where is a random title generator when you need one

[ever_neutral]

(1) I am on a brief break from school. Hence, postage.

(2) But more significantly, it is my cat's birthday today! Pixie is no longer a kitten. ;___; To celebrate, here is a photo of him on a ladder:



(3) As I am online I guess I will use this opportunity to talk about television.

Elementary is returning in a matter of days (... in Australia) and I realize I never posted about my feels about the ending of S1. So.

• So... that twist. I am ambivalent. This post pretty much sums it up for me. Not that I don't think it's kind of ingenious, because it is, but I can't be unreservedly flaily about it either.


• Irene(/Moriarty)/Sherlock should totally be my thing (FOE!YAY!) but evidently I am doing it wrong because honestly I am not really shipping that. The flashback dump did not excite me and oddly I am not seeing the Jonny L.M./Natalie D. fire I want to be seeing. I WANT TO SHIP IT BUT I DOOOOOOON'T. #life problems


• I maintain that the Joan/Sherlock story is the single best, most consistent, and best-developed thing about the show and I am still way more invested in their relationship than anything else. He named a bee after her, ok, all other arguments are irrelevant.


• Alternatively, Joan/Moriarty should be a thing.


• Lookin' forward to s2 though, despite my grumbling!

And I was supposed to review White Christmas aaaaages ago but didn't b/c suck and now I've lost most of my immediate feels ;___________; Still,

• ZOMG best show ever.


• Obviously the "are monsters created or born?" theme appealed, although sometimes I felt like it was more like an anvil -- in contrast to how subtle and slow-paced the overall show was.


• But the way they wrapped up that theme was :D :D :D I endorsed that ending so violently.


• Dude, Bang Sung Joon is crazy attractive in this. The shorter hair suits him so much better than the SUFBB mop tbh. And, fine, sociopathy also looks crazy good on him, smh.


• My other "fave" dudes were Mi Reu and Yoon Su and Young Jae for reasons of psychotic jackassery and in Yoon Su's case unadulterated masochism. X(((((((


• Speaking of which, SO UPSET ABOUT YOON SU'S DEMISE WHY SHOW WHYYYYY /o\ /o\ /o\ /o\ /o\


• ofc Eun Sung was my girl. The m:f ratio didn't even bother me here because Eun Sung.


• lbr Eun Sung/Young Jae was the wrong ship of my dead heart, I NEVER CLAIMED NOT TO BE EMBARRASSINGLY PREDICTABLE. "become twisted enough for a twisted boy like me to like you"??? LIKE IT COULD BE ANY OTHER WAY.


• And then I read Ranya's fic and I cried and my tears were black mascara.


• This show deserves a much better review OTL but suffice it to say everyone should watch this and then come cry.

Aside from White Christmas I also recently finished My Girlfriend is a Gumiho and Coffee Prince! \o/ Oh, and Boys Over Flowers. Which I am not going to spare further thought to because lol no. Aaaaand I am now about halfway through Playful Kiss, which I am enjoying a lot more than I would... So if you have feelings about those things then heckle in comments.

(4) Can someone please explain to me why Infinite are playing at the likes of L.A. and Paris on their world tour but not doing A SINGLE DATE in Australia? Like, it's Australia. tbh I have no idea how popular they are in the U.S./Europe (supposedly the NY tickets sold out quickly, idk?) but come on. DOES FRANCE HAVE ITS OWN KPOP RADIO CHANNEL? I THINK NOT. (Not that I know what I'm talking about, mind.) Anyway, I hope everyone on my flist who have tickets have the time of their lives on my behalf. Please touch Woohyun for me. (No, don't really do that, leave him alone.) (But do send him this bleeding black heart from me to his fishnet shirts. ;______; I can say no more.)

(5) idk.

Comments

[ever-neutral.livejournal.com]

..................................................................

