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ariadnes_stringIn which I catch up with the rest of the world
By seeing Avengers and reading The Hunger Games (okay, listening to it, on audiobook).
Certain characters portrayed by Michael Fassbender notwithstanding, I’m just not a superheroes kind of person. The movie was all really well done and well cast, but it hit very few buttons for me, and I thought it was particularly canny move on the script writers’ part have Tony Stark doling out insults on everyone’s costume before one could formulate one’s own.
Still, I love me some Renner, particularly when he gets to do his trademark batshit stare--enough to even get over that costume (which looked part of the “Elves do it with Magic” routine excised from Magic Mike for being too hokey). I probably liked his fight with Black Widow and the subsequent make-up scene more than the rest of the movie put together (because yeah, no magic glow sticks or fantastical ontologies). But I know that that’s purely matter of taste.
Oh, and Mark Ruffalo was amazingly poignant as Bruce Banner.
Y’all can kick me out of fandom now.
I finally succumbed to reading (listening) to The Hunger Games because my older son ripped through the series and loved it.
And though I had all the problems with it I knew I’d have (and which had stopped me from reading it in the first place) I could totally see what all the fuss was about. The characters were almost uniformly engaging and the plot swept me along. It made a particularly good thing to listen to while running through my own much more manicured patch of the Appalachian woods.
But I had my usual problems with narratives based on games (something which has kept me from truly loving lots of things, from Harry Potter to Gladiator). I suppose you could say that the strategy was so overt in The Hunger Games -- it was so clear the when the “game makers” needed to spice things up, it was really the author who needed to spice things up—that it was almost a meta on the whole narrative strategy. But it still bugged me. My son and I had some heated discussions about whether certain things were narrative cheating or not.
(and it makes me think that my sons’ generation is much more comfortable with the idea that “reality” is organized this way than people as old as me).
It was also probably not a good thing that I listened to it at the same time as I was reading Karl Marlantes’s What it is Like to Go to War (more on this when I’ve finished it). Marlantes has some compelling sections on the pernicious effects of the idea of the “clean kill,” and as I read THG, I got more and more annoyed at the way the narrative sidestepped what seemed to be the central moral problem of the book: would Katniss hunt and kill other children in her pursuit of winning the games? The actual deaths and their aftermaths were probably as realistically described as is appropriate for a YA novel. But, although Katniss kills, she never does it “in cold blood”: it happens by proxy, by accident, in self-defense, and as an act of mercy. Twice, people are killed “for her.” She says she’s going to pursue the other tributes, but she never actually has to. I wanted to see her make an ethical decision and act on it. The fact that it never happens started to drive me nuts.
And, yeah, I love clothes and kissing as much as the next girl, but enough already, huh?
Ahem. I think this review demonstrates why I shouldn't read YA novels!
I know, I know, I'm a grump.
In more important news, there is a masterlist now for Running Hot II, with fics from H50, White Collar, Sherlock and SPN. There are many more fabulous prompts from many fandoms including Avangers awaiting fills at the post. We also have AO3 collections for this year and last year. If you wrote something last year and posted it to the Archive you can edit it to include it in last year’s collection (and please do!!)
By seeing Avengers and reading The Hunger Games (okay, listening to it, on audiobook).
Certain characters portrayed by Michael Fassbender notwithstanding, I’m just not a superheroes kind of person. The movie was all really well done and well cast, but it hit very few buttons for me, and I thought it was particularly canny move on the script writers’ part have Tony Stark doling out insults on everyone’s costume before one could formulate one’s own.
Still, I love me some Renner, particularly when he gets to do his trademark batshit stare--enough to even get over that costume (which looked part of the “Elves do it with Magic” routine excised from Magic Mike for being too hokey). I probably liked his fight with Black Widow and the subsequent make-up scene more than the rest of the movie put together (because yeah, no magic glow sticks or fantastical ontologies). But I know that that’s purely matter of taste.
Oh, and Mark Ruffalo was amazingly poignant as Bruce Banner.
Y’all can kick me out of fandom now.
I finally succumbed to reading (listening) to The Hunger Games because my older son ripped through the series and loved it.
And though I had all the problems with it I knew I’d have (and which had stopped me from reading it in the first place) I could totally see what all the fuss was about. The characters were almost uniformly engaging and the plot swept me along. It made a particularly good thing to listen to while running through my own much more manicured patch of the Appalachian woods.
But I had my usual problems with narratives based on games (something which has kept me from truly loving lots of things, from Harry Potter to Gladiator). I suppose you could say that the strategy was so overt in The Hunger Games -- it was so clear the when the “game makers” needed to spice things up, it was really the author who needed to spice things up—that it was almost a meta on the whole narrative strategy. But it still bugged me. My son and I had some heated discussions about whether certain things were narrative cheating or not.
(and it makes me think that my sons’ generation is much more comfortable with the idea that “reality” is organized this way than people as old as me).
It was also probably not a good thing that I listened to it at the same time as I was reading Karl Marlantes’s What it is Like to Go to War (more on this when I’ve finished it). Marlantes has some compelling sections on the pernicious effects of the idea of the “clean kill,” and as I read THG, I got more and more annoyed at the way the narrative sidestepped what seemed to be the central moral problem of the book: would Katniss hunt and kill other children in her pursuit of winning the games? The actual deaths and their aftermaths were probably as realistically described as is appropriate for a YA novel. But, although Katniss kills, she never does it “in cold blood”: it happens by proxy, by accident, in self-defense, and as an act of mercy. Twice, people are killed “for her.” She says she’s going to pursue the other tributes, but she never actually has to. I wanted to see her make an ethical decision and act on it. The fact that it never happens started to drive me nuts.
And, yeah, I love clothes and kissing as much as the next girl, but enough already, huh?
Ahem. I think this review demonstrates why I shouldn't read YA novels!
I know, I know, I'm a grump.
In more important news, there is a masterlist now for Running Hot II, with fics from H50, White Collar, Sherlock and SPN. There are many more fabulous prompts from many fandoms including Avangers awaiting fills at the post. We also have AO3 collections for this year and last year. If you wrote something last year and posted it to the Archive you can edit it to include it in last year’s collection (and please do!!)
