About a year ago, I started a MSTing of a log from one of the myriad HP games. I got distracted and forgot about it, but something recalled it to mind tonight, so I threw in an ending.
Disclaimer: I do not play this game, nor do I really know anyone who does. The MSTing was started as revenge for some annoyance several of their players caused.
My mom… sometimes I wonder about her.
We were in the car yesterday and the conversation went something like this:
K: Yeah, Lexington is like that [like Exeter, NH] too. The downtown is really cute and I always said to myself I need to go and walk around there… but I never have.
Mom: Oh, Lexington… when I was in high school, I used to work at the cleaners there.
K: Oh?
Mom: Yeah. I would let everyone I knew clean their stuff and not charge them.
Mom: Except Florence. [Her stepmother]. I would tell her how much it was and then take her money and keep it.
Mom: Then I’d put her clothes in and sneak them out later, all clean.
K: !!!
K: And they never noticed?
Mom: Oh, they trusted me to open and close the place and things, you know.
K: Apparently they shouldn’t have!
Mom: *just giggles*
Got home from class around 10. Needed to finish typing in the notes and email them to the prof before I went to bed.
I still have to do this. *sigh*
Why do I do this to myself? It’s really stupid.
Anyhow, now I’m posting this rather than going to type the notes.
So thanks to Okina’s generous birthday gift certificate, I went on a spending spree at B&N and got a bunch of Nancy Drew reprints. Dang. I’d only read the first one before, but I really like Original!Nancy. She is sooooo much cooler than Revised!Nancy.
Here are some snippets of dialogue from The Hidden Staircase which illustrate my point:
“There!” she exclaimed, with satisfaction. “Any ghost that comes prowling about is apt to meet with a warm reception!”
(p 179-180)
“If my father were here, he’d convince you all right,” Nancy said, with rising temper.
“Your father?” [this is the sheriff speaking]
“Yes, Carson Drew.”
“You don’t mean Carson Drew, the lawyer from River Heights? You’re his daughter?”
“I am.”
“Well, that’s different. Why didn’t you say so at first?”
“What has that to do with the case?”
“Well, I reckon a daughter of Carson Drew knows what she’s about. If you say Nathan Gombet is a crook, I’ll take your word for it.”
“Well, it seems to me you’ve taken plenty of time to make up your mind,” Nancy said sarcastically.
Just imagine the Harry Potter books with a decisive, insightful heroine at the helm:
Book 1:
Nancy arrives at Hogwarts.
Nancy: Hmm. I don’t know anything about my parents or this world. I will try and find out.
Nancy: *looks at old newspapers*
Nancy: *talks to professors and students*
Quirrell: Ha ha ha!
Nancy: *shoots him*
Book 2:
Lockhart: Look at me, look at me!
Nancy: *shoots him*
Book 3:
Sirius escapes.
Nancy: You know, the wanted poster is scary, but perhaps I’d better study it.
Nancy: What, he knew my parents and so did Professor Lupin?
Nancy: *talks to Lupin*
Lupin: *answers questions*
Nancy: Wow, that completely confirms everything I learned for the past two years by reading newspapers and books. Now I know what went on in the 70s.
Peter: *squeak*
Nancy: *shoots him*
Book 4:
Nancy: *waits*
Voldemort: Ha ha ha!
Nancy: *shoots him*
Book 5:
Dumbledore: I’m sure you’re wondering why I’ve kept you in the dark so long—
Nancy: Shut up, old man. I figured it all out long ago. Do you think I’m blind, deaf and dumb? Jeez!
Nancy: *shoots him*
George Eliot rocks. (Though still not quite as much as Jane Austen.) I can’t believe I’ve never seen this before.
I think we’re up at the new location… testing.
Happy Birthday to Kenpi. Also to my cousin but he doesn’t read this.
I have things to write about, but my brother and some other cousins are here (ages 16, 15 and 15) because I have to take them to Six Flags tomorrow. I just went last week, of course, so I am not exactly thrilled to tears about driving back to Agawam again. But mom’s car has a CD player. Wahaha.
You know, I could bring my drama CDs with me. I wonder if they kiddies would realize what they’re doing on the Gravi one…
Oh, I was reminded by a post to the Wellesley98 ml that I saw the trailer for Mona Lisa Smile when we went to see Legally Blonde 2 (Yes, it’s crappy fluff, but I happen to like an occasional piece of cotton candy.)
It kind of freaked me out a little. It’s… it’s weird to see Wellesley featured in a movie like that, even one set 50 years ago. Much weirder than to see one set in Boston. And the weirdness of it made me wary of seeing it, even though it’s the kind of movie I would normally go to see. I’ll probably still go see it anyway, but I fear I’ll be squirming in my seat through a good fraction of it.
It has to continue until my Yami no Matsuei box arrives. Hopefully this weekend. ^_^
I decided to stop on the Weiss Kreutz and wait until Kenpi came back, because that’s really not a show to watch alone. It requires MSTing.
So instead I watched Nadia:
* A lot of the music reminded me of Eva. Background, not vocal. I’m not sure if I was just imagining it because it was Gainax or what. But I’ve never noticed similarity when watching other Gainax anime (ex: Ebichu)
* As has been noticed elsewhere, the plot was really seriously unevenly paced. I think this was a problem also with Saint Tail, in that there were quite a lot of episodes that didn’t seem to have any real direction, yet weren’t standalone enough to be called filler.
