Archive for TV

movies, TV

Appreciating The Mandalorian

For more than a year, I’ve been working on rewatching all the Star Wars shows and movies in chronological order. I got a bit stalled on Andor because I finished the first season just in time for the second season, but then I wanted to go back and rewatch the whole series after that before moving on, but that took me a while because of all the stuff going on in my life. I finally got through that and on to the original trilogy of movies earlier this year, and I just finished The Mandalorian.

While Andor remains my favorite Star Wars thing, aside from the original movie, I’ve got a lot of appreciation for The Mandalorian, especially after rewatching.

For one thing, it was an interesting execution of the “big, strong man becomes responsible for something smaller and weaker” trope because it avoided a lot of the annoying cliches that tend to come with that trope. One big one was the sexist message that big, strong men aren’t expected to be competent at childcare. In most of the stories involving a man stuck with a baby, there’s humor milked from the man struggling with things like diapers and feeding. Usually, a woman (often the love interest) has to step in and help. But Din Djarin never seems to struggle with caring for Grogu. He just deals with it. He sometimes gets frustrated with the toddler-like behavior, but there’s never a sense of “oh dear, what am I, a man, supposed to do, since this is women’s work?” We even see other Mandalorian men as caregivers with their own foundling adopted kids. There’s also a good variety of reactions to Grogu. Yes, there are some women who go all gooey over him and coo over him, but there are also men who react that way. There are women who get protective of him and there are women who treat him like any other person, seemingly oblivious to the cuteness.

It also helps that we learn very early that Grogu isn’t at all helpless. He may not be extremely mobile and he’s pre-verbal, but he’s quite powerful in using the Force and can tame great beasts with the power of his mind. He protects Din almost as often as Din protects him.

That means we get the fun imagery of the big warrior dude looking after the small, cute creature without a lot of the questionable baggage that often goes with the trope.

Speaking of women, one thing I love about all the Star Wars TV series has been the dramatic expansion of the roles for women. I was a kid when the original movie came out, and it made for some heated neighborhood arguments about who got to be Leia when we played Star Wars, since she was the only girl who got to do anything. In rewatching the original trilogy recently, I was tracking the female characters, and in those movies there was Leia and one other woman who got to actually speak. The worst was The Empire Strikes Back, in which the other woman who got to speak was a flight controller who got one line. There was a slightly larger role for women in Return of the Jedi, since we had Leia, Mon Mothma, and then the slave girl in Jabba’s palace got to speak, but she spoke another language that wasn’t subtitled, so it doesn’t entirely count, as what she had to say was apparently so unimportant that it didn’t get translated for us. The special edition version also has the female-coded alien singer. But I doubt that girls playing Star Wars would have been happy with being the slave girl or Mon Mothma instead of Leia. There were barely any women even visible in the backgrounds. They just weren’t part of the fabric of the universe.

It was only slightly better in the prequels that came nearly two decades later. Padme had the Leia role as the woman who got to do something. Then there might be two more women who got to talk, but they still didn’t get to do much.

We got the big leap forward with the sequels that came a decade after that, with a female main character, plus Leia, plus a female villain for the first couple of movies, but it still wasn’t until the second sequel that there were more female characters who actually did something that mattered to the story.

As much as I love Rogue One, we were back to the woman who does something plus Mon Mothma for major characters, but at least we got some female pilots as part of the background (and some of them even had lines!). They had to do some finessing to fit with the original movie, so the female pilots all had to die to explain why there were none in the original movie, but enough men also died so that it wasn’t so obvious they were picking off the women.

But in the TV series, we finally have multiple women who actually get to do stuff. That really struck me in the season two finale of The Mandalorian, in which Din gathers his allies to rescue Grogu. The raid on the command ship involves Din and a crew of women. Most of the recurring characters who have names and get to do stuff are women. If you were playing The Mandalorian on the playground, it would be the girls who have plenty of roles to choose from while the boys would fight over who got to be Din and the rest would have to choose among the background Mandalorians or maybe Boba Fett (though at least there were male background Mandalorians, while there weren’t even any female background characters in the original trilogy).

I guess I shouldn’t complain too much about the role of women in Star Wars because that was the seed to my writing career. Since Leia was the only girl, I had to make up my own character to play when we were riding our bikes around the neighborhood, pretending they were X-wings and TIE fighters, and that led to me making up stories in my head about her, to the point those stories no longer had anything to do with Star Wars, and eventually I realized that if I wrote down those stories, I’d have a book, which led to me realizing that I could write a book (though it took me a while to actually finish one).

I also enjoy the worldbuilding the TV series format allows. It’s hard to fit in much detail about ordinary life and the people of the universe in a two-hour movie, but the series format allows us to visit different worlds and meet more people, including ordinary people, so that we can see what their lives are like. It’s funny how much lore they’ve spun out of Boba Fett, who was more a costume than a character in the original trilogy. He didn’t do much and barely spoke. But out of that costume they got the entire complex Mandalorian culture, as well as the backstory of the clones.

I don’t know when I’ll get around to seeing the new movie. It’s cold and rainy today (the heat wave didn’t last long), so not a day for either walking downtown to the vintage theater or driving to the nearby town that has a regular movie theater, plus it’s been a busy week and I’m catching up on work. Maybe I’ll have time during the week next week.

TV

Costume Dramas

I’ve found a couple of things on TV recently that I’ve enjoyed. I seem to be on a costume drama kick because I can’t seem to get into contemporary-set shows and movies, but put historical costumes on the characters and I’m interested.

