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What am I looking for in fandom?

Overly emotional late night posts are obviously always a good idea, right? A locked post on my flist was talking about bygone fannish communities; as I'm still in between fandoms and driven by the fact that I'm trying to decide if I should give Tumblr another shot or return to Twitter or whatever*, I fell back into contemplating what I'm looking for in fandom and if I can still find it in 2023. *It's totally fine to come back six months later, crossposting, right? :D? Also, I'm especially curious what people have to say and it is late and my judgement-- questionable. Because my kneejerk reaction is community, right? That's what drew me into fandom, the love for a canon but also the search for other people to talk about it and explore it with in a way largely separate from any commercial transactions. And yeah, I'll always seek out people I find interesting and who are easy to learn from, but if that was all, I'd still just be RSS feeding it up. But I feel like I do have that, so what am I doing wrong? On DW, I have a reasonably active flist, though it is nearly entirely media recs, with some personal and fandoms-I'm-not-in posts mixed in. I guess it doesn't scratch the fandom itch because even if a book is being passed around (very fun!), it's still at most one discrete post per person + comments. Mastodon is not quite active enough to feel like a community yet, just a somewhat scattered group chat. I guess the closest I have right now is Discord: I moderate a cnovel reading group where we're currently reading Little Mushroom and so chat multiple times through the week about it (unfortunately, Little Mushroom IMO is not... good enough to stand up to this treatment...)! In two separate servers, I now have weekly watch parties! And I'm reading fic and assembling a DCU recslist (tentative subtitle: 20 years of DCU), so I'm doing something concrete with fannish energy, even if it's a fandom where I chat with one other person in. I guess I have a few horrible hypotheses, some more horrible than others: 1. I miss scrolling through stuff and keeping up with a busy large group. On LJ, I would routinely be ?skip=100 daily; on Twitter I used to spend around 1.5 h daily keeping up. This would suck because it would imply that I'm superficial and primarily satisfied with parasocially looking at people's (fannish) lives lol. 2. The obvious: I'm not really emotionally invested in any fandoms right now, and idly chatting about jpop or BLs or cdramas are not the same as being all in on a single canon, thinking about and reading meta/fics. But I was (probably?) satisfied looking at fandom from afar for the decade I was out, with only sporadic commenting as engagement. 3. The most impossible to fix: displaced stress over something completely different. 4. I'm looking for something that isn't present in those existing avenues: lots of in depth meta. While I stayed subscribed to lots of authors on AO3 and found new authors to subscribe to, the meta writers slowly changed Tumblrs (which broke my RSS connection) or left fandom and I didn't search out more. Maybe fixable? Tumblr meta is so much harder to find, and also I'm older now and my standards have gone up (as I discovered when I was going through my old Pinboard links), but it... still exists somewhere I'm sure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Maybe I'll try Tumblr again and focus on meta writers?

On DW: https://superborb.dreamwidth.org/494109.html

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"Rec me a fandom" meme

Poking my head in to signal boost! A meme for reccing a fandom community over on DW https://superborb.dreamwidth.org/493318.html

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I've made an end of year reflections post on DW (https://superborb.dreamwidth.org/491766.html), and in the process, decided that I won't be crossposting to twitter/tumblr anymore. Find me on DW/discord/mastodon if you're so inclined! Miss you lots otherwise.

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Rock It, Mom (摇滚狂花)

Peng Lai was a popular rock star in China, before leaving her daughter, Bai Tian, behind to try and make it in the US; years later, after Bai Tian's father dies, she returns. I thought this was one of the more unique and interesting modern cdramas I've seen, with a lot of nuance in the portrayal of the complicated characters. Pacing was a bit messy, with some repetition (we didn't need quite so many episodes of mom-daughter revenge pranks) and contrived scenes (why would a job interviewer bring in a candidate who they were not going to consider...), and there was some tonal whiplash with the comedy parts. However, the last couple episodes really pull it together and end well! Peng Lai is pretty awful, and the mother-daughter conflict is fully on screen without flinching; obviously, they have to end with some reforming, but I think they don't let her off the hook. I was particularly impressed that despite the centrality of the biological mom relationship, it executed the step mom relationship well and gave it respect. They also did a decent job of fleshing out the side characters given that it's only 12 eps long. I found it a shame that they didn't have the space to really reflect on parallel of the grandma - Peng Lai relationship though. OTOH, I don't usually like the focus on a confession scene / misunderstandings in an early relationship, but they did a great job with this one and it was genuinely super cute. Of course, I loved the Chen Yue-Peng Lai antagonism, but it never quite lived up to the starting scene slow mo hair toss cut of Chen Yue. Overall, I thought it was well done and certainly very different! CW: alcoholism, terrible parenting, medical issues. If you need English subs, be aware the current set are clearly MTL; Bai Tian's name is often translated to daytime / during the day / Tony (???), and Xu Duo's to many.

