Busy Weekend

[chomiji]

The sis-in-law (the one who's married to a minister) had a rotten week: her employer is transferring her, with almost no notice, to a different facility, and as she runs a senior center (basically, daycare for senior citizens), it means leaving behind not only staff, but also clients. So she decided at virtually the last minute to come down (with our nephew in tow) and see the Young Lady's play (our daughter is crewing her school's not-quite-spring musical, Beauty and the Beast) Friday night, because she thought it would cheer her up. This meant I had to clean up the guest room, which was wall-to-wall wrapping paper bits and rolls still, from the last installment of Xmas. But when I got home, there was an Amazon box waiting: I have Samurai Deeper Kyo 27, xxxHolic 11 [thanks, megan!!], and Takumi-Kun 2!

Saturday I was not feeling well - malaise about sums it up - and nothing much happened except meals out (lunch at Oriental East, which has great dim sum and forgettable service; dinner at Austin Grill, which is quite good for a chain) and the week's grocery shopping. The Young Lady was crewing again and had to eat leftovers for dinner. Oh well - it builds character!

Sis-in-law left early Sunday morning, and then sanada came to visit! We had brunch at Jackie's (retro American cuisine in a groovy-funky 1960s industrial setting) and talked manga nonstop. A good dose of fangirling makes one feel ever so much better. Then we went and saw the matinee of the play ourselves. Energy level good, one or two really good performances, scenery very uneven (the Beast's castle was very, very good, the village scenery was pretty lame), costumes pretty nice (althought the dinner plates were awful), and the special effects were much fun ... during the Beast's transformation at the end, petals fell from the catwalks onto our heads. They were meant to be rose petals, but all I could think of was (a) Sakura of Doom and (b) Nanao dumping baskets of petals over Shunsui. And the casting was the usual marvellous Blair High School racial mix: Oriental Belle, African American Gaston, Hispanic (I think) Beast, and so on. Dinner was what the Mr. calls "the meat place" - Brazilian BBQ.

Comments

[chomiji]

megan, I think we're both just tripping over ourselves here with trying not to cave on issues that are important to us and yet trying to make sure the other person understands that it's not meant to be "in your face."

I think I've just got to do my book recs to you without worrying about the slash factor at all. In any case, I shouldn't be worrying about it because you're too sensible and generous-spirited to think that I'd be trying to put one over on you by recommending something very slashy, and so I'll stop even mentioning it. I think that's what tripped this latest round off - my comments on the Lymond Chronicles.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Well, don't feel afraid to rec something just BECAUSE it has slash undertones...I DO love some books like xXxHolic, Petshop(must get sequel...) Descendants of Darkness and Cantarella, after all. Really, my problem with yaoi has nothing to do with the slash, it's just that most of it seems even more focused on "when will the otp get together, and will they have sex?" than most shojo, without much focus on anything else(that isn't by certain mangaka) and I can't tolerate it there, either(I usually do best with my romances supporting the plot, aside from when my brain just needs a break.)

And I did bring up slash in Wallflower and Ouran, though I wasn't trying to say anything about slash itself, just thinking that maybe the different ways the two series pokes at tropes might be why one worked for you and the other didn't.

I do plan to read Lymond eventually. Part of why I haven't is similar to why I haven't before is similar to why I didn't really have Sayers high on the list until Smilla recced them: in the past, most of the people who recced them in those terms had recced other things like them that I found to be amazingly dull and pretentious. Come to think of it, a lot of them are the same ones who rec really dull and plotless shojo romances to me(but oh so swoonily romantic and compelling to them) as well as led to my watching some dramas that made me want to rip my hair out.

[chomiji]

I think that I, personally, am tending to think in terms of romance - especially new lovers getting together for the first time - because at the moment, it's fun and exotic and nostalgic to me, all at once. As of April 20, I will have been married 23 years ... and we were going together for 5 years before that. That's a long time. I think my yen for romantic fic is my version of a midlife crisis ... instead of having an affair or buying a little red sports car (family joke ... my late mother always used to say that her version of a midlife crisis would be to buy one), I'm reading and writing romantic fic, especially slash fic. So when you ask "Why do people always have to ship so much???" - I can't answer for anyone else, but I think this my answer.

