I Don't Really Know What I Was Doing Here But This Sort Of Ended Up Being A Love Letter To All My Girlfriends, So There We Are Then.

This post has been making the rounds on my Facebook newsfeed again, and I am too mentally exhausted after finals week to tear it apart once more, so here is my copy/pasted reaction from the first time this bullshit appeared on my laptop screen.





"I've been seeing this sort of thing waaaay too many times on my newsfeed. No. Just NO. PEOPLE can be fake. PEOPLE can be petty, competitive, jealous and prone to gossip. Starting "useless drama with you" is not a trait that is exclusive to girls. "Having fun" is not something only guys are capable of doing.
See, being male does not automatically make guys ideal friendship material. And ladies, having a female friend does not mean she is going to, at some point, attempt to steal your man or bitch about you when your back is turned. If you can't get along with a particular girl, have you considered that maybe, just maybe, you can't get along as individuals? Being a guy or a girl has nothing to do with it. The kind of friend you are depends on the kind of person you are. Whether or not you have a vagina is irrelevant".

I feel bad for girls who insist on cutting other girls out of their friendship circles, I really do. It's sad enough that we're all in our 20s and some of us still hold on to the prevailing nonsense that vagina-owners are inherently catty, petty, manipulative drama-mongerers who make for horrible friends, as opposed to guys, who just eliminate all need to deal with ~drama and who will apparently never diss you behind your back or any of the other supposedly bitchy stuff that lady people get up to.

Now, I must admit that I haven't had much experience with having very close friends who are guys. I hang out with a fair few of them, and I'd like to think I'm socially adept enough to carry on interesting, intelligent conversations with males within my social circle (and also make penis jokes when the situation calls for it) , but I've never had a guy friend on the level of the ultimate confidante supremo, or anything like that. This may change in the future, but for now I don't feel like I am missing out on much. Largely because I have enough experience with people in general to know that the trait of being a flaming asshole or a raging disgusting piece of shit is not something that is exclusively based on gender. People can be shitbags. If a person is being an insufferable shitbag to you, what you do is you call them out on their bullshit, attempt a reconciliation, and then cut them out of your life if they keep being a shitbag. What you DON'T do is take one person's shitbaggery and apply that as a given as far as an entire group of people is concerned; in this case, other girls. You're cutting down your pool of potential friendships by half the world's population. Now why would you do that?

Because I love my girlfriends. I don't necessarily have dozens of them, but the ones I do have, I consider precious to me (and I should really, really work harder at keeping in touch with them). My girlfriends are like little reflections of different aspects of my own personality, while also being fully-realized and wonderful people in their own right. I love having girlfriends, and I just love making friends with girls and women in general (god, does this make me sound creepy? I hope it doesn't). I don't have a Sex & The City-esque clique of girlfriends though - very few of them actually know each other, and I tend to hang out with them on a one-on-one basis more than anything.

But still. I love having lunch with them. I love texting them until I run out of credit. I love the slow and steady accumulation of inside jokes and references over the years. I love getting mail from them. I love making mixed CDs for them (and receiving some, too). I love swapping books with them. I love going to the movies with them. I love to let them paint my toenails. I love going to gigs with them. I love when they trust me enough to share their deepest fears and insecurities and desires and dreams. I love the doodled birthday cards they made for me when we were 15. I love when they show up at my house with gifts or letters or handmade things for no other reason than because they felt like giving me stuff. I love when they tag me on social networking sites when they've found something they think will make me laugh, or something that reminded them of me. I love quoting Mean Girls with them. I love making horrible, bad, very not good puns with them. I love when they tell me about a song that I just have to listen to because it will change my life.

I love when they start watching a new TV show because I kept harping on about it to them. I love having Skype dates with the ones who are too far away. I love when they remember things I probably told them months or years ago. I love endless hours of conversation about anything and everything, because all the things we talk about are great things. I also love the pauses and natural silences in conversations, because they are never awkward. I love when they come to me for help, or advice, or to confide, or simply ask for my opinion on nail polish shades or whether they should read Jane Austen before they start watching any of the adaptations. I love when they listen, and counsel, and comfort, and make time for me. I love when we giggle for no other reason than because we felt giggly. I love when they feel the need to update me when they've seen a hot waiter in a restaurant at lunch that day. I LOVE MSN CONVERSATIONS THAT TAKE PLACE ENTIRELY IN CAPS LOCK.

I love being stuck in traffic jams with them and having nothing to do but shoot the shit for over an hour. I love when we can pick up exactly where we left off, even if our last conversation happened a year and a half ago. I love seeing them accomplish things. I love seeing them happy, and I love it even more when they want to share that with me. I love that we allow each other to have our own spaces, to drift there and back, and to have other girlfriends, without resenting each other or growing jealous or resorting to any of the stereotypical crap that gets attached to female-female friendships.

I love the mutual respect, the genuine affection, and the fact that we have yet to really tire of each others' company. I love that they become my life-cheerleaders. And I love that they make the time and space in their lives so that I can fit somewhere in there, tucked away among family and school and jobs and boyfriends and a million other things they have going on in their day-to-day existence. And I love that they have all, and I mean ALL - the ones who have lasted for years, the ones that come and go, the casual ones, the intense ones, the ones I've already lost, the ones that exist only on the Internet (hell, the ones that happen in the comments sections of all our blogs, because I consider you all friends) - have  in their own big or small ways, made me who I am. I am nothing if not a wondrously messy human patchwork of all of them, all of you.


If all that sounds like I might as well be in a relationship with my lady pals, well then, you're not too far off the mark. Maintaining a friendship is hard work you guys, if that person is worth it, you had better be ready to put in some effort (something I have not been very good at since leaving secondary school, and I have been trying to make a concerted effort to change that). And this really applies to friendships all over the board, regardless of gender ; you're not really expecting anything in return for being someone's friend (or at least I would hope so). Ideally, you're not hoping to get a promotion out of them, or free stuff, or anything like that. They're not your ticket to not-dying-alone, or eternal companionship, or validation (they can help you get there though). You work at being friends and staying friends because you value these people as human beings and you want to make room for them in your life. Because they make it better. Because they make you better. And that's rare and wonderful. And if you're one of those people who insist on not allowing other girls to occupy that kind of space in your life, well then. You really have no idea what you're missing out on.

The Hobbit (2012) : An Alphabetized List of All My Feelings, Which Are Many.

relatively SPOILER-FREE, but I can't promise anything, so tread with caution!

