briarwood | The state of me...

Other than my crazy shoes post of yesterday, it's been ages since I posted. So here's a brief round-up of the state of Morgan:

I'm on the last day of a lovely week off work. I spent most of my time writing, and working on some stuff for geonncannon.

The writing is going well, though my goal was to finish a fic and I didn't do that. Still, I'm closer than I was :-)

I finished uploading my old Hercules and Xena fics to The Archive of Our Own. I posted a list of the stories for reference here. I did leave out two series, because they were, respectively my first ever published fanfic and my first ever slash. Both written before I'd even heard of a beta. Reading them now makes me cringe and I'd prefer to forget them altogether! The rest still make me happy :-)

The dogs have been...unwell, this week. Mum and I have spent rather more time than anyone ever should cleaning up stinky stuff from the carpets. *touch wood* all seems okay today.

To explain my insane shoes post of yesterday: do you know how hard it is to find exactly the right shoes? Well, it is when you have my lack of fashion sense anyway. I wanted platforms to wear at Asylum con, 'cause I'm a little short person and look tiny next to these tall actors in photos, but I can't wear shoes with a solid piece at the heel - I need mules or slingbacks. This limits my choices somewhat. But when I saw that crazy pair I just had to have 'em. Everyone's gonna laugh at me and I'll probably look like a clown but I don't care. I just hope I can walk in them when they arrive :-)

I also saw Watchmen and...actually I'm not all that impressed. It's got the depth I expect from a comic book (i.e. none at all) which wouldn't be a problem except I was lead to believe that the source material actually has depth. I wouldn't know; I gave up reading cartoons a long time ago, but still.

Watchmen is what you'd expect from Zack Snyder: stylish, violent and shallow. I also prefer my sci-fi to have some kind of internal logic and I couldn't see any here. So, thumbs down from me. Maybe it's better for fans of the source.

That said, it was wonderful to see JDM in a role that's not crappy romcom, and the Comedian is easily the best thing about the film.

I've been enjoying most of the season's TV:

Joss's new show, Dollhouse: Five episodes in I am distinctly unimpressed, but hanging on because I do trust Joss to have a rabbit in the hat somewhere. Joss tells long stories in small pieces; I've often found that a season I haven't enjoyed watching week-by-week turns into my favourite once I've got the full season and can cram it into a marathon-session. Buffy S3: so very irritating when I saw it one ep per week. Now I love it. Same with Angel S2, and actually Firefly, too. So, although I think Dollhouse is failing to deliver so far, I will trust Joss and wait until season's end.

BSG: OMGWTF! I have a feeling what I said about Joss's shows is going to apply to this season. It feels very disjointed to me, too many threads, too many questions, and can't Roslin die already? I don't hate her, it's just I feel like we've been watching her die for years... I am looking forward to the finale, though.

TSCC just keeps getting better. I know it's likely to get cancelled so I really hope they tie some of the questions up this season. I love their unique way of telling the story, the future flashes, the way you can't tell if some of it's real or hallucinations or dreams...the show makes you work hard, which is probably why it's not doing great in the ratings. But, like Farscape, it's worth it.

What can I say about SPN? The show has almost lost me several times this season. I just don't do angels. No matter what. Every show I've gotten invested in that has introduced angels has therafter gone totally off the rails. HTLJ, Xena - perfect examples. (Sentinel got away with it because it was just one ep and the guy could have been nuts.) Angels just don't fit into any reasonable mythology. But I'm hanging on, and though I'm less than thrilled with this season so far I'm still looking forward to the next episode.

The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency

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Charmed did okay with angels... but Charmed was already so campy and bad that everything in it was acceptable by default?

But yeah, I'm unimpressed too. For all the "we're making badass warrior angels!!" that Kripke promised... so far all I'm seeing is a lot of monologuing and blank stares. Maybe SPN's angels really are boring tax accountants but they're too embarassed to admit it?

Charmed did okay with angels...

Well...I stopped watching Charmed when they killed Pru, but do you mean the whitelighters? Because that makes a huge difference: that they weren't called angels. And they weren't really angels anyway because each of them had a human life first. They just served the same function - and that's why Charmed could pull it off.

Actually, it's the demons I had trouble with in Charmed...

For all the "we're making badass warrior angels!!" that Kripke promised...

SPN doesn't have the budget to deliver that.

That's a good point with the whitelighter / not angels part.
Heh, the demons "underworld" was awful. I enjoyed Charmed as a soap opera "feel-good" show so trouble was okay because I wasn't taking it seriously. That may be why SPN's such a turnoff right now - I'm so used to it being serious but the story is trying too hard to be something it can't due to budget / writing / whathaveyou. SPN does best with personal family relations, not the mysterious threat of an offscreen Apocalypse methinks.

