Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 131

Femslash Exchange recs, Part II

One Curse Tablet, Slightly Used. Historical RPF (real person fiction, i.e., historical fiction) - Sappho. I loved everything about this story, from the title to the premise to the intensity to the command of diction, which slides easily from high to low, from prose to poetry to invocation.

I present Sappho of the honey mouth to you, Persephone, goddess of dead things.
May she feel no love in her heart or pleasure in her bed unless she return to me.
May you bind her head to my head, her thighs to my thighs, her lips to my lips.
And may this curse tablet fucking work already, goddess.
May she come back.

Right Answers. Heathers (movie and musical). Sharp, bittersweet.

Chandler knows these questions all have right answers. There are right and wrong answers about everything in high school, in society. A right answer to the public is to wear plaid coats with shoulder pads, party late every time you get a chance, and hook up with guys. A wrong answer is to have yourself a girlfriend with a biting sense of humor and a morbid mind.

Chandler has been getting more and more questions wrong these days.

望女成龙 (from daughters, to dragons.) Original Fiction. Dragon shifter/human. Sensual, evocative, with a very dragon-y dragon.

wang nu cheng long --

(lit.) hoping one’s daughter becomes a dragon, a subversion of the Chinese idiom that wishes for this fate for a son— or

(fig.) to hope that one’s child succeeds in life, that they’ll chase down their dreams and grasp them, eyes wide and arms outstretched, hopeful and playful and so, so shining.

this is the story of a beast who shed her human skin.

faites-lui mes aveux. Original Works. Soprano/Mezzo in Pants. Absorbing backstage romance with tons of fun opera details and a great ensemble cast. It parallels the onstage and backstage stories, which I always enjoy in this genre.

Leah Beecham is cast as Marguerite, and that's only the first surprise that the university Operatic Society production of Faust brings with it. And Ellie Everett should probably have kept out of OpSoc altogether if she wanted to avoid Music Department drama, but it's a bit late now, because she's got the part of Siebel...

I am still reading Poisons (it's 21K words) but I am so far very much enjoying this well-written murder mystery set in an intricate fantasy world.

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Quick Hindi question

Can anyone give me a Hindi word/phrase that would mean something like beast's bane (as in wolfsbane), and a crack at an English spelling? The actual use is to put an animal to sleep (literally to sedate it, not to kill it), so something along those lines would also work. I'm looking for something that could plausibly be the name of an herb. Could also be tiger's bane.

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Femslash Ex Stories: Original Fiction and Black Panther

I know it’s Saturday but the collection only opened late last night, and I have two stories that are too good to wait a week to read and likely to be of general interest to many here. You can check out the entire collection by fandom here, or just original works here.

I got two wonderful stories for the same prompt, Military Officer Desperate To Redeem Her Honor/Loyal Subordinate Trying To Keep Her Alive. Both have fascinating worldbuilding, nicely structured plots, great characters, and ALL the military camaraderie and loyalty one could possibly want. I hope you’ll read them both, as they’re both well worth reading and quite different. (Also it’s always fun to read two different takes on the same prompt.)

Loved I not Honor more .

Ten Percent for Luck.

I haven’t had time to read much beyond my own stories, but I did read an absolutely delightful Shuri/Original Female Character story, “Citation Flirtation,” with banter that could have come straight out of Black Panther. T’Challa plays a charming supporting role.

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So Lucky, by Nicola Griffith

This blisteringly intense novel is one of the best books I’ve read all year. It’s a character portrait in gorgeous prose, has elements of magical realism and suspense thriller, and was impossible for me to put down once I’d started. (It’s short enough to read in one sitting.) So I’ll put off the plot description for a moment.

A lot of people have said recently that they only want fluffy escapism right now. I completely understand that, and if so, definitely avoid this as it's the opposite of that. For me there’s always a fine line between stories so closely aligned with the most upsetting aspects of the world or my life that I can’t tolerate them, and stories that deal with them in a way that’s cathartic, makes me feel less alone and more hopeful, and is exactly what I want and need at that moment. For me, So Lucky was the latter.

