Laughter Through Tears

I finished The Innocent Sleep, the latest October Daye novel, as well as the novella at the back of Sleep No More, which was from Reysel's point of view. I still haven't finished the Luidaeg novella that came with Be the Serpent, though. That's probably next.

Otherwise, I've been venting my anxiety by reading villainess-themed webtoons, such as The Perks of Being a Villainess, in which a soft-touch Korean engineering student learns about self-respect by assuming the role of a mean rich girl. It reminds me a little of Death Is the Only Ending for the Villainess, in that the protagonist is quite self-interested and the male love interest seems to like that about her. Also, for spoiler reasons. On a shallower note, I really like her purple hair.

It was alias_sqbr unsurprisingly who first got me into Beware of the Vilainess (now also a Yuletide fandom), and thus introduced me to an entire sub-genre of webtoons, much to my delight. "Villainess" comics (manga and manhwa, originating from a variety of countries and each with its own unique twist) that revolve around the isekai premise of a modern person "falling into" (or reincarnating into) a video game, except it's an otome dating sim, and the female protagonist is reincarnated as the game's catty and vain female villain. Basically, the rough equivalent of what USian hgh school shows call an "alpha bitch", on the model of Mean Girls' Regina George, but like, the daughter of a duke in a fantasy kingdom.

The in-universe game's premise revolves around the heroine being a "saintess", a model of feminine virtue who's gentle, healing (often literally), and preternaturally forgiving. She's instantly more beautiful and more popular than the alpha bitch villainess, sometimes despite being an adopted commoner. Often it seems one of the men who falls for her will be the villainess's fiance, who will then break off the engagement with his unpleasant betrothed, causing her to fall into a jealous rage and do everything in her power to sabotage the saintly heroine (who will then forgive her and tearfully insist that they could've been friends). The level of violence varies.

The reaction of the protagonist also varies. Some of them want to redeem the villainess that they were reincarnated as, and set her on a better path. I generally find this less interesting, because I'm me and a horrible little gremlin. A lot of these de-villification schemes seem to involve the villainess acting as wife or step-mother to a character who would eventually have become a villain, or even an older sister. By contrast, my favorite stories (from the ones I've read) give some kind of twist on the theme. Like "Beware of the Villainess", which starts with the protagonist cheerfully proclaiming that she intends to be neither saint nor villain, just to enjoy her life as a rich duke's daughter in the lap of luxury... until she opens a campaign to rescue the original saintly heroine from her sub-par male love interests.

I keep losing track of all the comics I'm following, and because so many of these are fan translations, the update schedule isn't always consistent. Labor of love, and all. The villainess tag also branches out from isekai stories to more general time travel and reincarnation ones, or other variations on second-chance tropes.

( Six recs and links )

I meant to note how many chapters each one has, but lost track. There are also a couple of others I've read through, but have decided not to link due to being ambivalent about their quality. I remain alert to emerging recs.

Now I'm going to sink into another one, and see if I have more recs for you later.

Volumes 6&7 of Saga are out in TPB format and we picked them up at this year's Olamot. Naturally I devoured them both at record speed. The next arc doesn't start until sometime next month, so for the first time in literal years, I'm actually caught up with the rest of the world (on this or any comic book).

My brother and I used to get a monthly comics package delivered via subscription. This was a method that more or less worked for us for many years, and my brother especially was a little pissed to see it go defunct. But since I've been keeping up with individual issues less and less for years now, and TPBs are generally much easier to read and to store, I'm not too miffed. There was a time when I would read and reread every issue we got, monthly, sometimes four or five times a month, while waiting for the next package with bated breath.

Now we more or less pick up TPBs only at the cons, twice a year, where the two comic book shops (AFAIK the only two in Israel) both have booths. So we get what we can and whatever they don't have we wait on. That's how I got the three Rat Queens TPBs (I reviewed the first two here), the first volume of the new Ms. Marvel (which I still want to catch up on) etc. etc. Some Star Wars volumes too, which I haven't finished, and one Adventure Time comic (with Carey Pietsch doing art).

Getting back to Saga, after the major cliffhanger that I left off on, the two new volumes were a pretty rough rollercoaster. New characters come in, old characters leave temporarily or permanently. One of the leaving characters was a great favorite of mine, and looks to be as permanently gone as they get. When is funny, considering that the Stalk was one of the first (possibly the first) deaths in the comic, and she's still around in some form or another. And the plot is unfolding in such a way that I can still confuse the Will and Prince Robot IV with each other, because... well, their arcs just have a lot of shared points.