* Nadia is really annoying. She
[Comment: AUGH. I had written a lot after this and then somehow it got highlighted and erased. I hate this stupid touchpad.]
… So …
She has a lot of traits which I dislike. But I also thought it was interesting the way she had opinions that she held very closely, even without having any real evidence or argument to back it up. Even to the point where she was looking ridiculous to hold them. I felt a lot of sympathy for Jean and Marie when Nadia was refusing to eat meat on the island, even though they obviously didn’t have enough vegetables for all of them. She slowly became more accepting over time, though not unrealistically so. The plot wasn’t exactly of the sort that would have caused her to look very hard at all of her opinions and make her change them.
* Jean is a nice change from beat-everyone-up hero, but otherwise he was kind of a non-entity. He didn’t seem to change much at all over the course of the series — the least out of anyone, except for the supporting characters.
* I think I’d said something else, but now I forget what it was. Overall, I liked the show. The plot was interesting, if poorly paced, and there was a resolution that actually made sense. So sue me, I like epilogues and happy endings.
After that, I’ve started watching Trigun again. After watching the first two volumes multiple times, I’m finally further into the series. Far enough for Wolfwood to show up finally. I’m glad. The series didn’t have enough main characters, and while I like Vash, Milly and Meryl okay, they were starting to wear thin.
It’s been almost two weeks now, so I figured I’d be a sheep and try to distill my thoughts on HP5 into something coherent.
Spoilers abound, though of course everyone’s read it by now, right?
Read More…
Overall, the tone of OotP was darker. Almost angry. And Harry was the outlet for that. He began the book as a sullen, angry teenage boy and he ended the book in the same way. In many ways, this was something that needed to happen. If Harry hadn’t started to react to the pressures and expectations of those around him like this, he would be less realistic. And one of the major points of the series is that he is, above all, an average boy and a human being.
That said, there were problems with the book. Problems which I can’t dismiss as me being upset at Sirius’s death or disliking the way some of the plot went.
I think all of the difficulties really had the same root: Harry Potter is a shounen series, and suddenly this book was shoujo.
When I look at it, this is really the case: HP has the plot elements of a traditional shounen fighting story. We have the hero, who starts off with underpowered companions and distinctly the underdog. We have the mysterious past. We have the evil supervillain whom the hero cannot possibly hope to defeat, but we all know he eventually will. And then we have the long plodding plot where the hero meets intermediate villains and powers himself up on the way to the final battle.
But suddenly, in book 5, this all stops. Book 5’s plot hinges on misunderstanding, emotional outbursts and sheer, willful stupidity. These are the hallmarks of a shoujo relationship manga. It was as if suddenly Goku and Cell stopped fighting so Goku could try to explain why he’d been seen kissing Vegeta at the Kame House. Guh.
It just didn’t work. Talking it over with people, trying to pinpoint why the book veered so wildly offcourse at the end, it was pointed out that she probably just couldn’t stand the idea of going back to chapter 5 or 6 and fixing it where the first cracks started appearing. It worked… well enough… if you don’t look too hard at it.
The problem is that it’s hard not to look that hard at it. I have a hard time believing that her characters are that stupid. And while this was most evident in the scene in the Department of Mysteries, the mysterious stupid-virus pervaded the entire book.
1) Remus starts talking out loud in the middle of a crowd of students about the fact that he’s a werewolf.
2) Dumbledore storms out of the castle in his grand escape and promptly disappears for more than a hundred pages.
3) Snape leaves Harry alone with the Pensieve. (This one, though, I think may have been on purpose.)
4) Remus speaks to Snape about continuing the Occlumency lessons, but apparently doesn’t make sure that they’re still happening and doesn’t bother to inform Dumbledore about the problem either.
… this could go on. It was just mind boggling. It’s not that there weren’t times in the other books where the characters behaved in an idiotic manner — it’s just that when it happens so often it ceases to make sense. If these people were THAT DUMB, they would be dead long ago.
So I’m left feeling unsatisfied. Cheated. Because I think she took the easy route — it’s not hard to make your plot come out the way you want if you force your characters to behave OOCly. Perhaps she felt pressured; perhaps she had writers block. But I can’t help feeling that OotP -could- have been a much more incredible and credible book.
I’ve been on an anime watching binge lately. It’s a bit unusual and probably won’t last all that long; for all that I love anime, there are usually lengthy periods of time where I watch hardly any at all. But I’d accumulated quite a few complete series that I hadn’t watched yet, so I’ve been cleaning out the backlog. Then I’ll have an excuse to buy more.
Kenpi did a bunch of 2 second reviews, so I think I’ll have to do something else.
Ta da! K’s Anime Review Haiku:
Get Backers
This show is shounen.
Really it is. They are not
a couple. I swear.
There are fights and boobs.
No one seems to care about
the latter. Poor girls.
Saint Tail
Meimi’s parents need
a room. But they are so cute.
It’s all very very cute.
Forty-three eps were
too many. It should have been
twenty-six only.
Princess Nine
Refreshing: a child
who asks direct questions. Too bad
no one would answer.
Koyasu was in
this one too. Hiroki was
surprisingly straight.
Fruits Basket
Rat and cat and dog.
Bishounen all. Tohru was
kind of oblivious.
Another threesome?
Perhaps. Not CLAMP after all.
Must read the manga.
Weiss Kreuz
Haven’t finished yet.
This show is kind of boring.
It’s really quite sad.
The seiyuu are great.
But the script is pretty bad.
Koyasu can’t write.