Turtwigodon

This has been knocking around in my head for a while and I'm forcibly reminded of it whenever another one of these soulless movies/shows come out

The best thing I can say about the vast majority of more modern live action attempts is that they are serviceable and overall meh.

Serviceable Live Actions of Animations I've Seen in the order I remember their existence

Beauty and the Beast - loved every decision Luke Evans and Josh Gad made; whoever gave final approval of the yellow Belle dress should never have that kind of power again; How dare they Nerf Phillipe's facial expressions! That horse is literally the only character in the animation with any kind of working brain cells and common sense! Justice for Phillipe and his side eye!

Aladdin - this is probably the last time I saw any light and hope in Will Smith's eyes; he did a good job given the impossible task of trying to reach Robin Williams Genie; the Jasmine costumes are gorgeous, I don't remember noticing any of the men's costumes (Aladdin, Genie, Jafar) which means they were neither spectacular or egregious

Cinderella - outside of the costuming department's work on THE dress and glass slippers and pretty much everything Cate Blanchett wore I could not tell you a single thing that happens in this that doesn't happen in every other Cinderella adaptation. I have almost no memory of this thing, I know I watched it, it's just that forgettable

Little Mermaid - this is probably the best example of 'this is just a soulless version of something much better'. Are all the beats hit? Yes. Are all the actors doing their jobs? Yes. Are all the window dressings and the like clearly visible? Yes. Is Flounder now a jumpscare? Also yes, but he's in it so sparingly I forgot about how awful the decision to make him painfully realistic was

Alice in Wonderland - to be completely honest Tim Burton's works have never really done anything for me and this really is no different. It's dark but whimsy and still more child friendly than Lewis Carroll

Into the Woods - this probably falls more under 'why musical plays are just better live on stage' than Disney is just making lesser versions of their IP's because they can but I appreciate Chris Pine's decision to turn his song into a shirt ripping contest.

Live Actions that upon research into offended me greatly and I will not watch them

Lilo and Stitch - HOW DO YOU MESS UP OHANA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lion King - my brother and I inadvertently ended up grilling our cousins, who did watch and were like 'its fine', on every one of our favorite moments and nearly NONE were in it. So whenever I am sad I just watch Nathan Lane's passing of the Timon torch and I feel better

Either Attempt at Avatar the Last Airbender

Live Actions that don't interest me and I haven't watched

Either Maleficent - Angelina Jolie does nothing for me and Maleficent is a character that falls into the same category as the Joker: Giving them a Tragic Backstory actually hurts them as a Character.

Moana

Jungle Book

Mulan - my brother described this as visually striking and without any substance

Snow White

Dumbo

Pinocchio

You know what live actions I've enjoyed: Christopher Robin, 1997 Cinderella and all three 101 Dalmatians adjacent films.

I think '97 Cinderella's appeal goes without saying but I love me some Bernadette Peters and this is by far my favorite version of the stepsisters.

Christopher Robin is such a fever dream of a movie, I could watch Ewan McGregor react to the computer generated avatars of Jim Cummings for hours on end.

Cruella, with the gift of prophecy meme, is just fun and campy. Both Emmas are having the best time, everything looks amazing, its the child friendly version of the Devil Wears Prada and I'm here for it.

I'm baffled from reading all the arguments that the Seanchan are going to survive in their current state for more than a couple centuries at best or that their society isn't currently in free fall and isn't quite frankly, always on the brink of imploding because it's built on five different powder kegs that can, will, and have made it a failed state.

TLDR - Seanchan society is five different fascist systems in a trench coat.

The Most Obvious One - The damane problem. Having your lever of control that allows you to subjugate an entire continent with essentially magical nukes also capable of being magical nukes is bad. Plenty of other people have explained this in detail, I'm not going further into it.

The Ever Victorious Army is Always Fighting - Pretty sure one of the Seanchan generals lamented being born too late because just two hundred years previously they were still actively subjugating the continent and the people. For comparison, European powers had control over huge swathes of the Americas within a century. It took Hawkwing's brood 800 fucking years. And they're still dealing with rebellions and uprisings often enough that their army is well seasoned and HUGE. They've literally been infighting their entire existence, that's not a win, that's the hundred years war to the nth degree.

The Exclusivity and Concentration of Power in the Blood - Semirhage killed a couple dozen people - on what to her was probably a slow afternoon and who were probably all related to each other - throwing an entire continent into chaos. If you build a society where less than a hundred people have any kind of real authority and power and they all die, you have built a house of cards not a successful government. Let's be real, huge swathes of the Blood have probably been taken out by communicable diseases because they don't have magical doctors, just magical nukes that they don't want touching them. Oh but they can raise people to the Blood, it's a meritocracy. They raise people to the Low Blood, you don't get to rise under your own power to where decisions are actually made.

The Honor System - This complicated bullshit has to be soooo easy to manipulate it's not even funny. It requires people to follow a thousand rules about every aspect of life solely from societal teachings and pressure. Are those living in cultural strongholds and big cities probably following everything to the letter? Most likely because there's way too many people around that could kill them for disobedience. Is the Seanchan equivalent of Jim Bob living in the middle of nowhere doing much more than swearing to serve the Empress one time and then doing whatever the hell he wants? Yes, he is because the next closest person in power lives hundreds of miles away and doesn't even know he exists. Seanchan's system is a monolith among the upper classes because that's their claim to the power to rule, any commoner who doesn't have to interact with nobility on a daily basis is not heavily influenced by it and we know that because the army is ALWAYS FIGHTING REBELLIONS.

