Prepare for the Fight Scene!

The movie was... decent. It was probably as good an adaptation as they could do, and in a lot of respects, I do think it's better than the book. The cast was very diverse; it very much felt like an international effort. They did a lot to fix the characterization problems I see in the book-- Ender actually has to learn how to do things and is not instantly perfect at everything, and they show him doing a decent job at building rapport and leadership skills, which were completely absent from the book. Graff is definitely portrayed as a crazy guy with a vendetta that makes no sense, and gets called out several times for his tactics, especially at the end with the "simulation" victory.

Stilson is not in fact killed, and Bonzo's fate is left ambiguous, but I suspect the movie intended for him to live as well. But at least the conflict is better set up than just "Graff decided it was ok to let somebody attempt to kill Ender to build Ender's character."

They entirely cut the subplot involving Peter and Valentine taking over the world through blogging. Which is good, because let's face it, that is completely ridiculous.

The main flaw in the movie is that the time frame is completely condensed. Instead of Ender spending 5-6 years between arriving at battle school at age 6, and fighting the final battle at 11-12(?), he gets promoted to Dragon army after a month or so of training, and then is shipped off to Command School maybe 4-6 months after that (because the human fleet is arriving in Formic space). The amount of time is unclear, but Dragon jumps from being a new army to being #1 in about one scene and a few lines of dialogue. Most of the time is spent on the command "simulations" and the final battle, but even that is pretty quick.

Basically, because everything happens so fast, the emotional impact of all of it is completely blunted. I didn't feel any emotional connection with the characters at all until maybe the end. The actors do a good job playing the characters, but the plot just moves too fast. So they fixed a lot of problems, but created others by squishing the entire plot into maybe a year of movie time. Also, the whole child soldier aspect makes even less sense, since now not only are you using a 12 year old to command your armies, but it's a 12 year old with maybe 6 months of training. Because that sounds like a great plan.

Also because things are moving so fast, there's a lot of telling instead of showing, where Ender voiceovers about how stressed he and the other trainees are, but don't appear any different from their previous scenes.

A number of the lines felt very forced to me. When they use 'the Enemy's gate is Down" it felt much more like something they knew they had to include rather than something that felt natural and flowed within the story. Same with Valentine's lines at the lake, and Alai's "salaam" moment. And a lot of the stuff that Graff says seems to come out of nowhere with no real explanation or reasoning behind it.

There were enough Speaker for the Dead references that made it clear they wanted a sequel, which I kind of cringe at the thought of.

The big draw of the movie: definitely the visuals. The special effects were lovely, and the computer controls for the "simulation" games at the end were gorgeous and immersive; it felt like I was watching them play the most epic version of StarCraft ever. It was a lot more exciting than just having those scenes described in the book.

Overall: a decent sci-fi movie with pretty effects, but nothing amazing. Much like the book, it brings up some interesting questions, but doesn't really address them very well. It solves some problems the book had, but creates others in doing so. Entertaining, but not really worth a rewatch.

So I saw this post on Tumblr:

Cersei vs. Alanna

Someone please write a giant meta essay on how Cersei Lannister and Alanna of Trebond both

dressed up as their twin brother
wanted to be a knight and
are called lioness

Like, what if Alanna had not gone through with the switching places? Would she have ended up as bitter as Cersei?

And what if Cersei had said a big “fuck you” to her father, cut her hair, dressed as a boy and run away? Would she have turned into a big damn feminist hero like Alanna?

Are they two sides of the same coin or am I imagining things?


And I started thinking, and then I did write an essay that is probably entirely too long. But it was an interesting diversion.

( Cersei and Alanna, OR When Life Gives You Lemons )

Right, so, Gen Con!

I meant to write this up on Monday, which I took off from my job at Curtis so my brain didn't melt from 10 straight days of work. However, as it turned out Monday turned out to be, instead of a restful, chillaxing day, a day where I did all the chores it had been impossible to do the week prior, which included tackling the massive, massive pile of dishes that result when no one does them for a week. Fortunately I had more energy on Sunday/Monday than I'd expected, so this wasn't too much a problem.

Anyway, the recap:
( Read more... )

We also saw lots of cool cosplay, which I made more of an effort to take pictures of this year:
( Cosplay Pics )

Recently I hit that point where I've read all the books I own and can't seem to find any new series I'm really interested in. (There's a bunch of books I like coming out in a few months, but that doesn't help me *now*.) So, out of boredom and desperation, I decided to re-read the entire Animorphs series.

These books were pretty much my main obsession from 4th to 7th grade (after which my brainspace was conquered by Pokemon.) I think they're the source of like half of my knowledge of animals, and they're definitely the reason for my fascination with birds of prey and probably birds in general. But, like most things from childhood, I really only remember very specific parts, and the rest of it has been kind of glossed over. So reading these has really been a fun exercise in rediscovering this story, at least so far.

I thought it might be fun to post a little summary and my thoughts along with each book, just to keep track.


( #1 - The Invasion )

So over the weekend I painted a t-shirt design I'd been mulling over for a couple months, and submitted it to Threadless.com. Threadless is a cool t-shirt site that works via a voting system-- each approved design goes through a vote, and if it gets a high enough score, they print it and not only does my design become available on t-shirts, but I get paid. Woo!



