{ something tells me, girl, this is bringing me down. }

[delga]

GUYS. GUYS. MY HEART STILL BEATS*.

Like, what up, eljay? How have you been? I have been doing things that are not updating this journal. Which is dumb considering I come here two or three times a day to flist-check and stuff**. In the main I have not updated because nothing is happening here. Christmas sort of happened! I had to go to some works-related booze-up because of Peer Pressure and then that dissolved into...other things! I wrote a fic for yuletide and pre-reveal revealed myself due to some futzing with the fic notes! (Fixed that. You know, three days after posting. Oops.) I wrote some Yuletide treats! I finally submitted my post for What 2011 Sounds Like! I hung out with some people I used to go to school with and had both an excellent time and also an awkward time, which is my particular skill set! AND THAT'S JUST THE PAST FORTNIGHT.

I know, I know. Thrilling.

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I watched some stuff. And by some I mean a lot, relatively speaking. Here are some eljay cuts about those things.

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GOSH. I was really, really looking forward to the second series of this, and I absolutely was not disappointed. It was half the length of the first series, and the pacing was much better for it. In the way of first-to-second series transitions, the story was less intimate in some ways, taking on a 'bigger' picture. By which I mean, the first series was as much about being a Danish citizen or having a Danish family as it was the crime, whereas the second series had a slightly broader (more international) setting. You were still dealing with the intimacies of people involved, but there was discussion about the wars in the Middle East and so on.

I love what they did with Sarah Lund. (I have to say that I am always surprised by people's obsession with her jumpers because until I read about it in the hiatus, it hadn't even crossed my mind.) Her fragility this series didn't detract from her acumen. My gosh, a fully-rounded lady on the teevees! Who would have thought it. The other women suffered a bit this series. There were no Pernille Birk-Larsens. But between Lund and Nicolas Bro's fantastic turn as Thomas Buch, and the better pacing of this series, I didn't feel the loss too keenly. The cliffhangers are quite often contrived, but they don't feel too forced, and the finale was had spectacle and reason, which makes a change from other shows. (COUGHSpooksCOUGH)

Next Danish fix: Borgen, though I personally need to get my hands on Den Som Dræber.

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I personally do not think that this series was as good - or rather, as enjoyable - as the previous one, even though it was better in some respects. The show is odd in that sometimes it makes very good character decisions, and sometimes it makes horrible ones. I was willing to see where the Gwen story was going to go and then...it didn't. She was ejected because of something that was completely out of the locus of her control and divested her of all autonomy, and then the next episode we were supposed to forgive Arthur on a whim for the brutal killing of those druids. ...what?

I thought we would see more about the knights, and maybe about Percy, for example, and then...we didn't. Gwaine, who was fleshed out quite a bit last series, didn't have a lot to do until the finale, and became two-dimensional, whilst Elyan and Gwen never seemed to have any scenes together, and I think Percy's lines totalled to one an episode in the end. I wasn't dying for stuff from the knights by any means, but it seemed weird to gather them and then have them act like extras when there were stories that could have been told there.

I was also surprised by some of the directorial/cinematic decisions that were made. This may just have been me but none of the battle scenes have had as much of an effect on me as when Arthur fought on the front line during the siege in The Tears of Uther Pendragon.

But there were other things that I enjoyed hugely. I loved Queen Annis; there was some stellar guest casting this year. I was surprised as fuck by the deaths early on in the series. I gave a cry of joy at seeing Hunith. I enjoyed watching Merlin become more and more comfortable with his talents, and seeing him develop comfortably into his badassery, especially in those moments when he stood a villain down and acknowledged himself as a Dragon Lord, or as Emrys. It is so weird that the series best and worst episodes were written by the same person; A Servant of Two Masters (where Merlin is enchanted to kill Arthur) was hilarious and dramatic; the show-down with Morgana was brilliant.

So. Show. I don't know. I am still excited to see more, and I'm still fond of it. But sometimes there are glaring issues that I cannot gloss over. And there's a huge portion of the fandom which thinks the issues are Arthur/Gwen and/or a lack of magical reveal. But I think the real issue is that sometimes it's a pile of misogyny masquerading as storytelling, and that's upsetting, when there's clearly a lot there that they could be working with.

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TERRIBLE FILM. WHY DID I WATCH THIS FILM. WHY. WHY. WHY.

No, I'm being daft. I think I would have enjoyed it much, much more if Valerie's existence wasn't polarised between rich pretty boy and poor pretty boy. The rest of the story was pretty good as folk adaptations go. The werewolf trope is an easy go-to, as is the double-bluff (is grandma the wolf or not?), but the reveal made sense. But UGH, the constant neonatal indicators! Valerie was so puerile at times. It was annoying.

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I've seen this film a few times, but I will never, ever get over the scenes where Lars confesses he feels pain when people try to touch him, and where his sister-in-law loses her temper with him. We push her wheelchair, we drive her to work, we drive her to home. We wash her. We dress her. We get her up, we put her to bed, we carry her. And she is not petite, Lars, Bianca is a big, big girl. Emily Mortimer is fucking amazing in that scene. I spend a good three-quarter of this film crying every single time I watch it.

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I have also watched half of Misfits series 3, which is uneven in some parts, and excellent in others; Cowboys and Aliens which was everything I could have wanted it to be and yet also a bit of a disappointment (could do with drunk cinema settings tbh); Melancholia, which was about as weird and stylistically on point as you can expect from von Trier, and yet still managed to reel me in by the very end; Tamara Drewe which is fucking full of slut shaming and is miserable because of it, and also makes little-to-no effort in trying to voice its protagonist; We Need to Talk About Kevin, which is beautifully shot and directed, but goddamn miserable; and (a while back) Centurion, which is violent, and sometimes dumb as fuck, but so much fun for a sword-and-sandal, whilst not being run-of-the-mill either.

In other words: WATCH ALL MOST OF THE THINGS.

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I initially started this post to do a quick catch-up and then talk about Ladies, but, you know what, I never do that because it's an exhausting topic, and others are more coherent, and my rage-to-serenity spirals fluctuate massively. Suffice it to say, if you are thinking about Ladies and Lady Things a lot - in any way - you are probably doing as much as you can in a social environment that often feels like a constant no-win situation. The Internet, too, is this massively reactionary place, and sometimes the fall-out from that is that we become reactionary to every post that wants our attention for a cause of some sort. And somewhere along the line you're going to reach your limit for caring about a thing. Often that limit is short of the person who is making the most noise about that topic, and as a result you're going to feel some sort of shame. You can either get angry at the person who is making you feel that shame, or you can accept that you feel that shame because you are not the person you want other people to think you are. And you can deal with that or not deal with that. This is the same guiding principle for encountering all the -isms - feminism, sexism, gayism (see what I did there?) - and I think that either we get used to feeling uncomfortable about these things, or we sublimate, and get used to the fact that we aren't the people we might want to be perceived as being. I genuinely believe that to get on with life sometimes requires accepting these things about ourselves.

Our every concern, internal and external, is - of course, and necessarily so if only to deal with waking, working, and sleeping - relative. Don't let it beat you up. But don't be ignorant. Having our cake and eating it has always been a trial.

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*) ...is this a song? Did I just make that up?

**) devour kink memes. True story.