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Media diet, November

Dracula, Solo Dance, xxxHolic (2022), The Nightmare Before Christmas (Chinese dub), Meet the Chimps (Chinese dub) ep 1, Ponyo (on DW)

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Preliminary mastodon; and feelings (over on DW)

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The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow

This 700 page tome is an attempt to change the narrative of how humans organize themselves and therefore implicitly critique the rigidity of our society now. Overall, I learned a LOT from the book; the details of many of the societies, historical and indigenous, were new to me and it was organized in a novel way. From lirazel's rec, which actually details the arguments the book makes. The main flaw is that while it's fun to read takedowns, the book often tilts into defensive territory and too much ink is spilled on this. It reads like a series of university lectures, which is far too repetitive for a book. And yet despite this, sometimes their own hypotheses were very much citation needed, when they overreached. A collection of interesting tidbits: - Many cultures made seasonal changes of social structure; the variations in the seasonal changes are also huge. For example, European carnival, when social structures are turned upside down. - "Scholars and professional researchers, on the other hand, have to actually make a considerable effort to remain so ignorant" lol - A great deal of space is devoted to hammering the point home that it was Native American ideas of democracy and free thinking that started the Enlightenment, and it was not brought over from Europe with the guns and germs etc. (This was a very important point! It was repeated a LOT.) (Also, our ideas of more indulgent child rearing originate there too.) - Ancient Greeks considered elections not democratic and an aristocratic mode (sortition was the democratic choice)-- and this carried through for Medieval Europe as well. - There was a long period of time when people explored farming (on the flood plains ofc), while still hunting/foraging. Farming was originally a method of last resort, to get food out of less productive land. - The process of schismogenesis, when neighboring groups start defining themselves in opposition to each other. - The authors posit the basic freedoms are to move, to disobey, to rearrange social ties. "To move" is the most basic one, from which the others derive; obviously has implications for our current society. - The space in between the famous dynasties and empires is when people were probably least oppressed etc, and more work should be devoted to that. - Humans always CHOOSE how their communities are shaped deliberately. Anyway, I learned a lot from the book, but I feel like it could have used some tightening. I also am not necessarily completely convinced of all the presented evidence, BUT I think the points it makes are valuable nonetheless. On the scale of popsci books, it's on the pop side, very much a brief survey, but is not annoyingly so.

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A Dream of Splendor

Haohao, the best singer in the capital, is incensed upon learning there is a new pipa player eclipsing her fame. Naturally, the first thing she does upon meeting said pipa player is to praise her beauty ('even I can't help falling in love upon seeing you') and play a duet with her. Nominally based on the Yuan dynasty opera, set in the Song dynasty, this drama follows three women as they try to make a life in the capital. Zhao Panr was once a music entertainer, a legal status denoting the lowest social class, but now runs a successful small teahouse as a businesswoman. Sun Sanniang is a former butcher who dreams of her son passing the exams to become an official. Song Yinzhang is the best pipa player, which comes with the entertainer status that she desperately wants to escape. [Spoilers ahead]

It had beautiful sets and moments of compelling plot. Yinzhang's character growth is especially well done! The show also is, I think, trying to call on its theater roots with some of the staging, to unique and interesting effect; it makes the show feel different from the standard costume drama.

