#anceline rambles

[ancelineonline]

I’m not gonna lie, Griffin using Montrose’s magic “can always tell if you’re lying” power simply to figure out whether Shoebox is telling the truth in her own idiosyncratic way or being sarcastic in her own idiosyncratic way is 100% the best possible use of that power. Incredible. I love it. The way Justin deadpans every single thing Shoebox says so that you literally cannot tell and griffin has to ask every. single. time is peak comedy.

[ancelineonline]

I make silly stuff sometimes

[ancelineonline]

You know, a lot of Pride and Prejudice makes significantly more sense when you remember that Kitty and Lydia are both approximately 15 to 18 years old.

[ancelineonline]

The thing about calling The Lord of the Rings a trilogy is that it isn’t. It’s either six books or one, depending on how you look at it. Sure, it was published as a trilogy, but each book of the “trilogy” contains two volumes of the larger story. And each volume is a complete narrative arc with a rise and a climax and a resolution. I think that is part of why it is sometimes wobbles when adapted to other contexts. (It’s certainly why the Peter Jackson movies got a bit jumbled at times, especially in The Two Towers.) It can be a bit difficult to make a good adaptation of something that has two equally momentous climax points.

In Fellowship, people mostly deal with this by cutting out most of the first half, (goodbye Tom Bombadil and the Barrow Downs) and making the confrontation with the Nazgûl at the Ford of Bruinen part of the rising action instead of the climax. This is relatively manageable although I think it sells the story a bit short since the Hobbits are very much the main characters of the whole thing, even when it steps aside to focus on other characters.

In Return of the King, by nature of it being The End, a lot of threads are coming together and it is a bit easier to weave them together into something that makes sense.

The Two Towers though. That’s just two fully separate stories. The story of what’s happening to Merry and Pippin in Rohan and Fangorn and Isengard, and the story of what’s happening to Sam and Frodo on their journey to Mordor. Furthermore these are two stories that are tonally pretty different whilst still being part of the same overall story. The Merry and Pippin story has a political/military focus, and of course the battle of Helm’s Deep and the destruction of Isengard. The Frodo and Sam and Gollum story is more or less a road trip relationship drama. That’s funny, but the point is that its focus is very much on those three characters, their relationships, and the strain they’re under. It’s very personal in a way that the Merry and Pippin story isn’t, simply because there are so many more events happening in the Merry and Pippin story. It is difficult to weave these two together in a satisfying way! In fact, Tolkien doesn’t! He tells the Merry and Pippin story right through to the end, and then switches over to Sam and Frodo’s and tells that straight through.

Anyway that’s why a lot of adaptations of The Lord of the Rings falter a bit in the middle. And also why you should read the books again. They’re great.

[ancelineonline]

Look, I love the Lord of the Rings and I think it’s a fantastic series but it does suffer from simply Not Enough Women (and Not Enough Queer People but I’m less qualified to speak on that so I shall leave that to others.) So I have just decided the every Important Character* has a sister, which just happens to be busy doing fucking cool shit, just to the left, at all times.

(Except Eowyn, because she IS the sister busy doing the cool shit, she’s just doing it front and centre where everyone can see her, like a boss. Eowyn deserves an awesome sister but I fear than any sister of Eowyn and Eomer would have also pulled an Eowyn and secretly fucked off to murder a Nazgûl too.)

Pippin canonically has three sisters, and I firmly believe they are just as much of a menace(affectionate) as he is, and spent their time in the Shire making things properly miserable for Saruman. Tooks are just Like That.

*for my purposes, the Important Characters are the members of the Fellowship except Frodo (because he has incredible strong single child energy), and Faramir (because he’s my favourite. Yes I know him have a sister would be automatically included because Boromir is part of the Fellowship, but Faramir deserves both to be mentioned and to have a sibling besides the one his father loves best, I have A Lot Of Feelings about their family). (I would also include Eowyn and Eomer, but as mentioned they’ve got it covered.)

[ancelineonline]

I have overall been enjoying The Bartimaeus Trilogy, but I will say that it suffers somewhat from the same problem that Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes has, namely been really truly incredibly written with a point of view character who is so awful that it frequently makes me want to throw the character and the book into a wall in exasperation. Admittedly it’s significantly less of an issue with Bartimaeus because Kitty and Bartimaeus are perfectly fine, it’s only Nathaniel who regularly needs a good whack upside the head to regain his common sense. And lord knows Nathaniel is an arrogant idiot at times but he’s still miles ahead of Coriolanus Snow when it comes to like… having even the slightest capacity for being a decent human being. Which is to say Nathaniel has that capacity for human decency, albeit in incredibly small amounts and not very well cultivated. Coriolanus Snow simply doesn’t, and would throw it away from himself as fast as possible if you offered it to him. And indeed does so, many times, on purpose and with abandon over the course of his book.

[ancelineonline]

I did start reading the Bartimaeus Sequence because the Scarlett and Browne hangover was just so bad I needed to do *something.* I know I won’t like it as much, it’s been around a long time and I was a lot less picky about what I liked as a teenager when it was New and In The Public Eye more and I didn’t pick it up then. But sometimes you just gotta scratch the itch, you know?

Yes, I’ll probably pick up the Lockwood ones eventually too, but I’m even less interested in the premise of Lockwood than I am in Bartimaeus.

It’s just that Scarlett and Browne is sort of perfectly, exquisitely tailored for my specific tastes and interests in fiction so it’s going to be hard for other things to measure up. Also it’s criminally underrated, frankly.

(Before you point me to ao3, chill. I’m a veteran of fanfic. Obviously, I went there immediately and was not disappointed. However, there are no fics that have been posted since the release of Legendary (unsurprising, it was released two months ago and the fandom is Not Large) so none of the truly excellent fics I’ve found are quite scratching the itch the way I want them to.)

[ancelineonline]

Yes hello I am just rotating the Train Gang in my mind again.

I am obsessed with Chet Sapphire today cuz he’s great, but also because I was raised Very Religious(TM) (specifically Christian) and sometimes I am really very struck by religious parallels in media. Even ones that I’m almost certain were not intentional.

Do I think Haley and Gus and Dillin and Dylan and Aram and John set out to make religious parallels in the Off the Rails Story? Absolutely not. I still see them.

Because I see the parallel between Chet, who has to stare his new god in the face before he’s really able to acknowledge that she’s real, and Thomas, the discipline who had to see and touch Jesus after his resurrection to really acknowledge that it is his friend/god risen from the dead. And yeah that’s a fairly obvious connection. But what I appreciate about both the story of Thomas and the story of Chet is that neither of them are deemed lesser for this. Scenda does not love Chet any less than the others once he decides he actually does believe in her. Thomas is not a lesser disciple because of his need for assurance. We all need assurances sometimes.

I love this little story so much. I will continue rotating it in my mind and loving it and rambling about it.