skygiants

Yuletide reveals! I had two fics in the archive this year:

Statistical Methods in Risk Assessment, The Bletchley Circle

This was my assigned fic -- the excellent prompt was to write a fic focused on Jean, the oldest of the Bletchley Circle women, femslash optional but encouraged -- and I fell neck-deep into the research hole on it. I have a post coming about the several WWII-era history books that I read over the past few months while figuring what I actually wanted to write about, but most of what actually went into the story ended up coming out of what I learned about the Special Operations Executive branch, the only arm of the British government that sent women behind the lines as spies. And IT'S ALL FASCINATING, so thank you for such an amazing prompt,

xylaria! (Also, it finally gave me the push to actually watch season 2 of The Bletchley Circle, which I'd been meaning to do for literally years.)

Or, What You Will, Singin' in the Rain

I would very much have liked to fall neck-deep down the research hole on this one also --

emma_in_dream's excellent request was for Singin' in the Rain fic that incorporated historical of Golden Age Hollywood -- except I grabbed it as a pinch-hit on December 18th and I did not have time! So I did what I could with background knowledge, Wikipedia, and enthusiasm, plus a recent hallucinogenic Busby Berkeley musical experience. Don't ask me where the fake Twelfth Night movie musical part came from because I really do not know; it just sort of arrived fully-formed and would not leave.

Thank you to

genarti,

saramily,

gramary1971, and

innerbrat for amazing beta work, and to

genarti especially for pointing out how to use Malvolio to foreshadow the oncoming banhammer of the Motion Picture Production Code.

(Also, thank you again for my amazing Healer fic,

china_shop!)

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/463242.html

When

newredshoes was visiting this weekend, we ended up watching most of The Bletchley Circle, and I just sort of feel like talking a little bit more about Susan, the mystery-solving protagonist.

I mean, I've said this before, but the thing that gets me about Susan is that she has all the hallmark traits of a Sherlock Holmes or a, I don't know, Patrick Jane (I've never watched The Mentalist) or any of the other flawed civilian crime-solving geniuses who tend to anchor the kind of shows where geniuses solve crime. She sees the world in ways that other people don't; she sees patterns that most people don't see, and that leads her to have exceptional insights. She's incredibly intelligent, and very bad at explaining herself to people who aren't as intelligent -- she doesn't have the communication skills or the patience for it. And she LOVES her intelligence. She loves being right. She loves being right sometimes to the point where she forgets to have the appropriate reactions of horror at horrible things, and forgets to take other people's horror into account, because those horrible things prove her deductions correct.

But she isn't a Sherlock Holmes, because she isn't an independently wealthy upper-class white man who can afford to be dismissive of the rest of the world. She's a fifties housewife, a woman who has been socialized to be polite and conciliating and to always put other people at first. So she doesn't say, "I'm brilliant, I can see things you can't;" she says, "I'm good with patterns." And the way these impulses are at war in her -- her knowledge of her own intelligence and skills and the fact that she is smarter and better than other people, and the fact that she knows she's not supposed to be, and no one will take her seriously if she is -- is what makes her fascinating, and what anchors the show, for me.

And I don't think I've seen another character like this, and I want to.

(This is of course a request for recs, I am always requesting recs.)

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/330816.html

So recently

innerbrat and I have been using our spare time to watch a very serious kdrama in which everyone is clearly going to turn evil and/or die, but I'm not going to talk about that just yet, instead I'm going to talk about what we just took a break to watch instead: The Bletchley Circle.

So The Bletchley Circle is a three-part British series about four former Bletchley Park codebreakers during the war, and a serial killer, and a LOT OF FABULOUS COATS.

The basic idea of the plot is to examine the lives of these women who were doing important, skilled, life-saving work during the war - work that they could never talk about, because of the Official Secrets Act - and then were spit back out into a deeply sexist 1950s culture to become housewives and spinsters and waitresses, and had to cope with it.

In this case, the way in which they cope is by figuring out that they can use their super code-breaking skills to FIGHT CRIME, which obviously I am all in favor of.

The one in the reddish-purple coat - which is also clearly the best coat, so you know that she's the leader - is Susan. She's a calm, quiet housewife who is extremely good with patterns, and rather bad at explaining things to people. When she triangulates the location of a murder victim from a bunch of radio broadcasts, she firsts attempts to go to the police; they are dismissive. Next step: round up the old gang to stop a killer!

The other three ladies are Lucy, the young one with an eidetic memory; Jean, the no-nonsense one with valuable librarian skills; and Millie, the unconventional one (you can tell because she's wearing trousers.)

The show is far from perfect; it does that unfortunate serial killer thing with the camera and dead women, it's super white, and it's also somewhat prone to gestures of dramatic symbolism that do not necessarily make a ton of sense. (My favorite: when Susan asks Millie to use her lipstick to trace out potential train routes that the killer might have taken. Guys, wasn't lipstick . . . rationed? And expensive? Couldn't you use a pen . . .?)

But it does do a really good job of portraying a bunch of awesome, intelligent ladies doing their thing, and of focusing on issues of gender and class. We've also been watching Elementary around here, and at one point, as we were watching this, Debi said to me, "You know, if Sherlock was female, she couldn't get away with being Sherlock. No one would listen to her." And: yeah. There's that.

It's also chock full of completely stunning cinematography that feels like it could have come out of the 1950s, and, as I have probably made clear, does an amazing job with costumes, especially coats. As much as I respect Susan, would I mug her in an alley for her outerwear? IT'S POSSIBLE.