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until-another-one-comes · 2 years

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(Spoilers for the BN show below)

Okay damn I wanted to put this in my second part of my BN show review but since I've been stalling that for forever I'm just gonna say it in this post:

I really dislike how the show portrays Nate, Francis and Dee Dee.

Anyone who watches the show can agree its not a good adaptation of the comic/novel series. The tone of the show is different and almost everyone was changed from their original source, but these three are the ones that bugged me the most.

With Nate, I feel like they completely watered down his personality from the source material. Show!Nate feels more child-like and incompetent, and he feels very much like a generic MC who's actions depend on what the episode wants him to do, and not the other way around. They got rid of his street smarts, him being active in a lot of things (sports, scouting, various clubs in the school, etc.). Of course, since we only got 8 episodes so far, it is likely we might see some of this later on, but unfortunately I feel like they really did get rid of these aspects of his personality. Like in the wilderness episode, we see Nate not being able to build a tent, even though his comic and novel self is a scout and would know the basics of camping. The show focuses way too much on him being a 'prankster' when he's so much more than that. And he cares more about cartooning than causing troubles anyway. I'm crossing my fingers that we would AT LEAST see him being good at chess. Show Nate is written in a way that makes me feel the writers WANT him to be watered down so theres more room for 'shenanigans'.

Next is Francis. Francis, in the books and comics, is an interesting subversion of the 'nerd' stereotype. Yes, he's a geek who loves facts and reading and straight As in everything, but he's also active in sports, is not physically weak and despite being more of an introvert and mature compared to Nate and Teddy, is not some meek, shy nerd that we usually see in these types of characters.

The show took one look at him and go: Ah yes, nerd and nothing else. Adding in more stuff to really ramp up the 'weak nerd' stereotype and just,, getting rid of everything that makes him interesting. Another thing that bugs me is that Francis is Nate's best friend, and is one of the first few characters we see in the comics. But the show never really specified that or gave him much spotlight at all. Hell, despite hammering down that he's a nerd we don't even see Francis using his knowledge or book smart to get the gang out of trouble. And other than the way he's written, it's mainly because the show depends on another character to be the problem solver. Which leads us to my next biggest complaint...

Show Dee Dee. Hoo boy where do I begin. Listen, I don't like using this word much because its meaning has been carelessly tossed around in the wrong context, but Show Dee Dee is a complete Mary Sue.

Right away, you can tell that the show is very biased when it comes to her, giving her way more spotlight compared to Francis and Teddy (Nate's best friends, and the OG trio in which the series is SUPPOSED to focus on). So far in these 8 episodes we got TWO episodes with her having her own B-plot, while Francis only got one (and that episode focused on Nate anyway) and Teddy none at all. And even when the episodes don't focus on her, she STILL gets more screentime than Francis and Teddy.

The main reason is this- the show, for whatever reason, makes her competent in almost everything. In almost every episode we see her pull out a handy dandy skill that can help the gang in whatever trouble they're in because she played a role before this, and 'done her research' so now she's an expert on spying, rigging traps, and dismantling alarm systems. Because that's totally how acting works. You play as a spy and immediately know everything about spying.

So yeah, they changed Dee Dee from a drama loving girl who's good at discussing emotions and helping her friends, to a hyper-competent girl who can do almost anything and is always the one to fix the trouble they're in, rendering Francis and Teddy pretty much useless. Honestly, this shouldn't be a surprise since they literally wrote her as someone who can do what the trio can't do in her character description before the show aired, but I hoped they won't go down this route. No such luck.

And when they DO try to write her with a bit more depth, it still falls flat. Again, I'm gonna talk about the wilderness episode. In this one, we see Dee Dee struggling with anxiety of having to go camping, so she copes with it by acting and playing different personas all throughout the trip. Doesn't sound so bad, but holy shit, did they drop the ball hard. Right at the climax of the episode, Nate got cornered by a bear and is hiding in a hole (after a series of incompetent shenanigans because he's just that stupid and has no common sense IG). And guess who stepped in to help? Dee Dee of course (Francis and Teddy who?). And she did it in the most eye-rolling way that gave me second-hand embarassment. She scared the bear away by... unleashing a super-sonic scream so loud it caused birds to explode. That's it. That's the conclusion. We see Dee Dee struggling with anxiety all throughout the episode (and none of the girls bothered to help, which is smth I'm gonna rant about in another time) and it gets solved because... she literally has superpowers and doesn't need to be anyone else because she's just that awesome. Go Dee Dee.