[youcallitwinter.livejournal.com]

I AM SO SORRY, OKAY. I don't even know what is happening.

lmao, although now I'm genuinely intrigued; what is it that you hated about everything? I'm getting a very Ha-ni/Seung-jo vibe off the OTP (while I'd always thought it would be Jun-pyo/Jan-di instead.) so that really works for me, and it's even less problematic afaics because Tae-kyung is clearly fail and a dork of the highest order, while Seung-jo wasn't. And ain't it typical, I didn't watch this show for the longest time because I was so afraid of falling into the Ji-hoo/Jan-di-esque pit again, but turns out I don't ship second lead at all. I enjoy their interactions and everything, but I think they're getting second lead shipping treatment, while Ji-hoo/Jan-di pretty much had an OTP dynamic. There were so many times in that show where I thought it was totally possible for the show to do an about turn on the OTP (and it made much less narrative sense that they didn't), but here, I can't see Mi-nam(/what her actual name is) interested in Shin-woo at all. In general, it has a lot of elements of a Hong Sisters drama that I recognize from My Girl.

and Jang Geun-suk kind of has the hottest voice in the history of ever. It had 2 b said.

[ever-neutral.livejournal.com]

I'm getting a very Ha-ni/Seung-jo vibe off the OTP
I dare you to say this to Eleonore's face.

Well, since you asked... what I hated was basically how Tae-kyung was constantly an emotionally abusive dick to Mi-nam (e.g. iirc, throwing the only keepsake she had of her mother in the river and forcing her to search for it at peril to her health like all day ???) and Mi-nam had absolutely no tools to defend herself or hold him accountable because (i) she was in a strange place all alone and (ii) Tae-kyung radiated ~damage~ so much she felt compelled to love him unconditionally and idealise the fuck out of him (so basically, she switched one "God" for another, ha!!).

tbf I managed to tolerate them towards the end of the show, but wrt the first half I straight up do not see the appeal whatsoever.

I didn't ship Mi-nam/Shin-woo canon-wise either, btw. Though, I wouldn't have minded seeing that story play out in an AU where the writers cared about their supporting characters.

Jang Geun Suk is okay.

[youcallitwinter.livejournal.com]

I AM MUCH APOLOGIES, FORGIVE ME, ETC.

I dare you to say this to Eleonore's face.

lmao, why though?

tbf I managed to tolerate them towards the end of the show, but wrt the first half I straight up do not see the appeal whatsoever.

weirdly enough, the throwing-the-keepsake thing was pretty much the last thing that the show did that bothered me about them? because I felt their relationship drastically improved post that. that was pretty awful in itself, but after that, afaict, TK dialed down the dickwardness a lot and was actually really nice to Mi-nam, constantly doing things for her sake, even while whining about it (which was what reminded me of Ha-ni/Seung-jo re: the divide between what he's saying and what he's doing and "oh you're such a nuisance" and "what trouble could you possibly have caused now?".)

And, THIS IS SO STRANGE, but I find Tae-kyung a remarkably honest character, which is what is fascinating about him for me. He's never outright dishonest about what he feels or pushing the burden and responsibility of his feelings on someone else to alleviate his own (which is a pretty common kdrama male lead trait, "why do you make me like you." "I'm going crazy because of you.") It's mostly that he hasn't figured them out till he draws pie charts and color coordinates stuff. Like, (and this unlike Seung-jo) he never plays with her emotions or lets her stew in her insecurities if he knows of them (as in all the ~dramatic conversations about stars and moons and how useless she feels, all end with him making the metaphor something pleasant if it's in reference to her), he outright tells her he likes having her around, tells her he's on her side, tells her that he's smiling when her eyes are closed and she thinks he's mad (this is such a small moment, but I was all !!!!! over it because she was all "are you mad at me?" and he, in this completely matter-of-fact way, went "no, you can't see me because your eyes are closed, but i'm actually smiling"), constantly tells her that she's special to him in various round-about ways, tells her that he likes her, the moment he figures it out. It's just that I never feel that he's trying to gain the emotional high-ground with her by keeping his feelings guarded, even when hers are obvious to him. it's mostly that his (and her) feelings aren't obvious to him because feelings are such messy things and he's so neurotic about things being clean. Even in the moments he's jealous of Shin-woo, the text makes me believe that it's not just jealousy guiding his actions, but he's genuinely anxious that MN will get hurt because SW doesn't like her. I've actually never found him mean to her for the sake of it.

