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Just got back from Madison’s “Can’t Stop the Serenity,” which is Joss Whedon’s FIREFLY movie, SERENITY, on the big screen — a one-off annual event. Madison’s innovation this year was to also play DR. HORRIBLE’S SING-ALONG BLOG, which was highly awesome. I can’t wait until I, too, have a Ph.D. in Horribleness.

Because I own a buttload of dresses and never wear them, I wore this really summery sundress. With my combat boots. And I’m small. The first thing my friends said when I got in the car? “People are going to think you dressed up as River!”

Sure enough: two people took pictures with me in my “costume.” I win.

A woman who came in the same group as me, but who I just met tonight, said that I carry myself like River too. A normal interpretation of this statement would be that I present as a goddamn lunatic, but I prefer to think it means I kick ass.

* besides, you know, my curly hair.

Posted in I learned it from Joss Whedon

Having finished my term paper (…the first one, that is), I recovered by spending all weekend reading. Beginning with an ARC [advanced reader copy: not-quite-final promotional copy] of WATERSMEET by Ellen Jensen Abbott.

I was quite absorbed by this fantasy, whose protagonist is an outcast in a harsh human world at war with other creatures and its own internal ‘demons.’ I definitely felt this book was a good use of my Saturday, although my enjoyment of it wasn’t quite evenly paced: I loved the first half, then it kind of dragged for a while, then near the very end I got interested again. Whatever, I had a good time reading it.

And yet. A couple things about it kind of bugged me. Like, the whole point of the book is that the different creatures have to overcome their antipathy toward one another, people from all species have done terrible things in their mutual wars but they’ll be stronger and happier if they unite, etc. But then there’s these other creatures to which this doesn’t apply.

Okay, so some of those other creatures are notably less sentient; I’ll buy that as a relevant difference. But some of them totally aren’t. And I find it kind of odd to be reading this whole story about species who assume each other have no humanity having to learn to question that assumption, and yet the book never questions it about these other guys. It’s not like I wouldn’t accept even some pretty tenuous principle here; it’s just that I didn’t see any principle at all.

I had this problem with the latter seasons of BUFFY and ANGEL, actually. My favorite “how season 7 could have not sucked” suggestion from someone on one of the Television Without Pity boards was that the show should have embraced the corner it had backed itself into by letting some soulless demons have apparent personhood, and let the “slayer death wish” come because slayers grow ambivalent about their role as they realize some of what they’re killing could be redeemed. …And now I am mindful that Emily’s principle that “MY SO-CALLED LIFE is inherently on-topic” does not apply to BUFFY. Anyway.

My biggest problem with WATERSMEET is that I respected the main character less and less as it went on. And the main reason for this is that she made various mistakes, terrible decisions, selfish actions, etc, all of which were potentially forgivable… except not one of them had any real consequences for her. That, to me, was unforgivable.

I actually kind of fall in love with characters who make huge mistakes, as long as they also pay huge prices for them. Here, our protagonist pretty much endangers an entire community — one could even say the world — through her desire to avoid an unpleasant discussion, and when this comes to light? No one is angry; worse, the monster who wants them all dead hasn’t gained any appreciable advantage from the added time when his enemies were unawares. This violates a Fundamental Principle of Cause and Effect in Fiction, I’m pretty sure.

It’s not that our hero doesn’t suffer; actually, she suffers a huge amount in this book. But all of it is because of things beyond her control — which is compelling, up to a point, but not when I kept feeling like she should be suffering more for what she was actually doing. Unfortunately, the ending in particular did not fill me with hope for the sequel that is obviously planned. Just remember, Abbott: Personal Responsibility — bad principle for U.S. politics; great principle for fictional protagonists.

Posted in Abbott, Ellen Jensen, Flawed does not preclude Interesting, I learned it from Joss Whedon, Watersmeet

EVERNIGHT, by Claudia Gray (the pen name, evidently, of someone named Amy Vincent), was highly disappointing.

For starters, it opened with exactly the kind of prologue I find most off-putting, namely, one that seems to exist only because otherwise the first several chapters will be too boring, so the author wants to assure us that something suspenseful is going to happen later on. The problem? I don’t usually feel any suspense during action sequences unless I’m already invested in the characters, which, almost by definition, I’m not by the time of a prologue. I gathered from EVERNIGHT’s prologue that someone would wind up in some danger and feeling some guilty anguish, but nothing made me really care.