Because there isn't enough of it.

We are talking sisters biologically who moved through the Tower in lockstep despite not actually being twins, Adeleas being two years older. Sisters who chose different Ajahs and despite the institution of the Tower doing it's best to break ties to anything other than it in its potential members, were still so close that people could not tell them apart.

Also known as, I am completely avoiding the Faile-napping story until I have some actual patience for it. I read the Miss Marple books first and will break down my thoughts by book.

Murder at the Vicarage - I really miss the narrator. The Vicar was funny and quite a bit un-priest like. The murder was a bit overly complicated but I think for a first outing it did a really good job establishing Miss Marple as a sleuth character.

The Body in the Library - I like the twists and turns in this one better, less of an obvious murder and the murderer trying to hide in plain sight and more of a journey to the truth.

The Moving Finger - Minus the death part, the premise and the actual content of the letters was pretty funny to read. Good twist at the end, I enjoyed the BBC Radio adaptation too. I can't do audiobooks, they read too slow and the narrator doesn't have enough variety to differentiate well enough between characters, but the full cast broadcasts of a condensed 2 hour version are super fun to listen to. I borrowed all mine from the library on my phone for free.

A Murder is Announced - Loved the reveal and the clues leading up to it. Felt very clue the movie throughout most of it which was enjoyable.

They do it with Mirrors - I love the sister at the beginning, the murderer and their end is really unsatisfying, one of the deaths is super gruesome if you think too long about it, but the ending felt like the only possible outcome. I like the inevitability of the endings in most Christie novels.

A Pocketful of Rye - This was one of those books where practically no one is available to root for, you don't have a character you hope isn't the murderer. I loved the mean sister-in-law though, there's something great in having one person in the house that's just ready to disparage everyone else that they can't get rid of. She just gets to Grinch at them from the mount and they can't do anything to stop her.

4:50 from Paddington - This one was like the Body in the Library, we get to go a lot of places and see quite a bit, get lots of information to sift through to make sense of it all.

The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side - Knew from the second the murder occurred who did it and how, spent the rest of the book wanting to see the why and...it was a very understandable motive, and the end was one of those where the best outcome doesn't involve the court.

A Caribbean Mystery - It's fun in that it's the only one that you really need to read before Nemesis for it to all make sense and so you can enjoy the history and ridiculousness.

At Betram's Hotel - No one dies for the vast majority of the book, which made it REALLY slow to read through because not much was happening but a repetition of facts. Fairly obvious what the outcome of the b-plot was but the way it sped up at the end was great to binge.

Nemesis - This one I think is my second favorite, I loved the callbacks, loved the red herrings, loved the variety of characters especially the two women traveling together, loved the dead character bothering Miss Marple from beyond the grave.

Sleeping Murder - This was my absolute favorite one. I DEVOURED it in an afternoon. I try to draw the books out and give myself time to think on what's going to happen but this one I was locked in from the get go with the paranormal possibilities.

All the Short Stories - I liked this set a lot more than Poirot Investigates, the Murder Club collection was cute and fun little snippets as well background info on a lot of recurring characters.

This has happened to me twice, I don’t know if it’s because I’m white-passing, raised Catholic or have had deadpan sarcastic as my default tone of voice since I was twelve but they really don’t want to talk to you about God anymore if you tell them you haven’t been to your church since you got Confirmed and you make it sound like you just had your death penalty conviction overturned.

I remember saving them for last because the other two or three series in there were at most a trilogy and they were basically half the books in there.

One trilogy was like romantasy before it was cool, I remember being annoyed at how horrible everyone was in it. The basic premise was like a human prince brutally taking back his kingdom or subjugating neighboring ones with sorcery because they made fun of him for getting it on with a hot elf lady because of anti-miscegenation laws between DnD races. Anyway one of the main characters was his whipping boy from childhood who essentially narrates all the escalating war crimes as his Igor before his hatred kills him or something, I really don’t remember because of how unlikable I found fantasy Gatsby, Nick and Daisy.

The other trilogy was like if the navy had dragons instead of ships and I just couldn’t get into it.

I think a couple were standalone or duos and I honestly could not for the life of me remember what happened in them.

I read Wheel of Time in what many might consider a ridiculous order because I didn’t have EotW, if I remember correctly I had New Spring and then The Great Hunt to Crown of Swords and I wasn’t going to go out of my way to find the first book if this series, like the previous two, sucked.

So I read New Spring first and then jumped into Great Hunt. And let me tell you, starting from Lan and Moiraine becoming a dynamic duo to the active parenting of the five kids they took isn’t the worst way to get into the series.

There were honestly enough callbacks in the subsequent books that I got the gist of what happened and in short order I devoured the books of the series I did have.

Once I had finished reading what I had, I tried to find it in my school library - no luck. Then my local county library- nah. And then I spent my birthday money on EotW and up to KoD because that was the last book published when I was reading in ‘07.