Let's get one thing out of the way here ; was it even necessary that these movies be made? Forget the fact that it's now a trilogy, when one well-executed film may have been perfectly serviceable. Was it necessary to make The Hobbit at all? Is this a thing the world needs? To the casual viewer, this whole project probably reeks of self-indulgence and bloated excess. But I cannot be objective about this film. I really and truly cannot. Because I am very decidedly not a casual viewer. I'm one of those people who find the extended boxset DVDs of the Lord of the Rings trilogy to be too short. In the case of The Hobbit, I would have been perfectly happy if Peter Jackson had chosen to include all five thousand goddamn verses of Over the Misty Mountains. I am one of that generation of teenage girls who had a poster of Orlando Bloom on her bedroom wall when she was 13. Oh yeah. I went there. If you were 13 years old at around the same time I was, and did not have a crush on the utter lushness that was the Orlando Bloom of 10 years ago, then you :

a. are a lying liar who LIES
b. genuinely and unfortunately missed out on all this floppy-haired pretty :




I mean come on. You know your tweenager ass would have been ALL OVER THAT. Loving Orlando Bloom was a crucial element in the formative years of an entire generation of lady people, yo.

What I mean to say is that the LOTR films were a huge, huge influence in my life during that transition from childhood to adolescence (along with Harry Potter) and I generally have a MASSIVE emotional attachment to Peter Jackson's Middle Earth, as many people do. But the Lord of the Rings films were lightning in a bottle ; every element of it seemed to come together seamlessly, as if fated. Ten years, countless re-watches and endless oceans of tears later, there's still not a single character or snippet of dialogue or camera shot or piece of music that I would change or cut. And to expect the same magic from The Hobbit trilogy would be asking too much, so I don't. Which is why I am all too ready to acknowledge this movie's flaws, and there are many flaws.

Um, flaws. And stuff. 

a. It's a tall order to turn a 280 page children's book into a sprawling 3-movie epic, and these films run the very real risk of making everything seem - to quote Bilbo Baggins himself - like "butter spread over too much bread". The writers are essentially working in reverse here - while in LOTR it was about ruthlessly cutting shit out of Tolkien's rambling narrative in order to create a strong, cohesive triple-serving of AWESOMENESS, in this case it's about padding up a very simple plot to make sure all 3 hours of screen time feel like it has a purpose. And it doesn't always succeed. The Hobbit suffers a little in terms of flow and pacing ;  a lot of it felt like a series of vignettes woven together as opposed to a seamless progression of plot. And I do have my lingering doubts about how the rest of the book (barely 180 pages of it left!) is going to be spread out over another 6+ hours, even including Tolkien's additional historical material that Jackson is adding on to the original story.

b. I did not see the film in the very controversial 48 frames per second format, so I can't comment on that. I will say, however, that the CGI was a bit overdone in this one. The all-digital orcs and wargs tended to look fake as opposed to menacing. And frankly, Azog the Defiler would have made for much more genuinely frightening nightmare fuel material had he been a dude in makeup rather than an all-digital creation.



I think about the stuff that really scared me in the LOTR trilogy ; the Ringwraiths, for example. What was frightening about them was my knowledge that there were real people under those cloaks. There was a sense of solid, formidable, threatening WEIGHT. It's the kind of presence that the all-CGI representation of Azog can't quite convey ; he's a little too lightweight on the eye to really be as legitimately threatening as his character is meant to be.

c. There were a couple of scenes that dragged a little too much for my liking. While the very long scene of the dwarves arriving at Bilbo's house was a joy to behold, the White Council bit at Rivendell started testing my patience. It was just a bunch of old people waffling on and on about the events that would eventually lead to everything that happens in LOTR. While I appreciate the effort to make links and parallels to the trilogy, I really could have done with someone cutting this scene to about half its current length.

d. Now I love Howard Shore, but the music in this one felt a little too lazy and recycled. As much as I enjoy hearing familiar pieces of music from LOTR again (I'm pretty sure Peter Jackson knows that we all dissolve into a collective mass of weeping mush every time we hear this melody played in any form) I really do wish The Hobbit could have been given its own, full-fledged sonic identity. It's no accident that the best piece in the whole film is one of the only originally composed pieces that is unique to THIS movie, and what a piece of music it is. 


But it's not all complaints! Here is some good shit about the movie.

Like, good shit, you guys.


a. Martin Freeman is pretty much the best hobbit to have ever hobbited. Hands down.  He does what he does best - cranky, homely guy who just wants to be left alone to enjoy a cup of tea and keeps being reluctantly dragged into having adventures by strange people who befriend him against his will - and is PERFECT at it. His comic timing is as impeccable as always - the audience in my cinema spent more time laughing at the facial expressions he was making in the background than any of the actual jokes happening in the foreground. But what he also brings is some surprisingly heavy duty dramatic acting chops (not so suprising if you have already had the bittersweet privilege of being reduced to tears by Mr. Freeman's turn as Dr. John Watson in THAT EPISODE of BBC Sherlock, bless him). He brings heart, and warmth and humour to a role which could have almost been too easy and routine for him. Whatever happens in the next two installments of this seemingly ill-advised trilogy, the role of Bilbo Baggins is safe in the hands of this guy.

b.  Thorin Motherfucking Oakenshield, played by a longtime but low profile favourite of mine, Richard Armitage. Now, book-Thorin is a grumpy, rude, cantankerous, greedy old git who is far too in love with the sound of his own voice. So I understand and applaud the decision to make movie-Thorin much younger (and much hotter) and a sort of flawed tragic-heroic figure. Movie-Thorin is noble, regal, proud to a fault and quietly dignified; he inspires a kind of I-will-follow-him-into-death loyalty among his fellow dwarves rather than simply demanding it. He's also given a very detailed backstory, involving the fall of his kingdom Erebor at the hands (claws?) of the dragon Smaug, and his existence as an exiled prince. His main motivation is not just to retrieve his family's treasure but to reclaim his throne and give his people a home, so he also carries the burden of responsibility and pain and loss and grief and anger. It's a very smart decision, narrative and characterization-wise ; you get a movie -Thorin who is much more admirable, sympathetic and bad ass than book-Thorin.




This also raise the stakes within The Hobbit ; the fate of the world does not hang in the balance here, as it does in LOTR. The Hobbit is literally just about a bunch of dwarves who want to go kill a dragon and get their gold back. That's all. That's it. The attention lavished upon movie-Thorin's backstory and the tragedy of the kingdom of Erebor gives both his character and the journey itself a greater depth and meaning that they would not really have had otherwise. And taking Thorin's character arc into consideration, I believe there will be MUCH more emotional resonance and payoff by the time we get to the third and last film, and I'm personally very much looking forward to that.