There are two broader storylines: that of the women starting a teahouse and their struggles to be respected, and that of the politics of the court. While the latter had somewhat interesting dynamics, once we realized we would actually have to pay attention and like, remember their faces and names, it was let down by... being completely dropped in the last few episodes. Unclear what happened there; it got subsumed by a 'righteous Emperor' storyline. In light of that, the additional complexity that the show attempts to add with the politics storyline fails to do anything but serve as an excuse to add some barriers to the main romance. The politics behind how the teahouse works are moderately interesting and reach a resolution at least. As mentioned previously, the storyline of Yinzhang maturing and learning how to express her care for others is really well done, while keeping her innate arrogance intact. I did like that the women had flaws and were allowed to be selfish, while still having deep friendships with each other. Panr gets to solve some problems without having to rely on male lead, so I forgive the show her occasional over-competence. A particular plot point I thought was excellent was everyone thinking Yinzhang had left due to being upset over a crush, when it was really about her not feeling trusted, which nicely subverted expectations. In contrast, we don't really see any depth or growth in any of the men; the closest is Chi Pan, who goes from a comic villain to a comic semi-ally in a dubious transition. (He just made one too many actually damaging actions to be easily forgiven.) You'd think that the motivation behind the politics men would at least lead to interesting choices, but no, the side characters are all pretty one note. The show does do well in making you wonder if the potential male love interests are decent men or horrible deceivers though! I definitely was unsure and nervous while we waited to find out. Ditto the process of figuring out the politics men's various motivations. The first arc is very loosely based on the opera's plot, but this criticism asserts that the drama hugely sanitizes the women and... it's definitely correct. The drama tries to have its cake and eat it too wrt prostitution: that Panr is hugely protective of her chastity and both she and Yinzhang never sold their bodies, but also both of them defend other women who have their choices constrained. It /could/ work in a more subtle or better integrated piece, where the emphasis on purity was shaped differently, but here it just felt unconsidered. (The morals of the torture / murder / beatings are also never addressed, which is certainly ...a way to deal with it.) The tension in the storyline is also oddly paced. As a whole, it dwells too long on villains when we already know they're evil, without adding any interesting complexity or any internal motivation whatsoever. There are also many small competitions as the main women establish their prowess, and I understand why it dwells on those, but I thought they were somewhat repetitive and poorly filmed. It /is/ hard to show off better tea art or fine knife work, but if you're going to go this route, you have to figure that out. (ALSO, the whole point of a fancy tea pour is that it doesn't splash!!! Cut away like you do the pipa playing if you can't produce a nice pour.) Overall, the show started reasonably strong, flagged a bit, picked up again around ep 20 for a streak of compelling episodes, and then crashed headfirst into a stupid ending. In addition to the previously mentioned failure to resolve the politics, the women's storylines were resolved too neatly, while the big bad escalates the villainy to a ridiculous, unexplained degree just so he could be fully destroyed. Not cathartic. However, I am impressed that Yinzhang gets to end the show without being paired off! She and Haohao are meant to be!

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Media Diet Aug-Oct

I have been in Graeber purgatory for the last three months and I am STILL NOT DONE with Dawn of Everything, so uh. Some mostly non-book media! (I... am mostly enjoying it, but it's just very difficult to read through in one sitting, which makes my progress slow.) Make, Sew and Mend, by Bernadette Banner: An overview of hand-sewing techniques. From sophia_sol's rec. It was well laid out in terms of the order of covered topics and mostly clear, though it was occasionally excessively wordy. There were a few times when I had to reread a sentence a dozen or so times before I understood what was happening and afterwords felt like it could have been expressed with more clarity. On the one hand, I'm not an experienced sewer so it makes sense that I would be confused sometimes; on the other, surely that is most of the intended audience, as the techniques covered are not particularly fancy. I did learn how to properly anchor my thread! And corrected a few other things that home ec misled me on. 8UPPERS: In conjunction with their album promotion, Kanjani8 released this movie, where they are gangsters who have suddenly acquired a baby. I guess a lot of background was supposed to be revealed in teasers in advance, but the plot still made sense without it. Not that the plot is that complicated or deep, but it is coherent! Mainly, they cast a cute baby and there are lots of found family scenes. As We Like It (2021): An all-female cast retelling of As You Like It, set in a neighborhood of Taipei where internet is banned. It opens with many gay and lesbian couples as background, but an 'I'm not gay' freakout is what keeps Orlando and Rosalind-as-a-boy apart? And the het couple being able to have a baby is why they're superior? There are briefly mentioned gay couples, but it does come across as being far more comfortable with lesbians (or the playacting of a lesbian relationship) than with gay people. It tries to conclude with a 'gender doesn't matter' message at the end, but... all the main couples are het, though played by women, and the closest they get to queerness is the slight gender bending of Rosalind-as-a-boy. It was a fun romp, just not as queer as it seemed it'd be. Luca (2021): Summer adventure coming of age movie set in Italy, where a sea monster child explores the human world for the first time. (I got the rec from someone on DW, but I can't seem to turn it up in search, as searching "Luca" also turns up hits for "Lucas"...) Fun, easy story to watch. I didn't love the animation style, but so it goes. I really like that Disney+ movies are available dubbed in lots of languages, and they're often pretty ideal for language learners in terms of speed etc. Debrief (RP): Alternate Cold War with ghosts, one hour, two player game. From skygiants' rec. This was the first time I did an RP and I am not sure I'm very good at it! I played with bf, and we were much more inclined to negotiate openly and also not add character quirks that would make it more difficult to succeed lol. It was fun! Being time limited makes it an easier introduction too. If you play, warnings for upper class white men in mid 19c Britain attitudes and histories.

