Fandom Update

[seekingferret]

jukebox_fest is due Wednesday, my time. I finished my first draft last night... should be able to polish it by Wednesday, but time is a bit limited by social demands.

Debating invisible_ficathon. Didn't nominate, but there are plenty of things I might be able to write that were? Except I don't really feel like this is a good exchange for me. It's my kind of writing, but not the kind of writing I can toss off an emergency response for in a day if I end up stuck. I basically need to luck into a prompt that really inspires me or I'll be screwed, so probably will pass.

I never actually mentioned it here, but I got a netflix subscription so I could watch Daredevil. I... liked it. I didn't love it. I thought the balance it struck between realism and comic bookness was a little off. But I loved its perplexing Fake New York-centrism. The Awl really nailed the problem with Daredevil's version of Hell's Kitchen, but on the other hand, I really admired the show's commitment to exploring the small scale consequences of Avengers 1 in relationship to New York's actual long-term history of conflict between developers and tenants, even if it meant constructing a fantasy version of Hell's Kitchen. I also thought Foggy/Ben was a much better ship than Ben/Karen, and therefore was frustrated by the final shot of the season.

After finishing Daredevil, I moved on to Arrow, and have now watched the full Season 1 of the show. Which bears comparison to Daredevil, in many ways. I have a lot of thoughts about "You have failed this city" and Oliver's general usage of 'my city' in his guise as the Hood. I'm grateful that the show does push back a few times with people telling him not to use the possessive, but it's not enough. Oliver's life is way too disconnected from the ordinary life of the city for it to really be his in a spiritual sense, so the possessiveness comes off too often as an aristocratic sense of ownership. Knowing the place to get the best burger in the Glades does not somehow equate to belonging to the Glades. Fundamentally, though, the show recognizes this. Oliver is not only not a hero quite often, but he's not even aware of what's going on in 'his city'. I really admire the writers for letting Oliver fail so often, and for letting him sometimes even deserve to fail. I'm not sure how I am expected to feel, however, at the end of one of the many episodes where Oliver does succeed, after indiscriminately killing a crowd of faceless, nameless drug dealers or security guards. Arrow often struggles to fully articulate the mechanics by which a crime slips past the eyes of the legal system and into the purview of vigilante justice. I'm not saying necessarily that there shouldn't be a set of such mechanics, but I would like to see them elucidated more clearly by Oliver. I'd like to see Diggle and Felicity (or Laurel and Quentin, or Huntress and Dark Archer) force Oliver to articulate them. It would make the show much more effective as a meditation on the limits of justice.


Lastly, I am reading Kevin J. Anderson's The Dark Between the Stars, as it was in fact nominated for the Hugo for best novel, regardless of the circumstances. I am 250 pages in and I am loathing it. I've been bitching about this book in #yuletide for the past week. KJA's writing instincts just seem totally off. He routinely fails on basic narrative details. This one might be the most infuriating, but it's typical of a whole class of error:

Lee Iswander is frantic with worry and heartache after a natural disaster ruined his business and killed many of his employees. His wife offers to bring him his favorite food for lunch. In an internal monologue, he wonders what his favorite food is, if he even has one, if his wife knows what it is. A page later, his wife brings him food, and... the narrative does not tell us what the food is, or whether or not it's his favorite. It just says that she brought him food. I'm a hundred pages later and I am still obsessing over Lee Iswander's favorite food. It's such a confusing oversight. It's a six hundred page novel, why would you leave it out?