(Quite frankly I'm thinking about a whole bunch of other stuff I'd rather be doing on a pool table with you right now, Richard. Also, bitches love cardigans. Good sartorial call, man. )
 I'm also glad that the fabulous and underrated Richard Armitage (What intensity! What broodish brooding! What a loin-melting voice! What brain-mushing beauty! Most nom-worthy of all cravat-wearers!) is finally due to get some big-time exposure and success, as he so richly deserves. Thorin Oakenshield probably won't win him any Oscars but LORD it better make some bigshot casting people sit up and pay attention, because this guy OWNS everything about this character. 


c. The Riddles in the Dark sequence was pretty much worth the entire price of admission. It was funny and sad and tense and completely, utterly compelling in all the best ways. I probably wouldn't complain if the whole movie had just been three hours of Bilbo and Gollum tossing riddles at each other in that cave. And speaking of Gollum, who do I have to punch in the face to get Andy Serkis some kind of international award for being an awesome human being? The guy is a bleeding treasure of our age.




d. This is more of a neutral observation, but differentiating all 12 dwarves from each other (with the exception of Thorin because he is just so MAJESTIC) is pretty much impossible at this stage.  They are all rowdy and lovable as a whole, but pretty much indistinguishable as individuals. Kili, Fili and Bofur have enough screen time to establish some semblance of separate identities, but it will probably take at least one more movie to really get to know them all. The rest of the company are currently just a mesh of beard and leather and interchangeable one-liners to me at this point. Also, the decision to make some dwarves more prominent and/or likable over others will also eventually serve its purpose (you don't think I see what you're doing here, Jackson?) in the third film, in which [spoilers.highlight to read] EVERYONE YOU LOVE WILL DIE [end spoilers].





e. A few friends have complained about the lack of emotional payoff in this movie ; that any real emotional resonance did not genuinely come through until the last 20-30 minutes of the film, and even then it felt mechanical and scripted rather than earned. I think Martin Freeman and Richard Armitage deserve a lot more props for what they brought to those scenes in terms of emotional resonance, because they had a relationship dynamic arc to work through (in regards to Thorin and Bilbo) and they made it as sincere and believable as possible. I think what we all mean by "emotional resonance" is something along the lines of "THIS MOVIE DID NOT MAKE ME CRY A BATH TUB OF TEARS". Which, again, is probably a detrimental side effect of comparing this to the LOTR films. But it's so hard not to, when nearly everything about The Hobbit feels so much like a super-cranked up exercise in nostalgia ; the same music, the same characters returning, snippets of dialogue and scenes that parallel things that have already come before.


So here's the thing ; as a movie in itself, The Hobbit is fairly decent. It is no Lord of the Rings, and I don't think it ever will be, and it's probably better if you lower your expectations starting right now. Were there flaws? Many. Could it have been a much, much better film? Indisputably. Will I pay to go see the next two movies? Also yes. Will this trilogy own my heart as much as Frodo & co. have? I don't know. That really does remain to be seen. Will I spend the foreseeable future trawling through the Richard Armitage tag on Tumblr and crying over what a fine specimen of male perfection he is? Yes. Yes, that too.



HOW IS YOUR FACE AN ACTUAL THING THAT EXISTS, SIR.


Ultimately I'm just glad to be back in Middle Earth again. And I think this movie was, at its core, made for people like me, ready and willing to have ALL the nostalgia wrung out of my tear ducts once again, ten years on. I don't even care if I'm being emotionally manipulated here, just TAKE ALL MY MONEY, PETER JACKSON. Personally I can't wait for The Desolation of Smaug this December. Until then I'll be dripping snot all over my LOTR  DVD covers as I indulge in yet another all-weekend trilogy marathon. The extended box set versions of course. Followed immediately by the extended cast commentary versions. Because we do it the hardcore way, or we don't do it at all.

“If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!”  - John Waters


If there's one resolution I am going to be bothered to make for the year 2013, it is this : to read more. That's it. Just to read more books. I have fallen into the miserable habit of buying books, not reading them, and then buying more books anyway. The last straw came a couple of weeks ago when I returned from the Big Bad Wolf warehouse sale (bless the people who put that whole shindig together, by the way; it's essentially heaven for sad broke people who like words) with almost forty new paperback tomes and no space left on an already long-suffering shelf.

It's also an unfortunate side effect of being an English major that reading for pleasure just doesn't seem to have any room in my life's routine. I'm already tired and pissed about being told what to read and when to read it. Casual page-turning just isn't my idea of a relaxing time anymore. The minute I have any time to myself, it's straight to the laptop ; scrolling away into the wee hours of the morning until my eyes glaze over and I've been sitting there refreshing Tumblr's home page for half an hour. The Internet is great and everything, but there are things about reading that I miss deeply, and I intend to make more time for the printed word from now on.

It's not just the cliched shit that I miss ; the smell of ink or the sound of pages rubbing together or the texture of leather binding or anything like that. I miss that feeling of getting lost in a book. Being immersed in a time and place. Going back to re-read a phrase or a sentence that particularly struck you, and then rolling those words around in your mouth for a while (not your real mouth, though - more like the...mouth of your mind?). And the really good books, the totally 100%-immersive-experiences ones, they take a while to leave you, don't they? A few days, perhaps. You walk around having breakfast and going to classes and watching TV with that book still hovering somewhere in the periphery of your mind - names and faces and snatches of dialogue and places and smells. That book was a part of your world for however many days or weeks it took you to finish it, and for a while, Middle Earth or 1920's Detroit or post-war Greece or pre-Independence India feels as real to you as the bus stop down the road. And I never want to tear myself away from the pieces of the stories that choose to float around in my consciousness before making their gracious exits. It's a bit like reverse drowning in slow motion. You've been so completely lost in an entirely different place that it will take time to find your feet back in dull old reality. The last time I remember feeling this (which would also correlate with the last time I bothered to read a book at all) was when I sat down to finish The Hobbit for my children's literature module. I spent the entire week feeling as though half my body was still stuck somewhere in the Lonely Mountains, while the other half carried on with mundane everyday things.


I miss this feeling. I miss books. I miss having entire worlds living in my head. I miss reading. Which is why I am going to turn off my computer right after I've published this post, and finish reading Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex. That poor lump of tree pulp has been waiting patiently for me long enough.

