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catching up to series
Ciro and I have been watching The Expanse and are 6 episodes into season 2. (Also I skipped the first 4 episodes of season 1.) We put it off for a long time but ultimately I'm here because Jared Harris sometimes shows up. That is ultimately what I ask of a TV show.
The plot feels like it's written by somebody who played a lot of tabletop RPGs rather than someone who studied international conflicts. That limits how good it can be but also lets me enjoy it for what it is: a place to watch various colorful character business. It doesn't super need to make sense or build to something. Almost all the performances are fun and weird, and many of them resemble the personalities of people I know in my real life but am not used to seeing onscreen. I enjoy spending time with them.
The show feels throwback in a couple of bad ways, though. One is the protagonist, Jim Holden, who is presented as the moral center but is incredibly grating. He is my least favorite patriarchal fantasy archetype, "I am going to be an asshole any time somebody else tries to make a decision or calls a vote, while also insisting I didn't ask to be in charge and everyone should pity me for my terrible burden." (Example: Jack from Lost season 1.) Ciro thinks this vibe may come entirely from the choices of the actor, choices we do not like at all, but I'm not sure it isn't in the writing too.
The other one is that it's super women in refrigerators in a way I haven't seen in ten or 15 years. If a little girl shows up who is not main cast, she is somebody's daughter and is going to be killed to make them sad. I remember that so clearly from my childhood, and it being a reason I never gave a shit about TV dramas. It's weird the way TV and Comics did this more than books and movies did. I guess it has to do with the time pressures of serialized scripting. "Quick we need to add more emotional punch to this ep for cheap. Kill a little girl."
I'm less mad about this show doing it than I'm mad about it being Standard Operating Procedure for so damn long. It tells you who's allowed in the writers' room.
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Ilario and I have been reading Diane Duane's Young Wizards series at bedtime, and we've just hit the fifth book, which is the first one I haven't read. I read the series when the fourth one came out, in 1993, when the Science Fiction Book Club was selling the hardbacks for cheap. (SFBC still exists, by the way.) The next swath of books didn't come out until a new publishing deal in 2001-2005. (The series went through I think 4 or 5 publishers.)
By 2001, I was not hanging out in the young adult section of bookstores anymore. (I know some adults read a lot of YA. I mostly don't.) I'm not sure I even knew the series ever went past four books until maybe 2018 when Tumblr existed and I followed Diane Duane's Tumblr. So I'm interested to see how this all turns out.
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A couple of days ago I finished inking a sketch of two people repairing a spaceship, and it took a couple weeks because I would get nervous about it and have to stop and think for a few days. (And let ink dry, is the other thing. I'd get to a point where it was like "If I try to draw this line, I'm going to drag my hand across another line and smudge it.") It's good and I like it.
I'm still figuring out and experimenting with shading, with line weights, with adding color. I'm very confident of my linework, so it's a leap of faith every time I decide to potentially mess it up. I'm compensating by obsessively taking photos so that even if I destroy the drawing I have a record of the earlier version of the drawing.
As Ilario puts it, and this is a compliment, I am very good at drawing straight lines. In other words, I have a strong connection between my hand and my eye, and can put on paper what I intend to put on paper. What I'm trying to now incorporate into my style is the part when I'm not sure where I want the line to go, or when I want it to be more than lines.
The plot feels like it's written by somebody who played a lot of tabletop RPGs rather than someone who studied international conflicts. That limits how good it can be but also lets me enjoy it for what it is: a place to watch various colorful character business. It doesn't super need to make sense or build to something. Almost all the performances are fun and weird, and many of them resemble the personalities of people I know in my real life but am not used to seeing onscreen. I enjoy spending time with them.
The show feels throwback in a couple of bad ways, though. One is the protagonist, Jim Holden, who is presented as the moral center but is incredibly grating. He is my least favorite patriarchal fantasy archetype, "I am going to be an asshole any time somebody else tries to make a decision or calls a vote, while also insisting I didn't ask to be in charge and everyone should pity me for my terrible burden." (Example: Jack from Lost season 1.) Ciro thinks this vibe may come entirely from the choices of the actor, choices we do not like at all, but I'm not sure it isn't in the writing too.
