This list is partial and will be fixed when LJ edit stops hating me. updated 7/17/2012, sorta.

OH MY GOD, ME TOO: The Unusual Opinions Amnesty Post. In my unbiased opinion, the best comment thread ever in the history of ever.

Battlestar Galactica
( Read more...Collapse )
Buffyverse (BtVS & AtS)( Read more...Collapse )


Dollhouse( Read more...Collapse )

Supernatural

( character metaCollapse )

( all things angelsCollapse )
( thematic metaCollapse )

The Vampire Diaries/The Originals
( aka, the MysticverseCollapse )



Multi-show
You people and your quaint little categories - positive portrayals of male sexuality on Torchwood, Psych, and Castle
Sorkinits (oh shit. Major spoilers for AtS and West Wing; minor spoilers for Chuck and various crime procedurals, major spoilers for BSG are marked off)
THE MANLIEST PAIN OF ALL (marked spoilers for BSG, Mad Men, and AtS)
my three-step guide to character analysis (spoilers are cut)
the author is boxed
Strong Female Characters(TM)
care and justice ethic (focuses on Buffy, BSG, and Supernatural)

LORDS OF KOBOL HEAR OUR PRAYER

WE THE UNDERSIGNED NASTY WOMEN, BAD HOMBRES, AND BIG LEAGUE HATERS BEYOND THE BINARY

HUMBLY BESEECH YOU TO DELIVER VICTORY TO YOUR CHOSEN GODLESS LIBERAL SQUARE CONSERVATIVE METHODIST ISLAMIST SELLOUT TO THE GLOBAL BANKING CONSPIRACY

LET THE NEOLIBERAL COMMUNIST REVOLUTION COME TO PASS

FOR THIS IS THE DAY THE SHRILL FEMINAZI MATRIARCHY HAS MADE

LEAD US NOT INTO FASCISM, BUT DELIVER US FROM ORANGE RANTY SHIT-TWEETING EVIL

ALSO LET FLORIDA BE CALLED FOR US SOON BECAUSE MANY, MANY PEOPLE HAVE FORMATIVE TRAUMA AROUND THAT OKAY

ALSO MAYBE TEXAS OR SOUTH CAROLINA BECAUSE LOL

FOR THE NIGHT IS DARK, AND FULL OF TERRORS

THE WORST TERRORS

THE SCARIEST, MOST HORRIFYING TERRORS

BELIEVE US

IS ANYONE ELSE WATCHING THIS SHITSHOW?

I don't even know what was the most shockingly horrendous?

• a US congressman preaching actual white supremacy on live television?


• Chris Christie's witch trial of HRC for having the nerve to pursue diplomacy as Secretary of State?


• that three people there in some kind of official capacity - delegates and a Trump campaign adviser - have openly called for HRC to be killed?


• like, I'm not even counting the rank-and-file attendees, just people who are still there in some kind of official capacity?


• the sucking up to real-life Bond villain Vladimir Putin?


• Ben Carson using the dedication of HRC's thesis adviser's book as evidence that she is not just a traitor but a devil worshipper?


• the fact that Ted Cruz is the one who's come off better than anyone else?


• because he straight got them to BOO at HAVING A CONSCIENCE?


• that despite all this shit going down, somehow the big story is that Melania Trump plagiarized Michelle Obama's speech? (Which, bad, yes, and they handled it like amateurs, but at least the Secret Service didn't have to get involved?!)


• SERIOUSLY. TED CRUZ.

I admit, watching Paul Ryan's career go up in dumpster fire smoke has been a hoot. Other than that.....

I haven't been around because I moved this week and my internet has only been up and running for about two hours.

Without usual home entertainment, I've been rewatching old S2/3 West Wing DVDs, which is a weird thing to be doing right now. The more time passes, the more the Nice Republicans and their Different Perspective on Truth, Justice, and the American Way makes me go cross-eyed with frustration. Like. Can you imagine RL Republicans handling[Spoiler (click to open)]the accident and the MS disclosure happening on top of each other like that? They'd have spent the rest of his term trying to frame Ellie for the hit-and-run.

But! I have been writing about real politics a bit? So if anyone wants to read about progressive problems I have with Bernie Sanders (reproductive rights - campaign finance - campaign tactics - BSG parallels because naturally), or just to jaw about the election a little, here's a thread.



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UnREAL: quite possibly the best new show of 2015. All of the praise that it's gotten has been well-earned. The one thing sticking point I have is the repeated claim that Rachel Goldberg is “the female Walter White.”

Now, I have nothing against the idea of a female Walter White character. Walt's comedic doppelganger was a woman; some day soon he'll have a female dramatic successor and it'll be fantastic. But the unfairness of comparing Rachel to Walt is an example of the double standard between men and women, the higher moral curve that weights women's venial sins as heavily as men's mortal ones, which makes the idea of a woman with Walt's rap sheet only palatable if she's cut down to size.

