skygiants

ahhhh I super meant to make my Festivids rec post before reveals happened, but I haven't actually looked at anyone's names yet so we'll just pretend I actually did finish composing this under the wire!

I received not one but two extremely delightful vids:

Slow Hope, for the recent anime adaptation of my beloved 7 Seeds, which does an incredible job pulling out the gorgeous landscapes and atmosphere of the show and the key theme of the relationships that pull you through impossible times

Me Oyen, Me Escuchen, a Los Espookys vid which you should all go watch if my post about it from a few months ago even moderately intrigued you because it will give you a better sense of the bizarre, affectionate, exuberant mood of the show than anything I could have possibly said

I have not had a chance to watch through the entire collection but I did see a bunch of others that delighted me particularly, including but not limited to:

Hello My Old Heart - both Moana vids were really good this year but this one was my favorite for the nonlinear storytelling and the thematic build

Nothing But the Water - a beautiful Underground vid focusing on Ernestine that manages to both capture the complexities of her character and give her a moment of grace

We're Here, But Should We Have Come? - I've never seen Travel Man but the comic timing on this vid is so brilliant that it absolutely doesn't matter

Good As Hell - also true for this Midsommar vid; a gem and a work of art

Grounds for Divorce - David Tennant's Hamlet, A+ atmosphere and use of thematic symbolism

They're On Their Way - Muppet Treasure Island is my absolute favorite Muppet movie and this my new favorite Muppet vid

...and now I have to go to chorus practice so the vid that I made will wait until tonight!

The Lost Library exchange just wrapped up -- that's the metafictional one where you write a bit of a book or play or movie that's implied or stated to exist in another book or movie -- and it was, unsurprisingly, delightful.

I chucked two works into the fray, one straight-up unfinished script --

Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter (Draft 2, With Comments)

What has occurred to bring me to this pass?
For on my life, I cannot make it out.

[PERHAPS BECAUSE THE RELEVANT SCENES ARE MISSING FROM THIS PLAY, WILL]

-- and one semi-scholarly compilation, including some script excerpts and a few production reviews.

The Great Fire Lord

CASTING NOTES

FIRELORD SOZIN: Heroic leading man type. Strong, well-muscled, must look good shirtless.

AVATAR ROKU: Attractively sinister type. Small goatee, pencil moustache, fantastic hair.

DRAGONS: At least three actors per dragon. No skimping!

And, in exchange, I received another delightful rediscovered bit of the literary corpus of the Ember Island Players!

The Legend of the Blue Spirit

The BLUE SPIRIT enters stage left. He glides through the fortress like a ghost, kicking, punching, and slicing through the guards. He leaves the last one standing, and places his blades against the guard’s throat.

Honestly, I hope this exchange runs for long enough to build a whole Ember Island Players library. So much hilarious revisionist A:tLA history, so little time!

There's a bunch of other charming works in the archive, which I highly recommend checking out, but I'm just gonna toss out ( a few more recs )

I do not participate in Festivids, but I love it! I love it because a.) vids are great and b.) IT IS ACTUALLY POSSIBLE TO GET THROUGH THE WHOLE THING IN LESS THAN A WEEK.

(Yuletide archive, I will defeat you. But this is not that day.)

( Vid recs under the cut! )

A few things:

1. Much to my surprise and delight, winkingstar has podficced me! Specifically the Northanger Abbey snippet I wrote for Yuletide, Catherine's Fairy-Tail, which is absolutely the last thing I would ever have expected anyone to be interested in podficcing and therefore makes me even more gleeful about it.

2. Okay, I try not to be that kind of terrifying fan who runs around shoving things down people's throats (I guess those you who have literally had me shove these books physically into your hands can feel free to laugh at me here) but some of you may remember that time I read the Twelve Kingdoms books, fell madly in love with Fuyumi Ono's brain, ranted all over LJ about the perfection of Yoko Nakajima's character arc, etc.? FOR ONCE I AM NOT ALONE and now you should all go read izilen's Ten Reasons to Read the Twelve Kingdoms post so you can all fall down the rabbithole too.

The official news that Tokyopop is folding and the third Yoko book is therefore pretty much guaranteed to NEVER COME OUT in English actually broke me enough that I decided to do a reread on the Yoko books, this time using Eugene Woodbury's fan translations as a comparison to the Tokyopop ones I already read. In general, I think I agree with the assessment that the fan translations are better, with one nitpicky detail - I actually really like Tokyopop's decision to use 'king' as a gender-neutral term, rather than using 'empress' for the female rulers. Kingship is gender-neutral in the Twelve Kingdoms universe, and that's important to the story!

I have also now read the one Tokyopop never got around to publishing, The Shore in Twilight, The Sky at Daybreak, and - man, guys, I am SO ANGRY they never got to this one, because what Fuyumi Ono does in this series continues to be more and more impressive. This is the book where she just comes right up to the questions she's been flirting around in all the previous ones and forces the characters to acknowledge that the system of the way the world works, divine mandate of kings and all, has serious problems - makes, in many ways, no intuitive sense. And there's no way, as far as anyone knows, to reform it. Those are the rules. Break them, and your country suffers. So you find loopholes. You lawyer your way around the rules. I cannot admire Fuyumi Ono more for this - it's so brave and so fascinating to set up a system of rules for a magic kingdom and then deconstruct them in this way, and I can't think of another story that does it with quite this level of cold logic.

This is a book about how you can't just afford to obey the rules and keep your own house in order and close your eyes to what's happening elsewhere, because sooner or later it's going to rebound on you. And Yoko's intuitive sense of responsibility, the way she brings this point home and makes the rest of the rulers acknowledge it, makes me love her even more than I already did, IF THAT WAS EVEN POSSIBLE. (But we all know that I've got my #1 Yoko Nakajima Fangirl badge pinned onto my metaphorical shirt all the time, so.)

This is also, I should mention, a book in which the most important dynamic is between a lady general and the lady king she's come to ask to help save her country. Plus, a genderqueer king! (At least, that's how I read the king of Han.) And Yoko hilariously blackmailing Shoryuu into doing what she wants! And Shoukei and Suzu being background awesome! In short: DAMMIT TOKYOPOP, I would really have liked to own a physical copy of this book.

Over the course of my awesome weekend with visitors gramarye1971, phoenixchilde and neenie (as well as various NY associates), I mentioned that I had been thinking of writing up the Massive Diana Wynne Jones Complete Recommendation Post of Ultimate Doom. Fools that they are, they encouraged me! THEREFORE: I present to you a Full and Complete Roundup of Diana Wynne Jones Novels, for the guidance of all of those people out there who inexplicably have not yet obsessively hunted down and read everything she has ever written, and would like to know where to begin or continue.

This is part one of two, covering DWJ one-off novels; the second post (coming soon! Probably!) will be an overview of all of DWJ's series books.

( Archer's Goon )


( Black Maria )


( Dogsbody )


( Eight Days of Luke )


( Fire and Hemlock )


( The Game )


( Hexwood )


( The Homeward Bounders )


( The Ogre Downstairs )


( Power of Three )


( A Tale of Time City )


( The Time of the Ghost )


I read A Sudden Wild Magic but don't remember liking it particularly, and I haven't read Changeover, so I'm not going to talk about them here (cheating, I know) but if anyone has, and wants to chime in with Why They're Awesome, please absolutely feel free!

NEXT ROUND: Series books!