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Feelings about fannish platforms: Discord edition

https://superborb.dreamwidth.org/489961.html

I briefly discussed some of this on twitter previously, but wanted to more long-form discuss, which of course means moving to DW!! Anyway, these are somewhat scattered thoughts, but putting it together + talking with people about it always clarifies my thoughts. I like a lot of things about Discord! I wrote previously that it fannishly descended from the instant messaging programs of yore, and has similar dynamics as places with large group chats to mingle and meet friends and small ones to settle friendships. When it goes well, those are indeed both niches that I personally find essential to a ~balanced social media diet~. The difference is as fandom increasingly moves to Discord-only, its weakness as a primary fannish platform becomes more obvious to me. There's two main problems IMO: 1) no way to call out important / top level discussion aka curation; 2) difficulty in propagating social norms and thus community feeling. There is also the 3) "difficulty in FINDING a server" problem, but I think that is far less structural. 1: Beyond the obvious difficulty in backreading a busy server, it's really hard to point out a specific message as important without resorting to dedicated 'low traffic' channels or such. Partially, this is a me-problem, as I am completionist... But I also think this means Discord requires an alternate host to serve as repository for longer or more polished thoughts. OR a server with a very strict and different culture than I've usually observed. I wonder if that would be possible with a long slowmode? (For non-Discord users, slowmode means a user must wait a mod-defined amount of time before sending another message, though edits are allowed on previous messages.) In contentious debate, having a slowmode set really helped cool tempers and force a more reasoned argument, but I've never seen it used to force longer thoughts. Also, "curate your feed" became so central on tumblr, and caused problems on twitter, with its inferior curation tools, that I wondered how Discord-based fandom would deal with it. On Discord, there are even fewer tools to curate other than leaving a group, because everything is intrinsically shaped like a conversation and even blocking people, it's ...shaped like a conversation you're just ignoring one person in? 2: Within a server, you're essentially all in one room with EVERYONE AT THE SAME TIME. And this might work if the group can establish shared social mores, but that's non-trivial to do. One way that LJ had shared norms propagate is through lurking before having to participate; you can still do that, but it's much less interesting to lurk a conversation than polished (or not) public posts. Sure, messaging is probably a native way to communicate for a lot of people in their 20s and 30s, but the norms of that messaging are wildly different (and have changed over time! I was reading an AIM log from LJ days and wow do I message differently now!) This seems minor, until you have a disagreement and those norms suddenly clash over how you're supposed to resolve a conflict in the first place! One norm I've encountered often is the 'doubling down on shared opinions to distinguish in and out group', which I fundamentally disagree with. However, if you're trying to resolve a conflict and one party is used to seeing conflict as an in vs out group disagreement (and therefore looking for a common opinion) and the other is offended by viewing the world that way, this is not a path to success. Of course, I think the problem of 'how to disagree and still be in community' is at the heart of being a community in the first place, and not a Discord-specific problem. On the less outright conflict front though, every community has people you like or dislike to varying degrees, and I've discovered that in a Discord server, when you're sharing a space that can't be easily filtered, perceived norms-violations irritate me way more than in any other platform or real life situation I've ever encountered. I don't know if other people feel that way, but I've had enough discussions around it that I think it's relatively common, and more common on Discord than elsewhere. It's the lack of ability to socially get away, perhaps, combined with Discord being a difficult place to transmit those norms? 3: It is unfortunately a really opaque barrier to finding servers; getting access to comms, even if it required an essay, or figuring out a crufty forum feels different than 'make friends and become cool enough to get an invite'. This problem becomes more difficult to solve when fandom is less active on other platforms, decreasing the ways you can make friends! Even worse, you can't easily lurk to learn the social norms beforehand. However, fandom is just bigger now too, which means there are many more public Discords available, from which to splinter off. In some ways, it's a return to requiring active involvement in order to get access, instead of being able to passively consume from the firehose of public twitter/tumblr. It's harder to go track a specific person you think is cool back to their fannish home, but easier to find someone to chat with at all hours of the day. (And lead to friendships and new servers spawned. Ideally.) I don't know! I don't think Discord is even a good primary fannish platform, but it does seem to be where people are moving, for better or worse. At least I find it more amenable than tumblr, which means I might not disappear until the next migration?

