#accosteddarling

60. Biggest movie pet peeve.

Sympathetic adultery plots. Fortunately less common in the genres I tend to watch.

15. Your favorite movies from [1989].

Kiki's Delivery Service, Field of Dreams, Do the Right Thing, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

52. Favorite pre-code.

I haven't seen many pre-Code movies. I genuinely kind of like Broken Blossoms (for what it is), though.

The Big One is a long series of historical fantasy/alternate history/political thriller novels (I recently learned the term “encyclopedic novel” but I think it might be pretentious to apply it to these) set in the 1950s through 1970s. It starts out vaguely situated within the superhero genre and set in New England but it gradually expands to other fantasy concepts (witches; fairies) and other parts of the world. The key theme is attempting to act morally, especially as regards politics, when there’s an ineradicable, almost ontological power imbalance between you and other people. Most of the characters fail at doing so more often than not, although it would be inaccurate, and strip them of responsibility for their actions, to say that they’re “doomed” to fail. Everyone’s gay, everyone’s a communist including most of the Catholics, and there are a lot of ups and downs but the ending is for the most part going to be a happy one that vindicates the characters who’ve tried to do the right thing and brings around the characters who haven’t.

The other Big One is @absynthe--minded‘s and my WWII time travel historical romance audio drama script (I think both of us would be okay with it if it ended up a closet drama, but we do actually want to produce it if at all possible). It’s the story of a young American woman who goes through a time slip to 1940s London and a somewhat older woman she meets and falls in love with there. Culture clash is the big theme with this one--the past is a different country, not a better or a worse one necessarily but a different one, and there’s significant friction over even stuff like how these characters interpret their own homo/bisexuality that causes significant friction and angst. I have friends who like this story concept a lot less than the other one because of the friction and angst and because it’s going to have kind of a sad ending, but Absynthe and I believe strongly in it.

I’m also working on a series of “seven sacraments” novellas (defined as from about the length of “The Dead” up to about twice the length of “The Dead”). These are in different genres and set in different time periods, but they’re all historical, at least so far. I’ve done all of them except confirmation and anointing of the sick. The big things with these are the mythologization of American history, which these stories sometimes critique and sometimes participate in, and characters with religiously mixed families, typically Catholic+Jewish but not always.

While ATLA did make a hell of a lot more of an effort to present Asian cultures dynamically and to do well by its female characters than most American TV shows do even a decade later, it still bears a lot of the hallmarks of having been written mostly by white guys if you look for them.

MY TIME TO SHINE

In no particular order:

Poppy-but-actually-depressing fare like (some) Connie Francis or the more “““““upbeat”““““ Indelicates songs

Lush but easy-to-bang-out-on-piano thirties and forties standards with cute lyrics

Eighties bangers, the synthier the better

Stuff that’s nostalgic because of movie soundtracks or because of having been in high school in the late 2000s (this is an enormous range, from Paramore to Mark Knopfler to “All Star”)

Indie pop songs with lyrics that can be eisegetically read as critiques of the secularization thesis

There’s a pretty specific rationale for each of these but I’m interested in seeing if anybody else can follow my logic!

I should mention that, while I 100% believe Dostoyevsky that Myshkin is the embodiment of a pure and innocent soul, I don’t see him as the uwu softboy that some people seem to.

Kate Bush, “The Dreaming”

Joe Hisaishi, “The Bygone Days”

Rosemary Clooney, “Count Your Blessings”

Marina and the Diamonds, “Blue”

a-ha, “The Sun Always Shines on TV”

The Indelicates, “Savages”

The Cherubic Hymn from Tchaikovsky’s Divine Liturgy

@coroebus​ also asked for something on Japanese lit!

I’m supposed to be spilling tea rather than just dispensing factoids or analysis so here’s something that a lot of people simply refuse to understand even though it’s demonstrably true:

Although Japanese Buddhism has produced a lot of heart-meltingly winsome and bracingly trenchant literature, from Zeami’s plays to The Sea of Fertility, a truly massive proportion of its literary legacy is the exact same sort of gee-whiz well-meaning didactic schlock that people love to make fun of in Christian and Islamic contexts. Probably my favorite primary source on medieval Japanese popular piety is a Heian-period collection of setsuwa (folk tales and pious anecdotes) called Nihon ryōiki, which includes such entries as “On an Evil Man Who Was Negligent in Filial Piety to His Mother and Gained an Immediate Penalty of Violent Death” and “On the Birth of a Girl with Sarira in Her Hand Owing to Her Parents’ Vow to Build a Pagoda.” My favorite individual sentences from the book include “For karmic retribution is a real fact!” and “How can anyone not believe that?”