I was wondering what other HP fans on my flist think of this article:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20070725/cm_csm/ysawyer_1
“J.K. Rowling’s towering achievement lacks the cornerstone of almost all great children’s literature: the hero’s moral journey. Without that foundation, her story – for all its epic trappings of good versus evil – is stuck in a moral no man’s land.”
Personally, I feel it’s dead wrong, but I can’t quite put my finger on why.
Just got home from HP & the OOtP. It was a tad unpolished in places, but I liked it a lot and now I know what I want for Christmas!
Oh, and it really sets you up to be chomping at the bit for book 7. I know they did *that* on purpose…..
Nabbed from various people and uploaded to ATPo:
http://atpobtvs.com/existentialscoobies/images/Toronto/
There may be more later if more are uploaded by the gang.
x-posted to
The other day, another person wrote asking if I was going to do ATPo analyses of the Season 8 comics. With the usual argument–“Joss says they’re canon!” Yeah. Uh. Joss also once said spatulas were haunting him.
Anyway, leaving aside the fact that a great deal of what’s going on in the comics is just recycling of old villians (and not even the most interesting ones), in a medium (comics) where the sky *ought* to be the limit with new and interesting stuff from the master’s imagination,
one of the main points of ATPo analyses was to explain what the frig is going on in an episode (or issue) and I can’t for the life of me figure it out! Every panel, I’m like…”*Now* where are we?!” “Who’s that?!” “How’d we get from what was just going on to *this*?” “What are they *talking* about!?”
If I can’t understand it, I can’t explain it, and…
I suppose there’s a part of me that wants Season 8 up at ATPo for completeness’ sake, and that’s why I’m even bothering to mention it. ‘Cause, not impressed with it (the paranoid military story line’s kinda cool, but still feels a bit recycled….) for the most part, and, I guess I’m one of those fans who was satisfied with season 7 being the end of the story.
Eight and a half years ago (Jan 1, 1999), I got arm-twisted by some friends at the Bronze Posting Board into creating a website for my thoughts on the tv show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I called it “All Things Philosophical on BtVS.”
I got email. People wanted to talk to me (for some reason), and people wanted to talk to other visitors to the site. So seven years ago this Thursday (June 14th, 2000), I created a discussion board for the site.
Cool people came to the board. They had really cool thoughts* on the show, and on the spin-off, Angel. The board grew and grew. Small groups of ATPoers (or Existential Scoobies, as we sometimes called ourselves) who lived close to each other or were visiting towns where other ATPoers lived got together in person for food, laughs, and conversation.
And then, in 2003, the television show that brought us together was to come to an end. ladystarlightsj wrote me an email suggesting that perhaps we should all get together as a big group to celebrate the finale. We decided on a location: Vancouver, British Columbia, and a date (alas, not May 20th, 2003, but later that summer). ATPoers came from far and wide to that picturesque city. There was food! There was drink (spilled on the carpet)! There was singing! There were BtVS and Angel DVD-viewing sessions! There was much laughter and discussion and silliness.
It was so much fun, we decided to do it again the next year. We gathered in Chicago (2004)
We gathered in New York City (2005)
We gathered in Lake Tahoe (2006)
And this year, we are gathering in Toronto.
So you’ll understand if I’m excited!!1!
*It’s called discussion people, DISCUSSION. For some of us, that is the whole *point* of fandom. The term “meta” is a derogatory misnomer. Ptui! We shall speak of it no more!
I complain about ST’s regressiveness by contemporary standards, but this show was ground-breaking in its day. Back in 1964, when the show was first pitched to the networks, sci-fi was commonly thought of as the province of pre-pubescent boys–the stuff of Saturday matinees, comic books, and serialized periodicals that got stuffed in with the kiddy mags.
Star Trek gave sci-fi a decidedly adult face by putting it in a military setting any World War II vet would have recognized (well, except for the women, and the inevitable cheesiness). And it had a mixed-race, mixed gender crew in the days of pre-second-wave feminism and segregation.
So credit where credit is due.
Now onto my random comments: 1.1-1.10
So to celebrate my recent change in job title, I bought myself DVD sets of the original Star Trek.
*OMG geeks*
OTOH? This show has a sexist offense every ten minutes. I’m timing them. Soon there will be a drinking game.
ETA: How annoying is it that the episodes are on the disks in their air date order, instead of the order they were intended to be shown in? We all know networks suck!!
gehayi reminds us that today is the 30th anniversary of the opening day of the movie “Star Wars” (now called “Episode IV: A New Hope”). I was one of the little dweebs standing in those lines that wrapped around the block, waiting to see a movie that had dazzling, ground-breaking special effects even in the TV commercials. But it wasn’t the special effects that made the movie. That was icing on the cake. It was the use of mythos, of the most ancient story-telling tropes mixed in with a futuristic, sci-fi setting that made it special. Combining religious mysticism, heroes and villians, good and evil, space battles and explosions, intelligent humor, humanistic, personal character struggles, amazing cinematography, musical themes that followed each character (the “Peter and the Wolf-esque theme in the initial scenes where the droids wander Tatatooine was inspired), and a butt-kicking babe who could rescue her own rescuers…what was there not to love?
Just wanted to mark the moment, because it had a big impact on me and still does.
ETA: Oh yeah, and Han shot first. Make a note of it.
Latest book: “Eye of the Daemon” by Camille Bacon-Smith
OK, this book was totally cheating, as I’ve not only read it before, it’s been sitting on my shelf for years now. But I was having interlibrary loan issues, and needed something to read in the interim. Plus, a lot of this “book-a-thon 2007” is about exploring themes in fantasy novels that interest me, and revisiting a book I’ve already read for its themes fits that bill.
And how.
Suffice it to say, this book really pushes my buttons.
I’ve been thinking a lot about “story kinks” as the term is understood in the fanfic community–why we are drawn to the particular stories we are, whether as writers or readers. “Kink” here is understood in a broader sense than merely sexual, any story element that draws you in with such an inexorable power that you find yourself writing or reading stories with that element over and over whether you realize it or not. Among my many “kinks”–(1) parent/child relationships, particularly when the two finally meet after the child is an (near) adult, (2) aliens-among-us, (3) the experience of being part-human, part-alien (where by “alien” I don’t necessarily mean extra-terrestrial, but anything not commonly associated with the natural inhabitants of Earth we see in our daily lives), (4) supernatural families, especially special gifts/experiences being passed down through the generations, (5) a young person only discovering belatedly that they are half-alien or of some sort of supernatural origin, which finally makes sense of the weird/bad experiences they’ve had in their lives, (6) strong women characters who are not merely bit-parts or recurring (may be less of a kink than a prerequisite), (7) characters of invitation, (8) stories of the supernatural that take place in the real world, (9) secret identities/secret sub-cultures, (10) ordinary people becoming champions/messiahs, which may or may not include destiny/prophecy/previous foreknowledge of this as an element.
Author Nancy E. Shaffer 