Rachel may be a deeply toxic person, but she doesn't manufacture actual poison. She isn't an internal problem-solver, mind buzzing around one puzzle more deadly than the next, but an emotional vampire who is at her strongest when feeding off of others' attention and uncertainty. She's as likely to self-medicate her deep unhappiness with hedonistic highs as masochistic lows. She isn't a mass murderer – though her tendency to infect others with her own self-destructive patterns does have a body count. She's not a mentor, she's a perpetual mentee. She isn't someone whose core self is hidden from the world all too successfully, she's a person who reinvents herself moment to moment in response to her environment.

Rachel isn't Walter White, y'all. Rachel is Don Draper.

( not your grandfather's hero. mostly not, anywayCollapse )



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Happy new year, everyone!

I'm slowly catching up on fandom reading and comments. My old laptop recently sad-tromboned its way into obsolescence (tbh it was obsolete LONG before that but I put things off) and now I'm more or less adjusted to the new one. Before that, though, the annual retrospective:

( lots of gifs, but I think I corralled off spoilersCollapse )

I checked out the first half-dozen Gossip Girl episodes almost a year ago, didn’t really click with it, and kind of drifted away. But I’m enjoying it a lot more this time around. Last night I hit an especially meta episode of the show, which I took as a sign to pause and do a little bit of meta about the show. IDK how much sense this makes, it was taking way longer than these thoughts are really worth so I'm just putting it up. But I am really curious how this episode played for people who watched before the big reveal and so maybe it’ll be fun to see first impressions formed after it.

( about 2x5, I've seen through 2x7Collapse )

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A couple of great write-ups of this great show can be found here and here. A few (lol) thoughts of my own below.
 

( TRUE LOVE, PEOPLE!Collapse )

 

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So about five months ago, I had every intention of writing about at least one narrative decision which I love and which fandom hates. And then I got sidetracked from the meme (not sure why, since opening up this document I see that I had several of them either planned or done???) but also, which decision? I've already talked about plenty of roundly-despised choices made by my shows - S4 of AtS, S5 of The Wire, the vast majority of decisions made by Julie Plec and Jeremy Carver - but that is still the FOR STARTERS list. How, then, to reach into the miasma of fandom opinion and grasp one topic?

But then the Lord of Light showed me the way: GAME OF THRONES HAS RETURNED.

One caveat, and a few fair warnings: I haven't watched the leaked episodes, so this is only accurate up through S5E2, The House of Black and White. This might all change on Sunday night! That won't change the fact that the conversation this week has been dumb af. It is an adaptation-specific choice, which means that I will be talking about the books a bit. I think I've successfully limited what I've mentioned to things that came up on-screen this week or have been seriously hyped in the press over the last couple of months. There's one point that is related to something show-only people don't know yet but it is in a footnote and in white text. I also talk about Lady Stoneheart, which I think has been thoroughly spoiled for everyone over the past ten months, but if somehow you've made a point to avoid knowing what that means you might want to skip.

( it ends in blood, as it beganCollapse )



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This recent run of Supernatural episodes has been great. My lack of writing hasn’t been reflective of a lack of enjoyment, so much as my fannish head-space has been pretty deep in a reread of ASOIAF. (Soon. SOOOOOOOOON.) Also, it makes sense to review them together, since they’ve essentially been a few variations on the theme of the long-overdue collapse of the Myth of Dean Winchester.

 

( a long and not particularly insightful jumbleCollapse )

 

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( on the fates of us allCollapse )

 

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For an anon: Any thoughts on Tony Stark? Or if you haven't seen many/enough of his movies, witches on SPN and how they fit into the expanding universe.

I don’t have a whole lot to say about Tony Stark? I’ve only seen him in The Avengers and even then I’m mostly interested in his Bruce-adjacency.

Witches, though…

( must be the season of the....Collapse )

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( list of new showsCollapse )


Favorite Show: A couple of weeks ago I was chatting with someoneone who asked something along the lines of "is there really a show where you love EVERY EPISODE?" - posed, quite reasonably, as a rhetorical question. Except I was like ACTUALLY THERE IS!! So my show of the year is, without contest, The Originals.

( favorite books I readCollapse )




I do want to appreciate some of my favorite episodes/scenes/moments of 2014 television. These are spoiler-cut by show, for those who aren't caught up on/don't care about everything I watch.

[Agents of SHIELD]Agents of SHIELD: As I mentioned in my post on S1, I was totally spoiled for the two big twists of AoS (and, alas, for the two big twists of CA:TWS, which I still have not seen) and I was still transfixed by the episode of and immediately after the Hydra and Grant reveals.

I got around to most of the AHS excellence in my last post about the show.

