september's coming soon

There is SO MUCH to say about this book, and that's just so interesting on its own, given that it's the mythical backstory to a fantasy novel. Tellingly, most of what's interesting about it isn't the content as such, but the space this book occupies IRL.

( The very short version )

In the end, I was left with only one question and the internet answered it: No, nothing is ever said about the Moriquendi leaving Middle Earth, only the Noldor.

It's a very important issue, okay. And the fact that I can now ask that question says something about how deeply into the pit I've fallen *g*

This was originally a post about the depiction of race in human!AU Zootropolis fanart (yes Nick is a victim of racism but drawing him as a white man only becomes racist-per-definition if you insist on reading the film as an allegory strictly of the contemporary US, and there are numerous indications that he is in fact meant to be read as white, now go wank about how it's racist to depict a white person as a victim of racism and stay clueless about how ethnic discrimination works in all other parts of the world)

Outside of discovering my new favourite 3D animated film, I've been following and slowly growing disillutioned with Banana Fish, because I've also been watching Sailor Moon on my work commute and it's just so much more fun. And, yanno, it can frankly state that people are gay without also having to make a point out of how they're rapists and-slash-or pedophiles.

I've been reading stuff in no language relevant to the internet, except I've recently been reading Emilia Galotti and I expected something poetic and parodically sentimental, but good god it is genuinely funny (I mean, for being a story ending with an honor killing). I'm finding that I enjoy reading drama a lot more than I thought I could, and that has set me wondering about the dialogue-fic you'd once upon a time find on FFN. I never understood why people would write dialogue-only fic, but if my stint of reading drama has proven anything, it is that I can certainly see why people might enjoy reading it.

It's "YA fantasy gothic romance", apparently. I have no bloody clue where no less than two of the people writing blurbs found the 'gothic'. The romance does very much not play the narrative role you expect from something defined within the genre, and the fantasy is... somewhat the same, honestly. It is, however, written for teens, so... one out of four?

This isn't a problem with the novel as such, but with the way people are trying to sell it. You should definitely give it a try if the description below appeals to you, because I enjoyed it a lot. The "a lot" because of admittedly dumb spoilery reasons I'll detail under the cut. Overall, it is funny and occasionally touching and I liked all of the main cast.

The best summary I can give is probably this fine illustration, greeting you as you turn the page to the first chapter:



In more detail: Neglected British child goes to ~magical school~, keeps on being somewhat of an outsider there and spends his days with genius girl who is also somewhat of an outsider, and part of every summer holiday with the cheerful family of a boy who is very much a part of the establishment.

Or: Blaming the victim is always wrong but even slightly-shorter-than-average-for-his-age Elliot Schafer knows that he'd have an easier time if he wasn't compulsed to sass popular kids who taller and stronger than him. And at least he's not beat up in diplomacy classes in The Border Camp of The Otherlands, where he elected to stay because of the hot elf babe Serene-Heart-In-The-Chaos-Of-Battle. Unfortunately, Serene has attached herself to Luke Sunborn, who is tall and strong and popular and Elliot is most certainly not his friend, don't be disgusting.

Yes the core of the plot is inescapably Potter, but that's about as far as the similarities go. The standard fantasy plot of "ending a war and saving the world" is nominally there, but takes a definite backseat to Elliots social and romantic going-ons. Elliot, Serene and Luke are about as far removed from Harry, Hermione and Ron as you get. Elliot is bookish but otherwise unremarkable, Serene is a culturally out-of-sync warrior. Luke is... an inversion of Ron Weasly, mostly: the kind and polite and introverted and unconsciously popular kid who excells at everything concerning sports and martial arts, descending from one of the most revered families in the land. Also, there's this thing about Elliot worshipping the ground on which Serene walks so loudly and so out of character for him that no-one thinks he means it. There's his on-going, one-sided contempt of everything that is Luke Sunborn. The dynamics are so different that you'd be hard-pressed to get Hogwarts flashbacks except for the few reminders that Elliot's dad is a dick.