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Media Diet, July

Written media: Iron Widow, The Sentence, Afterparties, Lena

Visual media: The Ghost Bride, Wild Babies, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Night Bus, Legend of Yunze, Land of the Lustrous 

On DW (Tumblr keeps eating the formatting so I give up)

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Two rec requests for: 1. Joinable Discords for general cdrama or book chat? Most of my general cdrama chat is happening in the Qi Hun server and book chat on DW, both of which are lovely, but I'd like a little more.

2. Blogs or news sites? Something with a relatively high interesting story to article count ratio OR more in-depth stories. (I'll rec one to start: I feel like sixthtone's articles have gotten better and meatier over time! Focused on stores about China, with a wide coverage.)

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Rainless Love in a Godless Land (無神之地不下雨)

The plan for the kawas (gods) to leave after the last rain falls is disrupted by a human girl. According to some random Taiwanese blogs, they used general concepts from Amis mythology, but any particular story/kawas is fictional. The good: The worldbuilding is TIGHT, very cleanly done. It started very strong, doing a great job of subtly setting things up without explicitly overexplaining. The arcs that did get resolved, where they revisited earlier scenes from new perspectives, were incredibly satisfying. The reveal of the motivations of the character you're set up to think is the villain is VERY good; in only a few minutes, it totally recontextualized everything in a believable, yet unexpected, way. Toem, a character who's written to be ambivalently evil, is also incredibly acted and has great scenes (and outfits! and earrings!). Generally, the other world set is used to great advantage, as are subtle special effects, though the male lead's fortress/house is uh, hilarious. Early on, the otherworldliness of the kawas was subtly contrasted with humanity's concerns in how they handled problems, though this got dropped in the genre shift (see below). The folktale at the beginning of each episode is really interesting: sometimes clever, sometimes overextended. For some reason, they seemed to have a very large music budget, with many new pieces appearing towards the end of the show. The bad: The plot is extremely unfocused as a result of trying to tackle too many elements: one of the reasons the ending feels unsatisfying, as noted by halfcactus is because it changes from a story about the female lead, which is shaped like a family centric story, to one about the male lead, which is shaped like a romance. Certain subplots were very draggy, in particular the romance (in retrospect, makes more sense since that was the story they were trying to tell), the guilt arcs, and when they were trying to do something clever with a slow reveal (made it hard for the watcher to participate since so much was omitted). I really, really hated the henpecked storyline; it was a bad relationship in a boring way. There are some interesting implications of the memory tampering allowed by the Comb of Memories, which they... didn't fully explore and they didn't even lean into how fucked up it was. halfcactus summed up the ending well as a fix-it fanfic (in a literal, not figurative way). This left SO MANY dangling, important plot threads? Overall, when it hit, it was VERY good, but there were major pacing issues because it spent a lot of time on things that weren't important and ended up unresolved. Still, I would recommend it overall, as the worldbuilding was fantastic and the way they tried to tell the story ambitious.

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Media diet, end of June

Under the cut: The Book of Form and Emptiness, Things We Lost in the Fire, Strange Beasts of China, Elatsoe, Ted Lasso S2, Go Ahead (以家人之名) (DNF), Bad Buddy (DNF), The Male Fairy Fox Of Liao Zhai 3 (男狐聊斋3), CODA (2021)

A little early because I'll be traveling without my computer... (I'll check DW when I get back, since I haven't quite gotten the hang of mobile DW yet either...)

