teach me the art of war

- Shadow and Bone s2 was eight hours of my life that I'm never getting back. I don't understand and don't want to understand the choices they made about pacing, or the rationale for trying to cover THREE NOVELS worth of content in a single season along with great piles of extra stuff they just made up all by themselves. Ben Barnes' performance and the excellent Nikolai casting were bright spots, but they weren't worth the mess that was everything else.

- I'm also not enjoying Ted Lasso s3, though less because it’s actually bad and more because it just isn’t giving me what I want. I’m here for feelgood escapism and nothing but feelgood escapism, whereas I feel like this and the last season have been leaning a lot more into being a serious TV drama about mental health and interpersonal conflict and what have you. Happy for the fandom that they’ve got so much toothy stuff to work with, but at this point I think I’m only continuing to watch out of curiosity + a bit of sunk cost fallacy. It just doesn’t spark joy like s1 did.

- On the other hand none of that reeeeeally matters because The Mandalorian is eating my ENTIRE brain. If the writers had all sat down at the first meeting and said, 'right, priority number one is to tell a story that lucymonster will love', they could hardly done a better job nailing everything I want out of this canon. Baby Yoda is now fully fledged Toddler Yoda, with the trail of wreckage behind him to prove it! The ex-Empire/proto-First Order stuff is endlessly absorbing to me, as is the nuanced exploration of what it means to be Mandalorian. Bo-Katan's involvement has exceeded my wildest dreams - she's basically the deuteragonist at this point? And the chemistry between her and Din has been nothing short of scorching. My teeny-tiny little little ship is suddenly the Hot New Thing and there's more art and fic to enjoy than I can possibly keep up with. Every other show in the world can jump the shark, for all I care. I'm getting all my needs met right here and I'm over the moon about it. :DDDDDDD

 - In writing news, I'm once again relearning the eternal truth that the Venn diagram of 'music I want to listen to for myself' and 'music I want to listen to for fic purposes' is very close to being two separate circles. As soon as I'm trying to brainstorm, my taste goes belly-up and all I want is the whiniest post-hardcore and metalcore in my library. I want Bullet For My Valentine, I want A Skylit Drive, I want breakdowns and high-pitched vocals and painfully confessional lyrics about some dude's inability to find or keep a girlfriend. Nothing else gets the creative juices flowing the same way, man, idek.

My wonderful friend sent me the most perfect little gift of Inej/Alina knifeplay yesterday. It's private so alas I can't share it with you all, but here are some other tiny, gorgeous ficlets I've loved on ao3:

burn me down by doctorkaitlyn - first kiss, 250 words

unconfessed heresy by Ashling - on sainthood, 300 words

bequeathment by ElasticElla - rituals and knives, 500 words

I'm in a good mood today because my husband brought bagels home from the markets this morning. I ate a blueberry one with jam for morning tea, and this arvo I'm having a plain one with peanut butter and nutella. Don't @ me if these are the Wrong Things to do to bagels - they're not really eaten all that often in Australia, so I'm improvising. They taste pretty bloody good to me, at least. Good enough to lift me out of my fatigue slump for an overdue post!


Video games

I thought Mark of the Ninja was going to be a fun, lighthearted sidescroller to kill some time with. It certainly was that - the stealth mechanics were fantastic, and the puzzles were just puzzling enough to feel satisfying without getting frustrating - but at some point Plot crept up from behind and punched me in the kidneys as well. I don't want to say too much about it, because I think it's best experienced as a surprise, but the ending made me so goddamn emotional. It only takes a few hours to play, but I suspect new game plus is going to suck me in hard on this one.

Dithering over what to play next. I have lots of good options downloaded to the console, but they're all much bigger commitments so I really need to pick just one. Star Wars: Squadrons has been on my list the longest and is meant to have really great flight mechanics, but my subconscious has irrationally lumped it in with Battlefront II, where the flight mechanics were so annoying that it soured me on the dream of flying starfighters. Horizon Zero Dawn and Greedfall both look fun - maybe HZD wins of the two of them, for its open world? IDK. There's also the Dark Souls remaster that I still haven't played, and Control, which wins points for apparently being inspired by the SCP Foundation stuff my sister's been going apeshit over lately. In further sororal challenges to my decision-making capacity, she convinced me to play the opening scene of Disco Elysium and I ended up loving it. So I can't strike that off the list either. Gah.


Books

I slowed my roll a bit on the Grishaverse after mainlining the first trilogy, but I've finished Six of Crows and am halfway through Crooked Kingdom. I'm still enjoying myself immensely, though I'm struggling to stomach one of the main relationships. Matthias is a soldier from an elite military organisation devoted solely to rounding up Grisha for execution; Nina is a Grisha who falls in love with him despite the fact that he believes her kind are inhuman, unfeeling monsters that deserve to be hunted to extinction. I found it off-putting but easy to ignore in the TV adaptation. In the novels it's one of the main elements, and includes multiple whole chapters from Matthias's point of view in which he ruminates on what an evil temptress Nina is and fantasises in graphic, sexually charged detail about how he's going to hurt her. Presumably there's a demographic out there who find empowerment in stories about women converting their predators into devoted protectors; I'm not part of that demographic, and I couldn't get past those chapters fast enough.