But anyway, Saga is still riveting and if anyone has opinions about it I'd love to hear them. I ight even d a proper review, once I've gotten through some of my backlog.

NaNoWriMo is over and I need to kickstart my reading habits. I tried to read Ancillary Justice but I'm having trouble getting deep enough in to be swept away, I might put it off until I have some extra mental energies. I have a number of books saved to my Kobo account that I have not yet bought, and I have a stack of TPBs. And, of course, my over-full book shelves full of smart books that I am perpetually too tired to read.

One of the last books I finished was Shira Glassman's The Second Mango but the new releases (from which she actually gets royalties) aren't on Kobo and I'd probably had to get them through Amazon or something. There are four novels in all and one short story collection, I think. But I have a lot of other options.

1. N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season is A Smart Book and also has geological tectonic magic, which is fascinating and extra appealing to me. On the con side, the excerpt I read gives me the impression of dense prose and a difficult narrator voice.

2. T. Kingfisher's (Ursula Vernon) Bryony and Roses is also an award-winner and yet it is also a fairy-tale and has that UV-brand deadpan humor that I find so comfortable.

3. Mary Robinette Kowal's Shades of Milk and Honey is a magicky regency romance, and my familiarity with the author's style means it promises to be a non-offensive f/m pairing, possibly in the vein of Sorcerer to the Crown (which was anj instant favorite). Also likely to be light and comfortable.

4. The Golem and the Jinni is that Jewish fantasy novel I have ostensibly always wanted, and also fairly well-reviewed (although it doesn't have the kind of gushing following some others on my list do). A bit of an unknown quantity.

5. The Lies of Locke Lamora. People having been raving about this book for as long as I can remember. Am I in a lovable rogue mood? Who knows.

6. Michelle Sagara's Cast in Shadow which was recommended to me by someone and indeterminate time period in the past. Yay, memory! I downloaded the preview for this on a whim and it gives me a comfortable feeling of a heroine with trust issues.

7. Or I could just get the next in one of the series I'm reading. I have a bunch of those I haven't finished, and that might help me get into a good reading routine.

8. I also have the TPB of Monstress (from Marjorie Liu) sitting on my shelf. And one of the Marceline Adventure Time books, and some Star Wars stuff. They are good for reading in bits and pieces, generally, but less convenient to carry in my purse (I have a purse. I'm a person who carries a purse now.).

Decisions are unusually hard for me lately. Or, like, more than usually hard.

This is the story of how DC comics depowered Barbara Gordon.

For twenty five years, Barbara Gordon played the role of Oracle, a master-hacker and world-class information broken, leader of the Birds of Prey and a revolving roster of superheroines, and one of the smartest people in the DC universe. This Oracle persona was developed by John Ostrander and Kim Yale after her spine injury in the famous (or notorious) storyline The Killing Joke. This storyline was rightly criticized for treating Batgirl as a prop in a story that focused on the relationship between Batman and the Joker. The Killing Joke is commonly included in lists of “fridgings”, brutal plots visited on female characters, for the purpose of providing motivation for male characters.

( Read more... )

Crossposted to hazelgold.net.

Instead of a tedious summation of my misadventures in academia and unemployment, I'm doing a Very Special 2013 Wrapup Reading Wednesday. Yay!

Last night (slightly after the new civil year ringed in) I finished Megan Turner's The Thief, the first book in the Attolia series, of which I heard many good things. I'm fairly certain I first heard of these books through oyceter and/or meganbmoore, but the name Attolia crops up pretty often in my circles. My friend Hez apparently hated it, though. Shrug.

That makes the books I've read since summer almost all lead-ins to another book. I want to continue all of them! It's hard to put them in order, but if I were: Hobb's Blood of Dragons (which I expect to be disappointed by, but I have a problem), Carey's Naamah's Curse (...I have several problems), Turner's The Queen of Attolia and Carriger's Changeless.

Other books I read in 2013 include: Gavin de Becker's The Gift of Fear, strongly recommended by the inimitable Captain Awkward, and a rereading of A Room of One's Own.

