Frank opinions, with a warm cup of tea.
Originally written: 05/03.19. Contains spoilers.
Going in, I wasn’t sure what to expect.
Perhaps a retelling of his early life, through to his work with The Boys™, Monty Python. In the beginning at least, I got that.
Continue reading “Review: Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life. Eric Idle.”
Contains spoilers.
I don’t remember exactly when I found out about this show. It was at some point after the end of season one, but a good time before season two started. I do remember how I found it though; it’s hard to ignore a show when you’re looking up the trick to writing about Spider-Man’s secret identity, and instead you’re flooded with LadyNoir fanart.
Continue reading “Miraculous Ladybug: An Overabundance of Katherines.”
Originally written: 28/02/19. Contains mild spoilers.
I first heard of this book through the Netflix film, watching with my cousins late on the night before I flew home. I’ve never been a romance person, but I thought it was cute and pretty interesting, so I ordered the book into my local library. After two months (yes, months) it arrived! Had it read in two days, so here are my thoughts.
Continue reading “Review: To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before. Jenny Han.”
It’s been a long time since I wrote anything here. Life got in the way and it dropped out of my head.
However, I’ve been wanting to start posting online again, so I thought of how I might do that, then remembered I have a notebook steadily filling up with book reviews. I’ve been keeping it since approximately the start of this year, and I thought, ‘Why not? I’ll post them.’
They’ll all be edited before posting, of course. The reviews in my notebook are “streams-of-consciousness” and painfully honest. Lacking in tact, truthfully, because they are for me and me only, but there’s no reason I shouldn’t post them once I’ve made them public-appropriate, right? Still perfectly honest, just a lot more polite.
Lets see how this goes.
Lucy Jane.
(If you’ve already seen this somewhere else, it’s because I posted a topic on Reddit r/Gallifrey… No post stealing here!)
This is going to be a two-fold ramble, so I’ll try to keep it concise; to start, the way in which having a now-female Doctor travel to the past (or at least, Earth’s past) might permanently change the show’s future, and then to follow up, my worries regarding the BBC’s handling of the subject of sexism.
I’ve been rewatching Tennant’s era in the last month, and it’s got me thinking about the upcoming Whittaker era; whenever the Doctor’s gone to the past with his female companion (whomever it may be at the time) there’s been a fundamental change in dynamic for the companion.
With Rose in the Victorian age, the Doctor was able to continue behaving in his usual manner whilst Rose had to deal with comments about her dress and subsequent implications about her person (“The feral child would probably eat meat raw…” etc). I understand it’s treated as a joke, and I appreciate it as such, but if you were to look at it from Rose’s own point of view, it probably wouldn’t have been so funny. Then in 1913, he was set up as a school teacher whilst Martha was relegated to maid (and a black maid at that; we had to see her deal with racism as well as sexism). It makes me wonder how Jodie’s Doctor is going to find historical encounters, should she have any.
I doubt the Doctor, for as long as he was male, would have ever really given thought to what it’s like for his female friends when they take trips to the past (not out of malice, obviously, just the general ignorance that comes with never having to actually think about something). Now that the Doctor’s a she however, that’s going to change. If she travels back to any time period on Earth beyond a few decades ago, she’s going to be getting blocked and stopped from doing what she has to do to save the day, etc. I’ve no doubt that the Doctor’s usual brilliance will help her push down these blockades, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be there in the first place, which will be brand new.
I have to wonder whether this will change the Doctor’s outlook on travelling to the past for future female companions. If she regenerates back into a man eventually, will the Doctor take it more seriously? Because often (as with Rose and the “feral child” comments) it’s felt like he doesn’t take it seriously. Even when I watched the show as a child, I could never imagine that travelling to the past and suddenly being treated like a second class citizen was fun for the companion. I wonder, will time spent as a woman give the Doctor pause enough to think about the sexism his female companions often face when in the past? Or might it be swept under the rug when the time comes for the Doctor to be a man again, however many regenerations later this is.
