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foxinthestarsStill waiting for the Amazon Japan order to arrive; I thought surely it would get here today, but no...
Also still working on getting everything moved over to Ao3. I'm mostly there now; I still have to do most of the Soujiro fanfic and then the Mirrorverse. But OMG, Ao3 is SO NICE! With the series feature, and the tagging system, and the rich text editor, and the not eating any punctuation that isn't grindingly ordinary, oh, so much better! (The eating of certain characters is like my biggest beef with FF.net; the embarrassing old FF6 stories will actually not be making the transition, at least not immediately, because effing FF.net ate the scene break markers, and I don't have copies of those on my hard drive---I think I have them on a CD somewhere but it might be a trick to find it---so I would have to actually read them to fix them, and that's not happening.) I actually think that, after I get all the old stuff moved, I'll post some stuff to celebrate---somehow chapters 18 and 19 of Secret Prophecy were never posted out of sheer laziness, and I could do Mirrorverse 31-33 (the "river chapters" that would take me right up to meeting the Monks of Genbu).
I do have this creeping feeling, though, at Ao3, like, for as long as I've done this fanfic thing, fandom is a social space whose mores I don't understand and find intimidating...
Fanfic also overlaps with the other thing I've been meaning to post about, which is the prose I've been reading recently.
Actually in the week leading up to Christmas, I happened to catch a little Avatar: The Last Airbender on TV (episode 2 and part of episode 3, IIRC); long before that,branchandroot had mentioned Embers in a way that put some curiosity on the back burner against the day I decided to brave my fanfic-reading phobia, and with the impetus of seeing the show, I went for it.
I have two complaints about it. Firstly, clarity isn't always its strongest point; sometimes I felt like I had to hunker down and ride out a wave of "huh?", but it tended to pass pretty quickly. Second, having it take over my life for several days running was damn inconvenient.
As the second "complaint" suggests, I enjoyed it very much. To the extent that there's a deconstruction based on really thinking through the worldbuilding, I just love that kind of thing, and I was always more of a Zuko person... (Yeah, the Gaang is fun, but a prettyboy with a scar and a soul in torment? It's like catnip, I admit it...) I was probably enjoying it more earlier when it seemed to focus more on that kind of thing and wasn't quite as bogged down in high-fantasy bloodlines and past lives as it's gotten lately, but still. I can also recognize that it moved into a different genre than the show, and a lot of the deconstruction issues from holding a cartoon to the ethical standards of a prose fantasy epic. I love seeing it done, mind, but it shouldn't preclude the show from working on its own terms at least much of the time.
More recently, I've been reading Barbara Tuchman's "The March of Folly" from the library; not so much to say about that (except a sinking feeling that if her ghost prepared a new edition a decade or two from how, current events might make the cut, but perhaps it was ever thus...). Once it's done, I'll have to move on to "Kokoro" so I can finally get back to reviewing Aoi Bungaku. (After that, the rest of Aoi Bungaku is based on much shorter stories, so I shouldn't need another big hiatus like this.)
Also still working on getting everything moved over to Ao3. I'm mostly there now; I still have to do most of the Soujiro fanfic and then the Mirrorverse. But OMG, Ao3 is SO NICE! With the series feature, and the tagging system, and the rich text editor, and the not eating any punctuation that isn't grindingly ordinary, oh, so much better! (The eating of certain characters is like my biggest beef with FF.net; the embarrassing old FF6 stories will actually not be making the transition, at least not immediately, because effing FF.net ate the scene break markers, and I don't have copies of those on my hard drive---I think I have them on a CD somewhere but it might be a trick to find it---so I would have to actually read them to fix them, and that's not happening.) I actually think that, after I get all the old stuff moved, I'll post some stuff to celebrate---somehow chapters 18 and 19 of Secret Prophecy were never posted out of sheer laziness, and I could do Mirrorverse 31-33 (the "river chapters" that would take me right up to meeting the Monks of Genbu).
I do have this creeping feeling, though, at Ao3, like, for as long as I've done this fanfic thing, fandom is a social space whose mores I don't understand and find intimidating...
Fanfic also overlaps with the other thing I've been meaning to post about, which is the prose I've been reading recently.
Actually in the week leading up to Christmas, I happened to catch a little Avatar: The Last Airbender on TV (episode 2 and part of episode 3, IIRC); long before that,
branchandroot had mentioned Embers in a way that put some curiosity on the back burner against the day I decided to brave my fanfic-reading phobia, and with the impetus of seeing the show, I went for it.I have two complaints about it. Firstly, clarity isn't always its strongest point; sometimes I felt like I had to hunker down and ride out a wave of "huh?", but it tended to pass pretty quickly. Second, having it take over my life for several days running was damn inconvenient.
As the second "complaint" suggests, I enjoyed it very much. To the extent that there's a deconstruction based on really thinking through the worldbuilding, I just love that kind of thing, and I was always more of a Zuko person... (Yeah, the Gaang is fun, but a prettyboy with a scar and a soul in torment? It's like catnip, I admit it...) I was probably enjoying it more earlier when it seemed to focus more on that kind of thing and wasn't quite as bogged down in high-fantasy bloodlines and past lives as it's gotten lately, but still. I can also recognize that it moved into a different genre than the show, and a lot of the deconstruction issues from holding a cartoon to the ethical standards of a prose fantasy epic. I love seeing it done, mind, but it shouldn't preclude the show from working on its own terms at least much of the time.
More recently, I've been reading Barbara Tuchman's "The March of Folly" from the library; not so much to say about that (except a sinking feeling that if her ghost prepared a new edition a decade or two from how, current events might make the cut, but perhaps it was ever thus...). Once it's done, I'll have to move on to "Kokoro" so I can finally get back to reviewing Aoi Bungaku. (After that, the rest of Aoi Bungaku is based on much shorter stories, so I shouldn't need another big hiatus like this.)
