learnedfoot

fandom_empire is running a round of bingo; signups are still open, though closing soon! At first glance my card isn't really sparking anything for me (not the fault of the challenge, the full list of prompts is really good) but the game is running for the next three months so I'm going to sit on my card for a while and see if inspiration shows up late with Starbucks.

...maybe it'll help if I think a bit outside my usual repertoire. Nothing on this card is screaming "Kylo Ren", but that might just mean it's time to do some writing for a different star war or maybe even a different fandom completely. It's been a while since I did that.

	1	2	3	4	5
B	Gesture	Nervousness	(Willow) Melancholy	Dystopia	Brother
I	Delight	Future	Found Family	Book Club	Death
N	Feathers	Mountain	Unknown	Inclusive	Adorable
G	Foggy	Tattoo	Meet Me in the Morning	Bookworm	Bedroom
O	Super Bowl	Farewell Ceremony	Useful	(Yucca) New Opportunities	Hallucinations

Fills:

• I4, 'Book Club': shall I compare thee (The Love Hypothesis, Adam/Olive, T, 1.5k)

By "it", I mean the Knights of Ren turning on Kylo in the final act of TROS. In this issue, we learn what the knights have been up to all this time and why they've had so little to do with their ostensible leader, and it turns out the answer - like all answers to the every mystery of Kylo Ren's life - is that he's a complete fucking dick. Even by the standards of the proudly self-proclaimed being-a-complete-fucking-dick club.



(Perhaps the legions of loyal followers who await my every update on this series will notice that I've skipped a couple of issues. That's because I had very mixed feelings about the last arc but lacked the stomach to publish my complaints. No stomach is needed for this issue, however! I have zero complaints! None! Zip! Nada! We are back to the good stuff!)

So anyway, today's instalment introduces Tava Ren, the woman who has now taken over leadership of the Knights of Ren. She's gutsy and dangerous, passionate in her worship of the dark side, and clearly a much more natural leader than her predecessor was - because when her knights lose their nerve mid-combat and run off leaving her for dead, instead of demanding their blood, she demands an explanation. At which a hardened band of Force-wielding, black-armoured thugs gather around to shamefacedly (shame-maskedly?) tell her of the trauma that reduced them to their current cowardly state.

Kylo's early days in charge, they tell Tava, were some of the group's best ever. They made a killing both metaphorically and literally, roamed the galaxy, partied it up...until Kylo, who they tactfully describe as "never the life of the party", started turning darker even than they bargained for. Constantly talking to someone no one else could see. Massacring their drinking buddies for no good reason. Leading them on missions that seemed increasingly more about some secret political agenda than personal gain. They were assholes with plastic horns on their heads who accidentally fell under the stewardship of a real devil, and no one dared question the drastic change to their modus operandi for fear of drawing his wrath on themselves. Finally Kylo abandoned them very abruptly one day (the day, by the looks of things, that Rey saw in her vision in Maz's castle!) to go join Snoke, but not before blithely volunteering to kill all his now former comrades - right in front of them, while they looked on in paroxysms of terror and betrayal. ("We're loyal," they pleaded with him. "We're your guys.") Snoke told him not to bother and sent a stormtrooper death squad after them instead, and ever since then the Knights of Ren have been on the run, terrified that one day Kylo will return to finish them off.

I love this for a bunch of reasons. Kylo being awful is always fun, and I'm enjoying all this insight into how truly, coldly evil he can be when the presence of Rey or his parents isn't triggering his inner conflict. It's a really satisfying explanation of Kylo's missing transition from the Knights of Ren to the First Order. Tava is AMAZING and I'm already loving the contrast between her "I'll restore this order to its former dark glory" and Kylo's "I'll use them as a stepping stone then kick them back into the water behind me".