First, there’s The Artful Dodger, which is a Hulu show, but it’s currently also available on Disney+. This is sort of a sequel to Oliver Twist, following the Artful Dodger (now going by his given name, Jack) years later. He got caught as a thief and was sentenced to be transported to Australia. On the voyage, he began helping the ship’s surgeon, got trained as a surgeon, and ended up joining the Royal Navy as a surgeon. Now he’s in his late 20s and has left the navy to be a surgeon at a hospital in Australia — and then Fagin shows up and tries to pull him back into a life of crime. It’s tempting because the surgeons aren’t on a salary. The patients pay them directly, and the higher-class surgeons get all the paying patients, leaving him with the charity cases, so he needs money, but he has to admit that he also kind of enjoys the thrill of a good scheme. And if he doesn’t get involved and help Fagin, there’s a good chance Fagin will screw it up and get him implicated anyway. Things get even more complicated when the governor’s daughter catches them in one of their schemes. She’ll stay silent if Jack will help her train to be a surgeon. She’s read all the books and keeps up on the latest medical journals, but has no practical experience. Between the two of them, with his practical experience and her book knowledge, they make the perfect surgeon — if only he can stay out of prison.

This is mostly a lighthearted caper show, though I sometimes find it hard to watch because it’s what I call Bad Decisions Theatre. Most of the trouble the characters get into is because they make really bad decisions, and I have to remind myself that the decisions make sense for the characters, even if they aren’t the choices I’d make. There’s still some, “Oh, no, don’t do that!” shouted at the screen. There’s a growing romance (that includes some bad decisions). They have a lot of fun with the Dickens source material, bringing in some characters from other books, and then their view of what Oliver Twist would turn out to be like as an adult is hilarious (and makes a lot of sense).

Jack/the Dodger is played by Thomas Brodie-Sangster, perhaps best known as the little boy with a crush on his classmate in Love Actually, but also the oldest kid in the first Nanny McPhee movie, along with appearances on Doctor Who, A Game of Thrones, and a cameo in The Force Awakens (hitting a geek trifecta), plus he was the voice of Ferb on Phineas and Ferb (must have been an easy gig because the running joke was that Ferb spoke once per episode). Now he’s all grown up, but he still somehow looks exactly the same as he did as a kid while still looking mature. He doesn’t have a baby face. I think it was that he came across as an old soul as a kid, so his features just solidified instead of changing. It took a little time in this show to get used to the idea of him being an adult and doing adult things (which wasn’t helped by the fact that I watched the show in January and February after watching Love Actually on Christmas Eve).

Then there’s the new production of The Count of Monte Cristo. I believe it will start airing on PBS in the US on March 22, but the whole series is already streaming on Passport if you donate to your PBS station. I think I was in high school when I read the book (when I went through a Dumas phase that had nothing to do with any required reading in school), so the details are blurry enough that I don’t know how faithful this adaptation is, but it feels faithful, at least more so than a lot of movie adaptations tend to be. The story is about a young man who’s wrongfully imprisoned. While he spends 15 years locked away with no trial, a fellow prisoner educates him and clues him in about the location of a lost treasure. He manages to escape, then uses the treasure to set himself up in the new identity as the Count of Monte Cristo. When he learns about the three men who got him sent to prison to further their own positions, he sets out to get his revenge on them. What I’ve always loved about this story is that he doesn’t get revenge by doing anything to them. He merely reveals things they’ve done (sometimes getting justice for other people they’ve wronged) or sets up traps that they walk into because of their corruption (a good person wouldn’t be caught in these traps). It’s a great story if you find true justice satisfying, though the first episode when our hero is getting wrongfully imprisoned is tough to get through.

I thought this was an excellent adaptation and I watched the whole thing in a week because it was like a book I couldn’t put down. Sam Claflin plays “Monte Cristo,” and I was surprised to see that he’s become something of a rom-com leading man in recent years because I mostly remember him as the guy in the thankless roles in fantasy-type movies. He was the young missionary held captive by the pirates in the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and he was the duke’s son who’d been Snow White’s childhood friend in Snow White and the Huntsman. He was supposed to be the Mr. Wrong in the love triangle with the Huntsman, but I thought he was a far more interesting character. I think he does a good job here as a guy who had most human feeling burnt out of him and who’s fixating on the wrong thing for what will fix him. He’s simultaneously a good guy and a bit of a soulless monster, and the fact that he’s being a soulless monster is eating away at the good guy part of him.

If you have Passport, check it out now, and if you don’t, then check it out when it comes on TV. Passport is probably the most reasonable streaming service. It’s a $5/month (or $60/year) donation, and you get so many of the Masterpiece Theatre shows (present and past), plus all the Ken Burns documentaries, tons of Great Performances stuff, etc. There are the usual sponsor promos at the beginning of a show, like when you watch on PBS, but no ad breaks, and you can usually get all the pledge drive programming without the pledge breaks. They also usually drop whole seasons up front so you don’t have to wait for the next episode, and sometimes, like in this case, they drop them before they come on TV. Since I’m not a night owl but live in the Eastern time zone, I like it for time shifting. I may watch the episodes on the same day they air, but I watch them an hour or more earlier. (I’m not being sponsored here, I just genuinely think this is a good deal and a good cause.)

