So I went out to see Prisoner of Azkaban all by my lone wolf lonesome last night after work. It was either that or wait two weeks until Gloria had a free weekend.
Angel: the Series
When the cancellation of Angel was announced in February, I wasn’t happy. Well, none of us were, of course, but I had my own reasons for being unhappy. “Their story’s not over!” I wrote in post cards and emails to all those “Saving Angel” targets. Angel and the others were slowly being digested in the Belly of the Beast, corrupted and crazy. They had to redeem themselves, and it didn’t seem like this was the trajectory of Season 5.
And there were things I wanted to see before Angel ended, things I needed if the end was going to be satisfying to me. I wanted to see a final showdown with Wolfram and Hart–they had been Angel’s nemesis since “City Of…”, and unlike the typical BtVS season, on the more morally ambiguous, unpredictable “AtS”, Angel didn’t defeat this “Big Bad” at the end of Season 1.
I would never accept, however, an ending that obliterated the evil W&H represent for all time. Season 2 made it clear that the real evil Angel was fighting was the corruption of humankind, and this kind of evil doesn’t just go away. Humans will always be caught up in the struggle between good and evil, symbolically represented on the show by the Powers that Be and the Senior Partners.
Another thing I wanted to see was Connor kill Sahjhan and a resolution to the memory wipe. There are all sorts of loose ends on the show, but these two really got under my craw. Connor was supposed to have this “big future”–at least according to Sahjhan in season 3 (not to mention Tim Minear!)–a future that seemed unlikely if the memory wipe/reality altering spell at the end of Season 4 turned Connor into an ordinary boy with an ordinary life.
The other thing I wanted to see before Angel ended was a resolution of the Shanshu prophecy. The literary promise of “To Shanshu in L.A.” was that Angel would walk off into the sunset in the last scene of the series, a real boy. Then Angel rejected the Shanshu in “Epiphany” for what I thought were very good reasons–he doesn’t fight for a reward, but because he doesn’t want to see people suffer. And Angel’s on-going day-to-day struggle to end suffering, the way Angelus once inflicted it, WAS Angel’s redemption, in my view. Not some “reward” at the end of the day. And yet the prophecy remained.
So now my show has come to an end, killed well before its time, and I am stunned to discover that I got everything I wanted (well, you know, except for the bit where Angel becomes an on-going mentor in his son’s life).
How the hell did Joss do that?
I wish they could have had one more season, a season post-Wolfram and Hart, a season that put Angel and the others back among the people they’ve been trying to help, a season that explored where their lives would go from there. A season to reinforce the themes of redemption and the good fight.
And I’m not happy that this end means the death of Cordelia, Fred and Wesley, and the likely deaths of Gunn, Angel and Spike. It’s hard to watch previous seasons of the show, to invest yourselves in the lives of the characters, knowing your characters don’t have much a future.
But the way they went out, like heroes, fighting the good fight that was the singular message of the show, makes the sting a little less.
Plot? Who needs a friggin’ plot?
Ganked from redredshoes
Plots are for wimps. Character is all.
You’re a Dialogue/Character Writer!
What kind of writer are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
Oh, and I don’t write fan fic. You knew that, right? Just checking.
What is a hero/champion?
This is a potential topic for my website, and I’m thinking about it because ljash said something interesting under one of my posts (I’m not going to link to it because it’s in the spoiler post from last Friday):
The fickle finger of fluidity
I tried to do the ten most influential books meme, I really tried. But I could only find five books on my shelf I counted as “influential enough”, and even a few of those seemed to be pushing it. If I lowered my criteria, all of sudden there were dozens and dozens of books that were equally influential, but none were really that “influential”. I just liked them enough to keep them for 20-30 years.
And I couldn’t help but feel like there were some really, important, influential books from my childhood that I just couldn’t remember. I couldn’t do that meme if I was leaving out really important books that had just slipped into subconciousness over the years. This feeling was quickly substantiated when I read other’s memes and remembered some of the books I’d forgotten. My memory is a sieve; I should be forbidden from doing these memes.
So I gave up. At first, I thought there was something wrong with me that I couldn’t do this meme. But after reading the reactions of oursin, redredshoes, and matociquala I realized it ain’t just me.
