Media Roundup Dec
Jan. 1st, 2024 20:22![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
superborbVienna Teng concert (I don't think this tour has a name?): I LOVED this, so I guess I do like small concert venues! She was so good, and I did get very emotional at a few points (City Hall, when everyone sang the end). I also do associate her strongly with fandom vids, so it was appropriate to go with a fannish friend. I didn't realize that Level Up was 7/8 time and you could totally see everyone counting during it after she said that haha. Her latest unreleased song was really cool -- two songs designed to be mashed up -- and doing it live with the looper was interesting, but I think was definitely not musically adept enough to follow it on a first listen. Unfortunately the venue speakers were terrible and kept peaking, because otherwise it was a perfect experience!! Highly recommend catching her live if you have the chance.
Creation of the Gods I (2023): The most recent blockbuster remake of the Ming dynasty novel, first of the three planned parts. It was pretty clearly adapted for the big screen, so all the characters are pretty easy to keep straight even if you don't know the source. The CGI was... not great. IDK, it's really if you want to watch a big blockbuster type movie, it fills the brief? Being an adaptation means that the story basically makes sense, the actors are blockbuster level, there's a few gratuitous shirtless scenes etc. I thought the actress for Daji did an especially good job of being fox-like; though my one unfun complaint is it's such a choice to cast the one non Han passing actor in the role (of the evil seductress who causes the empire to fall). PS I enjoyed the homing pigeon horses.
An Ancient Love Song 古相思曲 (2023): Popular historical writer transmigrates back in time and encounters the protagonist "demon queen" of his RPF and tries to change her fate as his visits are moving back in time and she moves forward. This is a really short 7 hours total runtime, and the pace moves at a reasonable clip. Definitely a light show, with very snappy dialog, big speeches, and generally ficcy vibes. The protag starts out pretty dopey, but quickly gets with the program. I like that the female lead gets to fight on screen and is taken seriously as a threat! And so there's a bit of role reversal (since the male lead is a scholar type), without crossing into being too tropey. The secondary couple also is VERY cute and have a lot of teasing flirting scenes. It does end up with a decent number of contrived scenes and clearly explaining basic concepts, but we got this adorable egg soldier out of it, so I can't complain too much. Misc thoughts:
- It's a good thing the horses drawing the cart can just drive the cart. Autopilot horses.
- I love that he didn't memorize the Shijing but made her memorize it
- There's a plot point about the brother being too pretty and they did cast a really pretty actor
I thought it pulled off the final ending well, so I would recommend this if you're looking for something light!
Led Astray by Love 相思误 (2022): Short webseries GL less than an hour total, the main transmigrates into the manhua she was reading and mostly fanservice happens over a coup plot. Sad that they had to recut this with the fanservice in the first episodes reduced (that seems to be why there are slow-mo shots there?). Nice light watch anyway.
That hbomberguy video essay on plagiarism: This was so long that I felt like I had to include it in a media roundup... I realized I kind of assume all video essays are ripped off books and other sources as a default, but not to this extent. Do still prefer internet fights documented in the form of a f_w writeup; yeah you get one fun effect when the voices are exactly overlaid, but is that worth... 4 hours... I really like the final point about how (spoiler?) the plagiarist positioned himself as The Only Queer Creator, which is of course a giant red flag.
The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, edited by Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang: A collection of Chinese scifi/fantasy short stories by women and non binary writers and translators. This collection took away my ability to read for the last three months because some of these translations are... really bad (etvolare's is the most translationese I've ever seen in a pro published work), but some were interesting so I kept pausing and not wanting to start again. Misc thoughts:
- I do see why people really rate Rebecca Kuang's writing (even if they may not like the content).
- Very diverse set of stories, some of which feel very 'standard' from the Western SFF view, some of which are distinctly "Chinese". I wish there had at least been dates of original publication to contextualize.
- The article at the end giving background to women writers in web novels was pretty superficial but also definitely needed in a book like this. It's surprising that it was completely about longer serialized works though? So I felt like there wasn't much context for the short stories in this collection.
Anyway, some good and some bad, I don't think there's anything in here I would say is a must read, i.e. I went back and skimmed the ones I remember being good and none had made a deep impression.
Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It, by Kaitlyn Tiffany (DNF): This book is primarily about One Direction fandom, with some broader Western pop-idol fandom mixed in, but I just couldn't get into it. I think it might be hitting expanded longform article (bad) instead of expanded longform article (good), and to be fair to it, I'm a bit tired of longform articles at the moment. Might try to pick it back up when the library holds roll back around.
Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi: Unreliable narrator writes a semi-autobiographical novel about her performing arts high school, second unreliable narrator discusses the bits that novel got wrong and continues the story into their adulthood, then a third narrator has experiences which reveal the real (?) story. I listened to the first half of this as an audiobook, could not get over the overly fake English accents and very uncomfortable sex scene that showed up around then, but it's otherwise a decent audiobook (...though I'm remembering this from half a year later). It is a pretty disturbing book (the candid is-it-rape-or-bad-sex sex scenes, the power dynamics in relationships), and the first half did get a bit tedious at times, but the payoff in the second half is there in the intersection between the two unreliable narrators. Some interest in the first half is in how outrageously theater-y the classes are. Despite my skepticism in the first half, I did find this a satisfyingly complex story.
