#tru talks

I just realised I forgot to Tumbl about when (a while back now) my friends took me to Mount Rainier National Park. Kind of a brain-blast when I'd only been in the States about fourteen hours. It instantly won awards in my head for:

Tallest trees I'd ever seen (our old oaks and yews tend to grow wide, not tall)

First native douglas firs and hemlocks I'd ever seen (and douglas firs seemed so leggy that I was quite startled to see fallen ones and realise they had a significant diameter, hence hand for scale while I went "oooh")

Highest I'd been above sea level

First active volcano I'd seen in person(!!)

First active volcano I'd stood next to(!!!)

First steller's jay I'd seen(!)

First bear-proof bins I'd seen(!!!)

First time being (slightly) jet-lagged (better than it sounds)

Deepest snow I'd ever seen(!!) (cleared roads and spring melts on a mountain, so it was about six or seven feet deep)

I felt similar about Project Hail Mary when I read it last year, but a) Rocky was a big help to mock Weir's usual Protagonist Archetype mercilessly, I have a lot more time for that archetype when it's a big confused space spider, and the culture clash was something I enjoyed a bunch b) I thought, "Well, this is basically unfilmable. At least not without a huge budget." And then, fifty pages from the end, I get jumpscared by the movie trailer. (Also, I got it as a Christmas present and didn't know what it was about. I figured it'd be a more grounded take where the only alien life was the astrophage. I was as startled and delighted as Grace when I saw Rocky's ship.)

Anyway, Drew Goddard and a great cast hammered it into shape, Daniel Pemberton is one of my favourite composers ever (some composers just make "epic music" albums that can kind of go with anything; Pemberton truly thinks about the textures and story beats and has even more of a narrative focus than a melodic one). I also think Gosling was good casting; he's very good at a sort of wide-eyed, complex helplessness that stops snark getting too smug. He can lean into the smug and has played that and suave types before, but for me I think it was the lethal three-four punch of seeing Blade Runner 2049, Barbie, The Fall Guy and now this within a few years of each other. After not getting on at all with La La Land, Blade Runner is where I went, "Oh dear, this guy is rather good." It's not just his strong comic timing so much as the fact that even when he gets funnier roles, he plays them quiet as well as broad, and finds the pathos. Neither Ken nor Colt Seavers would have been nearly as sympathetic or complex without the amount of painful yearning they've got alongside the silly stuff - which accentuates the silly stuff and makes it funnier.

I'm tentatively hopeful about 2026. (Note the tentative, other shoe, please don't drop too hard.) I think my New Year's resolution is to try and pack away the stuff in my room for the move. We'll see if I can manage anything else, but that's a start, right?

BG3 has all these smart, wonderful stereotype bucks. You have a seven foot musclebound barbarian who's a (quite smart) woman. You have the arcs about autonomy and sexual abuse given to blokes. You have butch and femme pan rep and characters who are complex.

So surely, a character who is that rare thing, a knight with a Grail quest who's black, an interesting deconstruction of heroic ideas vs. the reality of who you are and trying to bridge the gap, and a man who pretends just as hard as Astarion in the opposite direction, should be Larian catnip. He's exactly the kind of character who fits into the narrative about autonomy and bucking stereotypes and the future of Baldur's Gate perfectly. There's no excuse not to use him. Hell, his actor's certainly been enthusiastic and publicly willing to come back for additions.