Mara Tagarelli works for an HIV/AIDS nonprofit, is a serious martial artist, and is in a 14-year relationship with a woman named Rose. Then, one day, Rose leaves her, and she trips over nothing and falls. Shortly afterward, she’s diagnosed with MS, and in very short order loses her job, her ability to do karate, most of her social life, and all of her life as she knew it.

Because many individuals, the medical establishment, and society in general are absolutely terrible to people with chronic illnesses and disabilities, she starts a new nonprofit for people with MS. But she’s stalked by something that may be a hallucination (she’s taking medication that could cause that, and also has lesions on her brain) or her illness given physical form and malevolence or the criminals who have been robbing and murdering people with MS.

Whether or not they’re after her, those criminals are undoubtedly real… and when Mara investigates their crimes, she comes up with a disturbing theory that might be key to catching them. But who listens to an angry sick woman?

This novel captures justified female rage like little I’ve read before. I’ve been that angry sick woman who everyone ignores and disbelieves. Maybe you can’t live on anger alone, but women are told so automatically that they’re not allowed to be angry at all that it was very satisfying to read about Mara’s fury, along with her fear and helplessness and determination and refusal to be the meek docile patient that everyone wants her to be.

She hates being sick, she hates being in a body that feels terrible all the time, she hates losing the ability to do things she loved, she hates the way people act like utter assholes if you’re sick or disabled, and she refuses to be ashamed about any of that. And if she’s really on to something about those murders, she’s not going to let herself be brushed off until she gets to the bottom of it.

The book isn’t all anger – she also gets an adorable kitten and some new human connections – but it tosses the usual disability/illness narratives out the window, starting with the ones about how you’re supposed to be grateful for all it has to teach you and for giving you a new appreciation for the things that really matter (nature of those things unclear, given that your illness/other people's reactions to your illness/your reactions to your illness have destroyed not only everything you love in life but also the relationships that are supposed to be your support in this difficult time), how you're supposed to love your new body (that used to supply you with good feelings but now supplies you only with pain, nausea, and weakness), with a detour to the obligatory support group that are supposed to be helpful and supportive but are instead incredibly depressing.

Mara is extremely self-sufficient, and creates some of her own problems by trying to stay that way as it gets increasingly impossible. But when you've already lost everything, is it worthwhile to make your life easier by giving up the last thing you have left, which is the core component of your very self?

I found the book hugely cathartic. Sometimes when things suck, what you really want is for other people to just admit that they suck. Attitudes to illness remind me sometimes of the story of the Fisher King, who had a wound that could not be healed until someone asked him what was wrong.

We're so stuck in illness narratives, each neatly and arbitrarily tailored to a particular disease, that leave no room for individual people's feelings or identities or even the individual process of their illness.

Breast cancer? PINK! Yay female power! Buy pink stuff! Stop crying about it, it's just a breast. Be strong!

All cancer: Fight fight fight! If you're afraid you might die, you're giving in, and then if you do die it's your fault. Fight fight fight!

AIDS: We have drugs now! Just take care of yourself like if you had diabetes, no one dies of that any more.

MS/CFE: Shut up, crazy woman, you're not really sick. See a psychiatrist.

Anything hard to diagnose with 100% compliance to the strict diagnostic criteria in the manual: Shut up, crazy woman, you're not really sick. See a psychiatrist.

I could go on, but So Lucky isn't really about that, though it does touch on the differences between illness communities. It's mostly about looking into the abyss and giving it the finger.

If that's the mood you're in right now, So Lucky is for you. It’s beautifully written, suspenseful, uncompromising, unpredictable, and has a very satisfying ending. It also has a great cover and is a very nice physical object (the image doesn’t do it justice), so if that’s a consideration I would get the hard copy rather than the ebook.

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A Taste of India: The Definitive Guide to Regional Cooking, by Madhur Jaffrey

This is one of my all-time favorite books on food; I'm reviewing it because I recently re-read it. It's a survey of India's regional cooking, with recipes and photos. I have not tried the recipes as Indian cooking is really difficult if you don't have a background in it and know what dishes are supposed to taste like because you once ate them at someone's grandma's house; your results, by which I mean my results, are inevitably disappointing. So I am discussing this as nonfiction, not as a cookbook.

