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13. Alix Harrow, The Everlasting – so far we’re three for three with me having mixed/complicated feelings about the Hugo novels. With this one, on the one hand, this is the longest thing by Alix Harrow I finished (I got bored not very far into The Ten Thousand Doors of January), and also I found this more interesting than the deconstructed fairy tale novella I read for Hugo homework the other year – so I do think this is Alix Harrow making progress as an author and also as an author who appeals to me in longer form. On the other hand, my enjoyment of this book steadily diminished the more of it I read – I thought the first 20% or so was really good, and by the end I was just really frustrated with it, and had been yearning for the sweet release of being done with the bloody thing from at least 80% on. ( Major spoilers from here )

Three write-ups on my flist that I read at various points while being mired in this book and really enjoyed (and can now go back and comment on, yay proper keyboard!)
- cahn: x
- skygiants: x
- chestnut_pod: x

Novel (3/6): All three I have read were ambitious but flawed in various ways and to various degrees, and frustrated me at different points. I think I could probably map my enjoyment of / frustration with them over time, and would have to figure out how to rank them via area under the curve. But my gut feel is Incandescent ahead of the others and then… probably The Raven Scholar > Everlasting, but there’s a shorter book inside The Everlasting that I would’ve put above ‘Raven’, and maybe even above Incandescent… Pity that wasn’t the one I was reading…

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Hugo homework continues in watching stuff format:

Mickey 17 – I first became aware of this movie via Tim Key being in it, because my Elis & John Facebook people were posted about it. Tim Key has a very small role as the pigeon guy, so this in no way helped me understand what the movie was about. I still had no sense of that when I saw it on the Hugo nominees list, but at that point decided to check it out if the occasion would arise. And the occasion did arise, as it was part of the in-flight entertainment on the trip over to Europe. I had not, for example, realized that Robert Pattinson was in it (many times over XD) ( More, with spoilers )

So ultimately… meh. I’m not mad I saw it. I probably wouldn’t even be mad if it wins the Hugo, because there is some stuff there I liked, and I don’t have particularly strong feelings about the other movies I’ve seen, either. But it’s definitely not going at the top of my list.

Sinners – I’m not really sure how to think about this one in Hugo context because, while I enjoyed and appreciated the movie overall, the speculative element specifically worked the least well for me. ( Is the spec premise a spoiler? No other spoilers, I think )

BDP Long (3/6): So… I dunno. In terms of Hugo homework ratings, I definitely put this above Mickey 17. I kind of think KPOP Demon Hunters will actually stay with me more than Sinners, because of the eldritch critters and some of the tunes, but I don’t think it’s a better movie. So I think my current rankings are Sinners > KPOP > Mickey 17. But none of these are movies I loved, and none of these are movies I hated; they are just different levels of not-my-thing, and I guess this is me trying to rank them at how effective I thought they were at doing what they set out to do, minus how much they annoyed me personally :P (Ironically, Mickey 17 was the one I expected to like the most, but it just lost me with where it went…)

I could’ve also watched Frankenstein and Superman and possibly even Andor on the plane, but ran out of time / didn’t really feel like it, so I suspect this is likely where my BDP Long voting will end, but considering I’d seen zero of the titles when the list was revealed and had not much interest in any of them, that’s actually pretty good, I think.

On the flight back, I gave myself a pass from watching Hugo homework, and watching TV instead.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms – I fell off the ASOIAF TV show bandwagon a long time ago – I watched season 1 of GoT (and enjoyed it with quibbles), but then where s2 was going with my beloved Tyrells switched the ROI on the effort of watching an HBO show, and I just stopped, and have not watched anything since, nor the spin-off(s?). And my interest in ASOIAF as a series/Westeros as a world has waned to… well, not probably nonexistence, yet, but it’s not much of a draw, and I’ve forgotten a lot of the lore and history and names that were at the top of my mind when I was active in westerosorting, so the activation energy is a lot higher, too. But! I’ve always had a soft spot for the Dunk & Egg stories, and the reviews from both friends and critics were sounding really good, so I did want to see this one, and there it was.

And I liked it! And when the Westeros theme from Game of Thrones started up, that did send a little shiver down my back, because I do still remember the excitement of watching the amazing credits animation back in season 1, when everything was exciting and brimming with potential. But, back to the show itself. ( Spoilers )

But overall, I had a really good time, and I look forward to the second season.

Stashing the Lost in Adaptation link, mostly for my own reference.

Gavin & Stacey – so, I’d heard about Gavin & Stacey just, sort of, vaguely, as a well-known British TV show – I think it has a tendency to come up on House of Games as a source of lowbrow questions? – but I had no sense at all of what it was about, or what decade it had come from, or anything at all, until Taskmaster s21 introduced me to Joanna Page, and since I found her so delightful, when I saw that was one of the options on the in-flight entertainment roster, I decided to give it a shot. And I thoroughly enjoyed the first season and would be interested in watching the rest.

( More, with marked spoilers at the very end )