TV

A Romantic Adventure

With Valentine’s Day coming tomorrow, I suppose it would be on point to talk about something romantic, so I think I’ll plug one of my favorite romantic TV series that I just finished rewatching yet again: Once Upon a Time in Wonderland. It’s a spin-off of the Once Upon a Time series, but is only slightly connected. Aside from one thing that might be a bit confusing if you’re not familiar with the parent series, this one pretty much stands alone. It’s a self-contained 13-episode story, so it never had the chance to spin out of control in the way the original series did, and I think I may enjoy it more than I enjoyed the main series.

We’ve got two romances that actually work, and one of them is truly healthy and supportive. There’s a good villain redemption that involves the villain realizing that they were doing wrong, knowing where they went wrong, apologizing to the people they wronged, suffering the consequences for their evil actions, and trying to atone for their wrongs. Then there’s also a really satisfying villain comeuppance.

Where the series relates to the parent Once Upon a Time series is in structure. Like the parent series, it involves a mash-up of (Disney versions of) fairy tales and other stories. In this case, it’s an odd mix of Alice in Wonderland and Aladdin that somehow works. Jafar from Aladdin is the Big Bad, and there are genies (though not the Genie). There are also a few bits from Robin Hood, and there’s a suggestion that one of the characters is one of Cinderella’s stepsisters. It’s also told with the present-day story plus flashbacks to things from the backstory that are relevant to the current story (a lot like the structure of Lost).

This is essentially a sequel to Alice in Wonderland. As an adult, Alice goes back to Wonderland to find evidence that Wonderland is real to show her father, who thinks she made up the stories about her adventures. While she’s there, she meets someone and falls in love and decides to stay, but then she loses her love and returns home, grief-stricken. Our story picks up when she gets word that her lost love may still be alive, so she sets off to go back to Wonderland and rescue him, but she finds out that this is all part of a much greater evil scheme.

I really like the romance in this series because it’s so healthy. It involves two people who like and respect each other. They start as friends, then fall in love. All the conflict keeping them apart is external, so there’s no bickering. It probably would have been a boring story if we’d seen it in chronological order, since all the conflict comes after they’re already in love and a couple. But this story starts with the conflict keeping them apart and focuses on their efforts to get back to each other and later to overcome the obstacles to them being able to have peace. We see the early part of their relationship, with them meeting and falling in love, in flashback, so it’s just a highlight reel of the pivotal moments set against their current woes.

Alice makes for a great heroine. She’s good at heart and kind, but without being an idiot about it or a total pushover. She can be steely and ruthless when she has to be. We see her learning how to fight in the flashbacks, so it’s not one of those cases of someone just picking up a sword and miraculously being good at it. She’s also clever and mostly avoids falling for the villains’ traps. She keeps her head in a crisis. I just really find myself liking her.

This series is one of my comfort views. I wouldn’t call it cozy because there’s some serious peril, but I find it oddly reassuring now that I know the outcome. I like spending time with these people. Their version of Wonderland can be a bit campy, but I like it for the most part. There’s a bit of a steampunk esthetic in some of it. My only real quibbles for the series are the “1990s homecoming dress from David’s Bridal” look for the fancy court dresses and the epilogue. I can kind of see some of the reason why they gave that outcome to some of the characters, but it doesn’t ring true to me as something they would have been happy with.

The series is showing on Disney+, so if you want something in hour-long (a bit less) chunks that wraps up in 13 episodes and has a nice mix of action and romance with a fairytale flair, it’s worth checking out.

movies, TV

Revived Obsession

In addition to being distracted by trying to get my house set up to the point that it’s a livable space I can actually work in, I’ve had an additional distraction because the final season of Andor has been on, starting the day after I moved in. It ended this week, and I haven’t quite recovered because it’s reawakened and re-energized my Star Wars obsession that started when I saw the first movie in the theater when I was 9. It’s waxed and waned over the years since then, but this series is hitting me where I am now in a big way. It’s very much Star Wars for grown-ups.

There’s been a belief, promoted by George Lucas himself, ever since the prequel movies came out that “Star Wars is for kids,” but that’s as much of a retcon (retroactive continuity, when you decide something and claim that it was always true) as the fact that Darth Vader was Luke’s father and Leia was his sister (the idea that Darth Vader was Luke’s father was initially brought up as a joke by a friend at a dinner party when Lucas was outlining The Empire Strikes Back, then once they brainstormed it a bit, they decided it worked. The fact that Leia was Luke’s sister came up when outlining Return of the Jedi when they needed a reason Luke would drop his refusal to fight Vader, and protecting a sister was what they decided on).

The original movie was pure Boomer (and Silent Generation) bait. It drew on all the space adventure serials that played before Saturday matinees when those generations were kids, as well as tropes from the Westerns that were popular for those generations. It wasn’t kids clamoring to see that first movie. They were brought by their parents (like me — my family will never let me forget that I emphatically did not want to go see it). It was very kid-friendly in that the violence was fairly sanitized (in spite of having one of the highest body counts in all of movie history, given that an entire planet is destroyed). There’s no on-screen blood or gore. When Obi-Wan Kenobi is killed, we don’t see a decapitated body. He just vanishes. There’s comic relief from the droids, and Luke is young enough to be relatable and aspirational to kids without being an annoying kid character. But the main appeal to kids was that it was an adult movie we could see and enjoy and feel grown-up about seeing. It didn’t pander to kids. In today’s entertainment language, it’s “four quadrant entertainment,” which means that all the demographic groups can enjoy it together — fun for the whole family!

