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juushikaDevon's commute means we have about ~2 hours together per day, and I have not been coping well. My bad periods are both varied and familiar. This isn't the soul-deep sadness of sick family member; this is the dissociative grey of a depressive episode. It reminds me too much of college, and of watching my one source of comfort walk away. An overreaction—it is just two weeks of this hell commute—but given how many extenuating circumstances there are I'm unsurprised.
But I declare last week the worst of it. It began with 3 days of Devon being out of state for training, which is behind us now. Seeing him over the weekend helped reset my brain. We wasted a day driving up to see the exact apartment location, and get a feel for its placement. The highway sound is audible, but sounds like wind in the trees and I don't expect it'll seep indoors. The park and library both abut the apartment complex. This puts to rest a lot of my ... purchasing anxiety, I suppose.
And I started the active packing process—mostly clothes/books/games so far. I appreciate an activity to eat up the hours. There'll be rushed things later, and a huge list of things we don't have (nothing urgent except maybe ... flatware...), but my mum has volunteered a lot of items, including a couch. And we move in exactly a week. A week!
It'll get worse and get better but then hopefully be better indefinitely.
* * *
I've been watching The Magicians while packing, but had to stop for 3.5 "A Life in the Day" because it deserved my full attention. It's so like Star Trek: TNG 5.25 "The Inner Light," a comparison I don't make lightly, because that episode is phenomenal and they're not similar just in concept but in quality. My only complaint is can we just cast old people to play old versions of characters. The same episode is happy to cast multiple actors for the same growing son, and aging makeup still sucks. Just cast old people! Anyway who cares. The premise is of one those pure gold tropes—"it was all a dream/time loop" is only a cop-out when it avoids character development, but this more closely parallels a Bad End: it's an insight to a life these people could have and which, for both viewer and eventually for character, informs their character going forward. It's so queer! It's beautifully paced and the denouement, the beauty of all life, made me cry.
(3.9 "All that Josh" made me cry, too, but that's because musical numbers are cheating.)
I only read the first book in the series, and know bits of the plot of the rest (largely: Julia exists) because Teja read the other two. A chunk of my engagement in the first season or so was seeing how the promising but poorly-handled concepts of the book were translated more successfully to TV. Adaptation is fascinating! but most of the secret to success was to add PoC and add women and let all of the above exist in the same place in the narrative.
Now the show has mostly exceeded my book knowledge, so I can't look at adaptation. My technical focus is largely on tropes, particularly how they handle bad tropes. "Not really dead" sucks because it removes risk (this I admit is still a concern) and consequences—but there are consequences aplenty and character are radically changed by death. Julia's entire story is an inch away from awful (and I'm sure the books are), but the show intentionally engages and interrogates and subverts its tropes re: character growth & plot devices as result of trauma. The throughline is multiple-episode consequences, which is what separates the mystical pregnancy trope from Buffy's PTSD; not just nods to continuity, but complicated things persisting though multiple episodes/plotlines as well as being the focus of entire episodes/plots. I've loved this aspect of the genre's evolution since I finally saw The X-Files, and this is the payoff.
And my emotional focus is the character arcs. It wasn't, in the first season—the cast is better in the show than the books, but they were still assholes in a stylized but still-unlikable way. The issue of friendship isn't light-handed—the show doesn't bother itself with light-handed—but it is humanizing, and contrasts effectively against the asshole aesthetic. It's built room for episodes like "A Life in a Day." "TNG's "The Inner Light" works because of investment in Picard; I can't really remember the episode's supporting characters, but I remember discovering a different side to a distinct, stylized, role-defined character. "A Life in a Day" only develops character arcs in snips and snatches; the more consistent development is in relationships, between Quentin and Eliot, between the characters and Fillory, the characters and their quest/social role/social circle. If you can also sing a musical number about it then it's not exactly ... delicately written. But it's working, that combination of longterm repercussions persisting through sometimes-episodic writing as a form of trope inversion + found family/friendship narratives as trope played straight = engaging, effective character arcs.
I still don't know if it's a good show, but I'm glad I picked it up.
(By coincidence/kismet, three convos about the show have been occurring through the bits of the internet I visit, all with similar vibes, all with an undercurrent of "I hope Lev Grossman hates the show, because it stands in opposition to so many of the bitter, hateful, limited, gross things that made his books so awful" and I delight in it. I put off the show for so long because of the damn book!)