The Book of Form and Emptiness, by Ruth Ozeki: The story of Benny Oh, as told partially by his book, partially by himself, primarily after the death of his father, when his mother starts hoarding things and he begins to hear objects. Although the somewhat chaotic and elaborate descriptions would seem to be not to my taste, the prose actually worked really smoothly and well for me? I think the internal structure and careful attention to rhythm pulled it off. I found the descriptions of his mother's hoarding extremely unsettling, which I don't think has happened to me before. It was very unmoored in time/location and none of the characters were that compelling to me, so although it was an engaging read, I found it somewhat unmemorable by being so incohesive. (PS: Disneyland is not in Florida.) Things We Lost in the Fire, by Mariana Enriquez, translated by Megan McDowell: A collection of short stories set in Argentina, primarily along the lines of magical realism / social commentary. From meitachi's rec. The book seems billed as macabre and dark, so I expected more unsettling feelings from this collection, but I think it fit more as 'ghost story' than 'horror' levels of dark. While the stories were interesting social commentary (mostly on gender and poverty, always with the undercurrent of the desaparecidos) and I read them like potato chips, I think they're a little bit unmemorable for me? A common problem with short stories I guess. Strange Beasts of China, by Yan Ge, translated by Jeremy Tiang: A novelist who once studied cryptozoology learns about and tells the stories of a series of beasts, slowly coming to understand her own story in the process. Recced by excaliburedpan! The beasts are a rather straightforward metaphor for marginalized groups (as the author herself says); although I don't usually check goodreads, I was startled at the number of reviews that seemed to miss the point, is that normal? I enjoyed the imaginative beasts and their stories, the snarky relationship between the main character and her underclassman, and the slow reveal of the main character's backstory. I was not super impressed with the translation, which came across monotone, and I thought the social criticism was very unsubtle (though I guess maybe not, given the goodreads reviews...). Overall, I liked it a lot, as a book that tried to tell a complicated story about humans and beasts interacting and mixing. Elatsoe, by Darcie Little Badger: In a world very similar to ours, but where some myths / magic are real, our protag has a family secret that allows her to raise dead animals; her cousin dies and comes to her in a dream to tell her he's been murdered. From sophia_sol's rec! It read more MG than YA to me, and in that light, it was perfectly cromulent. I enjoyed the characters and their interactions. However, it always felt weird that the world and its history were so similar to ours yet had these magics that should surely have affected things. If you're in the mood for MG, this would suit. Ted Lasso S2: In season two, the show gets a chance to add more complex characterization and relationships, as the team tries to win their way back into the top level of English soccer, the Premier League. It remains mostly unstressful, except I kept getting VERY NERVOUS in all the Nate scenes because he was becoming more and more of an asshole. Two points annoyed me: the improper spotting and joking about someone having their neck crushed by weights is not actually funny??? And the TV psychology privacy practice of Sharon, the new team psychologist, discussing specific patients with her psychologist without anonymizing it. I remain very into the Ted/Trent dynamic, even if on screen interactions were sadly scarce. Overall, remains an entertaining and mostly light series, with enough humor to act as a hook, but not too much second hand embarrassment. Go Ahead (以家人之名) (DNF): Three unrelated kids grow up together as family and support each other through family troubles. Given the presence of ZXC, this must have been a halfcactus rec, lol. They were very cute as children, and I really did love the two dads trying to parent them together! It was just a little overacted / contrived and I can't build up the motivation to keep going... I think those who like modern family centric dramas would like it (based on the episodes I've seen!), it's just ultimately not my favorite genre, you know? Bad Buddy (DNF): Two boys from neighboring rival families have competed since they were young; when they became close at the end of secondary school, one is sent away. Now, they've both entered university in rival faculties. Livetweeted here! Everyone loved this so much, and indeed, the fast pace and tightly focused scenes were great! I just... find the friends hating each other thing very stressful and all the really cheesy romance scenes Too Much q_q. Not for me, but definitely if you like tropey BL, I'd recommend. The Male Fairy Fox Of Liao Zhai 3 (男狐聊斋3): A fox demon (fairy?) can't ascend until he repays the life debt from being rescued by a human a thousand years ago. Recced by douqi! Livetweeted here. The plot and characters are pretty much standard, but it is quite overtly gay and the fighting is very swoopy, so it's a satisfying 1.5 h movie. (No Eng subs yet.) CODA (2021): The only hearing child in a Deaf family needs to decide between staying to help her family fishing business or leaving for music college. Choosing singing as the plot device is rather loaded, and unsurprisingly led to some criticism of the movie. Overall though, it was pretty formulaic in plot, with enough well executed scenes and acting to make it worth watching if it's a genre you like.

