Arctic Light

The rest of the trilogy came in at the library - and I have already read them!

Outside-the-cut reactions: I really loved the trilogy a lot. It's more upbeat and optimistic than the somewhat bleak first book suggested, the worldbuilding continues to be absolutely fascinating and original, and I enjoyed the characters a lot! (Especially certain ones.)

Bullet-point All The Spoilers reactions with no particular context follow. If you like reading unspoiled, I recommend not reading the spoilers because there are some really nice twists. However, feel free to ask if you have any questions, because there is some pretty heavy content in this series - cannibalism, police brutality, slavery, graphic violence to name just a few. Also, obviously, if spoilers don't matter, read on!

( Pacific Fire spoilers )

( Dragon Coast spoilers )

( Nitpickety (also spoilers) )

The following exchange this morning was too much fun not to share. It references the first couple of chapters of Biggles Follows On, in which Cold War spy hijinks occur, as well as canon-typical flirting.

( This is a perfectly normal way to deal with your arch-nemesis, right? )

You know how sometimes a book just makes you clutch your heart and go "ohhhhhh"?

( Spoilers for Phoenix )

p.s. I looked up Vlad's comment to Loiosh in the previous book that "You're not expendable, you're not stupid, and you're not going", because it was so damn familiar that I was sure I'd heard it somewhere before, and aha, it's a Blake's 7 quote. (Slightly altered: the original is Avon, in the first person.) I am amused that I wasn't wrong, and also amused at the hat tip. Well played, Brust.

I tend to like having TV playing while I work on art/comics pages, usually either something I've seen before (rewatching superhero movies and old sci-fi TV is good for this) or something light and fun that won't require a lot of my attention.

Lately I've been watching a Canadian sitcom, Schitt's Creek, because a post about the show back during Yuletide intrigued me sufficiently to check it out. It can be incredibly cringey in that sitcom kind of way, and most of the characters are basically terrible people in that sitcom way, but then it'll do a sudden 180 swerve into FEELINGS and ... then the middle of season 4 happened to me. I'm a sucker for a good musical episode, okay? And the end of 4x09 is probably one of the cutest things I've ever seen.

Two youtube scenes under the cut. They ARE spoilery but I'm also not sure if this is a show that matters all that much if you're spoiled for. These are clips of key scenes from one of the show's main romances (an M/M one).

Admittedly I'm partly just putting these here because I want to be able to rewatch them whenever I want. I really like it when shows incorporate music into the plot in fun and creative ways, and this was so sweet.

( Two clips )

After making the previous gen tropes post, it occurs to me that, not in all cases, but in a lot of them, you can probably accurately identify things I'm going to fall for by the number of those top-10 tropes they have ...

Agent Carter: 8
GotG: 9
Iron Fist: 9
ATLA: 9
Stranger Things: 8
Heavy Time/Hellburner: 8

(Taking a generous definition of some of these tropes in some cases ...)

... Though I tried to do Dark Matter and my brain broke at how to apply any of these, between the amnesia stuff and the fact that they're basically ALL antagonists in various ways, at least until the found-family stuff starts to kick in. It also works better on longer works than shorter ones, because shoehorning all of these into, say, a single 2-hour movie is tough.

But yeah. I also frequently find myself gravitating towards new things to watch/read based on various combinations of these things, so it's not like it's a tremendous coincidence that I keep finding them. I guess it's good to know what you like ...?

Festivids 2018/2019 is live with 79 vids in a bunch of rarely-vidded fandoms - and I am completely over the moon about my gift!

Say Amen (Saturday Night) (Iron Fist, Ward character study)
IT'S SO GOOOOOD. Great song choice, great editing, and while I am sure I would've been delighted with anything I asked for, if I could've said "out of all my requests, this is the one I want most", that WOULD be the one I wanted most, so I am just ♥ ♥ ♥.

*showers it with hearts*

... I have to say one more thing about Iron Fist as of 2x03. Well, a couple of things, basically just character-interaction squee.

( Some spoilers herein )

I got slightly more votes on Downbelow Station, but I feel like I need to write about Heavy Time/Hellburner first, before I can properly discuss it (because a lot of what I have to say about Downbelow Station relates to my pre-existing love of those books), and that's going to take awhile because I have a LOT to say about those.

So I'll talk about Merchanter's Luck right now, since it's a fairly short, simple book that I read for the first time a few weeks ago (and absolutely LOVED - despite being a relatively less-known standalone of hers, I think it insta-jumped into my favorites of hers on a single read).

This book belongs to the Merchanter/Company Wars branch of Cherryh's Alliance-Union universe. (Most of which are standalones; they can be read in any order.) Interesting little fact I stumbled across the other day: this book was apparently also the entire reason why Downbelow Station was written. She came up with this one first, but needed to work out the political/social backstory for it, and she did that by writing Downbelow Station ... which ended up being much better known. But this was the first book she wrote dealing with the merchanters.