The illustration hints at the tone. In Other Lands follows Elliot through ages thirteen to seventeen, for his education in ~magical school~. Since Elliot is a precocious bookworm full of salt and vinegar, his narrative is a running line of snark about most everything - that is, when he's not lapsing exceedingly poetic about Serene's virtues. Four years are crammed into fourhundredandsome pages, and it's hardly a surprise that the fantasy keystones of "worldbuilding" and "political plot" take a definite backseat here. More than anything, this is a novel about growing up and becoming a better person, and I - at least - certainly think that shit is more entertaining if it comes through mermaid fanboying and casual elvish sexism ("A woman's experience of blood and pain is, naturally, what makes womenkind particularly suited for the battlefield. Whereas men are the softer sex, squeamish about blood in the main. I know it's the same for human men, Luke was extremely disinclined to discuss my first experience of a woman's menses.")

There's a plotline about a theatre club setting up the Romeo and Juliet of The Otherlands. For god's sake.

Yes, this is essentially a high school AU set in Narnia. It was not terribly surprising, when googled, that this started out as an "online novel". And wouldn't you know it: On the author's webpage, the commentaries she'd made to her work as she initially published it was links to good ole' eljay.

I have to talk about that, of course. Because I definitely suspect that part of the reason I enjoyed this book so much, was that there are elements of this book that definitely read like fanfic. Less so than The Captive Prince, for what it's worth.

SPOILERS BELOW THIS POINT.

( i shipped it from like page two )

The fact that Goodreads has a reading challenge at all is proof that for a not inconsiderable amount of us, reading isn't just pleasure, but some variety of self-improvement project that's enough of a duty to be something we procrastinate about.

For some of us, of course, the question isn't the action of reading, but of reading the right things. I'll be the first person to admit that there's fic out there that have a lot more literary qualities than most of the what's given the best shelf space in physical bookstores around me, but that's no excuse for reading it instead of the truly good stuff you'll find in your library. The fact that you find the occasional gem on some old LJ account doesn't make up for the fact that fanfic is an extremely conservative genre what form and content concerns. It doesn't hurt anyone to read something that will surprise you, and in my personal case, there's that whole bit about all the classics of some three different literary traditions that I feel I should be familiar with beyond having classes on them.

I'm currently torn on whether or not I should add the No. 6 novels to my reading list on Goodreads.

The answer should be given, really: they're proper novels that have been published in some three different formats and were adopted into two other media. They're individually short and written for a young audience, but they're real books with ISBN numbers and stuff. They're as "real literature" as it gets.

But the part of me that rates my literary experience on whether or not it was at least deemed worthy of being published by a real publishing house at some point (just liek fifty shades!!!!11) keeps on insisting that it's cheating, because

1) I'm reading unofficial translations of unverifiable quality
2) I probably wouldn't have gone looking for them if I hadn't seen the anime and really liked it, meaning that
3) My motivation for reading this pretty much equals fanfic, and thanks to the notably literal feeling of the translations and how I'm already familiar with an adaptation, the reading experience is likewise a case of "well I'm not here for the pretty prose anyway"
(Bonus: 4) They're really short and adding all nine of them would feel like using comics and plays what the reading challenge concerns - it doesn't count if you can finish it off in one afternoon)

Who knew I had such staunch moral standards for my consumption of prose fiction. Certainly not me.

Oh, no, I've read Lord of the Rings before. I read it as the Jackson films came out so that I'd knew to whine about them, but the Jackson films were fifteen years ago, and I hadn't read it in its entirity since. There's a bit of story to this.

To begin with, I'd read "The Hobbit" a few years earlier, and the book was very, very dear to me. I loved Bilbo Baggins something fierce, but as we all know, there's not a whole lot of Bilbo Baggins going on in LotR, and scarcely more of the general tone of The Hobbit. It's very, very obvious that "The Hobbit" is a children's book and that "Lord of the Rings" aspires towards myth, and I think that my problems comes being in the minority that read The Hobbit first and wanted more of it. I'd tried to read it several times by the times the films came around, yet I only just managed to finish the last two parts just before setting off to the cinema to see their films adaptations, respectively.

Briefly told: "Fellowship of the Ring" always went down fine. I loved the bits in the Shire, I loved Tom Bombadil, I loved the bits in Moria and the bits in Lórien. I loved "Fellowship of the Ring".

Then came "Two Towers", where I struggled. I didn't finish it until my third attempt at getting through it, and if you asked me to describe it to you before my recent re-read, the most detailed summary I could've given would be "Merry and Pippin meet the Ents, Strider and Legolas and Gimli run around doing IDK and meet Gandalf, Sam and Frodo and Gollum spend five hundred pages walking through some mire and I think they meet Faramir or was that in book 3".