But I'm most especially pleased because it completely fixes one of my quiet, sad, petty complaints about TROS - namely, after all the hype, that it made literally nothing of the Knights of Ren. There was no depth to their relationship with Kylo. They made a couple of appearances behaving more or less like stormtroopers in weird grubby armour, then they ganged up and tried to kill Ben for no obvious reason, then he matter-of-factly killed them all and moved on with his life. The novelisation made that last scene even worse, by having Ben "realise" the knights had been "Palpatine's all along" and so were basically just pretending to be his subordinates while snickering behind his back. (I'm not saying this is a reasonable lens to bring to the text but I AM saying that this development Did Not Please my inner neurotic teen self who was always half-sure any given social invitation was a prank aimed at luring her out to be mocked for the stupidity of thinking she was actually welcome.) I am far, FAR better pleased by the reveal that actually that was just Ben self-victimising again (old habits etc) and that in fact they'd all admired him immensely until he went bonkers and fucked them over.

I'd like to close with a picture of Tava Ren with her helmet off. As you can see, she is an absolute BABE. Flowing red hair! Cool tattoo! Lots of murder! My crush is probably doomed given Kylo's track record with people who annoy him, but I'm going to stan her so hard for as long as she's around.

( See? BABE. )

I've just finished reading The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, and am now faced with the self-distrustful task of reviewing a book I utterly adored but to which most of the other people whose opinions I respect seem to have had mixed or negative responses.

Let's be honest at the outset this is an extremely maximalist piece of fiction, and I can understand why not everyone would be on board! It's an unabashed Frankenstein creation: part self-insert RPF romance inspired by the author's binge-watch of The Terror during covid lockdowns, part semi-autobiographical musings on empire and identity and cultural assimilation under the shadow of the protagonist’s Cambodian heritage. The former on its own I suspect I'd have found cloying, the latter drearily navel-gazey, but in combination I thought they very successfully moderated each other's excesses and created something that was both meaningful and genuinely fun to read. This unlikely potion is brewed inside a cauldron of time-travel shenanigans and sinister bureaucratic machinations ending in a reveal about the climate crisis and our global future that I won't spoil but that made for a great open ending, equal parts harrowing and hopeful. So yeah, this is absolutely about Bradley wanting to bang blorbo from her history books (and I love that for her) but she's used her horniness to open up a bunch of other, deeper conversations at the same time. It's my very favourite kind of fanfic in tradpub form. The prose absolutely sparkles with oblique metaphors and vivid-but-never-purple imagery, and there are multiple passages I ended up pausing to copy out into my notebook - something I rarely bother to do - just because I thought the language was so charmingly apt.

Also Obama of all people likes it too, so yay for not being completely alone in the fannish lunchroom here. Come sit with me, Obama! Let's squee together!

Anyway, I should probably, uh, include an actual summary of the book I'm flailing so self-consciously about, right? An unnamed civil servant whose mother survived the Khmer Rouge gets recruited for a top-secret government time travel project that has experimentally retrieved a handful of historical figures from just before their moment of death and brought them to the present. She is assigned to live in a house with Lieutenant Graham Gore (1809-?1848) of the doomed Franklin expedition and help acclimate him to modern life. Culture clashes are fumbled through, manly Victorian naval officer emotions are sexily repressed, and they gradually fall in love while the narrator warns us with increasingly ominous asides that their story is going to end badly. The time travel worldbuilding goes exactly as deep as I ever want time travel worldbuilding to go, which is to say that the book opens with a cheerful "time travel exists, no it doesn't make sense, don't worry about it" then proceeds to lead by example and not worry about it. The fish-out-of-water humour is modulated by a keen awareness that people have always been people and that "educated in a different era of technological advancement" does not mean even slightly less smart. THE END TWIST BLEW MY TINY MIND.

I just love it. Love love love love love it. And in a rare happy coincidence, on the same day I returned my borrowed copy to the library, I peeked in on a secondhand bookshop and found a very reasonably priced copy right there waiting for me! So now it's on proud display on my genre fiction shelf, its fuchsia spine neatly - and with great thematic honesty - dividing my "serious" grey-hued sci-fis from my Barbie-pink romance novels. It's definitely one I want to keep my own copy of for leisurely rereading.

