What's Up This Week

[a_whale_bone]

Reading

Still slowly making my way through Havana: Year Zero. It's still mostly about Julia's relationship with these three blokes instead of about her search for proof that the telephone was invented in Cuba, though there's now a mystery about who has the document she needs. Two out of the three blokes have betrayed her - she's still annoyingly fixated on the current lover despite him being a lying cheat who lies and cheats, and it mostly seems to be because he's hot (he does sound hot, to be fair) - and I'm pretty sure a third betrayal is coming. Any of the three of them could have the document Julia's after and be lying to her about it. I just want her to go "fuck this" about all three of them and maybe go find her boyfriend's ex, who successfully left all the bullshit behind and moved to Brazil.

Also still on Shadowlands, which is still so interesting. After Neolithic Orkney we went to the lost city of Trellech in the Marches of Wales, which is in the middle of an ongoing archaeological argument. It had a lot of iron deposits so may have grown really fast due to its industry when England was in the middle of the brutal subjugation of Wales. Then it was to Winchelsea, the first of which was swept out to sea and the second of which mostly lost when a huge number of its inhabitants died during the Black Death. There's a lot of plague in this book generally, which accounts for a lot of the deserted medieval villages. I'm now reading about Dunwich, "The City that Fell off a Cliff".

Writing

Nothing. Nada. I'm occasionally thinking about writing? The Fic in a Box reveals are tomorrow, so maybe it'll feel like I've written something new once my stuff is on my AO3 page.

Watching

Also not much! What am I doing with myself? I have no idea. I've watched a bit more Interview With a Vampire which was briefly very funny when they had Claudia the Teenage Vampire living with them and Lestat and Louis had to be parents, but it's all taken a turn for the tragic. I gather that book!Louis isn't that popular but I kind of love him in the TV show. I blame Jacob Anderson.

The third Doctor Who special is one I'm in two minds about. I'm not sure the Toymaker worked well as a one-off villain, though there were great moments (the creepy puppet show of former companions especially), and I think I need to wait and see how things ultimately play out to decide how I feel about the bigeneration. I don't mind changing canon (this is Doctor Who, after all) but it did feel strange to make Fifteen share so much of his first outing with Fourteen. But I do like the idea of a future Doctor, one who has done some heavy emotional work, coming back to show some kindness and compassion for his previous self. I think Fifteen is in a closed time loop and we'll see how this plays out from his side, and that could be interesting.

THAT SAID Ncuti Gatwa was as amazing as I hoped he would be. An explosion of charisma and charm and energy, funny and quick and with a hint of some underlying darkness that I really hope he gets to play. He's a Doctor who hugs, and calls people "love", and has a jukebox in the TARDIS, and happily runs around in his underwear showing off his thighs. I love him. I can't wait for the Christmas special.

Comments

[murderershair]

Book!Louis is popular, it's just that most of his biggest fans don't like the show, I think. But I definitely feel the show version of Louis is an improvement. The easiest non-spoiler difference to explain (beyond the racebend) is that book!Louis is a much more passive character overall.

[a_whale_bone]

Oh, interesting. I really like show!Louis but he still feels quite passive, especially compared to Lestat and Claudia. He spent most of an episode lying around reading Flaubert! I'm interested to get back to it and see where he goes now that his relationship with Lestat has reached a bit of a breaking point, because it did feel like he'd just been meandering along in his existence for a while. He does seem to need an external force to make him do anything (though when he takes things into his own hands in the show it does seem to go wrong quite often, so I don't entirely blame him).

I'm definitely mostly fond of Louis because of Jacob Anderson, and the racebend adds an interesting dimension. I'm not sure I would be quite to sympathetic to a white Louis.

[murderershair]

Yeah, you've definitely gotten up to the point where show!Louis is behaving more like book!Louis does from the start, though iirc he still has his moments. Book!Louis, besides being a white plantation owner, portrays himself as pretty suicidally depressed from the beginning rather than someone who's honestly tried and failed a few times before sinking into that state, if that makes sense. I did find him more sympathetic on reread as an adult than I did as a teen (especially knowing Anne was struggling with alcholism and grief while writing it) but I think there's more compelling layers in the show's version and especially in his relationship with Lestat (the part where Daniel starts playing his "old" transcripts of Louis to compare and contrast his different versions of events is Louis directly reading his words from the book, FYI, which delighted me a lot). Though I do wonder if some show-only fans hate Lestat more than book fans did at this point just because show!Louis does a better job of portraying Lestat as the architect of his misery.