It wasn’t until later that they realized they had something kids loved. It took them nearly a year after the original release of the movie before they started making Star Wars toys. The Empire Strikes Back was even more mature and actually less kid-friendly. There was more on-screen violence that wasn’t the sanitized “pew, pew, pew” of blaster fire. Characters got injured and bloody. Han was tortured. Lucas was criticized for the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi for being ready-made merchandising, but I believe his rationale that it was about the story, that he wanted something small, primitive, and innocent helping bring down the Empire (and bonus if they’d make good toys). Even if there was a cute factor seemingly aimed at kids, the thematic issues in that movie are pretty deep.

It was only when they came back more than a decade after the original movies with the prequels that they went all-in with that “Star Wars is for kids” line, with elements that were deliberately aimed at child interest, and they then made animated series that were clearly targeted toward kids (even though they ended up going rather dark and with some heavy themes).

But when we got to Rogue One, there was nothing child-friendly about it. The funny droid sidekick is a snarky killer, and that’s really the only comic relief. I’ve called it the Saving Private Ryan of Star Wars. It’s serious, dark, violent, and brilliant. It stood to reason that the prequel series leading up to it would be similarly serious. It’s about surviving under an autocratic regime, the stirrings of rebellion, and just how hard and dangerous revolution is, requiring great personal sacrifice by some so that all can live free. It’s very heavy, and the deep political themes probably wouldn’t be of much interest to most kids. I doubt it would have caught my imagination the way the original movie did when I was a kid. It’s about sneaking around and conversations rather than space battles and the action sequences are riots that turn into massacres.

But it’s an in-depth look at the Star Wars universe and the ordinary people who live there, not just the princesses, politicians, and Jedi Knights that we’ve seen in other movies. It’s the mechanics, shopkeepers, farmers, bureaucrats, and other people trying to get by in an increasingly hostile galaxy, and it’s about the people who have to keep to the shadows to try to build their movement. We get a sense of daily life in that galaxy. We see their homes, their kitchens and bedrooms, where they go on vacation. It’s a chance to really wallow in that universe and see multiple aspects of it.

And that’s made the rest of that universe more interesting. It all has more depth and texture, and that’s why I’m getting back into it the way I was when I was 9-14 and the original movies were coming out, and it was all fresh and new to me. After this week’s Andor finale, I’ve rewatched Rogue One, which is even more heartbreaking now, and tonight I’ll go back to that original movie that started it all, knowing what happened to set up that whole situation and just what was sacrificed along the way.

Now we’ll see if this current wave of obsession has the same effect the first wave had, since that was what kicked off my wanting to be a writer and tell stories. Maybe it’ll inspire even more story ideas.

 

movies, TV, Books, writing

Heroes and Villains

Some of the recent author discourse online this week has involved the nature of heroes and villains and the author’s responsibility in writing them. This stemmed from a statement from one of the writers of the TV series Breaking Bad about how maybe writers needed to think of the implications of what they wrote, after viewers seemed to have missed the point of that series. I didn’t watch it because it’s very much not my sort of thing, but I understand it’s a series about a high school chemistry teacher who finds out he has cancer and to provide for his family (possibly because insurance is bad and he won’t get good benefits?), he starts making and selling meth. Since he knows chemistry, his meth is superior to that made by trailer park junkies, and he becomes a sort of drug kingpin. This writer talked about how audiences saw him as a sympathetic figure who was doing what he needed to do to care for his family in an unjust system, but the writers thought they made it clear that this was just an excuse he used, while he actually ended up doing it for the power and money.

I have to say that this writer sounds pretty naive. You have a character in a respected profession that’s often seen as an underdog in society, dealing with something a lot of people can relate to (struggling with health insurance and finances), so people are going to sympathize with him and relate to him and try to justify his actions.

However, it doesn’t take a teacher with cancer dealing with health insurance for audiences to sympathize with bad guys. I’ve been around online discussion of various fictional things (TV, movies, books) since the mid-90s, and I’ve seen that it doesn’t take much for certain members of the audience to like and sympathize with the villain, even if they have to make up reasons to do so. You could have an unrepentant puppy murderer, and there would be people claiming he’s really just a softy, and he only murders puppies because the good guys were mean to him about his puppy murdering (especially if he’s attractive or charismatic). He could be saved and changed if only someone treated him right.

There’s what I call the hero/villain double standard. A villain doesn’t have to do much to be hailed as heroic. He just has to do one good thing, or sometimes even refrain from doing something bad one time. On the other hand, it sometimes seems like the most evil thing a hero can do is try to be a good person, so that even the slightest failure to live up to that ideal is worse than any evil the villain does. And yet, actually succeeding in being good makes him holier than thou and boring, and audiences want him cut down. The puppy murdering villain can be hailed as a hero for letting one puppy go, while the hero will be vilified for taking the largest brownie (but also criticized as holier than thou and too good to be true if he takes the smallest brownie).

But you can’t write for that audience because they’ll never be happy. They’re suspicious of people who try to be good and they think they can save villains.

I think writers may unintentionally feed into and encourage these views, though. While a villain redemption story can be satisfying under some circumstances, too many of them and you start to perpetuate the myth that all villains are actually good inside or doing their evil for selfless, good reasons. Writers like to redeem villains because it makes for a big, dramatic character arc — from selfish and evil to heroic. Meanwhile, the arc for a good guy usually isn’t so dramatic. At best, you get the farmboy to hero arc, where he’s not so bad at the beginning and all he really does is level up to deal with the situation he finds himself in. The way you get more drama is to tear down the hero and find his flaws.

