommendation of my little sister, who liked the teen movie genre a lot more than my friends and I did. I generally saw movies with people, which meant I generally saw dramas with my parents or action movies with my friends. For a while, Cat, Susan and I even had a Bad Action Movie Night tradition, which produced much hilarity at the expense of films like Mortal Kombat or various Highlander sequels, though we did also watch some decent action movies for variety's sake.

...No, wait, I did see a third teen movie. The one with... a brown-haired girl and that annoying guy who dated and/or married Sarah Michelle Gellar. She's All That, maybe? One of those dumb nerd-girl-cleans-up-nice plots. Oh, what is his name. Freddie something or other. Anyway, that one was just a brainless way to kill two hours, as you can tell by my near complete inability to remember it. 10 Things I Hate About You is not brainless. Fluffy, sure, but there's an actual story and charm to it.

All of which is by way of leading to this: Allison Janney is a treasure. :-)



*(I also saw The Faculty, which, though it purports to be a horror movie, actually plays brilliantly when viewed as a comedy -- specifically a teen movie farce in which people happen to die in stupidly unbelievable ways. In fact, I dare you to take the doing-drugs-proves-you're-human plot twist seriously. But that is extremely tangential to this post.)