The merchanters, in Alliance-Union, are matrilineal clans of traders whose lives are centered around the ship on which they live and work. In the grand tradition of "introduce the world and then break it", the female protagonist of Merchanter's Luck is someone who does not fit in her closely knit family and their matriarchal-utopian world. Allison is fiercely ambitious, but she is stuck as a junior member of the crew/family, and unlikely to ever achieve the status she craves. So she's on the lookout for a ship of her own.

Enter Sandor, the captain of his own ship, looking for a crew.

What fascinated me about this book is how the back cover blurb suggests a fairly standard romance, and in fact I went into it in part to find out how Cherryh would write a "boy meets girl" story, but it turns out not to be that at all. Or, I should say, it kind of starts out as that -- Sandor and Allison meet and flirt; she's on the prowl for male company, and Sandor's on the prowl for someone to help him run his ship (and also fascinated by her). And then everything goes Pure Cherryh and veers off in a different direction entirely. (A direction that my id liked very much.)

( Spoilers under the cut )

No spoilers past mid season three, please! I'm not caught up yet!

So here's the other thing that's eaten my heart/brain/soul over the last week or two: Dark Matter



What is it? It's a 3-season Syfy spaceship show, by some of the same people who did Stargate. All of it is streaming on Netflix.

What's it about? Six people -- seven counting the ship's android -- wake up on a spaceship without their memories. Evidence suggests one of them is a traitor. Further evidence suggests they're part of a galactic conflict they can't even remember. They have to figure out who they are and who they can trust before their pasts catch up with them. Basically this turns into found-family on a spaceship, as it does. (Also, to make it less confusing if I end up making more posts about this show, most of the main characters have numbers for names, because they don't know their real names for awhile and adopt numbers as shorthand.)

Why is it awesome/why might I want to try it? FOUND FAMILY ON A SPACESHIP. I've really missed having a spaceship show in my life, and this one hits my team-love buttons like few things have since Stargate.

It’s got femslash, slash, and het potential. It’s got a ton of interesting character relationships, including kid-mentor ones and sometimes-enemies learning to trust each other (”Stop saving my life. … Now you’re just doing it on purpose”) and a relationship that’s a lot like Janeway/Seven of Nine in which one is a woman of color. It’s got canon h/c and teaminess and all the sci-fi tropes (e.g. the characters meet their evil alternate universe doubles, trapped on a prison world, taken over by mind-control goo, on a spaceship fulla zombies, time loops, etc). It has redemption arcs and snark and themes about the meaning of life/what it means to have a soul and characters running around doing action stuff in long coats and leather jackets while rock music plays in the background. It's got several Stargate actors in recurring roles, including David Hewlett playing a character who is basically Rodney McKay as a seedy fixer, and Evil Elizabeth Weir.

It has a female Asian captain, a cast that (depending on the cast makeup from season to season) is frequently at least half female and less than half white, and multiple recurring female villains for your foe-yay needs. Plus a number of different characters being incredibly hot in black leather, and actually some pretty cool sci-fi worldbuilding, such as travel-via-cloning in which instantaneous intergalactic travel is accomplished by animating a disposable clone of yourself in a different location, and a galactic milieu with a higher-than-I'm-used-to level of background multiculturalism; they really do a pretty good job of making this feel like a plausible hundreds-of-years-in-the-future Earth-colonized galaxy, at least I think so.

It also contains an episode that has managed to make the coveted "sholio's All-Time Favorite H/C Episodes" list. :D (Er, this list does not exist in reality. But now I think it's a list I should make. And post.)

What might turn me off? There are some questionable writing/casting choices (my least favorite of these is that one of the main characters is basically Space Samurai from Space Samurai Planet, and he doesn't really have a whole lot of characterization other than that). In general, since it's by the same people who did SGA and Stargate Universe, it unsurprisingly shares some writing weaknesses with earlier Stargate shows. I'm watching it with my husband and I get the impression that the handwavy science and occasionally WTF plot resolutions are driving him crazy on a regular basis. I personally could not care less because I am there for FOUND FAMILY IN SPACE, but ymmv.

Also, it got unexpectedly cancelled after season three. I suspect (though I don't know for sure, since I'm not there yet) that it's going to end on a forever-unresolved cliffhanger.

Anything else? Based on what I remember from the last time I posted about Dark Matter when I watched the first season, there are people following me who dislike Three. Which is fine, but keep that to yourself around here, please, because Three is AWESOME and no one can tell me different. :D (Although it's tough to pick a real favorite; as of season three, I think the entire cast is my favorite. It's one of those shows.)

ETA: If you haven't watched the show, beware of spoilers up to early season three in the comments!

You guuuyyyysssss, dis4daria on Tumblr made fanart for two of my Guardians of the Galaxy fics, and it is ADORABLE and AMAZING and breaks my heart and put it back together again, and I can't stop gazing at it.

SEE ALL THE SHINY HERE!

(Her baby Yondu -- yes, I wrote a fic with a small child version of Yondu in it, HUSH -- is the cutest thing I have ever seen. THE ENORMOUS RED EYES!)