On the other hand, Bardugo really matured as an author between the Grisha trilogy and 6oC - the prose and pacing are greatly improved, and the alternating third person POV works better than the awkwardly executed first person of her debut. The expanded worldbuilding is also fantastic. Ketterdam could hardly feel more different from Ravka, but they still clearly belong in the same universe, and I enjoyed how the preceding three books got boiled down to 'oh, the Ravkans and that civil war of theirs' with the same mild, disinterested sympathy everyone's apt to show for political turmoil in faraway countries.


Music

Darkthrone are releasing a new album! I really enjoyed the first track, Death Cloak; I also enjoyed the field day metalsucks.net is having with it.

It's been a good few weeks overall for black metal. Panopticon's ...And Again Into The Light is hauntingly beautiful and feels like rambling outdoors in the vast, lonely wilderness even while I'm curled up in a beanbag in front of the heater. The bluegrass and folk elements sound on paper like they should be gimmicky, but they're not. At all. There is so much soul and feeling in this album. I think it's another one for the pile of albums I only listen to when I have time to sit down and immerse myself from start to finish, because listening to any one track in isolation just doesn't do it justice.

At the other end of the black metal spectrum, Wild North West by Vreid is a rollicking good time with lots of classic thrash and rock 'n' roll influences. I don't feel any special urge to meditate on it or anything, but it has the kind of high-tempo energy that makes it good for brisk walks or cleaning sprees.

In metal that isn't black, I've been enjoying Inhumation by Unflesh. And in music that isn't metal, I've been on a bit of a nostalgia kick for spooky, gothy bands with female vocalists: The Birthday Massacre, Kidneythieves, Digital Daggers, Rasputina. Also Jack Off Jill, though specifically only Clear Hearts Grey Flowers - I just can't handle their earlier shouty riot grrrl thing anymore, I wish I could but I can't, I don't know where I ever used to find the energy.

On Tuesday night, my best friend came over and brought tidings of a new TV show I supposedly had to watch. 'There's a villain called the Darkling,' she explained, 'and the way he treats the heroine is textbook abuse. You'll probably ship them.' (She and I live at opposite ends of Reylo Discourse Street and she has my standing permission to rib me about it.)

I spent the first six episodes feeling smug about my indifference to the Darkling. That'll teach my friend, thought I, to label me as predictable! Just because he has a black cape and a goofy Ebony Dark'ness nickname and an evil plan motivated by deep inner pain doesn't mean I have to fall for him! Then today, episode seven gave me a flashback to his tragic villain origin story and I had to tuck my tail between my legs and text my triumphant friend the news. Just like that, I'm gone on him.

My friend isn't the only person I've seen compare the Darkling to Kylo Ren in the five-odd minutes I've been in this fandom. They've all missed one small but critical nuance. The Darkling isn't Kylo Ren - he's Kylo Ren's Mary Sue self-insert in the thinly veiled Reylo fanfic he wrote to vent his feelings about the TLJ breakup. He's the cold, self-collected, effortlessly imposing dark magic user Kylo Ren desperately wants to be. He's charming and seductive, and loses his beloved not because he can't stop throwing tantrums in front of her but solely because his mother interfered. I love the Darkling and I love Kylo Ren, but other than the wardrobes they are very different people.

Tied for the number one spot against the Darkling is Inej, who is my other predictable type of favourite character: badass black-clad woman with lots of knives. I mean, just look at her. She's, and bear with me on this, a child acrobat turned sex trafficking victim turned spy for a crew of eccentric gangsters whose exploits make up the most enjoyable parts of the show. Despite surviving among humanity's scum, she has deep moral and religious convictions that the plot stretches to their absolute breaking point. She's not allowed to kill, but killing is the only way to save the people she loves from certain death. The target she's contracted to help kidnap is a living saint, but if she goes home empty-handed, she'll be sent back to the brothel. She's all the things that are tough and sexy and impressive about characters like Black Widow, but without ever slipping into two-dimensional femme fatale stereotypes. She has so much heart you guys, and - wait for the shock of your lives - very little f/f fic about her on ao3 once you filter out the WIPs, modern AUs and cameo appearances in larger juggernauts. So like. I have some work to do.

Not right now, though. Right now the feelings are too fresh to write about - I can't even write a proper show review, I'm just rambling my guts out here. It always takes me a bit of time to settle when a brand new fandom grabs me by the throat. What I really need to do next is read the books, because I've already inhaled all the major spoilers for the rest of the series on the fan wiki, but it's not enough I need more.