"Before I Go, I Just Want To Tell You That You Were Fantastic. Absolutely Fantastic" : Or, Why I Don't Really Want To Watch Doctor Who Anymore.

I don't know how many of you guys are New Who fans, but VERY VAGUE SPOILERS AHEAD for the new seasons of Doctor Who, just in case. 

It's happened, guys. I've come to a point where I love the idea of Doctor Who more than I love the show itself. I have not had the slightest inclination to watch the most recent Who Christmas special (a sentient army of man-eating snowmen descending upon Victorian England would usually be the kind of thing I would gobble up with glee), and I am not entirely sure I even want to keep watching the 7th series, for as long as Steven Moffatt is in charge. He has done a solid job as head writer and showrunnner on BBC's Sherlock, but something about his ideas and story arcs and characters just don't sit right with me. Here's an ever-growing list of things that bother me about Moffat-era Doctor Who : 

a. Almost every single episode hinges on some kind of Destruction-Of-The-Universe dilemma. The Doctor has to fix this, or the time-space continuum will collapse. The Doctor has to fix that, or the world will reboot itself and everyone will cease to exist, and some alternate timeline will take its place. Mr. Moffatt is a very very clever man, and a lot of his time-travel related ideas are genuinely fascinating, but his stories reek of self-indulgence to me ; he seems determined to make the plot of every individual episode as convoluted as possible. And it's not necessary. At all. When nearly every single one of the Doctor's adventures has the stakes raised to apocalyptic levels on a regular basis, things start feeling cheap. You stop taking the dangers faced by these characters seriously, because you know that no matter how bleak the situation, the Doctor (via Steven Moffatt) will find a way to push the rewind/reboot button on the universe and put everything right again, only for a similar thing to happen next week. I'm tired of overly-complicated season-long arcs that are eventually solved by simply re-setting the whole of time and space so that the events of all 13 episodes pretty much never happened. That's really poor pay-off. That's pretty much erasing all trace of development your characters may have had during the course of the season, and Moffatt has done this erase-reboot-replay thing TWICE  now, and will probably keep going along the same vein until someone takes a frying pan to his face.

Not even Matt Smith's hair can make things right now, Moffatt.

b. Moffatt's female characters, nearly all of them companions to the Doctor, seem to come in only one flavour ; spunky (hate that word), flirtatious, and a good side helping of capital-S sassy (DOUBLE hate that word). Amy. River. Mels. Oswin. And now the newest companion, Clara. All these women are essentially slightly different variations of the same character template, and it's beyond frustrating. I could go into further detail about how the roles of these women (so far, in the case of Oswin and Clara) are very tied to female functions of reproduction and marriage. Amy and River's major plot arcs were concerned with their respective weddings, and don't even get me started on how (SPOILERS : highlight to read: in the 6th series, it was revealed that the Amy who had been travelling with the Doctor for half a season was in fact a sentient flesh replica, and the real Amy was heavily pregnant and locked up on a spaceship, waiting to give birth the whole time. END SPOILERS). I can't remember when I had last been so pissed off with the writing on a TV show. That stunt wasn't a clever plot twist, it was an outright cheat and a massive disservice to the character and any semblance of growth and development Amy could have had. And I'm actually still angry about it. Until I am proven wrong - and I am open to the possibililty - I absolutely do not trust Steven Moffatt with the handling of female characters on Who. Not one bit.


c. Which brings me to the biggest problem I have with Moffatt-era Doctor Who. The success of the show has resulted in much bigger budgets, which means better special effects, larger and more elaborate sets, and the kind of absolutely gorgeous cinematography you sometimes don't even find in movies.

source

Seriously, these new cameras or whatever the shit they're using is stunning.

 But while the show is now much prettier to look at, and much more epic in physical and storytelling scale, it seems to me that the one ingredient that made the previous Russell T. Davies-era Who so special to me was lost : heart. There really isn't a lot of heart in the newest seasons of Who.This is of course entirely dependent on individual responses to the show ; I can't speak for every fan. But whatever is going on with the show right now is simply not working for me. And it does pain me to say this because I genuinely adore Matt Smith and his take on the Eleventh Doctor. But I am just nowhere near as invested in these new characters as I was with the TARDIS-teams of the Ninth and Tenth Doctors. And it's more than just my inner 16 year-old self's stubborn attachment to nostalgia.

I love you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and you..

Now, I'm trying hard not to romanticize the older, non-Moffatt era episodes ; there were many, many, many flaws. I don't think I can ever get over what the writers decided to do with Donna, for one thing.  But I could forgive nearly everything else, because of how warm and real and sympathetic the characters were.

And I think that's what lies at the core of my inability to connect with Moffatt-Who - I want the Doctor's companions to be ordinary, regular, unremarkable people. I'm done with Moffatt and his hell-bent insistence on making every companion some sort of cryptic, enigmatic mystery for the Doctor to solve before it's too late. I'm done with the epic monikers ; The Girl Who Waited. The Last Centurion. The Woman Twice Dead. I'm done with convoluted puzzle-box companions. Companions with secrets, and obscure identities. Companions with grand destinies, companions who are anomalies in time and space, companions that fall into the Doctor's lap because they're special simply because the writers say they are.

I want the teenage shopgirl who dreamed of worlds beyond the last stop on her night bus route after work. I want the young medical student who yearned for a cause that was greater than herself. I want the temp secretary who was loud and bossy and yelled a lot because she was afraid that no one would listen to what she had to say. Perfectly insignificant people who never believed they were worth much until one person (or one alien, in this case) came along and showed them all the potential they had to be much better, and much braver, and much smarter, and much kinder, and much much much more important than they ever thought they could be capable of. I want to experience their sense of wonder at seeing the universe, and I want to see them grow into extraordinary beings. I want to see their families ; their clingy moms, their emotionally distant dads, their immature boyfriends, their weird and wonderful old grandparents. I want to see love and friendship and human connection. Because in spite of the bad special effects and the farting aliens and the flying killer eyeballs from outer space, it's the Doctor's companions who made me want to keep coming back. Perfectly ordinary people who found it in themselves to do extraordinary things.




 It's this heart that I find so obviously missing from almost everything Moffatt has done with the show so far. Because let's not kid ourselves ; the show may have Doctor in the title, but it certainly isn't all about him. And Moffatt seems to have made it all about the Doctor now, with added high-definition sound and fury, to the detriment of the companions on the TARDIS ; the people we're supposed to relate to, the audience surrogate, our avenue to channel our own travelling-through-space-and-time fantasies. And more significantly, our desire to simply be better people.