If you would like to see this become a real short OR just want to support art, please do go over and vote. I'm really proud of this one so I hope it makes it in.

Just finished listening to another audiobook today, so I feel like it's time for a book post. Here's what I've been reading lately:

Elantris, by Brandon Sanderson (audiobook)
I think this may be one of my favorite books of the year. I loved nearly all the characters, even the side characters, and while I didn't particularly like the 'villain,' I at least sympathized with him. The magic system was really interesting, and there were a lot of nice moral and social ambiguities within the world and the characters, which I appreciated. The setup is this: There was a giant, magical city called Elantris, run by immortals with powerful magic. Anyone could become an immortal; the magic took people randomly and transformed them. But 10 years before the story starts, something went wrong, and while people are transformed, they now end up as zombie-ish people who don't have heartbeats, are always hungry (but don't need to eat), don't heal, and who have splotchy black patches on their skin. In the beginning of the story, Raoden, a prince, wakes up and finds he's transformed. The other characters are Sarene, his wife (and politically savvy princess of a nearby country) whose marriage contract says that she's legally married to him even if he dies. She arrives in the country and finds she's married without ever having met Raoden face to face. The third character is Hrathen, a militant priest who is given the goal of converting the country to his religion in three months, or the country will be forcibly converted through military intervention.

It's a really interesting world, the characters all feel very real and interesting, and the conflict starts up right away. Highly recommended. My only issue was that I was glad I heard the audiobook, as Sanderson uses a REALLY odd phoenetic system for all the names. "Kiin" is read "Kaye-aye-n" and I know if I'd been reading the names instead of listening, I'd have gotten them all wrong.

The Girl in the Steel Corset by Kady Cross This was an entertaining read, but sort of 'meh' overall. It's a YA book, set in a steampunk world with a ragtag bunch of teenagers who all have some kind of special ability thanks to "organites", aka organic nanobots retrieved from the center of the Earth, ala Jules Verne. There's also an in-world connection to Jekyll and Hyde. It's not a bad set up, but I felt like the characters took too long to figure out the main plot, which was mostly ignored for the middle of the book as two of the characters made googly eyes at each other and danced around a weak love triangle. When they finally get back to the plot, conflicts are resolved far too easily and there's never any real threat of danger-- I knew all these characters were going to be fine, and even if they weren't, the presence of the nanobots meant they'd probably be able to be miraculously healed.

This brings me to the technology of the steampunk world... this book, I felt, sort of crossed the line into too much modern tech in the Victorian era. Obviously, the flavor of steampunk is reinventing 21st century tech with 19th century materials. But I feel like the flavor of the setting gets muddied a bit if you go too far in either direction. This book featured nanobots, motorcycles, robots that perfectly replicated life (like a robot cat), flesh-based androids with semi-sentience, cell phones, perfect mechanical limbs and replacement organs (a mechanical heart) AND superpowers. It just... felt a bit much, and ignored most of the Victorian sensibilities as well. I think when steampunk incorporates too much modern tech, it seems to lose its point. If you're going to include so much, why not just write straight sci-fi in a modern setting? So it wasn't terrible, but it wasn't very memorable.

Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson This is the first of Sanderson's work I didn't really enjoy. Like the above, it wasn't terrible, but it did feel rather jumbled and a bit too meandering. The characters were fine, but they weren't nearly as memorable or interesting as the characters of Mistborn or Elantris, and I never really got a sense of the stakes in the story. A war looms over the two countries involved throughout the book, but I couldn't bring myself to be too worried about what would happen if it started. The really interesting character, Vasher, the billed "immortal still trying to fix his mistakes of hundreds of years before" is only rarely a viewpoint character. Disappointing, as I thought he was the most interesting. The two princesses were sort of bland, the god character was boring when he wasn't sometimes annoying, and mostly I just didn't get invested in any of them. Things happened without seeming to have any real point or purpose. The book picked up at the end, but it still was only 'interesting' and not 'riveting.' I would have rather seen the last third of the book as the beginning, and gone on from there.

It was a shame, as the magic system, using souls paired with colors, was very unique, and the setting (a city in a tropical jungle) was also something rather different. I just couldn't figure out what was going on or why I should care about any of it.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (audiobook)
Just finished listening to this one today. It IS very like Neil Gaiman, as I'd heard, but it was also very slow paced and thoughtful. I think the book has some interesting, if not terribly new, things to say, especially at the end, but mostly I enjoyed it for the gorgeous imagery it presented. The circus acts are all fascinating, and some of the images and illusions we hear about-- like a huge ship made of books and paper sailing in a sea of ink-- were things I would love to illustrate or see illustrated. I enjoyed the book because it described a place I wish were real. The Night Circus sounds amazing and I would love to wander its paths and discover all the secret tents and new wonders. I have heard they made some kind of game out of it and I might seek that out, as it seems this is a story that would benefit very well from a visual adaptation. The plot itself was solid but again, not really surprising. The main characters were okay; it was the side characters who carried things for me. Still, it's a book I'll probably re-read at least once, if only for the ideas.

Originally I wanted to do GLaDOS, and then I realized that that would be *really fucking hard*, so I went with turrets instead.

( Hel-lo? Is Anyone There? I hear you..... )