Category: Stories, Packaged and Sold

Category covering assorted forms of narrative media; books, comics, movies, TV shows, and video games.

Madness and the pet monster.

“I really need your help. I don’t want to be like this. I want to be a good person.”

Right, well, Tate has just gained a ridiculous amount of sympathy from me.  I have been there.  I mean, I haven’t nearly chewed anyone’s face off to make a point or defend my crush, but I have been there.  (Yes, more American Horror Story, although no spoilers this time.)

Knowing that there’s something wrong, but that even then the mind you use to understand that truth is off.  And knowing isn’t enough to fix it, thinking about it isn’t enough to fix it, wanting it isn’t enough, trying isn’t enough…

It’s hell, and there is no-one I’d wish that on. Continue reading “Madness and the pet monster.”

The nature of the beast.

Yep, more American Horror Story; thoughts which mostly revolve around the second episode, although bits of the third might creep in.  Watched them back to back.

I really think I should just give up on defining Constance and Addy.  I don’t think they’ve died–the interactions with others and the very prosaic baking scene kind of killed that theory for me–but the way Constance especially shows up inside the house at the oddest moments is seriously uncanny.  And given the end of the “Home Invasion” episode and her discussion with Tate and Moira, she pretty clearly knows what they are and is dealing with it jest fahn, as George Stark would say in a rather heavy Southern accent.

(Constance was the source of one of two “oh right, that’s what this reminds me of” moments this episode, too.  Blanche.  She’s so very much Blanche from A Streetcar Named Desire.)  And I think that’s about as far as I can get without spoilers, so ahoy the cut. Continue reading “The nature of the beast.”

Safe Haven

Watching the first season of Haven, which is a sort of small-town/X-Files crossbreed. Kirsti mentioned it, and I like talking TV shows and the like with her, and it’s certainly not the kind of thing I’d avoid. Spoilers after cut, and I should really figure out some kind of cut-off point for when to quit worrying about spoilers. First season only came out last year, but I watch older things too. Continue reading “Safe Haven”

Nerves.

It is ridiculous to get stage fright when you are going to see someone else. Still.

Off to Scottish crime authors night; details later, from keyboard rather then phone.

ETA at 1 a.m. on the 25th:

I had a lovely time.  😀  Stuart MacBride, who was the author whose name caught my attention in the first place, is very funny in pretty much exactly the way you’d expect a man who writes gritty (and/or morbidly cheerful) stories about serial killers to be.  He read the short story I just linked, too; said it was the first time he’d read it for an audience.  He signed my copies of halfhead and Flesh House, and seemed pleased to hear I’d liked halfhead.  Apparently he got a lot of grief for writing something that wasn’t in the series he’s best known for; I think that’s a serious shame, as it was a good book and a damn fun story.

Ian Rankin I had heard of and read before; Denise Mina I hadn’t.  I’m rather regretting the last, now; I would have picked up her book The End of Wasp Season if I weren’t on a strict self-imposed moratorium of Only One More Book This Year Dammit.  (There was an accident incident with a bookstore in Niagara Falls.  Oh lord, was there an incident.)

Selective perception.

Rewatched the first episode of American Horror Story as part of highly delicate TV negotiations (to wit, John’s desire to see the end of the season of The Shield is stronger than my desire to watch the next episode (now next two episodes) of AHS[1], and I’m not watching it when I have the TV alone because he’s interested in it. Continue reading “Selective perception.”

I didn’t use to believe that the past could reach cold hands out towards the living…

Dammit.  Thoughts are all over the place, and I need to be up in five hours.  Some very sketchy jottings on ghosts as handled in American Horror Story. Spoilers follow. Continue reading “I didn’t use to believe that the past could reach cold hands out towards the living…”

Apocalypse as revelation.

Pardon the etymology geekery, here.  Apocalypse, broken down to its Greek roots, means revelation (from apo-, “from, away from; after”, and kalyptein, “to cover, conceal”.)  So it’s a sudden shocking understanding, a tearing back of the shrouding curtain of ignorance; in Middle English it referred to a sudden vision or insight.

So.  Going back to the post about the lack of end-of-the-world movies; half of the ones I listed came with a sudden revelation that cast the events of the movie itself in a different light, and of the two Dead movies, Day had a pretty shocking (within the genre) revelation right around the climax.

I suppose it’s easy to have everything go wrong.  But it’s harder to have everything go wrong and have people not feel cheated.  Paying attention and following a story and then having the protagonist fail and the things you cared about be undone regardless of your caring about them is annoying.  But paying attention and following a story and then having all the little details you picked up and absorbed mean something new and different while the protagonist fails; that can work.  It’s a different pay-off; rather than vicarious victory through the story, you get personal understanding of the story.  At its best, it’s that brilliant “oh my god, that’s what was happening!” at the end of The Usual Suspects.

I wonder if it’s easier to do in speculative genres because the audience is more prepped to pay attention to details of the setting, so it’s easier to seed things for them to pick up.  Or possibly in crime/mystery stories, because the genre invites people to try and figure it out; there’s the expectation of some kind of puzzle, even if it’s not necessarily a world-twisting puzzle.

I suppose the advantage of doing this in stories rather than movies is that people will generally feel like they’ve invested less in a story that suddenly twists to become something different, and are less likely to resent it if they don’t like the change.

Stuffy mornings and the end of the world.

Definitely coming down with something.  It might just be something that’s a reaction to being so far south of my usual stomping grounds, but it’s something.  Am regularly coughing up a little muck in the mornings, and I hate that.

Lete’s see, thoughts… alright.  Discussing, recently, TV series that ended properly (weren’t cancelled, felt like they came to a natural resting place) and movies that ended with the end of the world.  Movies set after the end of the world–that is, movies which are presented not only as happening in a resource-poor high-danger wasteland but happening after everything was destroyed to produce this wasteland–are a lot more common.  For ones which actually end with the end of the world, the only ones coming to mind right now is 12 Monkeys, Dawn and Day of the Dead, and Return of the Living Dead (seriously, watch it).

I’m not sure why the reluctance to produce such things.  Most of the movies that depict a setting which could result in the end of the world aren’t ones which are likely to have a sequel anyway, so it’s not as if they’re being avoided out of fear of murdering franchise potential.

(Oh, Terminator 3!  I forgot that one.  And would sort of like to go on forgetting it, actually, but it counts.)

End of the world movies are a downer, yes, but that doesn’t make them bad.  Movies (in terms of pacing and complexity) tend to resemble short stories, and there are a lot of short stories that end with the end of the world.  So why, relatively speaking, are there so many fewer movies that go that route?  Harder to make?  Less likely to be popular?  And is that last veering towards the snobbery of insisting hoi polloi can’t possibly appreciate a good apocalyptic tale?