And from "Return of the King", which I got through on my first try on sheer willpower, my memory was "they destroy the ring, Sam marries Rosie Cotton and sires his own football team, Eowyn gives up being a warrior and becomes a healer and marries Faramir, Legolas and Gimli are so totally a couple".

I assumed there was something wrong with my othwerwise capable reading abilities, aaaaand... yeah, in a way? Having become fifteen years older and professionally trained in the science behind reading comprehenseion, I'm pretty certain that my problem with reading the last two parts of Lord of the Rings was because "The Hobbit" had given me some genre expectations, and when LotR moved way beyond the genre, I was mentally unwilling to follow it there. I was there for the goofy dwarves, goddamnit, and if the book insisted on being difficult, then I wasn't about to follow it!

That, however, wasn't all. Lord of the Rings was an attempt at writing a mythology, which is reflected in its style. The Lord of the Rings is told to an audience that presumably lives in the same world that the story takes place (ref. The Hobbit, where the narratee is explicitly said to live in the same world as hobbits). Thus, the "author" (Bilbo, Frodo, Sam) makes references to Tolkien's mythopeia as naturally as a work of western fiction might refer to classical mythology. The enormous difference, of course, is that any reader who hasn't read the Silmarillion won't have the foggiest idea who Feänor or Eärendil are; will have to confer with the maps to figure out where the hell Anfalas and Anorien lie. At some point, it was mentioned that Aragorn and Eomer went into Minas Tirith with Imrahil, and I just went "Imrahil? Who the hell is Imrahil?" I can only assume he had been mentioned at some point before since he's obviously got some clot in Minas Tirith and leads one of their armies in the final battle, but yeah, that kind of thing. There are a lot of very casual references to past mythology, and a lot of landscapes and places mentioned in a manner that takes it for granted that the reader knows the map of Middle Earth like their native country.

Then there are the names. Forget about Sauron and Saruman, try with Denethor and Theoden, who besides being summarised as "allied ruler of questionable allegiance w. inheritance issues" have names that are fucking anagrams. Whenever I was reading about one, I couldn't remember the name of the other.

But that said: Having grown older and more open-minded re. genre, it went down just fine this time around. More than just fine, at that: I really, really love it and can actually see myself reading it again at some point when I don't have a 100+ list of unread books lying around at various locations.




And some complaining about the (Jackson) films:

First of all: I mostly like them very much, but don't do what I did and force people you love into maratoning them with you. Note that the problem was the maratoning, not that I did it in company; she suffered without complaint, but 3 times 3 hours is too much. I'm pretty sure Game of Thrones wouldn't exist if Peter Jackson hadn't made Lord of the Rings, but I'm also pretty sure that Lord of the Rings is a story of a scope that would be told better in TV-sized bits.

There is a lot of sillyness happening here, more obviously so after watching Jackson do it to the Hobbit too, I guess. Legolas-on-Oliphant action is one thing, but I don't actually think Rohirrim vs. Oliphant army was a whole lot better. There was a lot of pointless fighting going on here. Did we really need thirty minutes of Faramir going at Osgiliath? And Gollum jumping Frodo and Sam at Mt. Doom's doorstep, FFS.

In general, there was a lot of moments being blown out of proportions that didn't need to be - see Pippin with the palantir for the prime example, compared to the book. I just feel that a lot of those things would've been more, well, believable if they hadn't been so obviously dramatic when in the book they weren't.

I find it more annoying than I thought I would to revisit Jackson's films and be reminded about how he pretty much turned Merry and Pippin into one singularity. It's expected, I guess, but good God: Merry is the smart one out of all four of them, yet his first appearance in the film is to utter "no no, the big one!" while he and Pippin are filching Gandalf's fireworks. I'm also none too fond about the, uh, modernisation of Sam and Frodo's relationship. I don't like Sam a whole lot in the films in general. I'm oddly not bothered by the doe-eyed youngster Frodo - I guess Wood just makes it work. It bears some comparison to the BBC radio drama, particularly at the point where he starts ordering Gollum around. It might be that I'm subconsciously doing some Ian Holm = Bilbo thing in my head, but goddamn was that weird to listen to.

Legolas and Gimli: Ugh. Legolas lost his merry ways to become Aragorn's BFF, Gimli was reduced to comic relief.