And then, there’s the second question I have: do you think the writers will be able to handle this subject with any subtlety? Because a few years ago I would have said yes, definitely, but in recent years the BBC’s become more and more of a blunt hammer with sending forth their political stances, and I worry that the chance to explore the subject in a mature, and more importantly thought provoking manner, will be squandered by writers whose priorities go politics first, story second, which is always a killer for any story. I worry that we won’t be seeing “the Doctor, who is a woman”, but “the WOMAN DOCTOR! Come and see the Woman Doctor save the world!”
I’ve wanted to see a female Doctor since I was a little girl, watching the show religiously whilst clutching my toy TARDIS, but in this modern era of the BBC, I don’t think I trust the people in charge to handle it well at all.
So, I’ll pass the questions off to you, the reader; will the Doctor be forever changed by her time as a woman, and do you think the BBC in it’s current state is capable of handling a female Doctor maturely?
I came across my old USB stick earlier this week, from when I was still in school, and aside from boring projects I had written for classes, I found a folder labelled “stuff”. Intriguing, I know. Inside, apart from another folder labelled “music” that contained Billionaire by Bruno Mars and nothing else, was a folder that held the first two chapters of my first ever book, that I wrote when I was about thirteen.
Without even so much as taking a look inside I was cringing. You don’t need to look at your old work to be embarrassed by it, folks. My oldest published work was written when I was seven (I think – I forget exact ages). It won me my first award at school (English star) and sparked off my life-long want to be an author. My mother was so proud of it that she typed it up and printed it off – and thank God she did, because seven year old me’s hand writing was questionable at best.
It was about, to cut it short, a boy who found an egg in the playground at school, which upon hatching was found to contain an alien who would later go on to bring about the literal apocalypse. The final paragraph detailed the final humans alive desperately defending the final vestige of civilisation. I have it in a folder next to me as I type, and I am very proud of it. I can read it and laugh at my seven year old imagination, and maybe cringe a little bit, yeah, but even so, it’s a vital part of my history. I love it.
The folder I found on my old USB stick is a different story. As I said earlier, since I was young enough to understand the concept of jobs, I wanted mine to be “author”. Being able to walk into a Waterstones and find one of my books in there has been a genuine fantasy for a long time. So, it stands to reason that I started trying to write my first best-seller when I was eleven. I won’t use character names or go over plot points, because honestly, the ideas themselves aren’t bad, and I could still use them at some point. It’s entirely execution that, well, executes this book.
I have chapter one open in the tab next to this one, and have been reading it alongside the writing of this blog, using the imagined pressure of an audience that doesn’t exist to make myself read. My live reactions, written as I read, are as follows:
The book’s title was The Cavern of the Drow. I already hate myself. My vocabulary wasn’t as bad as I was worried it would be, and there’s a dragon, which is pretty cool. I just read the name of the first side character and I can’t believe I remember him. Ignace Grantaire. Christ. His brother Nicholas is a bit of a prick, but Ignace is too. Plenty of Marvel Banter™, guys.
Exclamation marks. So! Many! Exclamation marks! right off the bat in chapter two (which is as far as I seem to have written, thank God). Just, way too many. Questions end in exclamation marks, rather than question marks. Sentences that certainly couldn’t be exclaimed are ended in exclamation marks, rather than full stops. In fact, the only spoken sentence that isn’t ended by an exclamation mark is said to have been exclaimed. Following this, the main character and her cousin are soon proven to be utter sociopaths.
Then, I follow up with a double whammy; an entire paragraph of dull physical descriptions. I’ve taken their names out, but here it is.
Thing 1, a tall, confident 11 year old, had sunshine-blonde hair that was wavy and thick, her eyes were narrow, almost slit-like, of the deepest sapphire blue and her cheeks were rosy, though her skin was a creamy pale. Thing 2, on the other hand, was a shy 8 year old, had perfectly straight, thick, straw-coloured hair, with droopy, chocolate brown eyes, although like her older sister, had pale, rosy skin.