And the supersonic scream is the second time this has happened. Seriously. She did it for the first time in the pimple episode, and her screaming so loud that every students around her fell down somehow impressed the substitute drama teacher, instead of just relying on her acting skills. Okay. It's not enough that the show had to make her Artur 2.0 they had to give her superpowers because she's just that special. I'm going to scream louder than she can if they bring up this BS AGAIN.

*deep breath* So. Yes. These three are the biggest glaring spots for me when it comes to the show. Ofc, other characters have their own issues as well (which I'm gonna make a proper review of one day I swear) but yeah, I'm really bugged by how the show changed Nate, Francis and Dee Dee. Here's to hoping that they will be written better and that Francis and Teddy will get more spotlight.

#big nate #big nate show #review

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elenajohansenreads · 3 years

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Books I Read in 2021

#83 - Shadowmarch, by Tad Williams

Mount TBR: 69/100

Beat the Backlist Bingo: Cover features your favorite color prominently

Rating: 1/5 stars

Well, that was a slog.

So I have a history with this piece of intellectual property. I was introduced to Williams as an author in college (1998) because several of the friends I made my first year were big fantasy nerds--no surprise there--and I was perfectly ready to move on from my high-school-era love of less sophisticated fantasy authors. I borrowed The Dragonbone Chair from one of those friends and off I went.

So in 2001 when news about Williams writing an online serial went around, and I saw the $15 price tag...well, I was a perpetually almost-broke college student still, and sure I spent money on books, but that was a high gateway, because a) I didn't own my own computer yet, I was borrowing friends' or using the computer lab to write papers and such; and b) sure, a chunky fantasy novel might be $7 or $8 in paperback, but it was portable, easy to reread whenever, and nobody had tablets or smartphones or e-readers yet, so an online serial publication was definitely not portable. Even fifteen dollars seemed like too much for the inconvenience of a book I could only read sitting at a computer, and couldn't read all of at once.

I was genuinely angry about this shift away from the paradigm, and much like Williams vowing this serial was online only and would never be published traditionally (which I distinctly remember but don't actually have a source for) I too vowed that I would never read it.

I held out much longer than he did, if my memory of that claim is even true. But I'm wishing now that I hadn't bothered.

This is bad. Not even close to the level of quality I expect from Williams, based on the earlier Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series, as well as War of the Flowers--which was weird but I enjoyed it--and the Otherland series, which was even weirder and not always good, but yeah, I still enjoyed that too, for the most part.

Who am I supposed to care about in this book? I'm no stranger to multiple protagonists, but there are simply too many here, meaning none of them get the development time they would need to be interesting. I'm trying to wean myself from the complaint that protagonists need to be "likable," because a character can be a jerk and still be interesting, but few of these protagonists are particularly likable either!