The other one is that it's super women in refrigerators in a way I haven't seen in ten or 15 years. If a little girl shows up who is not main cast, she is somebody's daughter and is going to be killed to make them sad. I remember that so clearly from my childhood, and it being a reason I never gave a shit about TV dramas. It's weird the way TV and Comics did this more than books and movies did. I guess it has to do with the time pressures of serialized scripting. "Quick we need to add more emotional punch to this ep for cheap. Kill a little girl."
I'm less mad about this show doing it than I'm mad about it being Standard Operating Procedure for so damn long. It tells you who's allowed in the writers' room.
--
Ilario and I have been reading Diane Duane's Young Wizards series at bedtime, and we've just hit the fifth book, which is the first one I haven't read. I read the series when the fourth one came out, in 1993, when the Science Fiction Book Club was selling the hardbacks for cheap. (SFBC still exists, by the way.) The next swath of books didn't come out until a new publishing deal in 2001-2005. (The series went through I think 4 or 5 publishers.)
By 2001, I was not hanging out in the young adult section of bookstores anymore. (I know some adults read a lot of YA. I mostly don't.) I'm not sure I even knew the series ever went past four books until maybe 2018 when Tumblr existed and I followed Diane Duane's Tumblr. So I'm interested to see how this all turns out.
--
A couple of days ago I finished inking a sketch of two people repairing a spaceship, and it took a couple weeks because I would get nervous about it and have to stop and think for a few days. (And let ink dry, is the other thing. I'd get to a point where it was like "If I try to draw this line, I'm going to drag my hand across another line and smudge it.") It's good and I like it.
I'm still figuring out and experimenting with shading, with line weights, with adding color. I'm very confident of my linework, so it's a leap of faith every time I decide to potentially mess it up. I'm compensating by obsessively taking photos so that even if I destroy the drawing I have a record of the earlier version of the drawing.
As Ilario puts it, and this is a compliment, I am very good at drawing straight lines. In other words, I have a strong connection between my hand and my eye, and can put on paper what I intend to put on paper. What I'm trying to now incorporate into my style is the part when I'm not sure where I want the line to go, or when I want it to be more than lines.
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The political stuff is still way better than on any other sci-fi show. The fridging is far, far less with one irritating exception in S4. I'm biased because it's my favourite thing on telly.
The sketch is incredible btw. I'd get it as a tattoo. Not even exaggerating.
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I also haven't found a way to talk about it that sounds right, but there's something really special about the way the pilot, Alex, is friendly but dweeby and also adult and also good at his job. I don't know how to put it. He's somebody you want around who is going to be great, who is not a leader, but isn't introverted. It's very relatable? He doesn't remind me of me, he just seems like a person. And Amos could be so grating but is instead delightful.
Anyway I'm glad you like it so much because that gives me a good deal of confidence there is even more great stuff ahead.
And thanks for the compliment about the sketch. :)
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To be clear, Alex isn't my favorite character, so much as that I'm excited that the show makes space for characters like that to exist in its world. Kind of like how everybody in The Office is odd and exaggerated (it's comedy) but then Oscar seems like a regular guy who walked in there, but it's not played up like "oh Oscar's the regular guy reacting to the weirdos." He's just a regular guy, extending his regular guy aura to the setting, non-ostentatiously.
Basically, I think the fact that Alex exists the way he exists so far makes me accept the reality of the other characters more. It would make sense if that character needed to leave at a certain point. I'm slightly nervous that they'll do a plot centered on him, or he'll get angsty about something, which would cut against what I like about that character, which is that he feels like the person who happens to be there, not like the person who has to be there or that we're focused on.
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That is an extremely legitimate reason.
The other one is that it's super women in refrigerators in a way I haven't seen in ten or 15 years.
Huh. I have been recommended this series by two or three friends now and no one has mentioned the refrigerators. I appreciate the information, although I'm sorry it's true.
Ilario and I have been reading Diane Duane's Young Wizards series at bedtime, and we've just hit the fifth book, which is the first one I haven't read.
I have not read beyond A Wizard Abroad myself—and I found it weird enough when that one showed up—but I know people who like the later books. Ada Hoffmann has a really interesting review of A Wizard Alone, which Duane rewrote and republished after being informed that her depiction of an autistic teenager was not very correct.
I like your spaceship sketch a lot.
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Oh, that's very cool! I did click through.
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Okay, cool! Maybe the people who were recommending it to me had just forgotten that the first two seasons were like that.