#taking recommendations for well written satisfying lighthearted media

[arrowpunk]

Me: Hmmmm I think I need to start watching/reading/listening to more silly lighthearted media. I've been consuming too much heavy stuff lately and I don't think this is good for my overall mental wellbeing without something to balance it out

Also me: OOOO you know what I want to try watching again? Black Sails

[gffa]

hello lumi! I just want to say that I absolutely adore your blog and you’re honestly one of the people that took me from casual Star Wars movie fan to someone more interested in legends and the extended canon. Just thank you for everything that you do, following you has been a delight. :)

I have kind of a large request so please don’t feel the need to respond if you don’t want to but you’re the person that came to mind when I first started looking into this. So basically I wanted to start going through all of the canon Star Wars media and books but looking at the lists of canon material, I realized there was lots of media that I’m interested in reading/playing that is not canon like the Knights of the Old Republic games or the Jedi Apprentice series. It just got me thinking about other really good Star Wars books or comics that I would be skipping over just going by canon content. So my question is this, for someone just dipping their toes into Legends, what are your recommendations for must-reads and where do they fit in the canon timeline? Again, no worries if you don’t want to answer, I know this can be a loaded question. Happy belated birthday and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day/night!!!

Hi!  Thank you for the birthday wishes!!  And for the very kind comments, I am deeply honored to have helped dragged you into this hellpit and also terribly sorry about it at the same time. 😂 I don’t mind giving Legends recs, as long as you know that my frame of reference with them isn’t as strong as my LF canon one is (and even that’s been waning as the books get less and less satisfying for me) so I’m not going to be able to give as wide of a recommendation set as you might hope. But I can give you some good places to start! - Revenge of the Sith by Matthew Stover is one of those books that set the standard for novelizing a movie and adding onto it, it takes an already great movie and just knocks it out of the park with all the depth it gives the story.  I’d also recommend Shatterpoint by him as well, though, I haven’t gotten terribly far into it yet, it’s Stover, so I’ll recommend it. - Wild Space by Karen Miller is a book that I can’t necessarily say is good, but that it’s still probably my favorite SW book ever just because it’s so incredibly quotable.  I have a lot of issues with it (it’s not great at Jedi philosophy, it doesn’t earn its ending, it feels like two separate books stitched together, etc.), but the sheer amount of HIGH DRAMA and how hilarious that is, as well as quotes I love to pull from it make for a scream of a read. - Yoda: Dark Rendezvous by Sean Stewart is probably the book that best captures the Jedi, as well as Yoda’s character and Dooku feelings, so I would highly recommend this one, too! -  I haven’t finished either Labyrinth of Evil or The Rise of Darth Vader by James Luceno, but I’ve liked everything I’ve read from him before, so I give these a cautious rec.  I’ve also heard good about The Cestus Deception and Darth Plagueis. - I think the Republic series of comics is pretty worth reading, though, sometimes it can get pretty wild.  If you have a strong stomach for dramatics, you may enjoy this one a lot! - If you want some more batshit, off the wall, lighthearted stuff, anything to do with the 2003 Clone Wars series are GREAT.  The animated series is just completely fucking bananas in the absolute best way and the comics are kids’ fair but they absolutely capture the chaotic energy of the show in a way that makes them SO MUCH FUN to read. - I go back and forth on the Jedi Apprentice/Jedi Quest series, like, I think you have to approach them knowing that you may well not be the target audience for them, as well as understand that the early ones were started around the time TPM first came out, so the prequel movies weren’t even finished by the time they were being written and it shows in a lot of the worldbuilding, as well as you can’t make sense of them as logical, so much as “what’s an exciting story for a kid to read?” imo.  But if you can go in with that mindset, there’s a lot you can really enjoy about the books, as long as you don’t let fandom ruin them for you.  XD (If anyone else has any recs, feel free to mention them, as mentioned, I’m not as deep into Legends as I was with the canon, so my recs are fairly bog-standard prequels-centric ones!)

[paradiselostbythedashboardlight]

Quarantine, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Wrote 430,943 Words of Prose in a Year

As we are coming up terrifyingly fast on a full year of quarantine with no end to the pandemic yet in sight for most people, I’ve been taking some time to reflect on the last year of my existence in a state that most people now refer to as quarantine. Since March of 2020, I, like most other sane people in my country, have stopped traveling, going to stores, seeing all but a limited group of other humans, and begun having recurring nightmares about being in crowds without a piece of cloth over my nose and mouth.

Suffice to say, it has been a bit stressful.

The other thing that I have done since COVID-19 began rapidly spreading across the globe last year is write over 430,943 words of fiction. 