I’m just not the type that can make lists of “favorite” things or “influential” things. My mind doesn’t organize the world in terms of those kind of value judgments. It’s too fluid. My favorite things change every day, my influential things, every year. And at the same time, I am a creature of habit, hanging on to the same sorts of preferences year after year. But that doesn’t mean I would consider those things “favorites”. I’m just used to them and too busy or lazy to seek out alternatives. I do encounter new things all the time, of course, in the random bumblings of daily life. I make new discoveries all the time, and find new things to delight in.
Speaking of TV shows that died young…
This weekend I rented the first DVD of “Kindred: The Embraced“. I remember watching this show way back when and not caring for it much. I’m not sure what’s different now. Maybe my tastes are different. Maybe I see how this is not really a mobster show in vampire disguise like I thought last time, but a sociological study of what a vampire sub-culture might be like. Maybe it’s because I live in San Francisco now. Maybe it’s because I get to watch all the eps in a row and get more story before making up my mind. Maybe it’s because I have a better grasp of the vampire metaphysics of this particular universe this time around.
But I like this show. It’s pretty cool. And there are only eight episodes!!! (*sob*)
I noticed in the credits, though, that this was based on and produced by a guy who wrote for the “Vampire: the Masquerade” thingee. Was that ever in novelized form? I always thought it was just an RPG, and looking it up on amazon.com didn’t clear it up. Are they novels, or just rule books? ‘Cause I’d like a little more story, but I don’t want to spend my money on RPG rule books.
— Masquerade, who did NOT adopt her name because of this RPG.
Agnosticism, belief, and the fantasy genre
I’ve been meaning to post on this topic for a while when bits and pieces of discussion plucked the strings of my thinking, but the topic in itself requires lots of thinking, so I’ve been putting it off.
Atheism, skepticism, and agnosticism
Cleanthes’ words of wisdom over at the ATPo board:
If you don’t think there’s such a thing as a fundamentalist Atheist, and you claim to be atheist, then you are a fundamentalist atheist.
If you worship Skepticism without the slightest bit of skepticism over skepticism, then Ockham will haunt you.
As to the rest of his dialogue with Fresne, alas, I am too left-brained to follow all its intricacies.
A curse on my over-sized left brain!
I’m so glad we have these folks gracing our board.
Turgid supernatural soap opera
I know I should read Proust and James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and all those people, but I don’t. I haven’t read “literature” since I nodded off in American Short Story in the 10th grade. But I know I should read that stuff because I absorb what I read and it is reflected in how I write.
But *alas*, I read for entertainment. To relax, to pass the time. Anything that I perceive remotely as, “this reading is GOOD for me, it will enhance me as a writer and/or person”, I won’t touch. It’s *work*, and all the pleasure dribbles out of it.
The preceding was my long neurotic apologetic preface to my review of the Tanya Huff Blood series, which falls somewhere in that nether region between fantasy and horror where BtVS and Angel ambiguously reside. And in fact, it was the resemblance of this series, in spirit, if not in level of writing quality, to BtVS/Angel that kept me reading through five books.
Specifically, this series has (1) richly drawn protagonist characters, (2) a hidden world of the “supernatural” existing within our world that our protagonists must enter and investigate and participate in to varying degrees, (3) a writing style that is humorous and a bit irreverent and yet at the same time takes its subject matter seriously, (4) and butofcourse, soap opera. Angst and passion and relationships.
Doing a novel synopsis…
I have no problem telling people I’m writing a novel. It makes me sound Interesting at parties. “You’re writing a novel?” But inevitably, people ask me, “What is it about”? They want a 30-second synopsis. Or is it 30 words? Anyway, that’s when I get tongue-tied. I suck at giving synopses, and usually just say lame stuff like, “I don’t know,” or “It’s complicated”, or… I change the subject.
It’s not like I’m embarassed about my novel or anything. It’s just it’s… it’s a character-driven novel with a bit of a complicated plot, and how do you summarize such a thing? Plot-driven novels usually have a concept, or a premise. Something that started the whole writing process in the first place, something the writer is shooting for that lets him/her know when it’s complete.
Author Nancy E. Shaffer 