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Media Diet, mid-June

Am I doing a mid-June Media Diet solely so I can discuss The Color of Distance even though I didn't have quite enough for a dedicated post? ...Yes. The Color of Distance, by Amy Thomson: A human biologist is stranded on a world where the amphibian-like intelligent life has extremely refined abilities of biological manipulation. From skygiants' rec -- DW search was NOT pulling up the rec, but it seemed like it could only have come from a Becca rec. THIS BOOK WAS 1000% MY JAM. So much my jam that I hadn't realized the books I had been reading were not my jam?? Anyway, a list of things that were my jam: weird aliens with development/society that were well thought out, difficult cross-cultural communication, extended academic presentations and associated nerdery, characters who kind of hated each other a bit and had to work through it, complicated disputes that didn't have simple resolutions where the characters' needs were in conflict. The ways that learning about each other impacted/changed how they viewed the world! I did not like the ~alien word~ emphasis at the very beginning, but it stopped afterwards thankfully. Also, stranding her when they know about her being on the planet seems ...kind of evil? And not going after them in the first place when they went missing conflicts with their strict leave-no-microbes-behind policy and evil? The book also has a very 90s sci-fi obsession with overpopulation, and does mostly fall into the one-species-one-culture trap. I am very sad that the sequel is apparently not good, but I loved this book so much! An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin, by Gad Beck and Frank Heibert, translated by Allison Brown: The first part of the memoirs of Beck, a half-Jewish teenager in Berlin during Hitler's rise to power and the Holocaust. From skygiants' rec. Beck so clearly cares about people and understanding people, and the strength of the memoir is (IMO) the description of so many different, complex people from many walks of life. I found especially interesting the descriptions of the daily life of how their underground network operated -- and the many people who needed to be coordinated -- and that two of the non-Jews who contributed were motivated by spite after a perceived betrayal by the Nazi party. A short, complicated read. CW: underage sex with adults in positions of power and, obviously, Nazi Germany The Past is Red, by Catherynne M Valente: In a post-apocalyptic world, the survivors live on a giant floating garbage patch. From sophia_sol's rec. I thought the worldbuilding and plot was quite shallow. The impression is rather like a series of ideas without thought about how they'd connect and follow-through? Also, I did not enjoy the prose very much. I did like the moral it tried to convey about loving your world as it is and living for the sake of living. These Violent Delights, by Chloe Gong (DNF): Romeo and Juliet retelling in rival gangs of 1920s Shanghai. The prose is melodramatic and repetitive in a tedious way, and could have used some serious polish. Characters are rather thin, with 'snappy' dialogue and actions prioritized: e.g. breaking things to make a point just reads as if this supposedly mature protag is a total brat. I finally gave up at the line, "Despite the shine, it was brisk out today, chilly in the sort of way that drew the roses in the garden a little straighter, as if they couldn't afford to lose a single second of the warmth filtering through the clouds." Second... of warmth... Maybe I'll come back to this when I'm feeling more patient with superficiality. Mini Metro: A puzzle game where you build a rail system as a city grows. I needed a new mobile idle game after Two Dots was becoming a bit repetitive, but Mini Metro in the standard mode is a bit too real time for that (one of modes is to create an efficient system, and so you can't lose). However, I got sucked into trying to beat all the city achievements. Each city has an achievement where you have to build your rail lines with a particular restriction and reach a certain number of travelers transported. And now that I've done all of them, I can put it down in my Media Diet hahaha. I liked that the achievements encouraged you to try different techniques! The game does a good job of differentiating each city even though they can only tweak a few things-- notably, the map itself, but also the speed of the trains and some of the power-ups you get. From youtube, it seems that Mini Motorways, the sequel game, improves upon the base idea, but it's not available for mobile (yet?). Gorogoro Kitchen: A youtube channel, mostly vlogs of daily life / flea markets in France by a Japanese couple. I find the rhythm of these vlogs very soothing, and also love looking at flea markets.

[superborb]