Books I am still in the middle of: Jorge Luis Borges' Ficciones on my brother's recommendation, Dorothy L. Sayers' Who's Body because the ebook was free, and a book on Babylonian mythology that I bought at the university bookshop on a whim. Naturally I have been picking them up and putting them back down as the mood strikes me. And, nominally, I've been in the middle of China Mieville's Perdido Street Station since sometime in 2012.

In 2014 I want to read more books cover to cover, and keep better track of them, possibly even blog about them more. I want to finish Mieville before I start on my other Kobo purchases, or on the other, free, ebooks I have. I want to be caught up on Saga and Animal Man, even if I can't maintain an interest in any other comics. And I want to read lots of fanfic, but that's a separate post that I think I'll make tomorrow.

Happy Wednesday.

We've been sorting through years (in my brother's case decades) of comics to figure out what we keep and what we try to sell. All the keepers go in my spacious new cabinets, sorted into shoeboxes for convenience (we are out of boxes and need more). I've taken this opportunity to try and catch up with monthlies I haven't been keeping up with. During school time, it was hard to keep in mind things like "when the monthly comics package comes in the mail" and "what happened last month" and "how far along am I" and besides, I was finding it generally harder to read.

Looking at the current subscription, there's a bunch of stuff I'm not sure I want to keep up with. Why did we subscribe to JLA, again? It seemed like a good idea at the time. And now that X-Factor is wrapping up (seven years of my life, right there) I don't know if we'll find enough monthlies we want to make shipping worthwhile. Legit, if I could get Saga digitally, I might just drop everything else. I just need to talk to my brother about it.

Then today I went to the pharmacy and sat for the make-up lady for about an hour. And made a hole in my budget. Good news, though, everyone says I look fantastic. I don't know if I'll ever get used to mascara, though.

Otherwise I'm just drowning myself in fandom and fanfic projects, trying to brush up on professional topics that I haven't touched in ages, and generally keeping busy to keep anxiety at bay. Trope bingo is going better than I had been concerned. For a while it looked like I'd have all ideas and no follow-through, a disease I'm intimately familiar with. However, things are looking up and that helps me generally feel good about myself. Well, the Wellbutrin gets some credit, too.

I've been in this apartment over two years and I finally got my bookshelves in today. And they are exactly what I wanted. Now for the task of filling them, which may -- may! -- take longer than I anticipated. I still have all the childhood books in my parents' house (childhood in this case includes the army, el oh el) not to mention bozes that haven't been touched in a decade. Literally. Plus my grandmother left me a hundred of her favorite books which she had wanted me to read for years and years, "when you have the time." My god I was a literary disappointment to her.

Anyway in terms of both book storage and reading, I have my work cut out for me. Not to mention, I found a whole stack of comics from Dragon*Con 2011, most of which I barely cracked open. My family has a book buying problem, I think. Or actually. It may just be my brother and myself. God. I remember the days when I read the same books over and over and I feel like kicking that kid in the shin or something.

So here I am again, attempting to connect my study materials to real life, fandom and/or porn, while nursing a stalking cold and a headache that feels as though Betty Crocker is trying to mind-control me through a handsome red tiara. Meanwhile I still haven't read the most recent monthly package of comics because I planned to do it on Friday but was just too goddamn exhausted, and the book I have been making gradual headway on since Dragon*Con has reached its point of WTF no return. I wish I was in bed reading or mainlining a new TV series. My bed is cozy and using it to study makes me sad.

Both my favorite fandoms are making me sad, both of them because of shipping. The only novelty is, in one case it's the f/f shippers who have gone rabid, illogical, fling flaming poo mad. As for the other Lost Girl-related stuff, that's to be expected. Ah, the mild social discomforts of being the "bad bisexual" in any given group of vagina-lovers. I could go on, but I don't feel like it. As for Homestuck, at this point I truly think I'd be happy if Jake English just up and died. Maybe I should do a whole essay about how hard it is for me to relate to male characters.

Just my luck, I get a canonically queer intellectual character that I actually sort of like, and his entire existence causes my primary fandom to go up in a BFBVFS.

I miss my Eeyore icon. Where'd it get off to?

First, three videos:

( Three Hannukah-appropriate YouTube videos behind the cut )

Next, fannish5's question for the week: "5 characters that don't (or wouldn't if it existed in their universe) celebrate Christmas."

( This is a question after my own heart. )