But I declare last week the worst of it. It began with 3 days of Devon being out of state for training, which is behind us now. Seeing him over the weekend helped reset my brain. We wasted a day driving up to see the exact apartment location, and get a feel for its placement. The highway sound is audible, but sounds like wind in the trees and I don't expect it'll seep indoors. The park and library both abut the apartment complex. This puts to rest a lot of my ... purchasing anxiety, I suppose.
And I started the active packing process—mostly clothes/books/games so far. I appreciate an activity to eat up the hours. There'll be rushed things later, and a huge list of things we don't have (nothing urgent except maybe ... flatware...), but my mum has volunteered a lot of items, including a couch. And we move in exactly a week. A week!
It'll get worse and get better but then hopefully be better indefinitely.
* * *
I've been watching The Magicians while packing, but had to stop for 3.5 "A Life in the Day" because it deserved my full attention. It's so like Star Trek: TNG 5.25 "The Inner Light," a comparison I don't make lightly, because that episode is phenomenal and they're not similar just in concept but in quality. My only complaint is can we just cast old people to play old versions of characters. The same episode is happy to cast multiple actors for the same growing son, and aging makeup still sucks. Just cast old people! Anyway who cares. The premise is of one those pure gold tropes—"it was all a dream/time loop" is only a cop-out when it avoids character development, but this more closely parallels a Bad End: it's an insight to a life these people could have and which, for both viewer and eventually for character, informs their character going forward. It's so queer! It's beautifully paced and the denouement, the beauty of all life, made me cry.
(3.9 "All that Josh" made me cry, too, but that's because musical numbers are cheating.)
I only read the first book in the series, and know bits of the plot of the rest (largely: Julia exists) because Teja read the other two. A chunk of my engagement in the first season or so was seeing how the promising but poorly-handled concepts of the book were translated more successfully to TV. Adaptation is fascinating! but most of the secret to success was to add PoC and add women and let all of the above exist in the same place in the narrative.
Now the show has mostly exceeded my book knowledge, so I can't look at adaptation. My technical focus is largely on tropes, particularly how they handle bad tropes. "Not really dead" sucks because it removes risk (this I admit is still a concern) and consequences—but there are consequences aplenty and character are radically changed by death. Julia's entire story is an inch away from awful (and I'm sure the books are), but the show intentionally engages and interrogates and subverts its tropes re: character growth & plot devices as result of trauma. The throughline is multiple-episode consequences, which is what separates the mystical pregnancy trope from Buffy's PTSD; not just nods to continuity, but complicated things persisting though multiple episodes/plotlines as well as being the focus of entire episodes/plots. I've loved this aspect of the genre's evolution since I finally saw The X-Files, and this is the payoff.
And my emotional focus is the character arcs. It wasn't, in the first season—the cast is better in the show than the books, but they were still assholes in a stylized but still-unlikable way. The issue of friendship isn't light-handed—the show doesn't bother itself with light-handed—but it is humanizing, and contrasts effectively against the asshole aesthetic. It's built room for episodes like "A Life in a Day." "TNG's "The Inner Light" works because of investment in Picard; I can't really remember the episode's supporting characters, but I remember discovering a different side to a distinct, stylized, role-defined character. "A Life in a Day" only develops character arcs in snips and snatches; the more consistent development is in relationships, between Quentin and Eliot, between the characters and Fillory, the characters and their quest/social role/social circle. If you can also sing a musical number about it then it's not exactly ... delicately written. But it's working, that combination of longterm repercussions persisting through sometimes-episodic writing as a form of trope inversion + found family/friendship narratives as trope played straight = engaging, effective character arcs.
I still don't know if it's a good show, but I'm glad I picked it up.
(By coincidence/kismet, three convos about the show have been occurring through the bits of the internet I visit, all with similar vibes, all with an undercurrent of "I hope Lev Grossman hates the show, because it stands in opposition to so many of the bitter, hateful, limited, gross things that made his books so awful" and I delight in it. I put off the show for so long because of the damn book!)
no subject
Date: 2019-03-29 06:14 pm (UTC)I hope the move goes smoothly -- it sounds like a really difficult period right now. <3