Jaffrey's prose is wonderful and her eye is sharp. She writes about food as one should, as inextricable from culture, people, and place. She also brings in relevant history. When she writes about places I've been to and dishes I've eaten, it's so vivid and matches so well with my own experiences that it made me feel like I'd traveled back in time. (It was written in 1985, so she's writing about the same time that I was in India.) If you want to take a virtual tour of a world that doesn't quite exist any more, if for no other reason than the passage of time, you could not do better.

All cuisines are regional, but India's are really regional, and in America at least, about 95% of them never got exported. Even having traveled in India, gotten invited to people's homes, and eaten a lot, I only heard of maybe half or a third of the dishes she mentions, and only ever tried one in twenty. But at least I got to vicariously experience them via her luscious descriptions.

It's a gorgeous book in every way. If you enjoy food or travel writing at all, I can't recommend it highly enough. It will transport you.

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Dear Yuletide Writer

Dear Yuletide Writer,

Thank you so much for writing for me! I am already excited to read whatever you come up with. If you want even more details, click on the tags for the fandoms. If you get stuck on a story for what you actually matched on, the easiest fandom to pick up in a hurry is Rocannon's World, which is a novella-length novel.

If you're not my writer and are just reading this, please do not comment to say that you hate my canons or find them problematic or triggering.

Prompts for all canons contain spoilers. Prompts for The Leftovers are particularly spoilery.

( General Likes. )
( General DNWs. )
( The Dispossessed - Le Guin )
( Finisterre: The Nighthorses - C. J. Cherryh  )
( The Leftovers (TV) )
( The Punisher (TV 2017) )
( Rocannon's World - Ursula K. Le Guin )
( True Detective )

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The Leftovers (TV)

And now for another controversial rec! This one is so hard to rec that I almost didn't as it's completely likely that not a single person reading this post will want to try it. Like Punisher, I found it an intensely emotional experience that had a lot to say about trauma, hope, and connection, and I really loved a lot of the characters. And I'm requesting it for Yuletide.

One day, 2% of the world's population vanishes, apparently at random. They don't come back, and while many people have theories, no one actually knows why it happened. While a number of the characters really want to know what happened, the show isn't about solving a mystery but about exploring a situation; if you go into it expecting a mystery that will be solved, you will be disappointed. The show picks up several years later, and explores the effects of the trauma and the upending of people's beliefs.

The Departure is different from death, as no one has any idea if the vanished people are dead or not, and so leaves everyone in a state of uncertainty. It defies logical explanation, but it doesn't fit neatly into any religious explanation either. (A priest is particularly furious at the idea that it's the Rapture, as some objectively terrible people were taken and objectively innocent or good people were left.) A cult which springs up in its wake isn't religious at all, but rather nihilistic.

But though the Departure isn't death, it works as a way of making a show about grief and loss that completely defamiliarizes death. None of us really know what happens after we die, but we all have fixed ideas about it. But since the Departure is an unfamiliar fictional scenario that mimics death (people vanish forever, and we have no idea why or if they live on in any sense or if some day we'll join them), it makes us look at death and loss and God as if we were encountering them for the first time, with uncertainty and an open mind.

I've never seen anything quite like The Leftovers. I'd categorize it as magic realism if I had to categorize it at all, as the magical/miraculous elements are often reflections of a character's emotional state or personality or beliefs. The second two seasons capture a sense of wonder and uncertainty and liminal states of being in a way I've never before seen on TV, or anywhere else for that matter. The world has become a place of miracles and wonders, sometimes beautiful, sometimes horrifying, sometimes darkly or absurdly funny, always strange. The acting, writing, cinematography, and design of the second two seasons is wonderful.

As fits a show which is largely about belief, faith, and how we cope with the unknowable, it is often unclear whether a moment is a miracle, magic, a hallucination, a delusion, a reasonable but incorrect belief, a dream, something with a perfectly logical explanation that we're just not privy to yet, or some combination of those. But everything always makes sense on multiple levels - any of those possibilities work in terms of the characters, the world, or the situation. The ultimate truth is uncertain, but the characters and their world, though strange, feel very real.

There are some episodes that are some of the best TV I've ever seen - gorgeous to look at, hilarious, surreal, and deeply moving. The whole show is beautiful and intense, and both invites and defies definitive interpretation. If you're willing to get on the ride, it will take you somewhere unpredictable and wonderful.