And personally speaking, I think the show has definitely suffered because of this. Moffatt-Who has infinitely better production quality, and more interesting plots and places to visit, and I do enjoy these aspects of the show for what they're worth. I wish there was a way to combine Moffatt's budget and effects team with the much superior character-based writing of the earlier seasons. Because the show would be essentially perfect if this were to happen. But honestly, until and unless things change soon, I'm going to revisit the Ninth and Tenth Doctors every time I find myself needing a Who fix. Crappy puppet aliens and egg-beater Daleks and laughable explosions and all. Because that's where I'll find the characters who have already made homes for themselves in that (very large) corner of my heart which I reserve for fictional people. Rory and Amy and River  just don't mean as much to me as Rose and Martha and Donna do. A beautifully written and emotionally resonant character can make you forgive ALL the lousy special effects in the world.

TL:DR - Doctor Who, in its current incarnation, simply is not working for me, you guys. It's sad, and unfortunate, because this show was such a huge part of my adolescence. I tried sticking with it, I tried to not let the writing bother me, I tried extra hard to love the new characters.  But I think I need a break from the show because I end up angry and frustrated more than I am entertained and moved. I might come back to it eventually. But until that day :




Also, just because I have stopped keeping up with the show does not mean that I will not accept Doctor Who-themed gifts for birthdays or Christmases. Like, oh gosh, I don't know. This set of TARDIS fairy lights? Because they're really cool and I want them? Yes?

This Is The Only Time There Will Ever Be Pictures Of A One Direction Member On This Blog. Maybe.

Taking a break from not doing homework to toss out a quick post


I want these things for Christmas.

a. TARDIS fairy lights. I mean come on.




b. And because any time is a good time for silly walking, this Monthy Python-themed clock.




Currently hopelessly in love with Cold Specks' debut album. You need to make some room in your life for this woman and her music, if you haven't already.





Now I don't get the love for One Direction, and honestly the fans scare me a little (nothing against the boys' music though - let's just say I'm not exactly trying to change stations whenever What Makes You Beautiful comes on ). But I do think it's worth mentioning that I find Zayn Malik extremely aesthetically pleasing and I enjoy looking at him very much. Hot damn, boy.
I mean, I'm sure he's a very talented vocalist and musician, too. I mean.

TALENT

OMG SO MUCH TALENT

LOOK AT ALL THE TALENT




MMMMMM TALENT


Give him a few years and he'll get even more fine, and he'll have fully mastered the art of the Boybander Staring-Through-The-Camera-At-Your-SOUL Smoulder and then none of us will stand a chance. And yes, I googled his age. He's 19. You can't send me to jail for that. So there.

ALSO, SIGUR ROS CONCERT IN LESS THAN A WEEK, AND I AM PUMPED YOU GUYS. I HAVE MY PASSPORT, MY BUS TICKETS, MY GIG BUDDIES AND I AM ALL SET FOR WHAT WILL HOPEFULLY BE A LIFE-DEFINING NIGHT OF ICELANDIC GLACIER PIXIE MUSIC SENT FROM THE POST-ROCK GODS.


ALSO SORRY FOR SHOUTING, BUT I AM SO INDECENTLY EXCITED ABOUT THIS, THAT CAPSLOCK SEEMED ONLY APPROPRIATE.

Loving An Imperfect Thing , Or "Supernatural" : A Long Overdue Rant.

*SPOILER warning for all aired episodes of Supernatural, up to the season 7 finale.
**except for you, Sue Fyenn, you need to read this anyway. 
***additional warning for the fact that I initially wrote this only for myself, which means this entire post is pretty much just a gigantic brain dump of thoughts, and probably isn't very eloquent or organized.
**** this is going to be LONG. If Supernatural means nothing to you, then I am so sorry. Cookie? 

Supernatural is a thing I may have mentioned once or twice around these parts. I've been watching it regularly for the last seven (going on eight) years, and have devoted many, many, many hours of my life to reading fan fiction, crafting character-themed playlists, watching crappy camera phone recordings of fan conventions and trawling through the actors' and producers' Twitter pages (creeper love is deeper love).



For the blissfully unaware, Supernatural is essentially about the relationship between two (really hot) brothers who traverse the great American Midwest in a bad ass Chevy Impala, armed with rock salt and holy water, shooting demons in the face and saving innocent people from unspeakable horrors that range from werewolves to mythological gods to serial killer circus clowns. Despite being aired on the CW, and despite featuring lead actors who would look much more at home on One Tree Hill , Supernatural is a lot better than it seems. The early seasons in particular grapple with issues of faith and family, the sacrifices that come with being a hero and doing the right thing, and my personal favourite theme : the brothers being forced to deal with the reality that the world is not a simple binary of good/evil, and that morality comes in nearly infinite shades of grey, and that anyone - be it the monsters they hunt or the humans they save - is capable of falling anywhere on that spectrum. The later seasons bring in heavy elements of Judeo-Christianity - the apocalypse, heaven and hell, sin and purity, destiny and free will, and as always, the brotherly bond between Sam and Dean Winchester. All very complex, heavy duty themes, but in the middle of all this the writers have time to also provide us with a scene in which the anthropomorphic personification of Death eats deep fried pickle chips out of a paper bag.

God, I love this show.

And yet, as much as I love it, I can't deny that there are some pretty serious flaws that I have either never noticed before, noticed but did not want to acknowledge, or noticed but did not know how to articulate. I can't say that I am now any more eloquent than I was a few years ago, but in any case I'm now here to totally call out Supernatural known henceforth as SPN) on some of the things it has been doing wrong over the last seven seasons.

a. Women, sexualized violence & generally shitty character development.

Before I say anything more, I'm going to ask you to watch this video. Context and some knowledge of the show helps, but is not necessary.








No seriously. Watch it.



Have you watched it yet?




No it's fine, I'll wait.






Done? Great!

The video you have just watched (or not watched, in which case you are a horrible person and we can't be friends anymore) is titled Women's Work, and is soundtracked by Hole's Violet. Created by LiveJournal users sockpuppett and sisabet , Women's Work is arguably the most controversial piece of fan-created media in the SPN fandom. Using footage from the show, these fans spliced together images of nearly all the women that had been featured on SPN up to that point : victims, love interests, demons and supernatural creatures, to show how the female characters are all either "victimized, sacrificed, abandoned or demonized" and are sexualized violently at every stage.