[Game of Thrones]Game of Thrones: I was ambivalent about some parts of the S4 finale, but

(1)

(x)

Abstractly, I oppose blood vengeance. An eye for an eye puts innocent optometrists out of business and all. That said, JUSTIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICE!!!

(2)

(x)

BITCH BIT HIS EAR OFF

Non-finale honorable mention: Really 100% of Olenna moments were among my favorite entertainment of the season, but the best one has to be this:

(x)

GRANDMA TAKES CARE OF EVERYTHING, DEAR



[HTGAWM]

How to Get Away With Murder:

(x)

[The Originals]The Originals

LBH, the greatest moment of the The Originals so far - and probably on The CW ever - was in the mid-season finale when Elijah said he felt patronized and the baby said "WAH." I thought this was too good to be true so I watched it a half a dozen times to make sure, and then I watched it another three times because it was beautiful. But here is a small selection of the runners-up:

(1)

(x)

(2)

(x)

(3)

(x)

[Orphan Black]Orphan Black:

(x)

[Scandal]Scandal:

(1) Liv pulling the trigger on Rowan. GIRL YES.

(2) Because Liv is protected by protagonist privilege, James dying was the most heartbreaking thing that Scandal could have done for me, but ugh, it was such an excellent narrative choice, and painfully well-executed.

(3) NEVER FORGET:

(x)

[Supernatural]Supernatural:

(1) I'm not even going to try to pick a demon!Dean moment. It was all perfect.

(2)

(3) LOVE AND HEARTBREAK AND LOOOOOOOOOOVEEEE

[even if you don't care about Supernatural you want to see this one](4)

(x)

[True Blood]True Blood: I am so glad I caught up with the show in time to savor the last season. Sookie's "part of my truth" speech to Bill was a great final word on the show - that whoever Sookie is, whatever the world punishes her for, there is nothing wrong with her, and she knows it. The Hep-V storyline is one that, I think, could not have been what it was 20 years ago or 20 years from now. 2014 was the year of Truvada and The Normal Heart and just, a moment in time where those who survived a plague became more able to tell the rest of us what that meant for them. I love that the show told us a part of this story; that it was a show which could tell this story.



[TVD]TVD:

It seems my psychosomatic Christmas avoidance flu was in fact the actual flu and all I've been any good for in the past week or so is watching Game of Thrones on a loop. And a little quality self-pity, but mostly Game of Thrones.

So, December Talking Meme is officially a January talking meme.

But I do have a few stray thought about GoT that I want to catch in case I want to write more later.


( no book spoilersCollapse )
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In my defense, AHS: Coven is finally up on Netflix, which means there has been little room in my soul for anything not American Horror Story. HELLO FRIENDS, I AM HERE TO TELL YOU THE GOOD NEWS: AMERICAN HORROR STORY.

This is where I know I should make some disclaimer about aesthetics and subjectivity, because it's true this show is tailored to certain tastes (to wit: superior ones) (it's not that I like you less if you do not have a gaping void in your soul which can only be filled by watching Jessica Lange snort a line of blow with the King of the Underworld, but to be honest I am not entirely sure what we have in common?) but instead I will point out that AHS has everything that critics are so hyped about when it comes to Hannibal - brilliant nightmare logic that takes the viewer into the darkest horrors lying in the human subconscious, illustrated by genuinely artistic cinematography - except instead of being anchored around a well-drawn but not particularly unique central queerbaity relationship, the subjects of AHS are almost all women, gays, and gay women. OOP.

And there's a lot along those lines which makes the conversation around this show so frustrating. Interviewers have an unsavory habit of trying to put the actresses on the defensive about the Terrible Horrible No-Good Very Badness of the show's women, and not paying a whit of attention when the grand dames disagree. Fandom finds it quite trendy to wring one's hands about the Problematic (TM) ~~representation of people who are hardly ever represented, let alone centralized to this extent, and then go back to watching shows that would never in a million years hire actors who display radical difference. &c, &c. The show hits a lot of nerves, a lot of deep stuff I'm not really feeling like getting into right now. What I am into is the fact that it is absolutely fantastic.

There is at least one moment in every episode of Coven and so far in Freak Show - there were a few in Asylum but not the perfect batting average of S3/4 - which is just so deliciously campy and perfect, I have to flop over onto my side and squall aloud in sheer bliss.

( behold some of my favoritesCollapse )

Top three reasons why @waltzmatildah should stick with The Sopranos

My usual answer to this question is that, you know, life is short, if you don’t like something then there’s tons of good shit out there. Black Mirror’s pretty good, have you checked it out? But if you’re on the fence about sticking out The Sopranos, there are very good reasons why you should:

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I'm going to hold off taking stock of S2 until after the midseason finale airs next week, but I don't see my take on Ward changing radically in one episode, so.
 

( spoilers through The Things We BuryCollapse )

 

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