It's almost impossible to provide specific examples of things I liked without being hugely spoilery, so I'll put a few under a cut with some details redacted. ( Read more... )

The season two finale and the series finale were absolutely wonderful, and left me very satisfied.

But. Almost everything I've been praising above is in the second two seasons. Season one is mostly a relentlessly grim exploration of how the Departure screwed people up. Several of my favorite characters aren't in it at all, and some characters who later became favorites are incredibly unlikable or annoying in season one. It's so different from the second two seasons that it almost feels like a different show. But you can't really skip season one because it sets up so much that pays off later.

Unlike Punisher, which I think has an unfairly bad reputation and would be enjoyed by many people who can cope with the level of violence, I can only rec The Leftovers with some serious caveats, which unfortunately function as a kind of one-two punch.

1. I really disliked most of season one and only managed to plow through it because I'd been tipped off that seasons two and three were completely different. More on that in a moment.

2. The entire show prominently features every trigger and squick known to man, including (mostly in season one) repeated, graphic, violent dog death. You can miss almost all the dead dogs if you avoid them in S1 (fast-forward every time you see a dog, anyone with a gun, or anyone opening the trunk of a car), but there's also some animal death in the rest of the show. Goat sacrifices, bird sacrifices, killing for meat, wild animals hit by cars - if any animal harm is a hard no, avoid the show.

Other things that might be hard nos: multiple, intense suicide attempts. Vanished, dead, and/or endangered children. One rape (of a male character.) Christianity. Religion, faith, and disbelief in general. Some violence/bloodiness. Comas. Terminal illness. Vomiting. Mental illness. There's probably more that I've just forgotten.

If you'd like to try the show, I suggest starting the pilot. If you like it, great! Keep watching.

If you hate the pilot, here are your options:

A. Do what I did, and plow through season one, fast-forwarding any bits that you particularly dislike. (I fast-forwarded most of the scenes with the teenagers, Holy Wayne and his crew, dogs, and the Guilty Remnants.)

B. Stop the pilot at whatever point you start hating it. Go straight to episode 9, "The Garveys at their Best." It's a flashback episode that will catch you up on a lot of what you need to know about the characters before the Departure. It's also the only time anyone ever smiles in season one, so enjoy it. Then read summaries of episodes 1 and 2, watch episode 3 (the one focusing on Christopher Eccleston as a Job-like priest having a very tough day), read summaries of the next set of episodes, watch episode 6 (the one focusing on Nora, a woman who lost her entire family in the Departure - this is closest in tone and themes to seasons 2 and 3), read more summaries, optionally watch episode 8 (it's gloomy but some important stuff happens in it), watch episode 10 (the season finale). You can now move on to seasons 1 and 2.

If anyone's actually seen this and wants to talk about it, I'll make a spoiler post to discuss some stuff. Please don't put major spoilers (like, more spoilery than in my cut) in comments here.

The Leftovers is on Hulu.

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The Punisher (TV 2017)

I'm going to do a couple rec posts for fandoms I'm requesting or thinking of requesting for Yuletide, in case any of you might get into them too and request them or write me a treat.

At least half and possibly all the fandoms I'm going to request for Yuletide this year are very controversial and/or widely disliked in the fannish community. I've hesitated to write about them because I find it frustrating and annoying when I write about something I love, and I get an avalanche of responses saying, "I hate this," and "You do know that this is very problematic, right?" and "I watched five minutes of it and hated it," and "I'm not going to watch it because I already know I hate it."

So please don't comment to say any of those things. If you hate it, already know you'd hate it without seeing it, feel that it's problematic, etc, please just skip this post.

On to The Punisher! It's a flawed show but it's one of my favorites of the last couple years. I've watched it at least three or four times and have enjoyed it just as much every time. It's a very emotional show and really gets to me on that level. It also hits a lot of my fannish buttons, repeatedly and with a hammer.

Frank Castle is a Marine who got entangled with a conspiracy of criminals while overseas; when he returned, they murdered his wife and children, and put him in a coma for a year. He woke up, became a vigilante who the papers called "The Punisher," killed a bunch of people, and then tried to retire under an assumed name. This all happened in Daredevil season 2, in which he also met a journalist named Karen Page who helped him out despite qualms over his methods.

