swatkat

+ This story about Cliff Chiang drawing Black Canary for a fan is the cutest thing ever*. Even if I generally want comics!Ollie to be far, far away from my Dinah.

* Except today's Gunnerkrigg Court, which is beyond adorable. <33333

Speaking of which, I have seen the second episode of Arrow, and it is still quite fun. Ollie is still very pretty, Stephen Amell is still hilariously bad most of the time (his angsty voiceovers, my god), his inappropriate chemistry with his sister is still inappropriate but also gripping (the only scenes where his acting works, as far as I'm concerned), and his Hamlet backstory is still ridiculous and cheesy (he cannot be the man his mother wants him to be! because he has to be the man his ~father wanted him to be). I do like the actor who plays Dinah Laurel a lot, and her relationship with her father has excellent potential, I think. I hope they tell us eventually that her mother was the first Black Canary - followed, obviously, by her taking up the mantle.

+ I continue to make my way through OUAT S1. It's great fun, and ( spoilers till 1.13 )

+ ( HIMYM 8.10 )

+ ribbonspooncat's thoughts on Bering and Wells (there is a moving gif in the link - I used Readability for better reading)

ladyshinkicker's thoughts on Bering and Wells:

So, HG Wells is actually a woman – she provided the ideas, her brother provided the moustache, but who wrote the books? Each of them bears Helena’s name, but we know that she was bronzed before all of HG Wells’ books were published. Her exact status – author or muse – is ultimately an ambiguous one, and I know that this is a plothole which some fans like to criticise the writers for, but I honestly think it works. Helena isn’t quite a muse, she isn’t quite an author, and she isn’t quite a character: her presence queers the narrative (many of her lovers were men; many of her characters were men; many of her authors were men) but it also deconstructs the act of narration itself. She’s introduced before she’s ever introduced – Myka read HG Wells’s novels, Pete’s seen the movies, and Myka spots ‘Edward Prendick’ in the guestbook. Pete’s Genre Savvy, he knows how this works, but he’s still thinking in terms of actors and performance and guesses; Helena can’t quite stay away and the pseudonym she uses is her real name. When she introduces herself as Helena, that’s an implicit admission of her identity as HG Wells as well as a denial. They’re looking for Charles, the one with the moustache, but they’re calling him HG – she is HG, but she isn’t, too. Identity is never that simple for her.

ladyshinkicker's thoughts on HG Wells:

I think that she works brilliantly within the narrative as a sort of ghostly presence, lurking in all of the dark places and threatening to huff and puff and bring down the narrative around them – and, through that haunting, serves to shore up the narrative itself. Helena is the act of deconstruction and she is constantly deconstructed – what else is left, when the story tears itself apart, begins again, and rips that one up too?

I watched Deathly Hallows 2 with my family (it's a time-honoured family tradition - we have seen all the HP and LoTR movies together), ( spoilers )

Unlike some other fandoms, where adaptations into different mediums exist as universes in their own right alongwith the source text, the HP movies aren't really canon - they have been, at best, like animated scrapbooks, putting faces to names and images to certain ideas, with fans picking and choosing the bits they like and rejecting the rest. For me, canon was over when the last book came out, and I have no emotional investment in the movies as such. But I'm sad to see it go, because they were fun in their own way, and I will miss squeeing about them (unless someone does a reboot after ten years - it has been known to happen).

I would also not mind reading some post-DH fic now. Hmm.

+

Speaking of HP, I've been meaning to rec this webcomic for a while now: Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell, which I know some of you already follow. I'd started reading it sometime back, got distracted after a couple of chapters, and got back to it after bell mentioned it in a post. It's a really wonderful science fantasy-ish series set in a school called Gunnerkrigg Court, featuring a girl called Annie (short for Antimony) and her best friend Kat. It feels a little bit like what HP might have been if Harry went to a Hogwarts where his parents' friends were teaching and where he happened to befriend Sirius and Remus' daughter and had all sorts of adventures and discovered things about himself and his weird school. The world-building is seriously fantastic, especially the things it does with science and magic, and the art is really pretty.