But I’d heard good things, so on I went to the actual book. Throughout the early chapters, I kept trying to like it, and almost managing. I thought the premise — a school for vampires suddenly opens itself to human students — had definite potential. Character-wise, Gray did something I really liked:

It’s funny–when people call you “shy,” they usually smile. Like it’s cute, some funny little habit you’ll grow out of when you’re older, like the gaps in your grin when your baby teeth fall out. If they knew how it felt–really being shy, not just unsure at first–they wouldn’t smile. Not if they knew how the feeling knots up your stomach or makes your palms sweat or robs you of the ability to say anything that makes sense. It’s not cute at all.

–but then undermined it by never having her character actually think or act like a shy person, just telling us a lot of times that she was. I felt like I would’ve wanted to read the book Gray told us she was writing.

On a sentence level, EVERNIGHT vacillated between incredibly pedestrian, generic prose and the sort of quintessentially young adult cadence I really like, where really long and really short clauses mix together; you can see all of this in this short paragraph from early on:

Until that moment, I hadn’t known what fear was. Shock jolted through me, cold as ice water, and I found out just how fast I could really run. I didn’t scream–there was no point, none, because I’d gone off into the woods so nobody could find me, which was the dumbest thing I’d ever done and looked like it would be the last. [...] I had to run like hell.

There was also a lot of sloppiness on little details (like, no one in high school is old enough to drink legally!), which was distracting, but I dutifully moved along in the book, waiting for the plot to develop. And then it did, and I was sorry.

(Vague but important spoilers below.)

The entire first half of the book is playing an absurd trick on the reader, which is then revealed. It’s a trick in the tradition of Agatha Christie’s THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD, which I thought was very clever when I read it as an eleven-year-old; it here has the effect of just undoing any investment I had in the character I thought I was reading about. Seriously, there was absolutely no reason to have kept the crucial information from readers except for the author to revel in how “clever” the trick was, except it… really wasn’t. EVERNIGHT is trying to be “Enemies” from Season 3 of BUFFY, and ending up more in the territory of “And it was all a dream!”

And speaking of gratuitous choices, here’s my fan letter to the author:

Dear Claudia Gray,

Please don’t spoil Hitchcock movies I haven’t seen since I was a small child and don’t remember the big plot twists in, just so you can have the characters discuss them to establish that they both like old movies. Thank you,

Love,
Elizabeth

As blog readers will know, though, I can overlook a lot when I really get into a teen romance. Which is why the final straw for me was that the protagonist and her love interest are the most codependent creeps since Meyer set the trend in this genre. Seriously, our heroine Bianca goes on, and on, and on about how much the sniveling hero Lucas just wants to protect her. If I could’ve believed in these characters and their allegedly undying love for one another, I would’ve been really frightened for them.

My last complaint, I swear: EVERNIGHT flagrantly violates the Chekov Rule (”If there’s a gun in the first act…”) with the most blatantly dropped plot point this side of BUFFY’s seventh season. (And by that, I do mean every damn week of season 7, but that’s no excuse; if it was real bad when Joss did it, it’s certainly no good when this lady follows suit.) It’s possible this is just setup for some sequel, but I’m sure as hell not reading any more to find out.

TWILIGHT, VAMPIRE ACADEMY, now this… Why can’t I find a damn vampire romance that’s any good? In book form, that is.

Posted in Evernight, Flawed, however, can indeed coincide with uninteresting, Gray, Claudia, I learned it from Joss Whedon, Mead, Richelle, Meyer, Stephenie, Twilight series, Vampire Academy series

…that is 800 million times more original, creepy, and moving than TWILIGHT, rent LET THE RIGHT ONE IN.

But oh my god, it scared the crap out of me.

Best scene, according to me: a discussion about what “going steady” means, held between two twelve-year-olds. One of them is a vampire who is rather covered with blood during this conversation, but the conversation is played straight teen angst and joy. Best part: the characters are totally believable, but there’s such a mismatch between the content of their words (going steady doesn’t mean anything) and the emotions that come along (one of them, in particular, in disbelieving ecstasy at the decision to do it). It’s an in-character incongruity, and it’s awesome.

Best scene, according to my boyfriend: Let’s just say it involved body parts. And not in a “now they’re trying to make you think about sex” way, in a “oh my god, all these people are going to die” way. He called it HEATHERS-esque.

Also: watching this movie really makes me realize how BUFFY/ANGEL’s occasional little glamorous tricklets of blood do not do justice to what would be gushing around and messing up everyone’s clothes and faces if there were real vampiric consumption taking place.

Also also: I liked the way the movie gives its own take on some of the vampire canon while making it a genuinely cool scene, instead of a belabored “Now we’re going to explain why vampires can’t do X.” Well done. (You know, I hope this post makes any sense since I am trying so hard not to ruin anything. Spoiler-free is the way to be!)

Posted in I learned it from Joss Whedon, Meyer, Stephenie, Twilight series