30DoA.07: Day 7 - Character you’d most like to slap: Miaka & Tamahome, Fushigi Yuugi

Day 7 - Character you’d most like to slap: Miaka & Tamahome, Fushigi Yuugi

I'm not a violent person, and I mentioned yesterday that characters that annoy me tend to break my suspension of disbelief. So I'd be more likely to verbally slap the writers than physically slap the characters.

I've mentioned several times in the companion piece (30 Days of shipping) how much I hate, hate, hate when authors try to extend romantic tension in writing when things can be solved by having a friend sit a couple down in a room for a half hour and have them talk. You can get away with it a bit when the two people aren't physically able to carry on a conversation -- I mention in the comments once about Curse of Chalion where the guy is rushing over the mountains and back to arrange a marriage treaty before the king dies, and the girl is helping to protect the heir. There it's hard to have them sit down and hash out their feelings.

( The entire second season of Fushigi Yuugi was like this -- the first season handled it a bit better, in my opinion. )

(Icon is sadly relevant... it's also why it's not my default any more.)

It sucks when you find out that an author who you like, read the blog of, and in the past has written some good essays on politics and cooking is, at the most charitable*, exceedingly ignorant and privileged about immigration and adaptation, and more likely wrote some damn bigoted things when before she had called out bigotry as what it was.

And, hell, by her analogy, since she advanced the position that immigrants should shut up and assimilate as their civic duty, I should be typing this in Iroquoian or Omaha-Ponca, or Massachusett, rather than English.

I'm gonna have to move that one to the 'used only' file. As much as like getting books, I'd rather support used bookstores (and/or use my stock of credits from trading books) than authors I disagree with, even if I do enjoy their books.

(In other news, still pondering what to do about DeviantArt. It basically comes down to whether I want to treat it as a platform like LJ of sharing stuff or a community in of itself, which changes my opinion on how I use the site. Kind of embarrassing if I go back, after I flounced. Or implied I was going to. But more important to be true than proud.)

* More charitable than even I'm comfortable being.

30DoS.07 Day 07 - The most heartbreaking scene? Harry/Susan in the Dresden Files

Day 07 - The most heartbreaking scene? Harry/Susan in Changes

Hoo, boy is this a spoiler. If you are a Dresden Files fan and haven't read Changes yet... for the love of god, don't click on the cut.

Fans are pretty ambivalent about Susan Rodriguez in the Dresden Files. For non-fans, she was Harry's first on-screen girlfriend (Elaine, his first girlfriend, is mentioned and later shows up, but we don't know if Harry ever dated seriously between Elaine as a teenager and Susan). The two of them started dating when she asked him out in the first book, though Harry had known her before as 'this tabloid reporter who tries to get paranormal info from me'.

( By book 3, Harry was ready to propose to her... )