lesbiassparrow

Things that I like about this show:

1. Evil dad. He's really, really evil as you can tell by his smirk. His business empire (don't laugh) is built upon a design idea he stole off a 5 year old. The five year old has held a grudge ever since (seriously, she is mad about it, even if it does seem a bit insane as he presumably changed the design a fair bit to make it work. But he also ran off with her mum, which doesn't really seem to faze her.) Anyway, he's great and every show should have one.

2. Liang, the prettiest hero ever. If you don't believe me look at dangermousie's picspam: Click for lovely pictures. It should be illegal to be that pretty and wander around in public. As I find the heroine a bit wearing with her endless tears and wailing about how she will be a famous designer one day, I tend to watch for him and his very well-lit angst.

3. Er...I am not sure I have a 3. But look at the pictures of Liang! Yes.

Things that I don't like:

1. The heroine (Sui) is a bit of a wet blanket. There's a lot of clinging and very fetching tears and whining. She's alright when not whimpering but that's not a lot of the time. And unlike other the few other heroines of taiwanese soaps I've seen she doesn't actually have that much to complain about. Okay, evil designer stole her drawing as a five year old (how the hell did she even know about it? was she reading fashion magazines as a wee child?) and ran off with her mum (which no one - not even dad - seems all that upset about) but in the grand scheme of things it's perhaps not enough to have a desire for revenge that makes some Jacobean tragedy look tame by comparison.

And in incredible animal stories: Sooty shearwaters migrate for 40,000 miles. Really. Sooty Shearwater migration

ETA: I started reading The Lymond Chronicles and I know I've been told it's slow for the first 100 pages but no one said anything about the language! 'His whiskers promenaded!' 'which dislimned every shade of their privacy.'! It's like Walter Scott on acid - which might not necessarily be a bad thing, mind you.

ETA 2: There are wheens of things. And wily choleric eyes (how is that even possible? Surely if your eyes are angry they cannot really simultaneously be wily?) Soon I am sure there will be scrips mentioned! Tell me it is worth continuing with this book because otherwise it is like reading a melange of RL Stevenson and Walter Scott - authors whom I like but who are very much of their time. Which is not the 20th century.

ETA 3: Lymond has been 'infused with fresh, delicate energy' and also used a reference from Horace. One which, I might add, made no sense in this context unless he thinks his male companion is going to feck off with another man and suck his life blood dry. But I do not think I am supposed to imagine Lymond is in love with this man, so I don't quite understand.

Poems which are easy to dislike: the Aeneid

Most people's reactions on reading the Aeneid are a bit puzzled. As in 'what is all the fuss about this poem? You're kidding me that Virgil wrote it at two lines a day and this is what he came up with?'

It has the problem of not having a very inspiring hero. Aeneas, really, is a incredibly pallid character and also a bit of a git what with the trail of dead women he leaves in his wake.* Also he is not very bright. No, honestly, he is the dumbest epic hero ever. People give him prophecy after prophecy telling him to go to Italy and he's 'oh, right you mean Thrace/Crete/where ever I happen to see next.' Mind you, his father is just as thick, and completely one with him on the misreading of prophecy. (My favourite bit: the scene where dad sees horses and says that they are either an omen of peace or war. Right. Covering your bases a bit with that one, Anchises.)

But for all that I think it is a great and horribly sad poem, mainly because Aeneas is so ordinary. Here's this bit player in the Iliad who only wants a heroic death, who is forced by his mother, Venus, to carry the glory of Troy to Italy. And he doesn't want to. All he wants to do is settle down, rebuild what he can of Troy and have a quiet life with his son and father. He keeps trying to do this again and again and it ends in disaster until he just lets himself be swallowed up by his destiny.

And in the course of the poem he loses everything. He sees his whole world ripped away from him with the destruction of Troy. He loses the woman he loves, he abandons his mercy in the final lines of the poem to kill from sheer rage. And what does he get in return? A mother who once says she'd be happy if he died as long as she can save his son, three years with a woman who probably doesn't want him, and an empire he doesn't care about. It's all about sacrificing yourself for something which will give you no pleasure because people have bigger plans for you than you can possibly imagine or want. Which is why it is both great and horrible.

*I have just realised this makes him sound like a psychopath. He doesn't actually kill the women directly, more they sort of, well, die around him.

In the wake of fandom madness over Harry Potter, I bring you an abbreviated list of insane fandom before the internet. Actually it's just two examples, but they involve classic fiction so it should count as more, surely?

1. After Arthur Conan Doyle killed Holmes off in The Final Problem, angry letters poured in - one of which started 'you brute!.' He was also hit by the handbag of one irate reader.

2. Samuel Richardson also received angry and despairing mail about his mid 18th century novel, Clarissa. One woman accused him of stealing her life story, others said they were too traumatised to finish, and still others begged him to pair Clarissa off with her rapist Lovelace. (Yay! for early shippers wars.)

Sadly, fan craziness is not new. But it does gather and spread faster than before. And I bet they didn't have icons in Ye Olde Englande.