In the world of series, especially long-running types of series like on TV, the structure of a series encourages the villain redemption arc. The villain is probably one of the more popular characters, but if you keep the same individual as the foe for too long, both the hero and the villain start to look incompetent if neither manages to defeat the other. You really can’t permanently defeat the hero of a series, but you don’t want to get rid of your most popular character. The answer is that you redeem the villain and bring on a new villain, so in later installments, the original villain is at first a reluctant ally with the heroes against the new villain, and gradually turns into a full-on hero. Viewers learn to look for the reasons that any villain will eventually become a hero, and as the villains and former villains remain popular characters among outspoken viewers, writers start focusing on them, sidelining the original heroes and not writing for them, so the heroes become more boring.

I’ve also seen people theorizing that Americans tend to go for underdogs who fight the system and challenge the status quo, but most of the heroes are defending the status quo, while the villains are the ones fighting the system (never mind that they’re often doing so for selfish reasons). I’m not sure I entirely agree with that, since there are way too many examples that go the other way around. In the Captain America movies, the most upright, pure of heart Marvel superhero is fighting the system and going rogue. He’s going against orders to do what he thinks is right, going against what he believes to be a corrupted organization, and even going against the other superheroes when he thinks they’ve sold out. (And, of course, a lot of fans vilified him when he finally made a selfish choice for his own happiness.)

Most of the Star Wars movies and shows have the heroes being rebels or resistance fighters against an evil system. The exception would be the prequel series, which was odd because the real villain was controlling both sides to undermine the system while the heroes were fighting to defend a system that they didn’t know had been corrupted. The least successful series so far, The Acolyte, was the one with the villains rebelling against the “good guy” Jedi system that was questionable. They find a middle ground in the shows centered around the Mandalorian, where the good guys aren’t really a part of the establishment and are sometimes in opposition to it while they’re also fighting outright villains, which puts them on the same side as the establishment.

And people still sided with the bad guys when they were the ones representing “the system.” I remember 1977, before Darth Vader had a sympathetic backstory, long before anyone imagined he’d be redeemed. In that first movie, he was mostly just a henchman supporting an evil bureaucrat, and he was an extremely popular character. There were “Darth Vader Lives!” t-shirts. Really, he was a cool costume and an awesome voice, and he had power he wasn’t afraid to use. Who hasn’t wanted to Force choke someone during a staff meeting? But none of the usual rationales for why people side with villains applied to this character in the original movie. He was mostly just intriguing and looked cool.

I think the answer isn’t to stop writing cool villains, lest audiences sympathize with them. It’s to write better heroes. Push audiences to sympathize with them. Don’t be afraid to make them human or flawed, but highlight where they’re good and heroic. Make them cool enough that people might want to be them. The writer has to like the good guys before the audience will.

movies, TV, Books, writing

Shipper Bait

Happy Valentine’s Day! I should probably talk about something romantic, but I’ve come to realize that both as a reader/audience member and as a writer, I’m more of a shipper than a romantic.

For those who aren’t up on Internet talk, “shipper” is short for “relationshipper.” As far as I can tell, the term originated in the X-Files Usenet newsgroup back in the mid-90s. If you wanted Mulder and Scully to get together, you were a relationshipper, or shipper. (The other faction was the No-Romos, who wanted them to stay friends and partners but not get involved romantically.) From there, the term spread. “Shipping” is wanting two characters to get together, looking for evidence that they might be developing feelings, imagining how they might get together and what it would look like if they did, sometimes even writing fan fiction about the characters being romantically involved. If you say you ship a couple, you want them to be romantically involved.

While some shippers really do want to see the couple get together, the real fun is in looking at the subtext and trying to figure out where things might be going. I think this is why I prefer to get my love stories in genres other than romance (and now romantasy). I have the most fun trying to read between the lines and figure out what the characters feel based on their actions. Romance novels are a lot more up front about the attraction. Even if the characters are denying it, you know where it’s going and it’s still pretty obvious. I think a lot of the “Moonlighting Curse” is due to this. Once the couple is together, you know where things stand and there’s no more room for imagination. (Though there were other things going on with Moonlighting, so it wasn’t just them getting together that killed the show.) This also makes it a lot harder to do in a book than in movies/TV. When you can get inside the characters’ heads, there’s little guessing, unless they’re utterly oblivious.

As an example, I’ve always said, not entirely jokingly, that Aliens is one of my favorite romantic movies. It’s fun to analyze the way Ripley and Hicks interact and see the way he looks at her and figure that they were falling for each other, and later they’d get together (the third movie Does Not Exist, so there). I was vindicated in this when I heard Michael Biehn say on a convention panel that he played the whole movie as though Hicks had a huge crush on Ripley.

I like to say that I write shipper bait instead of romance because the romantic relationships in my books tend to be fairly subtle and leave the impression of there being a lot more romance than there is because there’s so much material for the reader’s imagination. I’ve even had a book that didn’t have a kiss in it rejected by a fantasy publisher with the recommendation to send it to a romance publisher because it was too much of a romance.

I’ve been trying to think of my favorite fictional romances, or at least some that I think were handled well. I’ve got more from movies and TV than from books. Connie Willis probably does my favorite book romances, though she writes science fiction. Ned and Verity’s relationship in To Say Nothing of the Dog is quite lovely and has a swoonworthy conclusion. There’s also something pretty epic in the Blackout/All Clear duology that involves time travel and an outcome worth cheering out loud for. Lately, she’s been writing all-out science fiction romcoms, and they have just the right mix of romance and action. You want the couple to get together, but it’s not super obvious where things are going.

