RatCreature's Journal

After coming across squeeing in rydra_wong's journal about The Magnus Archives, I spent most of my time the last couple of days catching up with that podcast. The individual episodes are only about twenty minutes each, but well, as of now, at the end of season four of a planned five, there are 160 of it, so that adds up.

Fortunately I can do things like eating or cooking while listening to podcasts, and the 31st has recently been made a holiday again (not for Halloween, but as Reformation Day), so it was only moderately life disrupting, but the podcast is kind of ridiculously compelling.

If you haven't heard of the podcast, there's a framing conceit of an archive collecting testimonies of various horrible and creepy things that happen to people, but the short stories you hear interconnect at certain points so that you discover more of the underlying mythology and background history, and the archive staff also become protagonists in the events that you see unfold in the framework bits.

Horror normally is not my genre of choice at all, because I *like* happy endings, and those aren't really a genre feature of horror, especially not in the cosmic horror kind. Also I get really attached to main characters, and that is ill advised too.

And yet, here I am ( spoilery for the season four finale )

And now I have to wait until *April* for season five.

I watched Spider-Man: Homecoming this afternoon, and it was a lot of fun.

( cut for spoilers )

I've now finished watching all thirteen episodes and I really enjoyed it. I think it adapted the comics very well and is true to them.

Admittedly it is probably not the right series if you dislike grimdark and violence, but then that is true for much of the Daredevil comics ever since there *were* modern grimdark superhero comics. After all it was Frank Miller who shaped much of the modern Daredevil, and in reverse he started his career with that title (or at least it's the first he's become really known for) and developed his style there. I actually like Miller's work on Daredevil (unlike his works from Sin City onwards at least), but well, this still was pretty much what started superheroes going grimdark in the first place, as Miller's run progressed.

However I actually like that noir take on superheroes unless it goes truly overboard and becomes the kind of grimdark that is just a parody of itself without realizing it. And the Netflix series is IMO quite far away from that point.

For one thing at least to me the characters were still likable. I loved how they handled Matt and Foggy's relationship, and enjoyed the flashbacks to their college time that we got to see. I appreciated that ( spoilers )

I also liked Karen Page and her dynamic with both Foggy and Matt. I liked the symmetry that all three of them did not just work together, but each also followed things up on their own. Obviously Matt as vigilante but also ( spoilers )

I also thought their take on Wilson Fisk was done really well, that balance that he first comes across as a sort of "white collar" criminal who doesn't need to get his own hands dirty, but in fact erupts into hands-on violence and killing rages, and is even strong enough to fight Daredevil directly. I also liked how they adapted Vanessa to be more open-eyed.

I thought the James Wesley character as Fisk's right hand man was a great addition, though that is partly because his interactions with Fisk pinged my service kink *hard*. ( spoilers )

I also liked most of the minor tie backs to the comics that I caught, though I probably missed many. ( spoilers )

As for hints of larger events to come ( spoilers )

Unlike some other comments I've seen, I don't have much trouble to fit this with the rest of the MCU, i.e. the issue that the Avengers existing in the same New York where ( spoilers )

Anyway, I had a lot of fun watching.

Though you should take a look too at the great XMFC art roga drew for me for yuletart. It's for my XMFC prompt to show Erik using his powers to build something.

goss drew me a picture of SuperGrover for my drawble request, and it turned out absolutely awesome, with SuperGrover as part of a Green Lantern like Corps.

I just signed up for yuletart, and you should sign up too if you like drawing fanart.

Though took me something like two hours to edit my detailed request info so that it fit into the tiny 4300 character LJ comment, because I'd be happy to receive something in ten fandoms, so that comment length gave barely room to mention my favorite characters.

Anyway, it's an awesome art exchange. This will be the fourth time I'm participating and it has been running more smoothly every year. And I wouldn't want to miss it, even though I will just have to hope for the best wrt to the somewhat unpredictable family-related hazards to my schedule.

yahtzee63 just posted the last part of her awesome ST:AOS story Break (Spock/Uhura, ca. 26,000 words), which tells the story of Spock and Uhura's relationship from their first meeting to the end of the movie. You probably have all already read this or bookmarked it for reading anyway, but if not you really should.

The yuletart gift for me was just posted, and it's great! I got lovely Farscape art, showing Aeryn Sun, and you should look at it too.

My yuletart gift was just posted! Yay, art for me! It's a Nightwing and Arsenal drawing (gen, though you can interpret it with subtext too), so if you are into DC comics you should check it out, here.