SPN doesn't have the budget to deliver that.
They don't, and maybe that's one of the things that makes it so frustrating for me. But then again, if they did have the budget I don't know if it would fare any better. Instead of blank stares and cryptic comments there might be full on angel smitings and no more rock salt in sight.

SPN does best with personal family relations, not the mysterious threat of an offscreen Apocalypse methinks.

I agree totally :-)

Keeping the more apocalyptic stuff off-screen was an interesting decision. I think it could have worked, but for it to work the audience needs to see the fallout. And we're not seeing it. They started out on the right track: that speech Castiel gave at the end of...oh, gods I can't remember the ep name offhand. The one with the Witnesses, where we first learned about the seals. Dean asks why Castiel wasn't around to help and Castiel implies that there was a major battle going on elsewhere. That works, because we could see how it had affected Castiel, even if we didn't know the details of what happened.

But since then, all we've got is Ruby being cryptic, Uriel being an ass, and business as usual for the Winchesters. It doesn't exactly do a good job of racheting up the tension. And at the same time, the stuff they're not saying is getting irritating. If it were Joss or JMS, I'd be happy to wait, knowing the climax will be worth is...but Kripke isn't in that league; he just thinks he is.

Instead of blank stares and cryptic comments there might be full on angel smitings and no more rock salt in sight.

It would be useful to see some of that, actually. I mean, there's a hell of a difference between Uriel saying they've come to blow the town off the map in the Samhain ep, and actually seeing it happen. Imagine if, instead of Sam's death, Dean making his deal, killing the YED and the Devil's Gate opening in All Hell Breaks Loose the final episode of Season 2 had been Sam, Dean, Bobby and Ellen explaining what happened over a beer. That's the equivalent of what we've been getting this season. It's really crappy storytelling.

The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency is my secret vice - it's like an African Hetty Wainthrop!!

Oh, so much better! And why keep it a secret? I want everyone to know how wonderful it is!

Spn is losing me more and more each episode. The only ep I've really enjoyed this season was the magic murders one, which I thought was very well done, and very creepy. (Oh, and the sorta token Ted Rami ep was kinda funny too).

But the mythology, it's just a bit too much with the whole, Angels vs Demons fighting to stop hell breaking out on earth etc. I miss the family business episodes of S1.

It's losing me, too. I haven't really forgiven the show for vanishing Ellen, but what's really irritating me this season is how bloody irrational it all is. I'm totally on Sam's side, man: the angels are evil, Dean's wrong and I want Sam to kill Lilith and become king of Hell :-)

The only ep I've really enjoyed this season was the magic murders one, which I thought was very well done, and very creepy.

It wasn't bad. I loved seeing Meg again. In fact, I want to write the AU in which this season's Ruby is really Meg and she's got Sam totally fooled, which is of course why ghost!Meg was so pissed...

But the mythology, it's just a bit too much with the whole,

I don't mind the mythology thing so much as I mind angels, just on principle. The show was always heading for Apocalypse territory; I'm okay with that. But I can't do Angels.

Demons exist in almost every mythological canon, not always under that name and not always associated with an equivalent of Hell, but evil entities that possess human bodies - they're everywhere. If you look for Angels, though, you're into a specific mythology. Kripke may not intend it, but he's sending a message with that choice, about the way his fictional 'verse works, and it's broken my ability to suspend disbelief. It's redeemable, if the story goes the right way, but I don't believe Krip has that kind of skill as a storyteller.

I'd forgotten about the Meg one. That was fun too!

This show does seem to have a habit of, the Winchester boys and possibly Bobby aside, building up characters and then killing them off. Which means that you don't invest in new characters because they're not like to last out the season. But I miss Ellen too. She was a very good female character, and those are rare.

And Sam has a point, and that would make a much more fun show! But...I think one of the BIG problems with the whole "god is real" thing, is that you have to explain why bad things happen. And Spn have made angels into dicks to do that. (I think Scrubs handled the religion much better, and that's kinda sad really. Though Scrubs can make me cry, and Spn really can't.)

I think your AU would be much better than anything the show has done. Specially since if Ruby crawled out of hell, there's nothing to say Meg didn't too. (And Meg wasn't actually sent back to hell in BUaBS anyway right?)

But...I think one of the BIG problems with the whole "god is real" thing, is that you have to explain why bad things happen.

Only if God is good. Which is the problem with having introduced Angels: God is Good is part of that deal. It creates a circle almost impossible to square; SPN is trying to get around it by implying that maybe God's notion of "good" and the human notion of "good" don't mesh too well, but I don't think they're succeeding.

(And Meg wasn't actually sent back to hell in BUaBS anyway right?)

I think the scene in BUABS is ambiguous: it was an exorcism, so maybe she was sent back to Hell...but they'd abandoned the exorcism by the time Bobby thought to break the binding spell so maybe not. Either way, she'd found her way out once before, so why not again?

The state of me...

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