I think Jim and Pam’s relationship on The Office worked pretty well (aside from some iffy stuff in the final season). It helped there that the mockumentary format meant that we only saw what the camera crews were there to see, so even when they started dating it wasn’t entirely obvious what their status was and there was still room to guess and imagine.

Possibly my favorite TV romance was Nathan and Audrey on Haven, which had all kinds of supernatural stuff going on, plus one of my favorite paranormal tropes, the “in another life” thing in which the same people keep running into each other in different timelines, sometimes not knowing each other, but always falling in love when they meet.

Shipping isn’t limited to couples that actually do end up getting together or who are on that trajectory. I’ve even seen people ship characters from different fictional universes. It’s really common to ship non-canon relationships, sort of an amusing what if. My personal favorite there is that I figure things would have gone very differently for the galaxy if Obi Wan had ever turned to Padme and belted, “My gift is my song, and this one’s for you.” Seriously, an Obi Wan who looked like Ewan McGregor was right there, and she went for the whiny kid? I’ve seen some unhinged fan theories that this is what happened (well, maybe without him acting out Moulin Rouge), and Obi Wan was Luke and Leia’s real father. Anakin does get really jealous of Obi Wan having anything to do with her toward the end.

Somewhat closer to possibility is Cassian Andor and Jyn Erso in Rogue One. That lost opportunity is even sadder after the Andor series, which makes it look even more like she’s just the person he always needed, and they found each other just a bit too late. There are some pretty loaded looks they exchange. In my mental happy place, the Enterprise flies by and beams them out right before things go boom.

There’s a lot more room for romance in fantasy now that romantasy is the hot thing in the market, but I’m not sure I write enough outright romance for that. My shipper bait is too much for fantasy but not enough for romantasy.

movies, Life, TV, Books

2024 in Review

Happy new year!

I’m still considering this to be a semi-holiday before I plunge back into my regular routine (or my new, improved routine) next week, but it’s a good time for a year in review and a look at what’s ahead.

The big thing for 2024 was my cross-country move. That was a major change of scenery and lifestyle, and it really disrupted things for a while. As a result, I didn’t get as much written as usual, and I had the fewest books read of any year since I’ve been tracking.

It was kind of a reading slump year, probably for a lot of reasons. I know I didn’t read a lot during the prep/packing/moving/unpacking phase. I also didn’t have a lot of work-related reading. I wasn’t doing serious book research, so I didn’t have any reading that fit into my working time. Usually that accounts for a lot of books every year. I think I’ve been getting out a lot more, too. During the fall, I was out exploring most Saturdays, time when I might have been reading. In the summer, there were concerts in the park in the evenings.

But, if I’m being honest with myself, I wasn’t really prioritizing reading time. One issue with not having a dedicated office is that I have the computer right in front of me all the time, and it’s easy to fall into the habit of surfing the Internet or doing online puzzles and not pick up a book. One of my intentions for the new year is to be more deliberate about how I use my time. It doesn’t help that now I’m getting my newspaper online. When I get a house with an office, I may see about getting a larger tablet to use for things like newspaper reading so I can keep the computer in the office — and I won’t set up the tablet to access any of my social media accounts. I have a tablet, but it’s a small one the size of a book, which isn’t great for reading newspapers.

I think my favorite find of the year was the Seven Kennings books (first book is A Plague of Giants) by Kevin Hearne — a really different approach to epic fantasy with a very fun narrative style. I read those early in the year, before the move, so I was surprised to check my records and see that I read them in 2024. It seems like so long ago.

I didn’t really watch TV in 2024 other than on streaming, and there I was mostly catching up on older things I missed. The transition to the eastern time zone has messed me up for network TV because everything’s on so late. I enjoyed the Star Trek series Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds, and I’m loving the Star Wars Skeleton Crew series. I’ve been rewatching The Office. I’ve just started The Day of the Jackal.

I don’t recall what movies I’ve watched. I need to start writing down what I’ve watched. I haven’t gone to a theater, so I haven’t seen anything truly new. I’m not sure what I’d say my favorite of the year has been.

The early part of this year may end up being a bit chaotic, as I’ll be house hunting and then moving again. I have this apartment until early May, so I really hope I find something by then. I’d said I wanted to experience at least part of a winter before I make the decision to buy a house, but even though it’s colder than I’m used to (and I need warmer clothes), I can’t think of any other place I’d prefer to live. This area really seems to be a Goldilocks zone for me, just right on the metrics that matter to me. I would like to meet more people, and I’m gradually getting involved in the community. I think getting permanently settled will help.

I normally set outcome goals for each quarter of things I want to accomplish, but for work I’m going to be focusing on behavior and dedicating a certain amount of time each day to my main work tasks. That should lead to some outcomes, and once I’ve established the habit (or re-established, since that was what I generally did before the move disrupted everything), then I can worry more about outcomes. I’m also trying to get back into some exercise habits. That should be easier once I have a house. I don’t really have good space for yoga (I have to adjust to fit in some of the exercises without bumping into things), and the place is too small to get in steps just moving around. But I do get a fair amount of walking just going around town, since I can walk downtown. I walk to the library, to church, to the farmer’s market, to the bank, and to concerts and other events. I live near the top of a very steep hill, so walking anywhere involves some climbing to get home, and since I’m on the other side of the hill from downtown, I have to walk up first before I walk down the hill to town, so it’s literally uphill both ways.