The number seems insane to me still. That is (approximately) one Gone With The Wind, one entire Lord of the Rings series, or the first four Harry Potter books. That is still sadly not yet War and Peace (but who knows… the pandemic isn’t over yet).

So now that I am looking back, I find myself with one question: how did this happen? Why did I do this? What does this mean about my life this year?

Since apparently I answer best by writing a lot, let’s begin at the beginning. Let me tell you a story. I’ll keep it short, I swear.

Part 1: Blast From the Past

In March of 2020, I was still in the midst of an academic semester. There was a long academic document to write and a class to teach. However, as quarantine abruptly robbed me of most of my usual commitments, I was suddenly thrust into the position of having more time on my hands than I knew what to do with. Consequently, I decided to break out the Nintendo Switch I’d gotten for Christmas and revive a childhood interest in video games.

And boy did I. I played the games I owned for all they were worth. I played them during the evenings when I had no social engagements to attend. I played them during the Zoom meetings I was already struggling to pay attention to. By the end of March, I had finished one game, and it had set the wheels turning in my brain.

Here’s a fact about me: I don’t usually tend to write or read a lot of fanfiction about things that I consider really really good. Basically, fanfiction for me has always been an impulse born from incompletion or imperfection. I see no need to add to a perfect story (although I happily consume and create fanart). But for something enjoyable and yet slightly unsatisfying? That’s fanfic territory, bud.

So by April, I had developed a sort of epic fanfiction for this video game I was playing. It was one of those magnum opus kind of ideas, a grand retelling of the story with a huge sprawling plot and Themes (™). 

At first, it was merely a thought experiment that lived only in my head, a sort of entertainment to ponder in the hours before falling asleep. What changed? Well, a friend of mine decided to also write a fanfiction on the same video game and she kindly consented to let me read it.

Suddenly, I was ravenously hungry to read and to write and to share and to consume. I wrote a hundred thousand words of this fanfic in April and into early May, sending each chapter to my friend and being spurred onward by her kind comments. 

The fic became a gargantuan endeavor full of strange little challenges I set for myself. It was a canon-divergence, requiring plotting, worldbuilding, a darker and grimer tone. For some reason, I decided to write each chapter from a different character’s perspective, making the final product into a series of essentially short story character studies which together formed a plot.

By the end of May, the story was published for the world to see. It was well-received, although not particularly popular by fandom standards. And that was the end. I had gotten out my pandemic crazies, the semester was over and now I could move on. I had made my peace with the source material, plumbing all of the little details that I wanted to examine and creating a narrative that I found satisfying.

It was over.

Part 2: Summer Lovin?

Except that it wasn’t.

Confession: as I had been posting my giant fanfiction, I had also begun to explore the fan community itself, mostly curious to see some nice art and gather a bit of demographic info about what was popular within the community. As a result, I found a fanfic recommendations page. Among the recommendations was one author who kept popping up and i finally decided to give the fic a read.

Woah. It was good. Like, really good. Like, professional quality writing and themes that seemed designed to appeal to me. I devoured everything that the creator had posted in a week and then subscribed to eagerly wait for more.

As June rolled around, I realized that I had a problem on my hands. My great big gen masterpiece was finished, but this author had gotten me hooked on something else, something with a nefarious reputation online: shipping.

The term du jour for this seems to be “brain worms” so let’s just say that reading other fanworks had given me some brain worms. Inspired this time not just by the source material of the game, but now the fan community itself, my mind began to develop another idea.

I wrote the fic, about 11k, in a single afternoon of frantic writing. When I finished it, I knew it was one of my strongest pieces. It had just come together, a combination of all the thought that I’d been brewing up and a stylistic execution that just worked with the story I wanted to tell.

I posted it on a new account. Shipping seemed vaguely shameful to me still and my mom reads the other account.

To my surprise, the fic blew up. It got so much more attention than my long fic ever had. Even more significantly, a fan artist actually drew a gorgeous comic of the pivotal scene, completely out of the blue! I was essentially thunderstruck. Honestly, it was probably the first time in my life that I’d ever received so much positive reinforcement from a piece of writing.

While I’d written short stories for undergrad workshops, they’d never been particularly good and I’d never gotten particularly great feedback on them. I’d applied and been rejected by more MFAs and literary magazines than I could count. I’d pretty much resigned myself to writing for an audience of me and me alone (which I don’t mean to sound tragic about, writing for you is great and fun!)

But receiving so much support and praise and feeling like I’d made other people happy or sad or moved? There’s nothing better.

This makes my decision to write another fic for the ship sound vaguely cynical, the action of a person driven by an addiction to praise. I mean, no lie, aren’t we all a little addicted to approval?