Blankety Blank-Blank, however, had long, curly, auburn hair, with large, round, hazel-brown eyes and like her cousins, had pale skin with rosy cheeks. She, like Thing 1, was 11 years old.
I would at some point while writing this book have an idea for another character, another universe, and Blankety Blank-Blank would vanish into the ether as this new idea took root in a way nothing else in my life has. The character that replaced Blankety is the very same who heads my book series, and has headed it for nearly a decade now. Hopefully one day she will see the light of day to people besides myself.
The point is, reading back the first two chapters of Cavern of the Drow was a struggle. It encapsulates almost every bad stereotype about teenage writers out there. Even so, I have kept it and I won’t get rid of it, and if one day someone reads this blog post and asks me to publish those two chapters online, I would do it, if for nothing more than a message to other young writers that practice really does make perfect (or at least, something close to it).
I say all this because I just watched a video by a YouTuber, who I will not name because I don’t want to seem as though I’m trying to call anyone out, who detailed the great lengths they went to to ensure that no one ever saw one of their earlier writing pursuits. It was a bad story, and they didn’t want people finding it, and so went to near-obsessive lengths to make sure no one ever did. Though the video was generally well received (as in, “can’t see the dislike bar” well received), it left a rather bad taste in my mouth, and from looking in the comments I saw a few others agreed.
It seemed to put across a message I’m sure it didn’t intend to whatsoever, but did nonetheless, this message being; “Anything creative you do during your formative years will be terrible and looked back at shamefully. Hide your past, and go to any lengths to do so.”
I understand the embarrassment you feel when you remember your online creative pursuits as a teenager; I tried to become a YouTuber but didn’t have the same passion for it that I did for writing. I never deleted any of the videos, just set them to private. They too were a rather important part of me for a while, and I’d never pretend they didn’t happen at all, however bad they were.
That’s why the lengths this YouTuber described going to in order to erase their old story from existence didn’t make me laugh, it made me feel quite sad. An hour after I first watched the video, I’m still very much heavy hearted. We live in an age of no privacy, when anything we inadvisably do as a young person online will stick around forever, whether we like it or not, so we must instead learn to embrace the cringe.
Watching this YouTuber describe their secret shame made me think of sitcom plots where massive, convoluted plans would be constructed in order to undo small, permissive mistakes, that all culminate in the mistake being gone but our protagonist left just as unhappy as they were at the start.
In short, I suppose I’m trying to say that past creative endeavours are nothing to be ashamed of. Anything you did when you were younger that took you closer to the place you eventually wanted to be, like The Bug from Outer Space or The Cavern of the Drow, is an integral part of the person you are now. Don’t be ashamed of it, and most importantly, don’t let yourself become so obsessed with deleting it from history that you end up sounding like a B-plot to a bad 90’s sitcom.
Following my recent binge watching of How I Met Your Mother, I began thinking about the sitcoms of my teenage years; F.R.I.E.N.D.S and HIMYM. Seeing characters working in their general areas of interest and still not being happy, from the perspective of a now twenty year old me, seems… difficult to relate to. As a teenager watching these shows I had always thought I would at least work in an area of interest myself, even though my true goal always seemed a bit out of reach, and the media I consumed reinforced this idea. Now though, as I struggle to even get jobs I don’t want, seeing these dream lives lived out on the screen breaks my immersion a little.
It made me wonder what a sitcom based on the lives of young people today might look like, and what characters we would meet along the way. It would probably be based in America, as sitcoms tend to be, and set in an apartment too small for the camera crew (because seriously, the homes in F.R.I.E.N.D.S and HIMYM are huge!), with a group of five or six friends, who all live together in their two bed because money doesn’t grow on trees!!
Rather than constant relationship issues (maybe more forgivable in How I Met Your Mother because after all, the basis of the show is in the name), episodes would be based around scrounging up enough money from their minimum wage jobs to pay the bills and their mountains of student loans – if they went to Uni (college) at all. I’d say that, with five friends, three or four would have been (or would still be) students, and the remaining one or two wouldn’t, allowing for wider representation of today’s youth. Maybe there’s even an additional friend (and they’re the sixth) who still has to live at home because they just can’t afford to leave.