Speaking of walking, I have to get to the library to pick up a book while it’s still above freezing and before it starts snowing.

TV

Skeleton Crew

I’m not really in the demographic it’s aimed at, but I’m thoroughly enjoying the latest Star Wars series, Skeleton Crew. This is an adventure set in the Star Wars universe about a group of kids who find what they think is a secret cave that might be a lost Jedi temple, but it turns out to be a buried spaceship that takes off and blasts into hyperspace when they accidentally wake it. Then they have to find their way home, but there’s just one problem: No one knows where their home world is (though everyone would love to find it, since it’s rumored to hold great treasure). They have the help of a shady man who seems to have Jedi powers and an old droid who’s the only survivor of the ship’s original crew, who seem to have been pirates. It’s basically Goonies meets Treasure Island in the Star Wars universe.

I know George Lucas has said that Star Wars has always been for kids, but that’s a bit of revisionist history (like so much of what he’s said about the development of the saga). The original movie was pure Boomer bait, a nostalgic reimagining of the adventure serials kids of his generation saw when they went to Saturday matinees at the movies, those cliffhangers that were swashbucklers, westerns, or space adventures. The movie was child-friendly, with sanitized violence (in spite of having one of the biggest body counts of any movie, thanks to the destruction of an entire planet), mild language, no sex, and some comic relief characters. It appealed to kids, but it wasn’t aimed at kids, and that’s part of why kids liked it. There were no shoehorned-in child characters so we could have someone to “relate” to, nothing inserted strictly to appeal to kids. It was a grown-up movie that was still fun, so kids felt like they were getting in on something. Today’s executives would call it “four-quadrant entertainment,” which just means that everyone enjoys it. The whole family can go and have fun. When Lucas tried to aim at children with The Phantom Menace, it just came across as pandering, like kids aren’t sophisticated enough to enjoy a movie without a kid in it and without a clown. Even though Lucas was a parent at that point, he seemed to understand less about what kids liked then than he had with the original movie.

This series is specifically targeted to younger viewers. Most of the main characters are children. But it feels a lot less like pandering than The Phantom Menace did, which makes it more adult-friendly. When I was a Star Wars-obsessed nine or ten-year-old, back when the only Star Wars was that first movie, I would have been over the moon about this series. It would have hit almost all my buttons. I would have wanted to be the main girl character, who asserts herself as captain of the ship but who fears she’s not up to the task when things get serious. There are adventures and narrow escapes. There’s a touch of humor but no annoying clowning. There are literary references (lots of hints of Treasure Island, and the droid on the ship is SM-33 — so he’s Smee!). The only thing missing for child me would have been a cute boy to crush on, since the main boy in the cast has a bad Too Stupid To Live problem and even child me would have found him annoying, and the other boy is basically an elephant (and a dweeb, though a sweet one). Adult me has Jude Law, who isn’t an actor I tend to look for but I like him when I see him. I wouldn’t go to a movie just to see him, but I always seem to enjoy him when he’s in a movie I’m seeing.

This series feels a lot like those old cliffhanger serials, with narrow escapes from dire situations, and each resolution leads straight into a new problem. The episodes even end with cliffhangers. It feels like Star Wars getting back to its original roots. There’s also an overarching mystery of what the deal is with the kids’ home world that seems to have been isolated from the rest of the galaxy for some time and which seems idyllic but which has some unsettling dystopian vibes.

The series is enough fun to help tide me over until Andor resumes next year, and I’m enjoying letting my inner nine-year-old come out to play. Star Wars + space pirates isn’t a bad combination.

TV

More on The Office

I’m still rewatching The Office, watching an episode after listening to the podcast episode from The Office Ladies, and I’m noticing character details that even they don’t seem to have registered. The one that’s hitting me in this go-round is that Jim is what Michael is trying to be, while Michael is what Jim is in danger of turning into.

Michael wants to be the life of the party, the one who keeps morale in the office up with his hilarious jokes and pranks. He sees himself as well-liked and successful, the hot bachelor who can snag any woman. But he doesn’t seem to have any dreams of moving beyond where he is. He’s found his niche of success as regional manager of a paper company, and he only does anything toward moving beyond that when his position is threatened. He likes being the big fish in a small pond, and his dreams are pure dreams — stand-up comedy, screenwriting, improv, acting, being a secret agent. They aren’t anything he actually does much about. He writes a screenplay, which stays in a drawer (where it belongs, to be honest). He doesn’t seem to have made any effort to improve, so it was merely about playing out his personal fantasy of being a secret agent, not a serious effort to become a screenwriter. He takes the improv class, but considers himself to already be a genius, so he resists any effort at guidance by the instructor and alienates the rest of the class by being a poor collaborator.

Jim actually is the life of the party who keeps morale up in the office with his jokes and pranks, but a big difference is that his morale boosting comes from him paying attention to what the other people want and what will boost them. When Michael’s out of the office and Jim comes up with fun things to do, like the Office Olympics or the screenplay table read, he doesn’t build it around himself. He focuses on encouraging the others and drawing them out, like giving timid Phyllis the role of the sexy girlfriend in the table read or finding a “sport” for everyone in the Olympics. He even often overcomes his own dislike for Michael by soothing his ego, like giving him an Olympic medal in a stirring closing ceremony or joining him for a karaoke duet when Michael crashes his party at his home. Jim is the guy popular with women, managing to win the women Michael wants but turns off with his weird behavior. Michael talks about how cute Pam is (or used to be), but Pam falls in love with Jim. Jim’s the one who takes the hot girl (a pre-famous Amy Adams) home after Michael spends the day trying to impress her.