But my next fic was another long one, an 80k passion project modern AU that I dreamed up while spending a slow summer alone with my books and only able to leave the house for long rambling walks in the woods. The premise was essentially about characters attending a five year college reunion, something that I myself had missed due to COVID in May of the same year. The fic quickly became a way for me to process thoughts on a lot of topics in my life ranging from relationships to politics to mental health to classical literature.

This fic was also received with far more attention than I was used to and, as a result, I finally joined the notorious Twitter dot com where I found people talking about my fic unprompted, eager to follow me and like my every random thought.

I can’t say that this process was not without its ups and downs. Fandom has changed, in many ways for the better, since my last engagement with it during the 2013 Supernatural days on Tumblr. While fan friendships are often idealized or demonized, they are pretty much like any other human friendship (okay, maybe a little bit more horny on main). There is potential for amazing connection as well as pettiness. But in a year where many people suddenly had no social spaces that were safe anymore, I’m glad that I found a new line of communication with the world.  

So I kept writing fics for the ship, producing a lot of work that I am genuinely proud of and making connections with other people who enjoyed it enough to leave a comment.

To conclude this section, I was in fandom again. While I had not seriously engaged with a fan community since around 2014, I was back with a vengeance. And I had discovered an important truth about what unlocked my ability to write more than I ever had before: community support.

Not simply the kudos and the views. It was the comments. The discourse. The discussion. To add and contribute my thoughts and ideas to a greater network of thoughts and ideas that fed off of one another.

Often I had seen people complain about there not being enough fanworks for particular media or characters. Now I knew the secret. The comments and the community created the works. If I commented on other people’s fics, the more likely they were to write more. I made a resolution I have tried to keep, to comment on any story that I legitimately enjoyed reading, even if I had no particularly intelligent thing to say about it.

Part 3: A Novel Idea

By late October, I had produced a considering oeuvre for my ship of choice and was enjoying slowing my pace as I planned a few future projects.

Remember, though, how I mentioned not having engaged with fandom for the past 5 years? Well, that didn’t mean I hadn’t been writing.

For the past 4 years, I have won NaNoWriMo and completed 4 novels of over 100k each in length. These projects have been massively fun and improved my confidence with executing stories at the scope that I desire.

And so in November 2020, I settled down to write another novel. November is always a sort of terrible time write a novel if you work in academia, but this year, I had more time than usual. I set out to write a comedy fantasy novel, something mostly lighthearted and full of hijinks in order to pretend away some of the quarantine blues (which by this point were well established in my psyche).

This year in particular, I was reminded that writing a novel is… harder than fanfic. That seems like a very obvious point, but I’d written novels before. Suddenly, though, I was realizing how much a novel requires you to set up the world and the characters, while fanfic can be pretty much all payoff all the time.

While the fanfic flowed in wild creative bursts of energy, the novel required diligence of another sort. I wrote 2,000 words every day for two months. It was a grind. Sometimes, it was a slog. 

And sometimes it just wasn't good. The thing about writing your own novels is that the first draft is way more likely to be not good. You’re balancing a lot and it’s easy to let a few balls that you have in the air drop for a chapter or two, with no recourse but to go back and edit later.

I finished the novel by writing a final speedrun of 6k on new years eve, ending my 2020 with another project under my belt. No one has read it. Not even I have reread it.

I’m still glad that I wrote it. I’ll write another one next year. No one will read that one either.

Sometimes, we write for ourselves and no external validation is necessary.

Part 4: Where are they now?

January of 2021 is somehow now behind me, which is terrifying. I’m still writing. Mostly fanfic, although occasionally I go doodle around with some original ideas that are more conceptual sketches for the next novel.

As for the fanfic, I think I still have a few more good ideas left in me, but  I will probably leave it behind before the year is out. That feels a little bittersweet, a sort of temporary burst of fun and friendship that I wonder if I’ll ever experience again.

Coming to the end of this reflection, I suppose I should make a summative statement about what it all means.

In the end, it might not mean a lot. There are some small takeaways. 

It turns out that encouragement makes you write more! Who knew? Also, more free time makes you write more! Wow!!!!

The point that I think this reflection exercise has shown me, the point that I think matters more than any other, is that writing is a way to process my thoughts. Even if it is through the lens of ridiculous video game fanfic or novels about sad wizards, my writing is my way to make sense of my own mind. 

And sharing that is special. If you share it with online strangers, with your family on Christmas Eve, with your close friend who has become even closer and dearer to you since she let you read her work, or just with your mom (the one personal legally required to read your damn novel if you want to share it). To share writing is to give someone a little peek at your beliefs about the world.