1. Barrick is a whiny jerk who folds under pressure and abdicates responsibility to his sister, and then makes a spectacularly bad decision for no reason other than to set up some tension at the end, and his future arc. If it's because he's "mad," bad plot reason, and if it's because he's affected by the more general shadow-madness, well, I guess he could be vulnerable to it like anyone else, but that's pretty flimsy too. 2. Briony is a fairly standard "if only I weren't a woman, people would take me seriously" princess who doesn't fold as much under pressure but is dealt a really raw deal. I'll give her credit, she does legitimately try her best to rule her lands, but she's also kind of a whiny jerk like her brother, too. 3. Quinnitan is...pointless. Sure, I see how the end of her arc in this book echoes those of the Eddon twins, but there is no direct connection between her plot and anyone else's. And I mean that literally, if there's anything that ties her story to any other single part of the book, I simply do not see it, it's buried in lore or foreshadowing that was lost on me amid the sheer weight of nearly 800 pages of plodding narrative. I read all of her scenes constantly wondering why I should care, and the fact that her arc is a very basic harem plot, "I don't want to be a token wife but really what choice do I have?" sort of thing, doesn't help, because on its own it's incredibly unoriginal. 4. Chert is marginally likable, because he's arguably got the most defined personality and most personal growth in the book, as a person of a "little" race who is distinctly not human--I get a mix of gnome and dwarf, with a faint whiff of Podling from The Dark Crystal--and who deals with an unexpected foundling by taking him into his family and trying to make it work, even when that foundling is really a big blank space in the story who still manages to get into trouble. 5. Captain Vansen gets points from me for being the guardsman deep in unrequited love, which is a trope I would absolutely eat up with a spoon. The problem is, the object of that love is a protagonist I don't care for (Briony,) leading me to question what the eff he's thinking that he can even admire her from a distance, let alone be in infatuation/love. And his plot arc is mostly "something goes wrong that's not really has fault but everyone blames him anyway." Which got dull.

Chert and Vansen are most of the reason this book gets a second star*, honestly. Chert's scenes with the Rooftoppers are generally pretty excellent, even if they're mostly tied to a plot arc that I don't care for.

The other thing that's getting me about this is that it feels like a deliberately grim-dark retread of Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. You've got a castle that's the seat of current government but used to belong to the enemy--the enemy that no one is sure even exists anymore, that lives in a land far enough away to feel distant but also somehow close enough to be threatening, once people believe in them again. That castle is perched upon magically important ruins/caverns, and that enemy has forms of magic/communication that affect humans and can cause or appear symptomatic of madness. There's a race of small likable people who aren't quite dwarves or any other "standard" fantasy race, but are still somehow cute/appealing. There's a crippled prince who's not really well-liked. One of the primary female protagonists is a young woman who laments the limitations of her womanhood under the patriarchal feudal system of the world.

And to someone who's never read either of these series, that list of similarities could mostly read like fairly common fantasy tropes, and I forgive anyone who reads this review and thinks that. But I've read MSaT probably ten times all the way through in the twenty-plus years since I was introduced to it, and I feel like I've just been handed the same story again, with a thick coat of gray paint slathered on it and a few details changed--and those changes are basically always for the worse. No one in this story can be said to be a direct equivalent to Simon, who gets a very clear hero's journey, but if I'm supposed to slot Barrick in as a Simon/Josua mashup (that crippled prince problem) then it takes the entire book to get Barrick out of his comfort zone and on his journey, where Simon got booted from the castle at the end of the first act of the first book.

And that gets at the underlying problem that is at least partially fueling all other problems--this book is clearly just the first act of the larger story, and yes i know! that is what first books do! but this also doesn't have a lot of forward motion on its own, and it doesn't resolve anything aside from the mystery of a single murder at that happens near the beginning. Seriously, all other plot threads get kicked down the road with the "and now they're exiles" theme that the ending has assigned to most of the protagonists. Chert doesn't suffer that fate, but the ending of his story line--also the end of the book itself--is the foundling reasserting that he doesn't know who he is, which is not new information. We've literally not known who he is the whole time, except that we do find out who his mother is, but don't find out how he was taken or why he apparently hasn't aged as much as he should have or what the Qar intended by sending him back "home." The identity of his mother is basically the least important question surrounding him.

I truly feel like I just read a 750-page prologue, and that is not a good feeling.

*Yeah, I told myself this was a two-star book, but by the time I wrote the whole review, it's not and I can't pretend I still believe that. This is a one-star book. This is so bad I don't want to go on with the series, even though it almost has to get better, now that most of our protagonists are out on their journeys. And because it could hardly get worse, right? But this already took up so much of my time (I had to take a week-long break in the middle to binge some romances, as a relief from all this grimdark toil) and even though I've managed to collect secondhand copies of the rest of the series, and they've been sitting on my shelves for a few years waiting for me to invest my energy into them...I'm giving up. Not worth it.