Two of the students took “real” degrees while the other two took “Mickey Mouse” degrees, and of these, one from each category could succeed or fail. One real graduate could become a teacher, whilst the other could be struggling to find a place to use their law degree. One Mickey could get in low level at a TV station and over the seasons work their way up, whilst the other could end up at McDonald’s along with the law graduate – and props if one or both of them are called Mickey. (As an important aside, I don’t think of degrees in “real” and “not real” terms. The differentiation here just helps.)
The characters who didn’t go to Uni have a lot to explore too. Maybe one wanted to go but couldn’t because their family wasn’t able to afford it – and maybe that’s a bone of contention with a character who did go. The first could be a prodigy in their field, unable to attain the job they want solely because they don’t have the required piece of paper, whilst another of the friends studied the subject at Uni but can’t really do it to save their life. There’s so much potential for character study there. The other could be directionless, with no passions to be followed and in a dead end 9-to-5 job. I see this friend getting into a lot of arguments with the law graduate about how life should be spent, for some reason.
It’s just a fledgling idea anyway. Something that came to me this afternoon as I zoned out in the midst of cleaning. I don’t have names for the characters (beyond Mickey and Mickey, of course), or an exact place where it would be set, or any way of getting a draft script read. Right now, my priority needs to be finding a literary agent, of course. *Your US sitcom can wait until you’re an international bestseller, me…* I wonder if it’s an idea worth holding on to…
As I’m writing this on New Years Eve, with a terrible head cold and a bit of a mood on, I’ll wish you a great year, whenever it is that you’re reading this, and go back to watching How I Met Your Mother.
Recently, another Jurassic Park sequel slid from Hollywood’s tired, overused vag-
*Starts again…*
I would go on about the film industry falling back obsessively on old, sure-fire success franchises for easy money, but I won’t. As much as it irritates me, nothing I’d say hasn’t been said before by people with louder voices, so I won’t bother.
No, what I’d like to talk about today is the good ol’ forced romantic side story. Whenever I think about the subject, the first piece of media that comes to mind is 2015’s Jurassic World. I saw it at the cinema for my friend’s birthday when it came out, and beyond it being another aforementioned easy cash grab, I didn’t dislike it. In fact, as far as easy cash grabs go, I thought Jurassic World was pretty good. I liked it. Silly, of course (not that anything’s wrong with silly), and with your usual annoying kid characters to seethe at during all on-screen appearances, but a lot of fun. 6/10, would watch again.
Then, it happened.
The very thing I had dreaded since we first discovered that our two leads, Owen and Claire, used to be a couple for no discernible reason. The Unnecessary Romantic Subplot, or, as I call them, “why in the fuck” romances.
Owen and Claire could have disliked each other for any reason. Their personalities clashed completely and their past relationship didn’t affect the plot in any real way, so having them meet and simply not like each other wouldn’t have been out of reach, but no. No, instead, they used to date but then they broke up but they’re back together at the end! Despite! Having! No! On-screen! Or! Character! Chemistry!
For me, this one detail was enough to ruin my enjoyment of the entire film, and I haven’t been inclined to watch it again since. So I haven’t. Thinking about my emotional journey with Jurassic World in that half empty Odeon screen back in 2015 always makes me wonder: why?
Why does each piece of mainstream media seem unable to exist without romantic subplots, including things that aren’t themselves about romance? (Even a lot of kids shows from what I’ve seen – I mean it’s almost creepy.) Ostensibly, it’s about mainstream appeal. Inserting a couple into a piece of media expands its base appeal beyond its main genre – action sci-fi, say – and brings in more viewers, thus making studios more money, which is what they exist for. To earn money.
