Currently watching

[ljwrites]

Into the Badlands

Really good post-apocalyptic wuxia with big-stakes political/military intrigue and a compelling cast of characters. There are amazingly choreographed action sequences in the best tradition of Chinese action movies. I love how diverse the cast is, too, with many interracial relationships and a canon queer relationship. I'm almost done with this one and am hanging onto the last three episodes mainly out of a reluctance to let the show go. I'll finish when I'm in the mood.

Star Trek: Discovery

I have mixed feelings about this one. I love Michael Burnham and the Season 2 storyline is intriguing, but I'm still disoriented by the tight focus on the main plot and cast, resulting in a lack of the ensemble feel and leisurely pace that I'm used to with Trek.

The going is slow on this one because I'm watching this together with Mark and we both have to find time to sit down together, mainly while folding laundry. We haven't done this in a while, and the living room sofa is a jumble of clean laundry XD

Good Omens

This was all the rage on Tumblr for a few weeks and I still see quite a bit of content. I never could get into the book, and it sat on my shelf for years unread after my then-boyfriend lent it to me. Then we got married and I returned it to him as part of my move-in luggage. Neither Terry Pratchett nor Neil Gaiman ever quite gelled for me and the two of them together weren't a particular improvement, it turns out.

My husband loved the book, though, and wanted to watch the show with me, so we watched Episode 1 together. It's funny, I guess? I'm still meh on it, but it's easier and more passive than reading the book.

Black Lightning

I was stalled on Season 2 for a while before I started again recently. I haven't watched a lot of superhero shows but I like this one, with its intimate portrayal of a family threatened from the outside and dealing with their own internal turmoil and conflicts. And I am so rooting for Anissa/Grace even though I don't think Anissa has a very good track record when it comes to treating women well. (Chenoa did nothing wrong!) I'm sure she'll grow as a character and am looking forward to how it might happen.

Comments

[lb_lee]

Neither Terry Pratchett nor Neil Gaiman ever quite gelled for me

Oh man, I'm glad to know I'm not the only one! I have found a couple instances of each of them that I enjoyed, but it was definitely a "slog through six books trying to get it, give up, eventually find that one short story or one book that clicked."

That said, my friend who's storing all my possessions is SO INTO Good Omens right now. In my case, we eventually read it due to fandom work, and man did Fandom Telephone give us a very distorted picture of what the book was about!

[ljwrites]

I remember wondering what was wrong with me because both these authors have such dedicated fandoms and I just could not see it. I've read the Sandman books and like one short story by Gaiman (the horror retelling of Snow White), and I think two of the Discworld books because people were SO enthusiastic about them and my husband had a few of the books, but in the end... meh.

Do you mean to tell me Good Omens isn't a romance between the angel and demon? Because that is alllll I've seen on Tumblr.

[lb_lee]

Haha, yeah, not a romance between Angel and demon, massive cast, very sprawling!

[lb_lee]

Also, Sneak and Gigi totally like the Graveyard Book. And I like the Discworld book about the golems, because it is HARD to make a golem story I hate. (And the golem gets to live to the end! And be a hero! Even THAT is hard to find!)

[ljwrites]

I didn't know there was a Discworld book about golems! And yeah, books that give constructed people their due are hard to find. :/

[lb_lee]

Yeah, it's called Feet of Clay. It's pretty great, though it does take a while to get going, in my opinion. But then it just builds up more and more momentum, and ends very satisfyingly.

[loopy777]

Out of curiosity, which Discworld books did you try? The early ones have a bit of a different flavor from the late ones, and it's the later half of the series that had inspired all the dedication. Even within those, I think a Witches book can be very different from a City Watch book.

But I think they're all superior to 90% of novels, and Good Omens is one of the greatest novels ever written, so I'm obviously coming at this from a certain perspective.

(Although I'll agree that Gaiman isn't a big deal. I like some of his writing, but his only home run for me is Marvel 1602, and Sandman's first volume turned me off from that whole series. I can name a dozen modern authors who deliver for me much more consistently.)

[ljwrites]

I just looked up to check, and it turns out I read exactly the first three books--The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, and Equal Rites. So the first two Rincewind books and the first Witches book, evidently. I definitely did not get to the later books that people are evidently raving about.

I think it was the humor in Good Omens that lost me. I think I was supposed to find it funny that the demon guy turned off all the telecommunications, but I didn't and I just... drifted away at that point. I guess the pattern is that Pratchett (though GO wasn't all Pratchett) gets better as he goes but tends to lose me early on XD

[loopy777]

Yeah, it's a joke amongst Discworld fans that we never tell people to start with the first books. ("This is when Discworld starts to get good!" is the response when a full-series read hits books 4-7, although I'd say even 4 & 5 are kind of weak, compared to what comes.) I actually started with one of the last in the series, which itself is a direct sequel to a slightly earlier book that I went on to read next, and only after that did I go back and start from the beginning. The first few books are fun fantasy parodies, but forgettable without their later context.

I'm surprised that's the "joke" that turned you off to Good Omens. The way I interpret that scene, it's not even much of a joke, but it's a very important thematic moment. The demons are describing their corruptions, with the first two talking about forcing holy people to have impure thoughts that will drive them away from holiness, and then Crowley talks about shutting off everyone's phones. There's a bit of humor in the contrast, where the phone thing seems weak in comparison, but then he explains that shutting off everyone's phones annoyed all the people within a major metropolitan area, which led to them all being mean to others who didn't deserve it. So he truly corrupted all those people, taking away all possible justification for the cruelties they inflicted of their own free will, simply by prodding them into typical human behavior. So what was a weak act becomes profound because he did more for Hell's cause than the guys who were using demon powers to basically mind-control people. And it reveals a lot about the story's perception of humanity, but not yet all of that perception.

I mean, if humor doesn't work for a person-- it is very British in Good Omens -- then it can indeed be annoying. (See my reaction to the humor in Avatar, and the episodes that rely too heavily on it.) But that scene in particular always struck me as transcending what you'd expect to find in a comedy/parody.