In The Punisher, Frank is trying to live a normal life under an assumed name. This all goes south when a mild-mannered NSA analyst, David Lieberman, who is currently assumed dead due to having been entangled in the same conspiracy but is actually in hiding, contacts Frank with an offer to team up. Frank initially doesn't take this well, to say the least, but they do end up teaming up. This brings Frank, who has been living in a kind of emotional stasis walled off from human contact, back into contact with terrifying things like friends, family, and his own feelings.

So, it's basically about a person who went through a ton of trauma, dealt with it by cutting himself off from relationships and emotions (other than violence and anger), and is dragged kicking and screaming back to humanity. This and variations of it are possibly my single favorite story of all time.

On a purely quality level, The Punisher has some extraordinarily good performances, mostly very good writing, fascinating characters and complex character relationships, and a lot to say and show about some topics very close to my heart, such as PTSD, anger, how the same traumas affect different people differently, how men and women are allowed to express emotion, what happens to soldiers after the war, and how people respond to living in a fundamentally unjust society.

On a fannish level, the relationships are fantastic. There's a low-key funny and adorable odd-couple buddy relationship that is just the best, with tons of domesticity. Frank and David live in a bunker together for most of the show; the evolution of their relationship from Frank zip-tying David naked to a chair, to them squabbling over tea and sandwiches, to David literally holding a near-death Frank in his arms and sobbing, just gets better on repeat viewing. (This is also a GREAT fandom for hurt-comfort. Frank gets shot, stabbed, beaten half to death, etc, about every other episode.)

There's also a really fascinating dynamic where Frank gets involved with David's wife Sarah and their children, who think David is dead, and steps in David's role as husband and father to some extent. I have a huge infidelity squick, so this storyline in particular made me very tense for a while; if you do too, I can give details in comments. For now I'll just say that it works out in a way that I really liked, with none of the dishonesty or meanness that would normally ensue, and that David/Frank/Sarah are very shippable. The parent-child type relationships are great too - the kids aren't generic cute kids, they're real-feeling people. (Real-feeling people having real-feeling relationships and conversations is generally a big draw of this show.)

Frank also has a compelling relationship with his Marine buddy Billy Russo that's completely different from any of his other relationships, and another one with Karen Page, ditto. Frank is my little black dress in this fandom and you could plausibly write him with all of them and also some characters I haven't even mentioned yet, like his other Marine buddy, Curtis, a disabled former medic who runs a veteran's group, and Dinah Madani, the FBI agent who's sometimes working at cross purposes to Frank and sometimes on the trail of the same people. (I wouldn't rec the show specifically for female characters, but it does have a number of very interesting, well-rounded ones who do not exist solely in relationship to men.)

I am not a fan of the comics, so can't comment on them other than to say that I was always vaguely perplexed as to why having a lot of guns - and not even high-tech guns, just regular guns - was a superpower. The answer is that isn't. While the Punisher TV show is set in the same world as the other current Marvel TV shows, we really only know this because of character crossover; it doesn't acknowledge superpowers at all.

Flaws and caveats: like every other Netflix Marvel show, it takes a couple episodes to get going. It has a lot of very graphic, disturbing violence. (Not gratuitous, IMO, and no sexualized violence to women. Exactly. There are some sexualized moments of violence involving men, plus one sort of sexualized aftermath of violence involving a woman. I have to say I really liked those and consider them features rather than bugs; I can describe in comments if you like as they're really spoilery.) It has a lot of guns, and the episode that tries to take on the issue of gun control does an incredibly bad job of it; that's unfortunately also probably the best episode for Frank/Karen interaction, so it's not skippable. On re-watch I fast-forwarded all the gun discussion. There's some draggy subplots that I also ended up mostly skipping on rewatch.

It has one of the best season endings I've ever seen. In fact it was such a perfect ending that I may end up not watching season two unless I hear positive things/don't hear certain negative things. So it works very well as a self-contained miniseries.

Again, please no comments about how you know you'd hate this and so won't watch it. I can take them as read.