Creation of the Gods I (2023): The most recent blockbuster remake of the Ming dynasty novel, first of the three planned parts. It was pretty clearly adapted for the big screen, so all the characters are pretty easy to keep straight even if you don't know the source. The CGI was... not great. IDK, it's really if you want to watch a big blockbuster type movie, it fills the brief? Being an adaptation means that the story basically makes sense, the actors are blockbuster level, there's a few gratuitous shirtless scenes etc. I thought the actress for Daji did an especially good job of being fox-like; though my one unfun complaint is it's such a choice to cast the one non Han passing actor in the role (of the evil seductress who causes the empire to fall). PS I enjoyed the homing pigeon horses.
An Ancient Love Song 古相思曲 (2023): Popular historical writer transmigrates back in time and encounters the protagonist "demon queen" of his RPF and tries to change her fate as his visits are moving back in time and she moves forward. This is a really short 7 hours total runtime, and the pace moves at a reasonable clip. Definitely a light show, with very snappy dialog, big speeches, and generally ficcy vibes. The protag starts out pretty dopey, but quickly gets with the program. I like that the female lead gets to fight on screen and is taken seriously as a threat! And so there's a bit of role reversal (since the male lead is a scholar type), without crossing into being too tropey. The secondary couple also is VERY cute and have a lot of teasing flirting scenes. It does end up with a decent number of contrived scenes and clearly explaining basic concepts, but we got this adorable egg soldier out of it, so I can't complain too much. Misc thoughts:
- It's a good thing the horses drawing the cart can just drive the cart. Autopilot horses.
- I love that he didn't memorize the Shijing but made her memorize it
- There's a plot point about the brother being too pretty and they did cast a really pretty actor
I thought it pulled off the final ending well, so I would recommend this if you're looking for something light!
Led Astray by Love 相思误 (2022): Short webseries GL less than an hour total, the main transmigrates into the manhua she was reading and mostly fanservice happens over a coup plot. Sad that they had to recut this with the fanservice in the first episodes reduced (that seems to be why there are slow-mo shots there?). Nice light watch anyway.
That hbomberguy video essay on plagiarism: This was so long that I felt like I had to include it in a media roundup... I realized I kind of assume all video essays are ripped off books and other sources as a default, but not to this extent. Do still prefer internet fights documented in the form of a f_w writeup; yeah you get one fun effect when the voices are exactly overlaid, but is that worth... 4 hours... I really like the final point about how (spoiler?) the plagiarist positioned himself as The Only Queer Creator, which is of course a giant red flag.
The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, edited by Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang: A collection of Chinese scifi/fantasy short stories by women and non binary writers and translators. This collection took away my ability to read for the last three months because some of these translations are... really bad (etvolare's is the most translationese I've ever seen in a pro published work), but some were interesting so I kept pausing and not wanting to start again. Misc thoughts:
- I do see why people really rate Rebecca Kuang's writing (even if they may not like the content).
- Very diverse set of stories, some of which feel very 'standard' from the Western SFF view, some of which are distinctly "Chinese". I wish there had at least been dates of original publication to contextualize.
- The article at the end giving background to women writers in web novels was pretty superficial but also definitely needed in a book like this. It's surprising that it was completely about longer serialized works though? So I felt like there wasn't much context for the short stories in this collection.
Anyway, some good and some bad, I don't think there's anything in here I would say is a must read, i.e. I went back and skimmed the ones I remember being good and none had made a deep impression.
Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It, by Kaitlyn Tiffany (DNF): This book is primarily about One Direction fandom, with some broader Western pop-idol fandom mixed in, but I just couldn't get into it. I think it might be hitting expanded longform article (bad) instead of expanded longform article (good), and to be fair to it, I'm a bit tired of longform articles at the moment. Might try to pick it back up when the library holds roll back around.
Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi: Unreliable narrator writes a semi-autobiographical novel about her performing arts high school, second unreliable narrator discusses the bits that novel got wrong and continues the story into their adulthood, then a third narrator has experiences which reveal the real (?) story. I listened to the first half of this as an audiobook, could not get over the overly fake English accents and very uncomfortable sex scene that showed up around then, but it's otherwise a decent audiobook (...though I'm remembering this from half a year later). It is a pretty disturbing book (the candid is-it-rape-or-bad-sex sex scenes, the power dynamics in relationships), and the first half did get a bit tedious at times, but the payoff in the second half is there in the intersection between the two unreliable narrators. Some interest in the first half is in how outrageously theater-y the classes are. Despite my skepticism in the first half, I did find this a satisfyingly complex story.