Media Diet, May

I realize that I mostly pull 'from x's rec!' links from DW search, but this doesn't work for if the post was flocked / recs I got off DW. HMMM, but I'm so bad at remembering where I got a rec from! The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo: The story of the former empress is recounted to a cleric from an order dedicated to faithfully recording history. I enjoyed the slow reveal and the pacing was quite good, but the last chapter that explicated what had been strongly hinted at earlier was a little redundant; generally not as subtle as I expected going in? A short, interesting read. The Thursday Murder Club: a Novel, by Richard Osman: Four people living in an upmarket retirement community come together every Thursday to solve cold murders, and when an actual murder occurs, set up to solve it themselves. Very ...witty is probably the right word for the type of humor. Funny in one-off sentences, but I found it somewhat difficult to read in one go as a result, and had to keep putting it down when it got repetitive. A fluffy sometimes amusing novel, with what reads to my USian eyes as rather conservative politics. The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, by Patricia A. McKillip: A fantasy novel with the window dressing of fantastical beasts, but really about consent, power, and fear. From dolorosa_12's rec! I thought the ending, though foreshadowed, was a little bit too deus ex machina to be fully satisfying? Beautiful prose without being self-conscious about it, such that the prose read in an effortless way. (Difficult to pull off!) I kept feeling like this was rather dark YA -- midway through, I decided I must be getting the wrong impression and this must be adult fantasy, but wiki seems to have it under YA? Anyway, short and packs a punch. CW: sexual assault, child marriage The Disordered Cosmos, by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein: Discussion of racism in science, with dashes of popsci particle physics and autobiography. From chestnut_pod's rec. Could have used a stronger editor with an eye towards continuity between the chapters, especially what had been introduced already and what needed to be defined. The popsci explanations were a bit confusing IMO, but I did know most of the general ideas already, so I can't totally judge accurately. The meatiest chapters were the ones in the latter half, which centered around particular faces of racism in science, but unfortunately I did not find them particularly novel. Once, It Was Love: Very short manga about a woman whose husband suddenly stops being able to see her. From x_los's review. I guess like a good thriller, I really wanted to know what would happen next. We get to understand the motivation of the female characters explicitly, but only ever the male ones through their actions; the stalker's motivations are clear, but the husband's never become so. Under the Skin (猎罪图鉴) (2022): Mostly episodic cases as a forensic artist joins the police force and works with a captain who initially hates him for his role in the death of his mentor years ago. I think the problem is the best parts of this show were things like... extended art scenes and their bromance relationship once they get to know each other, neither of which was enough to compensate for what I disliked. Some of the characters were compelling and the pacing was pretty good too. I had a longer rant here, but I've cut for length: the gist was too much 'TV logic' leading to thin/unrealistic plots, asshole cop behavior, and weird cuts / cases not resolving satisfactorily. Although they tried to be sympathetic to the circumstances of female victims and perpetrators, it went too far into 'reveling in their pain' territory for me; additionally, having two male leads and a few stereotypical male and female cop roles meant the show overall landed more sexist than I think they intended. Episodes 17-18 were probably the strongest, doing a great job with tension and bringing in threads from earlier in the series; I especially liked how it recontextualized how surveillance was treated during the show. Also, the captain introduced in those episodes did an exceptional acting job. Overall, I think I should perhaps stop watching Chinese cop shows and the very constrained stories they can tell. CW: gratuitous extended on screen domestic violence, tragic lesbians Dream Boys 2006 Kanjani8 v KAT-TUN (DNF): I watch partied the first hour of this, and the juniors tap dancing was my favorite number. So much inexplicable plot happened in the first hour that I am scared what happens in the remaining 1.5. Cyphstress: Online group puzzle in the vein of an escape room. The first half was too straightforward and tedious at points; the second half was occasionally frustrating. I think the problem was that (for me) there wasn't much of a feeling of satisfaction at solving the puzzles; just an 'I guess that's the solution...'? Still, it was fun to do as a group activity!

[superborb]

I feel Some Kind of Way whenever I encounter really rigid views of Chinese culture. Twitter forces one to start adding unnecessary caveats and apologies in advance and I want to resist that impulse, but really, sometimes you need to caveat your instincts, especially if you don't have any actual evidence backing them up? Like, yeah, your first instinct might be that Confucianism is patriarchal and so there can't be any female sect leaders in wuxia, but that's simply not true? Things are sexist enough without adding MORE sexism please. My first instinct personally upon encountering that "disrespectful to Confucianism" (sigh, as if culture were static) narrative was that it seemed incorrect. And then I went searching for receipts, which @douqi7s provided (from Jin Yong, since this is @douqi7s): 1. Lin Chaoying and Xiaolongnv in Return of the Condor Heroes 2. Abbess Miejue and the entirety of the E'mei sect in Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre 3. Abbess Dingxian and the entirety of the Hengshan sect in Smiling Proud Wanderer Anyway, this seemed egregiously wrong, but even those things that are commonly known to be correct are more flexible than generally presented. I had the previous post on how heterogeneous practices can be in time, but even more trivial things. In the last episode of Delicious Romance, there's single word name use, so that's unusual, but it's not THE END OF THE WORLD TABOO like fandom sometimes makes it sound. (Definitely unusual though.) People are soooo strict about name taboo, but my grandpa named my dad with one of the characters in his name and if he had a girl, he was going to use the other character. (Also definitely unusual.) I guess I just feel like fandom sometimes treats Chinese culture like a fantasy setting where there are static unchanging rules, but it encompasses so many people over so much time. And people have instinctive feelings over what feels right, which is very valid, but sometimes their instinct is setting up rigid rules that are either way too rigid or simply wrong.