Does this work, however, when the romance is so shoehorned in that it actively detracts from the film’s quality? Or when its presence is so minuscule and short-lived that it had may as well have not been there at all? (If I remember correctly, Owen and Claire are only a couple for the last ten minutes of Jurassic World, after an entire film of next to no romantic tension or build up.) Is it time for the executives who dictate what goes into a film script to accept that not every film needs a relationship to be good? The romantic subplot in Birdemic is what turned that film from “so bad it’s good” to “outright traumatising, please cease right now”…
But do you have an opinion either way, reader? Am I alone in despising this particular trope, or is the void I’m shouting into less empty than I thought?
I doubt the trope is going to disappear any time soon whether it irritates or not, though. As long as the films that include them make bank at the box office, studio executives won’t dare let script writers leave them out, and so we’ll be inundated with Owens and Claires to Kingdom Come. If this actually changes without companies suffering major box office losses, I’ll drink my own tea.
*Warning: Mild spoiler for The Gunslinger by Stephen King.*
So. The coffee shop AU. I hate it.
But first, for those who don’t know, an AU is a tool of fanfiction used to place familiar characters in different universes. Alternative universes. AU’s. The AU where Harry is the descendant of all four Hogwarts founders, parsle-converses with his pet snake who calls him “boss” and has his own harem of Hogwarts girls. The one where Roland doesn’t let Jake fall so he can pursue the Man in Black. The one where Steven Moffat’s rendition of Sherlock Holmes isn’t a complete and utter cun-
Then, there are more general AU’s. Ones that can apply to any fictional universe. Like, say, the coffee shop AU. Fans seem to love it, and I can only assume it’s a universally liked trope, because I’ve never come across people who dislike it – and believe me, I’ve looked. My failure in this is what sparked my entire blog in the first place.
So why do people like it, exactly? The handful I’ve checked out in my lifetime have all been so… boring. Is that the problem? Am I too action oriented to enjoy them? Because I just don’t see the appeal in taking Leon S. Kennedy, or Peter Parker, or Marinette Dupain-Cheng, stripping them of their powers, abilities or status, and sitting them down in… a coffee shop. Like, truly, I feel like snoozing already.
It could be a geographical thing. Do you need to be a US citizen with coffee flowing through your veins like blood to understand? Am I, as a Brit, simply too far removed from that culture? I – I just –
I have a lot of questions.
When I take the time to think about it as I write this blog, love for the trope comes from a firmly romantic place. “Rose is a barista at TARDIS Cafe, and Doctor John Smith goes in there every day just so he can see her pink and yellow blah blah blah blahhjjjjjjj.” Sorry. Nodded off for a second there. Back to business. So, it’s fluff fulfilment then. “My fandom has too much death and angst for my liking. I need my heart eyes now! No blood and guts included please.” (Actually, writing that just gave me a murder cafe idea, brb…)
I know it sounds like I might be judging fans of the trope, especially from that last paragraph, but I really don’t. You do you, guys and gals. No, I’m convinced that the problem is me, both in this case and in general. I am not a romantic, fluffy person. I take my romance as a side to go with my explosions and train-top fights, thank you very much. I am however, as mentioned above, a Brit, which means I love to complain so I’m going to keep doing it anyway, fuck you.
The root of my hatred is based, most likely, in over exposure. Years of clawing for interesting stories to read, only to tunnel through figurative miles of shit has embittered me. At least Andy Dufresne got Morgan Freeman on voice over and a chance to wash off in the river at the end of his tunnel. All I get are more shit shop AU’s. There’s no redemption here.
Are there coffee shop AU fans reading this? Are there any actual baristas reading? Do you fall in love with several mysterious customers per week? More importantly, do you get it? Does anyone reading this get it? (Here, imagine if you will, that my narrator’s voice, for one moment of weakness, breaks.) I’m so confused…
Despite my best efforts, I have thus far failed in my search for answers so for the moment settle with “I am a soulless robot who cannot feel love” and if, somewhere over the rainbow, a coffee shop AU exists that doesn’t slip me into an instant coma, I’ll drink my own Tea.
The Tea Room 