I will carry on doing this in numbered lists because I am way too lazy to start organizing all this in a nice, cohesive, academic way.

1. It's safe to say that nearly ALL women featured on SPN, whether as a one-off or a recurring character, eventually get killed off. At this point in time there are a grand total of zero women in the main cast, and none in the recurring line up either. That's ZERO, in case you were keeping count. Zilch.

2. So yes. On this show, all the lady persons die. Some people may counter this with a statistics based argument, something along the lines of "Hey! Men die on SPN too -  in fact, you'll find that more men die on the show than women". Which is well and good, except for simple arithmetic which will reveal that more men die on Supernatural because there are more men featured on the show, period. See No.1 for further clarification.

3. But the key difference doesn't lie in numbers and representation, it lies in the way that death and violence are filmed and portrayed in the show itself. When a dude dies in SPN, it is simply that - a death. It may be gory or gross in some way, but ultimately that's all there is to it. When a woman or girl dies or is attacked on SPN? It's a parade of cleavage and ass shots, naked-in-the-shower shots, clothes-slowly-being-ripped-off shots, long and lingering camera angles that film every implied-rapey moment. You will know exactly what I'm talking about if you've watched the video embedded above. It can all be equally as violent as the male deaths, but with an added element ; the women's deaths are sexualized. Every depiction of a female victim on the show is pretty much torture porn.

4. I will admit that the creators of the show also take the female gaze into account ; the long, lingering shots of Jensen Ackles' lush face and Jared Padalecki's mile-long denim-clad legs aren't exactly accidental (and I enjoy the hell out of them), but the sexualization of the male characters is simply never ever ever on the same level. For just one example, take demon Meg's torture scene in episode 6.10 "Caged Heat".  She is entirely nude with nothing but a thin leather strap across her chest and hips, and the other demon in charge of torturing information out of her is busy inflicting pain (off-screen) somewhere around Meg's lower abdomen and/or genital area. To say that it merely implies penetration or rape would be an understatement.

Compare this to pretty much any other time either one of the Winchester brothers have been attacked, assaulted, tied up, strapped down, or beaten and tortured to within an inch of their lives. They are always clothed. Their vulnerability is never sexualized. Their fear is never fetishized. Their pain is never porn-ified. The double standards are jarring, when you allow yourself to acknowledge them.

5. Leaving aside sexualized violence, we move into the territory of sexualized evil, or SPN's impossibly simplistic madonna/whore dichotomy. Most women are either virginal victims or angelic mother figures ; see especially Mama Winchester's ghost and/or memory appearances as a a barefoot paragon of maternal virtue clothed in a flowing white nightgown of feminine innocence - utterly Taylor Swiftian music video in its proportions). And if they're not mothers, girlfriends or victims, they are evil lady sex demons who wear really low-cut dresses and grind up all over the Winchester boys and talk in breathy, flirty voices because they are evil and use the evil sex to take advantage of the noble heroic menfolk. See especially : pretty much every female demon featured on the show, every other assorted female supernatural creature which uses sex to lure, trap and kill men.

6. It would be pretty irresponsible of me to assert that ALL women in the SPN-verse are reduced to virginal innocents or sexualized villains. Because of course there are some truly wonderful female characters...who all got written off the show. There was Bela ; intelligent, cunning, self-serving, snarky, thoroughly fun to have around, and in the end, utterly tragic. There were the two incarnations of the demon Ruby, who had wonderfully shady motivations and loyalties and could have been one of the most complex, interesting characters on the show. There was the demon-hunting mother and daughter duo of Ellen and Jo Harvelle. Jo in particular could have served as a wonderful foil or counterpart to Dean's journey ; she too lost a parent as a child and was thrust into a world of knowledge and responsibilities she was never ready for. But nope. Jo was introduced as a love interest, put on the shelf when the vocal majority of the fans didn't warm up to her, was brought back a few seasons later, killed off, and then brought back again as a plot device. We could have had it all Jo. We could have had it all.



In fact, SPN has a pretty established tradition of female characters serving as plot devices. Mary Winchester and Sam's girlfriend Jess were both killed off (or more suitably, fridged) in order to provide the Winchester men with their Man Pain, their angst, their motivation to hunt down all the evil in the world. Even according to the show's Big Bad Demon, both those women died simply "because they were there". We never really learn anything about Jess. We do learn some awesome things about the boys' mother, Mary. But even that comes after three whole seasons of the angelic-mom-in-white-nightgown routine, before the writers could find anything substantial enough about Mary to include in the main story arc. All other women in the show rarely, if ever, have a backstory or motivations of their own, or they are written out or killed off before any true potential can be reached. This show truly is about the Winchester boys - their conflicts, their struggles. Their issues are the most complex ones, handled with the most gravitas. Which is a shame, because I think the women on SPN have some pretty kick ass stories to tell, if only the writers would let them (we will always have fan fiction, I guess).

b. Ethnic representation

I'm not American, and it's probably not in my place to comment on ethnic representation in a show from a foreign country which I know best only through its popular culture. But even I have to say that for a show that so prides itself on its sense of mythic Americana (the beer, the music, the roads that stretch out into the horizon) and puts so much effort into creating a real sense of small towns and roadside diners and general American-ness, the America of SPN is surprisingly and blindingly white. The handful of African American characters present in the early seasons have all been killed off, or are essentially missing ; Gordon, Rufus, Agent Hendrickson, Missouri Moseley, Cassie. All characters who were dynamic and interesting and had terrific potential (Hendrickson in particular - can you imagine the Winchesters having a legit FBI agent on their side? And Gordon - a ruthless vampire hunter who must deal with the ultimate hunter's nightmare of turning into the very creature you kill for a living. STOP MURDERING THE INTERESTING CHARACTERS YO).
This post does a much better job of breaking down the race and culture issues in SPN - including the fact that the show has delved into Native American mythology and beliefs quite a fair bit, but has yet to feature more than a couple actual Native American people on the show.

Let's not even talk about the Asians.

Actually let's talk about the Asians.

There haven't actually been all that many actors of Asian descent featured on seven years of the show. The only references to Asian people and culture came in the form of porn. No really, porn. Dean's favourite Busty Asian Girls skin mag, and the hentai sites he frequents when he gets bored or horny or both. Until Kevin Tran appeared in the most recent season. And boy, was Kevin Tran a walking grab-bag of super Asian stereotypes - he was in AP Calculus, he wore sweater vests, he studied all day, his greatest interests in life were getting into an Ivy League school. His best friend (or at least his only friend that we see) is an Asian girl who also studies a lot and wears knee socks. But the season 8 promo clips show us a Kevin who has shaved his hair off, is shooting people in the face with holy water, and seems to have taken up the hunting lifestyle. And I am clinging on to the last shreds of hope that SPN will do something to truly subvert stereotypes and make Kevin Tran as awesome as he deserves to be.

c. The writers, producers and main cast are all part of one big boys' club.