-

So, having devoured that tasty bit of Terror RPF, I decided to go ahead and actually watch AMC's The Terror (2018). I assume everyone here is aware of the show at this point, but so we're all on the same page: semi-historical telling of Franklin's lost expedition, mixed with some supernatural horror in the form of a monster that's slowly picking off the stranded explorers. I was afraid it would be too scary for me, but actually I would have liked it to be scarier; for such a bleak story, the fear and suspense turned out to be surprisingly muted. But it was very atmospheric, and the characters were so good. We had buttoned-up 19th century military officers with strict codes of honour and etiquette, in both "irresistibly competent" and "puffed-up posh nitwit" incarnations; complicated, nuanced class tensions between them and the common soldiers they commanded; bonds of love and loyalty, bonds of necessity, bonds frayed to breaking point by paranoia and desperation. We had an Inuk woman struggling to fill her late father's shoes as shaman to the monster. A small handful of Brits who saw her, and a far larger handful who saw only lurid stereotypes about "savages". No one quite got everything right (well, except Goodsir, for whom the "cinnamon roll" meme was practically invented) but pretty much everyone was doing their best in circumstances for which it's quite simply impossible to prepare.

The Terror is one of those fandoms where I've heard people gripe about the dearth of eye candy, but this is an absurd and easily disprovable falsehood because guys, Captain James Fitzjames played by Tobias Menzies is in it? Like, get a grip?? He is INSANELY hot??? I mean look at him:

( behold )

He's also incredibly brave and noble and competent, with a tortured backstory and some immensely satisfying character progression. If my government ever calls on me to move in with a member of the Terror cast in the interests of national security - you know, as governments are wont to do - I pick this guy. He's my favourite. His death (not a spoiler, they all die, that's a matter of historical record and the whole point of the show) was heartbreaking in the best, most honourable way.

On the other hand...fuck Hickey, man. Fuck him so hard and not in a fun way. I'm usually such a villainfucker but I hate this guy with his relentless stupid smirks and his manipulations and his schemes. His death (again, not a spoiler) was the only moment of his screentime that I genuinely enjoyed. So I guess props to this show for delivering a bad guy that even I couldn't make excuses for? But he was so cartoonish. The smirking. Fuck off and get your arse flogged again, Hickey.

But yeah, I really enjoyed this show. I don't see myself writing fic for it but I definitely see myself reading some. If anyone happens to have any recs on hand for fic that lovingly tongue-bathes Captain Fitzjames - I'll take literal or metaphorical tongue-bathing! - please do send them my way.

I'm not going to tell you guys how many stouts down I am, because it's not actually very many but in my defence I'm on multiple different meds that you're not supposed to mix alcohol with. 🙃 

First, a little Iron Maiden deep dive! The Final Frontier was released in 2010 and usually hovers somewhere near the bottom of everyone's list of ranked Iron Maiden albums. But the other weekend I decided to give it my full attention in a dedicated listen-through, and - man, this band has genuinely never actually released a bad album, have they? The Final Frontier doesn't grab you the way some of their more popular albums do, but it has substance in a way that only really comes out if you pay full attention (and is so, so worth the effort when it does). It's a cinematic, semi-themed collection of songs about adventure and danger, about not knowing if you'll ever make it home, about not knowing whether home will really be there when you do make it back. Favourite songs are Mother of Mercy, Coming Home, Starblind and (#1 winner) The Talisman, but honestly, there's not a single miss on the whole tracklist.

Secondly, Black House by Secrets of the Moon is gorgeously moody, heavy goth rock by a black metal band that finally decided to stop will-they-won't-they-ing and straight-up cross the party floor. I really love the frontman's voice, and how the band's metal origins shine through so clearly in the sense of energy and urgency that infuses every track.

Finally, some singles! 1914 have released a new track, 1916 (The Südtirol Offensive), that hits so fucking hard, especially in the second half. The outro riff has been running through my head for DAYS now, I love it so much, holy shit. I'm extra glad I have this to savour, because the new Aephanemer single, La Règle du Jeu, isn't doing anything for me. There's nothing WRONG with it I don't think - it's just leaning hard on the parts of Aephanemer's style that I don't love and neglecting the parts that I do. Marion Bascoul, please don't go where I can't follow!