Long post is long, but mostly behind various cuts!

[jennaria]

Happy 2023!

I wrote my Yuletide story, 'As The Faithful One Waits,' as a pinch hit for corvidology, who I had just subscribed to for the Fannish 50 (see below), and who had links to all her source materials in her Yuletide letter. This was very handy, because I volunteered on impulse and the 'hey, those look interesting, I'm sure I'll be able to write something for them' idea rather than having actually seen any of her source materials. This led to a frantic three or four days of watching the source material, writing, re-watching the source material, editing, and uploading.

(For anyone who's interested in reading my fic, but has never seen Wuliang: it's a 37-minute film, which you can watch here, password is Wuliang - there's another translation here. It is absolutely beautiful, and it hits so many of my high-emotion, uneasy allies to Most Important Person in two days, buttons )

Originally it was going to be a straight-up not-exactly-fix-it fic, filling in the ~20 years where Po Xiao thinks Feng Ren is dead. Then I realized I didn't have time or knowledge about ancient/wuxia China, so instead I trimmed down my outline. Then I re-read my own draft, realized that wow, there's a lot of parallels between Po Xiao's dog and Feng Ren, re-watched canon to check that it would work, and ran with it.

Wife and I celebrated Christmas with Chinese food and a movie. Well, two movies. One and a half? The half, of course, being THE GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY HOLIDAY SPECIAL, which is deeply, uh…weird. Yeah, let's go with that. Although the opening song is on the good crack, at least, and it doesn't overstay its welcome - it's got a couple of moments that made me wince, but it knows to keep moving, so props for that. It pretty much lands the emotion of the ending, which is not a thing I take for granted in holiday specials, lord knows.

The actual movie was GLASS ONION. I haven't seen KNIVES OUT, despite the various rave reviews, because - okay, part of this has to do with my personal preferences for mysteries, which were heavily shaped by classic Golden Age mystery tropes, which is to say: I am here for the puzzle. I don't mind an intriguing detective, but I am not here for the detective and his poor choices regarding his personal life. Too many mysteries seem to assume I'm here for a murder-y soap opera, and start right out with here is Joe Schmoe, who's still pining for his ex-wife and wants to see his daughter more often, and also may be screwing his partner's girlfriend, and I'm already noping out.

(I mean, it's absolutely possible to lean too hard on the puzzle, to the point where you lose any human connection. It's a balance, and everyone has their preference as to where you prefer the balance to be.)

GLASS ONION...it's not that it doesn't care about the characters, but it gives us a mystery hook rather than a drama hook. What are these puzzle boxes? How do the individual characters deal with them? It's a love letter to the best of the Golden Age mysteries, a helluva lot more 'Agatha Christie updated' than, say, DEATH ON THE NILE (which looked pretty, but had no soul). Best of all, the mystery is played fair: I didn't guess the murderer, but not because the script pulled a bullshit reversal on me. A couple of friends have re-watched the movie, and the clues are all there - if you can see them.

And finally, Fannish Fifty! (A 2023 posting challenge - I include the link to check out if any of y'all want more interesting reading.) I'm going to be trying, yet again, to work my way through my Crunchyroll (etcetera) queue, because I looked at the prompts for Yuletide and realized that I knew pretty much none of the anime, which is just a crime.

So I'll try to note where you can find each anime that I'm talking about (because hey, maybe you want to watch it! …or hate-watch it, as the case may be). I'll be rating the anime partially according to the WAS scale, with some additions. Which means, for each anime:

Weeb rating - how much do you need to know of anime tropes and Japanese culture to understand this?
Crack rating - an addition which may or may not overlap with Weeb; how much should the viewer "repeat to yourself it's just a show, I should really just relax?"
Ass rating - how much gratuitous nudity or other attempts at titillation are there?
Violence rating - what it says on the tin, with a side of 'cartoonish or not' - sorry, everyone, I will never watch Attack On Titain no matter how good I"m told it is.
Shit rating - how good is it, in the sense of writing - does it have gaping plot holes, idiot ball, that sort of thing?

And of course, my actual opinion, which may or may not correlate to any of the above.

Next week on Fifty Fannish: I'm Quitting Heroing!

Comments

[kaifu]

Thanks for linking, Wuliang is really good! They packed so much into such a short film. (Still waiting for his dog to come back, though. -_-;;)

I haven't watched Glass Onion yet but Knives Out was much more about the family drama surrounding the murdered patriarch because they were trying to figure out which one of them did it than it was about the detective's own drama. I get the sense that they're both Rian Johnson's tribute to Golden Age mysteries - but since I haven't seen them both YMMV.

ETA: Should've waited until I read your fic to post - excellent fix-it, I particularly appreciate how you brought the dog back. ^_^

[jennaria]

Thank you! Yes, I am absolutely pro-dog and dog-returning. :-D

[adrianners]

Ha! I am now trying to imagine a version of these films where Blanc's relationship drama is the center of the story. He accepted the invitation to the island because he cannot deal with another bite of Philip's sourdough, maybe? I'd say Glass Onion and Knives Out share a thesis on different scales: The wealthy will ally with people they despise the instant their money is threatened. Knives Out shows it in one family while Glass Onion takes it national.

[jennaria]

Yeah, I like the version we got a lot more than any theoretical version where the center was Blanc's relationship drama. :wry: And I can appreciate the somewhat cynical world-view about the rich and what they'll do when they feel even a little threatened.

[enchanted_jae]

Sounds like a wonderful way to spend the holiday!

[jennaria]

We are great believers in Low Stress Christmas. Even if it's just the day itself.

[rebeccama]

I am not sure whether THE GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY HOLIDAY SPECIAL sounds interesting or cringy.

[jennaria]

It's definitely got some moments where the second-hand embarrassment is real, but not (proportionally) too much. (Although I'll also admit that I have not seen Endgame, and very little of Stage 3, or whatever the most recent stage of MCU was, so I might have missed references that would make it better or worse.)