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Yuletide tag set revealed!

The Yuletide tag set of eligible fandoms has been revealed!

I already have some fandoms I'm definitely requesting (The Punisher TV, The Leftovers TV) but I'm now debating switching or adding some others based on some very tempting fandoms I hadn't thought of initially. And also some fandoms I wouldn't request myself, but which I'd love to read fic for. Just in the books category, I was excited to see...

The Voynich Manuscript, Dorothy Gilman's Mrs. Pollifax, Robert C. O'Brien's Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Scott Westerfeld's Succession with my favorite odd couple (a socially anxious human woman and an Ai-worshipping cyborg woman), Susan Coolidge's What Katy Did, Richard Adams' Watership Down, Janet Kagan's Uhura's Song, Ginn Hale's The Rifter, Stephen King's The Stand, Firestarter, and Dark Tower, Ursula K. Le Guin's Rocannon's World, Earthsea, and The Dispossessed, C. J. Cherryh's Finisterre, Nick O'Donohoe's Crossroads, and Weis & Hickman's Death Gate Cycle.

Also R. A. Montgomery's Prisoner of the Ant People, which I don't think I've read since I was ten but which I vaguely recall as an absolutely bonkers Choose Your Own Adventure book.

What are you excited about?

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Gone South, by Robert McCammon

McCammon was a bestselling horror novelist a while back; his heyday was the 80s and early 90s. After publishing Gone South in 1992, he took a ten-year break from publishing. Nowadays he writes historical mysteries set in American Colonial times, the Matthew Corbett series (Speaks the Nightbird: A Novel (Matthew Corbett Book 1)[image error]), which looks interesting. McCammon was not a real favorite of mine but I did find his books to be enjoyable and engrossing. I especially liked Swan Song[image error], a Stand-esque post-apocalyptic novel on a bigger, more batshit, and more cartoony scale, and Boy's Life[image error], one of those pastoral nostalgia-with-horror, boy-centric stories which King and Bradbury wrote the Ur-examples of. (If comparisons to more famous writers doing similar things don’t make McCammon want to rip out his hair, I will eat my hat; I almost feel bad doing it too but am comforted with the idea that he will almost certainly never read this review. Mr. McCammon, if you do read it, please pretend you didn’t and don’t comment.)

This book turned up while I was doing some fall cleaning and bookshelf rearranging. I picked it up and read a few pages while trying to decide if I was going to keep it or not, and ended up reading the whole thing. I can’t quite say it’s good, but it’s definitely entertaining and gonzo. (Warning: the dog dies.)

I appreciate any book that features conjoined twin bounty hunters Flint and Clint (the latter consisting of a mouth which can eat but not speak and a single arm which can hold a small gun) forced to team up with a down-on-his-luck Elvis impersonator named Pelvis Eisley, who hunting a Vietnam vet dying of Agent Orange-induced leukemia who’s on the lam due to having killed the asshole who was foreclosing on his truck and who is reluctantly giving a ride to a young woman in search of the probably legendary Bright Girl who she thinks can remove her disfiguring birthmark. There is also a gang that smuggles heroin in live alligators. Which sort of makes sense when they point out that no one would want to search a live alligator. I said sort of. They get involved in the plot because the author wanted to have drug-smuggling alligators in the book they mistake Flint/Clint for someone they’re mad at, then later… I forget why they come back later. I assume because the author wanted them to. You can’t put drug-smuggling alligators in the bayou in Act I and not have them eat someone by Act III.

I mock – just a little – but I honestly did enjoy this book. I wouldn’t call it a great American novel but it would probably make a highly entertaining movie with a whole lot of juicy roles for actors, maybe directed by the Coen Brothers, and kind of reads as if it was written with that in mind. Sadly, so far that movie exists only in the temporarily fevered imagination of anyone reading this book.

I leave you with these immortal lines, which are typical of the book’s enthusiastic approach:

Pelvis, his wig gone and his contorted face brown with mud, was trying to grip the timbers and pull himself up, but not even his maddened strength could do it with Flint on the other end of the cuff. Blood floated on the surface around Flint’s arm, and he saw at least four alligators coming across the corral after them, their tails sweeping back and forth with eager delight.

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