And right now? When we’re still isolated and bored and scared and in desperate need of distraction? Binge some TV, play Nintendo, read a book. Take in other people’s thoughts.

But put down your own somewhere as well. It’s a conversation.

And for once, it’s a conversation that doesn’t have to take place on fucking Zoom.

[recentanimenews]

FEATURE: Gen Urobuchi's Puppet Masterpiece Returns This Spring!

  Hello everyone, and welcome back to Why It Works. Have you heard the news? Just in time to brighten December’s end, we’ve learned that Thunderbolt Fantasy will be returning for its triumphant third season and offering more fantastical adventures all throughout this spring. That season comes on the back of two prior seasons and a tie-in movie, and if you haven’t gotten on the Thunderbolt train yet, you might be wondering why a work of Taiwanese puppet theater has become such an enduring anime-adjacent franchise. Well wonder no more, as with its third season on the rise, this seems like the perfect time to extoll the franchise’s many virtues. Let’s dive into the finer points of Thunderbolt Fantasy!

    First of all, though Taiwanese puppet theater might be unfamiliar to many of you, Thunderbolt Fantasy’s writer is a familiar name: Gen Urobuchi. Urobuchi has established a strong reputation over the last decade or so, providing the stories for famous and famously dark productions like Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Fate/Zero. Personally, I think Urobuchi finds something valuable in all that trauma — that his interrogations of human nature are reflections on not just cynicism, but of the difficult search for hope in the darkness. Ultimately, that’s what stories like Magica Madoka, Gargantia, or Psycho-Pass are all about, and he certainly carries that philosophical restlessness over into Thunderbolt Fantasy where characters frequently reflect on the nature of justice or the purpose of their lives.

  But while Urobuchi’s shows are famously bleak, they’re also consistently well-written, and in Thunderbolt Fantasy, Urobuchi gets to apply his formidable talents for theme, narrative, and dialogue to a much lighter production. And as it turns out, Urobuchi is equally skilled at writing fun stories and showing the other side of his typically serious reputation.

    The results are not just charming, but also frequently hilarious. Thunderbolt Fantasy’s cast is broad and endearing, headlined by a reluctant hero who claims he’s too old to give a damn, but perpetually finds himself being manipulated by his ally-slash-nemesis, a roguish pipe-smoking wizard. In the first season, the two of them recruit a team of genuine villains to go attack Demon Spine Mountain, whose ranks include such luminaries as the Screaming Phoenix Killer, who basically spends the whole season angrily vowing to slay everyone.

  These over-the-top titles might imply the show is farcical in its tone, and it certainly leans into the silliness inherent in epic fantasy — but that’s not to say it’s some kind of parody of action-adventure fiction. Instead — though it possesses the energy and easy humor of a story that’s not taking itself that seriously — the characters are actually rich and dynamic enough to genuinely care about. And with airtight dramatic structure and plentiful witty dialogue, Thunderbolt Fantasy ultimately serves as another strong affirmation of Urobuchi’s narrative talents.

    Thunderbolt Fantasy would be well worth recommending if it were just “the lighthearted Urobuchi adventure.” But through Pili International Media’s intricate puppeteering, the show becomes both funnier and more visually impressive than you’d ever expect. First off, I can't deny there's an inherent sense of funny anticlimax in seeing a character announce a convoluted attack name, resulting in a doll getting flung across a field and into some trees that explode. The show leans into its visual comedy — in Season 2, one battle sets a roaring dragon against a man wailing on his magic guitar.

  That said, Thunderbolt Fantasy’s dolls and sets are genuinely beautiful, intricate creations, and the “character acting” of the puppeteers is convincing enough to create a sense of clear personality in their movements. Thunderbolt Fantasy is a feast of detailed sets and designs, and when the major fights arrive, they demonstrate feats of physical engineering reminiscent of classic kaiju films with marvelously detailed puppets and high-quality CG effects combining to wonderful effect.

    All of this is elevated into absurd, operatic theater by Hiroyuki Sawano, whose melodramatic scoring has never felt more appropriate. All in all, Thunderbolt Fantasy is an incredibly satisfying production, both funny and propulsive on a moment-to-moment level, and also deeply rewarding on a character and thematic level, with a remarkable visual style to boot. If you’re feeling at all adventurous in your viewing, I’d highly recommend checking it out before Season 3 arrives!  

    Nick Creamer has been writing about cartoons for too many years now and is always ready to cry about Madoka. You can find more of his work at his blog Wrong Every Time, or follow him on Twitter.

  Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: Nick Creamer