The main characters are all male. The directors are all male. The creator is male. The show was pitched and created with a male target audience in mind, before the fangirls ruined everything and embraced it for their own, because demographics be damned. Sera Gamble was the only main female producer and head writer on the show for 7 years before she too stepped down, leaving behind and even greater sausage fest than the show was before.
I certainly don't believe that all the men working on this show are being intentionally sexist ; the cast especially seem like smart, funny, charming, humble, passionate people who are genuinely appreciative of the fans. So no, I don't think any of them wake up in the morning and go "I would like a cheese bagel for breakfast and also I am going to be a misogynistic piece of douchewaffle today". A lot of our prejudices and perceptions of the world and other people are ingrained, and we don't realize we're being offensive or bigoted until it's pointed out to us, or if we're self aware enough to catch ourselves in the middle of sexist/racist/classist/other-ist thoughts and behaviour. And sometimes I think the dudes of SPN could use someone going up to them and saying "Hey, great show! But the way you guys portray gender and race is kind of problematic - mind if I give you some suggestions?".



In any case, more female input could seriously help the show get over some of it's more problematic aspects. Sera Gamble once spent an entire writer's meeting trying to change a single detail about the character of Ruby the demon ; Gamble wanted the demon to possess the body of an already-deceased woman instead of a living one, so that things would not get icky later on when Ruby would go on to do the The Evil Sexing with Sam (we're talking issues of rape and willing consent - a woman possessed while still alive can hardly be in a condition to agree to sex with Sam Winchester). This is something that the male writing team entirely overlooked, because it didn't even occur to them that this would be a problem..

d. Representation of fandom within the show itself. 

Supernatural has grown to be one of the most meta shows on television - there are dozens of references and inside jokes about the fandom, and an entire episode dedicated to Dean and Sam being zapped into a parallel universe where their lives are the subject of a TV show called Supernatural. It's amazing and weird and hilarious by turns. The show even found time to insert a fangirl character into the proceedings - Becky Rosen. Slavering, obsessive, ultra horny, socially awkward Becky Rosen who spends all her time writing Dean/Sam slash fanfiction and feeling up the real Sam when she finally meets him. Becky was pretty funny until that one episode which shall not be named, which essentially involved her drugging, abducting, almost-raping (?) Sam and trying to get him to marry her while he was under the influence of a love potion. That's when it stopped being funny. That's when you started wondering whether the show was still laughing with you, or if they'd started laughing at you. That episode was a mean-spirited, disturbing, problematic mess.

So here's the deal. Can we have more girls like Charlie please? Because here's the thing Supernatural, this is what most of your die-hard, super-invested female fanbase is like. Young women in their late teens to early/mid 20s with Lord of the Rings themed desktop wallpaper and Hermione Granger bobbleheads and unhealthy levels of attachment to their computers, who can quote any given cult sci-fi TV show at the drop of a sonic screwdriver (HA see what I did there). Icing on the cake? Charlie was lesbian. Like many, many, many other Supernatural fangirls. Charlie did not die in slow, horrible, fetishized ways. Charlie got to keep her clothes on. Charlie walked away not just alive, but as a heroine.  Charlie's sexual orientation was not the butt of jokes, fetishized or paraded around in a show of OMG LOOK HOW PROGRESSIVE AND LIBERAL WE ARE, and neither did it define her entire identity, because she was so much more than your token homosexual character. Charlie was amazing. Charlie is what this show is capable of when it's on top form.

e. Misogyny within fandom

Which is made worse by fanservice on the part of the writers. The Supernatural fandom has a hard time embracing female characters who are not older/mother figures, because any woman who does not fall within those tropes poses a sexual threat to the brothers' relationship. Not all fans are like this of course, but the ones who are have been vocal enough about their disapproval, resulting in at least two female characters being written off the show due to "poor fan response", namely Jo and Bela. Now, fan whining is bad enough, but it makes it worse when the writers simply erase these characters without ever really giving them the room and opportunity to develop into fully-realized creations (and perhaps even win fans over?). I can't say I know how TV works, but surely there's a limit to how far the creators are willing to go before they stop pandering to anything the fans want?



Take the demon Meg, once again. She has been a recurring character (in at least two incarnations) for seven-going-on-eight years, and there is still little absolutely no backstory about her. While the angel Castiel (who showed up in season 4) has had more than one episode dedicated entirely to him and/or his POV. Guess what? If Castiel had been played by a woman (or as a genderless angel inhabiting a female human body) the character would be dead by now ; not just because of the way fans would respond, but also because of how the writers would portray the character anyway. As it is, the currently very male Castiel is easily one of the show's most wildly popular characters and the Castiel/Dean slash pairing is well on its way to a glorious pedestal in internet fandom history. And just for the record, I love Castiel and the actor playing him (Misha Collins is a flawless human being and if you don't like him then you're just wrong, go sit in the corner and evaluate your life choices). But even I can't deny that gender has a LOT to do with the character's current level of popularity among fans.




In fact, there is already an in-show example of this - Anna Milton.

Anna was a fallen angel living life as a mortal, until she regained her angelic swag (and her memory of her true identity), but instead of resuming her rightful place in the grand scheme of things, Anna began to question orders, to doubt God, to contemplate the real meaning of being alive, of having free will and choice, of leading an existence of substance and purpose as opposed to simply taking orders from Heaven. In other words, Anna went through a character arc almost exactly parallel to that of Castiel. And more than that, in fact ; when we first meet Anna, she is a mortal who has already revoked her angel status, has already sacrificed everything to live life as a human and to go through love, pain, sickness, sorrow, joy, death, etc - all experiences that she cannot have as an immortal celestial being. Anna was ballin' awesome. And then Anna died.



Yup.

f. Sexist language and gendered insults. 