#booklr #book review #tad williams #shadowmarch #book photography #my photos #my reading challenges #mount tbr 2021 #beat the backlist 2021

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starsmuserainbow · 4 years

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(I've never done this before but...) All symbols for that Munday meme? XD

Monday Malarkey

[[Thanks for sending! And wow guess that means this post will be quite a size xD!]]

☯ : Do you prefer to wing it or to plot things out first when it comes to longer threads?

I think that always depends - but in general, I assume it tends to be good to at the very least have a starting point, so I guess that means plotting (to a degree, and not completely counting when stuff comes from memes because usually that takes care of a rough starting-point)? But when we do have a general ‘what we want to happen’, I think it’s nice to just let things happen as they do?

So, I guess a mix of both!

✎ : What is your favorite genre to write for in roleplay?

I don’t know, actually! I’m absolutely incapable of putting stuff into genres, so I don’t know! I like when, somewhere in threads, people actually open up to one another, like, talk about past happenings or the likes. And I think a lot of my threads would go into the ‘casual’ or ‘fluff’ category so maybe that? But I have a lot of other threads I like or liked a lot too, so I don’t think I really have a favourite genre.

✉ : What’s your favorite genre to read in roleplay?

I don’t really read that much specifically because of it being in a genre - if at all, I read RPs because they appear on my dash by being done by one of my mutuals with someone else!

✘ : Are there any genres you refuse to write for?

Smut would be the first thing I can name here, since I simply don’t write that stuff. Outside of that, uh, I can’t think of anything immediately!

✪ : Do you use roleplay as a method to better your writing in some way? If so, what are you trying to improve on?

I don’t actively think that I’m using it to better my writing, but I think upon repeating something again and again - which basically any RPer existing longer than a week does - it’s pretty much automatic that it also helps one to get better at it, so I sure hope that RPing does better my writing!

I can’t name anything in particular that I’m currently working on improving - I can say that I’m definitely interested in dash talk and all that stuff (you know, these fast-paced things that usually go back and forth quickly and die after a few hours or so) though I can’t quite see me actually trying to participate in it.

🎭 : Is roleplaying/writing a way to cope when things get rough irl?

I like to live in the world of my RPs, of my characters, so yes in a way - but I don’t really think I’m coping with stuff. It’s just that I like to think myself into a different world, and yeah. I guess I’m just mostly ignoring RL as much as I can anyway, so there isn’t really much to cope?

⌘ : How much importance do you place real experience into the things you write/rp?

Pfft, right, I could barely write about anything at all, then!

So, to actually answer this: Very little importance. I think as long as one can write it well, or imagine it, it isn’t important if they actually have experience in the area or not.

⚡ : What typically leads to inspiration for you when it comes to writing?

Nothing in particular! Like, there was at least once recently a dream that inspired my for a wishlist thing on Moonshot (which I still wanna write some day, and I’m considering to make my next open on him be about the situation even if that doesn’t really mean it’s any more likely for me to be able to explore the situation but still), and movies or stories or pictures do inspire me for things too, but mostly I think it’s just my imagination and what ‘letting my characters run freely’ there brings up. Hard to explain!

✿ : What’s your stance on self-inserts?

It feels a bit like a weird thing to me, and I don’t know if I quite entirely know all the specifics to the term. I’m not a fan of RPing with ‘real’ people anyway - be it from actual history, or politics or maybe stars or bands or whatever else exists as people RPing them - so I don’t think having someone put a FC around it changes that much?

If it’s a character they can simply connect to a lot, and maybe have some headcanons here and there that would also fit to themselves, that’s a totally different thing I think?

⌚ : When in the day do you feel you do your best writing?

There isn’t really any specific time of day! I usually do most writing during the afternoon and evening, but that’s because it’s how my day is scheduled and not because I can write there best or anything.

♟ : Do you do any research when you roleplay?

Number one - a lot of looking up of english words. There’s a reason why I basically always have a tab of a dictionary open.

And of course, if I’m to write like a poisoning or a certain area being wounded or a specific type of sickness, and if I haven’t researched anything to it or something similar before, I will try to look up a few things. It helps to get a better image of it, I think.

♞ : Which do you prefer, shorter or longer roleplay posts?