but i can totally understand that the constant idealization can be completely off-putting because there is such a disjunct between what we see TK as and what MN sees him as, lol. But I didn't mind because I was treating it like HN/SJ levels of crushage in my head. besides the fact that she was supposed to be a nun-in-training and has been constantly sheltered and could only understand this particular emotional upheaval if she related it to another emotion that she was familiar with- ie her love for God- made me less wary than I would have been with almost any other character and the same dynamic. and i felt like though TK's damage made MN love him unconditionally, it didn't really affect his actions towards her, if that makes sense-- i.e. I didn't feel like he did much that the text wanted to excuse because of his emotional damage. it was more of MN being comforting to him in moments of vulnerability (which, lol, worked for me so much) rather than the text giving him space to lash out against her in those moments and using his damage as an excuse for the lashing out. it was mostly as he told her that she was always around and distracting him when he was low (i.e. had just come back from a conversation with his mother) and that the day would have been "frighteningly long without [you]."

WHO WOULDA THUNK I WOULD HAVE THESE LONG THOUGHTS ON YB. THIS IS INSANE. (although tbf what don't i have long thoughts on.)

[ever-neutral.livejournal.com]

lol.

Okay, bro, I think we'd best table this discussion because I keep reading your comment and being like




BUT LOOK. IT'S FINE. You can ship datz if that's your jam, that's your prerogative. I mean, I was willing to just take "I understand it's problematic but it gives me feelings" because that is usually where I live.

I also recognize that you wouldn't be writing me this thesis if you didn't feel the need to ~defend yourself to me? So I should now apologize for fostering this impression. tbh my Nicolas Cage reaction image was hyperbole. It's the ship that personally bothers me, not you shipping it. (tbh, the only thing that bothers me about you and Lizzie going about your ways is the claim that the problematic behaviour wasn't ~that~ abusive because it implies that mine and Eleonore's squick reactions weren't as valid as the interpretation you drew. Which I recognize is probably not your intention but just putting it out there.

TL;DR agree to disagree, mmmkay?

[youcallitwinter.livejournal.com]

Hee, no, not at all, I only wrote all that because I'm used to coming over here and rainbow!vomiting whatever I feel, it legit had nothing to do with either yours or my reaction to the show! I was just trying to delineate my own thoughts on why the dynamic didn't bother me much, because I'd fully expected it to. It WAS because I didn't feel it as problematic in my reading of it (as opposed to v.-problematic-but-I-ship-it-anyway which also I do a lot? like I'd mentioned in the Secret Garden ship), but if you did, in your reading of it, then that is, of course, entirely your prerogative, and I'm sure neither Lizzie nor I mean to suggest at all that your interpretation is less ~deep or you're not looking at the show ~correctly or that you wouldn't have been squicked if you'd been reading it the ~right way.

THIS IS LEGIT THE FIRST THING WE HAVE DISAGREED ON RE: KDRAMAS IS WHY I'M DDD: But haha, yes, of course.

ETA: But I feel like I should stress that I did not in any way mean to imply that your feelings on the subject were invalid, and if that's what came through, I sincerely apologize!

[ever-neutral.livejournal.com]

Np np we're cool.



THIS IS LEGIT THE FIRST THING WE HAVE DISAGREED ON RE: KDRAMAS IS WHY I'M DDD:
Ha, statistically it had to happen eventually. :P

[youcallitwinter.livejournal.com]

ALEX, I HAVE SO MANY PRETTY ASIAN ICONS RIGHT NOW, I AM DYING. WHY CAN'T ICON-CHOOSING BE A LEGIT PROFESSION. (also lmao@asian, it feels so weird to keep saying that when i'm asian too- as are you-, but, y'know.)

[ever-neutral.livejournal.com]

WHERE ARE YOU GETTING ALL THESE ICONS FROM?????? I DEMAND TO KNOW.

(lol, ita, it's because asian things are rare in deeply anglocentric fandom tbqh.)

[youcallitwinter.livejournal.com]

I spent hours searching for them and then hours staring at them. And I'm not even kidding. My life is officially ruined.

(this is true, they're not even like a token representative group or anything. funny, i never paid much attention to it before :s)