Bitch. Slut. Whore. Sam is "gay" or a total "chick" because he is more emotionally vulnerable and open than his brother. Being possessed by a demon is likened to rape or having sexual intercourse with another man (or you know, "Gaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy!"). I understand how the language is tied in with the macho-ness and general hypermasculinity of the Winchester family (leather jackets big guns classic rock muscle cars giant hamburgers punching shit in the FACE). But seriously, gay jokes? Can we just not?. And it's a shame too, because with Dean and Sam Winchester, the show has actually subverted your macho male hero type to a degree ; there's Sam who is sensitive to other people's emotions and always ready to TALK ABOUT HIS FEELINGS and cry if needed. And Dean is essentially the family's mother figure - nurturer, caregiver and all-round maternal in his role towards Sam. And both brothers are incredibly emotionally vulnerable. Why undermine all this wonderful character development with OMG U IZ SOO GAY?


So after ALL that, why do I keep watching? Partly because I genuinely do love the show, flaws and all. And also partly because if I stopped watching a show for all the reasons stated above, I probably would not be watching any TV at all. These things aren't issues exclusive to Supernatural. It's all of TV, all of film, all of media. As the wonderful makers of the Women's Work video stated, they could have very easily made the same video using footage from any other genre show on TV ; some episodes of Buffy, the X-Files, and certainly any one of the dozens of procedural cop/crime shows floating around. I guess I'm thankful that there is always online fandom to critique, analyze, subvert, interpret, and most importantly and wonderfully of all, create their own versions of the show.
If you're anything like me, you're horribly protective and clingy about Things that you love, almost as if you had written and constructed and created every aspect of it yourself. So it can be hard to acknowledge, let alone accept that a Thing that you love has deeply problematic flaws. But it needs to be done, and this article by Social Justice League just sums it all up perfectly.

"As fans, sometimes we need to remember that the things we like don’t define our worth as people. So there’s no need to defend them from every single criticism or pretend they are perfect. Really loving something means seeing it as it really is, not as you wish it were. You can still be a good fan while acknowledging the problematic elements of the things you love. In fact, that’s the only way to be a good fan of problematic things."

In the meantime, I'll be catching up with season 8 of Supernatural with all my fingers and toes crossed. Because I'm still a sucker for you, Show. And the admittedly shitty things you do will never negate the awesome parts. I just may have to remember to Internet-smack you upside the head once in a while. We're good, guys. We're all good.

You know. For now. 

BAP'S Tyrannical Book-Handling Rules.

I am notoriously anal about books. I've almost entirely stopped lending my books out to friends because I feel truly bad about subjecting people to my list of rules and restrictions, which include the likes of these :

• NEVER EVER leave the book lying face down, to the point where the spine bends or cracks. How would you like it if your backbone got bent over itself, you barbarian
•  NO dog-earing. I expect you to either use bookmarks or just go with your memory.
• When you're reading paperbacks, DO NOT flip the book so far open that you bend the spine. It is entirely possible, and not as difficult as it sounds, to hold the book open at an angle that doesn't damage the spine while you read. This rule is negotiable when hardcovers are involved.
• DO NOT take the book with you into the bathroom or shower.
• DO NOT bend, fold, or crease the covers or pages.
• DO NOT eat or drink anywhere near the book. The only acceptable stains are when the pages turn brown with age, not coffee.
• DO NOT take the book with you to school, work, or generally anywhere outside your house where you can drop it, misplace it, leave it behind or otherwise lose it.
• Highlighting, scribbling, underlining, or defacing the book in any way is punishable by a slow, torturous death. Or maybe a smack upside the head. It all depends on my mood, really.

Yeah I don't know how I still have friends after all that, either.

I should probably explain that all these apply only to books that I own. If the books are yours, or if they are a gift from me (and I do love buying books for people ; all future nephews and nieces can look forward to a book for every birthday and Christmas and THEY WILL LIKE IT dammit) you're free to do with them as you please ; drop them in the toilet, lose them at the train station, smear the pages with foodstuff.

Most people I know subscribe to the life philosophy of letting the copies of your favourite books show exactly how much you love them. Torn, creased, folded, stained, falling apart and held together with tape and glue, or the pages bloated because of the one time the book fell in the toilet bowl or when you had to run across the campus parking lot in the middle of a thunderstorm or something. Books that show signs of life, of having been loved and handled and shared and passed around, bearing dozens of fingerprints and coffee-and-chocolate stains and smell like that one brand of perfume you used almost every day when you were sixteen. That's fine. That's great. Whatever makes you happiest, whatever way in which you choose to cherish your reading material, go for it. I say this with no trace of sarcasm.

My own books, on the other hand, look almost exactly as they did the day I got them. Spines intact, no creases or lines on the covers ; still in mostly pristine condition. The only sign that the copies are not actually brand new can be seen in the yellows and browns of old paper. Visitors look at my bookshelf and proclaim that "it looks like no one has ever read these before!", which to me is like a compliment wrapped in a taco of insult. I have read every book on  my shelf at least twice, and many of them are copies I have owned since early childhood. I love those books. I treasure them and I remember how and where I acquired every single one of them. They are my babies. I even keep the books I don't particularly like and will probably never read again because I'm afraid of making them sad if I give them away (I have issues, I'm dealing with them okay).

And I genuinely resent the idea that I (and other nitpicky pieces of shit like me) am somehow less of a book lover because I am too obsessed with keeping my tomes in mint condition to actually enjoy the words, the content. I resent the idea that I am some sort of an incarnation of a demon librarian because I won't allow my books the liberty of relaxing just a little.

Don't judge a book by its cover, but also don't judge a reader by the way they read. Their...readeringship. Methods. Thing. You know what I'm getting at. I still cringe to the very core of my being when I see someone holding a paperback so wide open that the spine cracks and I can see where the pages are already coming loose. But do I see them as barbaric uncouth uncultured Philistines who have no idea how to treat literature and thus are not worthy of the joys and wonders of the printed word? Yes!

NO.

NO I mean no.

No of course not.

How you read and keep your books really have no bearing on the kind of the reader you are. It took me a while to learn this, and to stop judging people who felt no life-defining need to handle their books like the tree pulpy equivalent of cut glass dinnerware. These days, as long as we can sit down over a cup of over-expensive pearl milk tea and totally fangirl over Neil Gaiman's brain and leather jacket collection, we're good. Just keep your unrefined paws off my copy of Good Omens. 


This is post is brought to you by Tom Hiddleston, who thinks reading is totally sexy, especially if you put on a suit for the occasion.

And just a smidgen of lens flare. Ooooh.

p.s All that being said, I do have a thing for old books. Especially the kind you can find in university libraries, with musty pages and cloth-bound covers and check-out cards with return dates from the 1950s stamped on them, and handwritten notes scribbled into the margins. I sometimes go to the library just to sniff them, like a creeper.