But Michael is also a cautionary tale for Jim, what could happen to him if he stays where he is. Is the best he can hope for being regional manager of a paper company someday? Will his jokes and office antics go from being a morale boost to making his staff cringe and keeping the HR department busy? Will he continue to have dreams that he never acts on? That’s why the later seasons are difficult to watch for me because he seems to realize all this, himself, but when he tries to act on his pent-up dreams instead of just playing them out in a computer game, he gets cast as the bad guy and it nearly destroys his marriage because it draws attention away from his family and leaves his wife carrying the load. That’s unfortunate because he had supported her so strongly in pursuing her dreams, but at that time they were just dating and didn’t have two small kids to deal with, so the situations aren’t equal. I’m not at that point in the rewatch yet. I’m still in season two, when Jim is pining for an engaged (but clearly unhappy) Pam and avoiding going after other, better jobs because that means being away from Pam.

Last night’s episode was “The Injury,” which may be the ultimate episode of this series. It doesn’t get into any of the ongoing arcs, but it so perfectly represents what the show is about, with Michael being so childish and demanding about his minor injury that he completely misses Dwight’s more serious injury (and then still tries to take the spotlight even after they realize Dwight has a concussion), and Jim having to step up and be the adult in the room to take care of Dwight and deal with Michael (the scene with the spray bottle in the van is one of the funniest things ever on television).

One thing I love about this series is that the documentary format did away with the studio audience/laugh track thing for TV comedy and let the TV audience decide for ourselves when to laugh. I’ve now reached the point where I can’t watch old-school sitcoms with a laugh track.

I found something I wrote back in late 2020, probably for a TV forum, on how various characters on The Office would deal with the pandemic, if you teleported the season 2-3 cast/situation to 2020 (rather than where they’d have actually been in 2020). I may have to post that next week, especially if I still have Book Brain and can’t come up with anything else.

TV, My Books

Returning to The Office

I recently stumbled, quite belatedly, onto The Office Ladies podcast, in which Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey (Pam and Angela on The Office), who became best friends during the process of making the series, do a rewatch and dish on the behind-the-scenes info about the making of each episode. I was aware that this existed, but I’m not really a podcast person. Then the episodes that are on YouTube showed up as “recommended” for me, and it turns out that they’re perfect for listening while I do Sudoku, crossword puzzles or online jigsaw puzzles. And that got me started rewatching the series to catch the things they mention. I did a partial rewatch a few years ago but got sidetracked before I finished it. Now I’ve been going back and looking for the things they point out in the podcast.

I actually watched this series in the first place because when they showed Pam in one of the promos, I immediately said, “That’s Katie!” and had to watch to see who this character was. The series premiered a couple of months before the first Enchanted, Inc. book was published, so it had already been entirely written and edited and the review copies had even been printed. That means The Office in no way influenced my series. But it was like seeing my own character that I’d already written come to life.

Her hair in the first few seasons is different than I see Katie. I think Katie looks more like Pam did in later seasons when she didn’t have the long, curly hair (which is ironic, given that I have long, curly hair), and Katie’s probably a bit spunkier than first season Pam. But Pam otherwise fit my description of her being like a girl next door, hair that wasn’t quite blond and wasn’t quite brown, eyes somewhere between green and blue, the kind of person whose description could apply to half the population. She even dresses a lot like I imagined Katie dressing. I guess first season Pam was more like Katie before she gets the job offer, when she’s in her original job at the beginning of the book, before she gains a bit more confidence and gumption from realizing that she has something special about her.

Then there was the office setting. I’d tried to do more of a workplace comedy at first, something a lot like The Office, but with magic — except there was no US The Office at the time, and I didn’t see the British version until later, so I didn’t have a good frame of reference. That idea mostly went by the wayside as the magical plots took over and the characters came to life. Before I decided that Merlin would be the boss and he’d actually be a good boss, I had the idea of the boss being someone more like Michael, mostly because I have had that boss (he even had the same first name). He wasn’t quite that stupid, but he was really big on the whole “having fun” thing and liked to have parties, only ours were usually after work, which forced us to stay late at the office or go to work-related events on weekends. He once came up with this whole incentive program where you set your goals for the week, and if you hit them, you got to leave early on Fridays, but then he’d plan either mandatory meetings or office parties for Friday afternoons, so you couldn’t actually leave. His whole life was the office, and he tried to make it that way for the staff.

I ended up not using that in the book. The only thing that remained from that original character was the bit about Merlin reading all the fad management books, though I ended up using that to show how he thought they were kind of dumb instead of constantly adjusting course based on which book the boss had just read. That came from a different job where the upper management of the company seemed to go through a different management trend every year. When I moved, I finally got rid of some of the stuff they handed out for each year’s theme.

Now I’m so far removed from the working world that I can look at this series almost as a fantasy show set in a strange, unfamiliar realm. It’s funny to look at it now and remember that feeling of deja vu as I remembered my former boss but also saw one of my characters come to life. It’s been about 20 years since they filmed the pilot episode, so Jenna Fischer has aged out of the role of Katie, but that was definitely the type I had in mind as I wrote.