I can’t really work with one-liners much, they often feel like no effort had been made, so, longer than that would be good. Outside of that, as long as there’s something I can work with, I think I don’t have much preference towards how long or short is it. Well, I mean, maybe a full-on novel or something would be a bit much as reply xD, but I assume that’s rather unlikely to happen anyway with how RP works.

Or if this is about the length of posts, I can only try to appeal to people again, to please cut their posts, and remove and ask from a continued thread. But I don’t think that that’s what the question is about, so I won’t say more on that here.

♥ : What kinds of characters are the most fun for you to write for?

If you look at my muses, I guess the only answer I can give is: Aliens!

I don’t know, maybe that has to do with confidence. I have other characters too, but when considering to write them I tend to feel uncertain of if I can do certain things or if they work or would be interesting for others, so, I think that’s why my roster so far only exists of tamaraneans.

In general though, I think I tend to enjoy writing characters in a certain ‘good against evil’, or call it maybe action if you want, setting more than casual, everyday life ones, if that makes sense.

💔 : What kinds of characters do you have the most trouble writing for?

First thing that comes to mind here, is ‘sexy’. Like, take Blackfire for example, if I wasn’t as much myself as I am, I bet I’d have her do or say a lot more ‘dirty’ or suggestive stuff. I just can’t write that, and that’s one of the reasons why every now and then I feel like I don’t do Blackfire justice at all.

➳ : When creating OCs, what do you typically start with first? (i.e. appearance, name, a theme, etc.)

I think usually the rough ‘who’ comes first, as in what they do or are for? Like, that was the case with both Moonshot and Starlight, and, though I don’t think anyone actually knows of her since I only made like one post about her ever or so, Kahmlur. Also with most other (= non-tamaranean) OCs I’ve ever made I think. Usually first comes the rough idea, like said, and then I’ll work on details some more, like how I imagine their personality or behaviour. And usually by then already a image starts to form in my mind for their looks, which will then be the next thing to do. An actual detailed backstory usually only comes when I actually want to, like, write them on something public like here I think. Or when I happen to just be bored enough to write one.

Though of course, sometimes it can also happen that I play around in some character creator, and the result inspires me to do an OC out of that look.

♚ : What’s something you just can’t stand and will unfollow someone over?

If it happens too much and too often, a dozen, especially when non-RP, posts almost at all the same time. I get it, they’re online at that moment and want to share stuff or something, but it’s just too much and frustrating to see other stuff through. So yes, if that happens too often, I might end up unfollowing.

🌟 : How do you usually like to start an interaction with someone new, or do you prefer to have them approach you?

When I followed someone first, and they follow me back, I usually take an effort to make myself go to their IMs soon-ish (or asks or whatever if like their rules say they don’t want IMs, or the likes) and just greet them in some way. I try to lead that talk then towards something more, maybe plotting or a random starter or whatever, or at least to asking for how they prefer to start things.

As with those following me first, well, usually I kinda subconsciously wait for them to come to me first. Which… not always happens, and I think I should change that thinking anyway since I should just approach even if they were the first to follow if I want to interact with them too, but uh, that’s just what I do there without actually thinking much about it.

(And as for those I never become mutuals with - I usually don’t reach out there. I’m not confident enough to do that, so if I’m not ending up mutuals with someone, I’ll in 90% of the cases unfollow again once I realize it won’t happen, and the other 10% I’ll keep on my dash because I really like their content, even if it makes me sad that I won’t ever interact with them. And those that I never follow back, I hope I’m having it stated where I can clear enough that I’m still open to them approaching, though of course I have a right to say no in occasions.)

💕 : When it comes to shipping do you prefer to draw things out and let them develop slowly, or do you prefer to jump right into them and skip the developmental stage?

I love the interactions, the deepening of a connection, the admitting of secrets or talking about heavy topics of the past! Not that I have ever had those to write much, but I still love the idea, and so I think I can with rather good certainty say that I prefer the slow developing.

#✫ Tamaran to Earth ✫ | Answered #✫ Out of Clurblopf ✫ | OOC #long post #(and yes I know maybe I should have done it with a cut here bc length but I didn't want to)#nvertoolate

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