But please, that says nothing about you, or anything that I think you ought to be doing.

As for Lymond: yes, it can be disheartening when people rave about something, and then you try it, and your reaction is "Meh." You might therefore want to check out this page, from the publisher, which has an excerpt from the first volume and links to excerpts from each of the other 5 volumes. I highly recommend reading these - they don't give overly much in the way of real spoilers (nothing that you couldn't glean from cover blurbs) and yet they have a real feel of the books. Warnings: in vol. 1, she was still groping a bit for her voice. And the excerpt from vol. 2 includes a couple of chapter-head quotations to set the theme, and doesn't put them in a different typeface, which is a bit confusing.

And the excerpt from Pawn in Frankincense is really wonderful and will give you a good idea for the feel of the writing in the series as a whole (that's also the volume that most readers seem to remember the most fondly when they have finished the series).

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

It's strange, because I'd usually identify myself as a romantic, and I love love love my romances, even if I don't ship(a decent example here is Tsubasa, where the series is very, very much driven by the relationship between Syaoran and Sakura, and it's the driving force of much of the series, and, while I like them and I like their story, I really feel no compulsion to actually ship them) and many of my favorite shoujo-Basara, Mars and W Juliet come to mind-are very much driven by (actually, in those cases, built around) the romance. I think I just need some reassurance that they can also handle the non-romantic trials and tribulations of life, thus, need a lot more to the plot. For example, in both Mars and W Juliet, the leads get together early on and are together through most of the series. The problems they face go beyond romance-in W Juliet, they deal a lot with figuring out what they want to do with their lives, realizing their dreams won't be easy to achieve, and trying to have their families realize that what they want and what the parents want isn't the same thing. In Mars, both leads have suffered some severe psychological trauma, both relating to sex-she suffered sexual assault that resulted in her becoming so shy and withdrawn that she's almost catatonic, and his mother and past experiences have lulled him into the belief that sex is meaningless, and that he's good for nothing but it. In their case, it was absolutely crucial to them and their story to focus on their having sex, because it was necessary for their healing. (Resulting in it being the only manga ever for the plot to take a "when will they have sex? let's drag it out a bit" turn and not have me scream to get it over with and move on with the plot already.)

But mostly, I think there just always needs to be SOME sort of core relationship/s to drive the story, romantic or otherwise, and even though I'm drawn to the romantic relationships, I like the non-romantic ones, too, and I like them the way they are(BotI is a good example...the series is built around the relationship between Manji and Rin, and even though there's room for romance there later on, I don't really feel any need to go there because I like them as they are now.) I think the only series I follow/have followed that doesn't have some relationship that at least some part of the story revolves around is Mushishi.

[chomiji]

I've been thinking about this on and off ... I am going to post at some point on "what cho needs from a story," because it's been coming to me that the whole "older characters" thing is a complete red herring - I re-read kids' books all the time, and love them. What I'm beginning to zero in on is somewhat what you;'re saying - the relationship thing.

And the diffrence between Wallflower and Ouran, I think, is that in Wallflower, the guys are objectifying her to a large extent (she's The Problem) and she is also objectifying them (the whole "creatures of light" nonsense). In Ouran, Haruhi quickly becomes part of the gang, even though they also crush on her (increasingly seriously, in the current book) and do a little minor objectification of her sometimes (she's their token Common Person). But they plot with her, and involve her in their crazy schemes, and as characters, they care about her and about each other, in varying ways and degrees. The most recent Ouran crystallized it - SPOILER - one of the twins is starting to feel seriously about her, and this is "something he can't share with his brother" for the first time. And another person in the group - Hunny - notices the situation. So there's more mutuality among the group members.

Having said that, you will probably like the other Wells books - they both feature group interactions and friendships, and both romantic and non-romantic relationships. (And Lymond has a bunch of that as well ... difficult to say without spoilers, but there are definitely the following: mother-son; brother-brother; friendships among older women; platonic older woman-younger man; proxy elder brother-younger sister; male-male comrades-in-arms; and probably a lot more that I'm not remembering. There is also at least one searing instance of how destructive hero-worship can be to both parties.)