Notes on my rewatch of The Untamed, episode 2

    Part two of my public notes to myself about every random thing I'm noticing as I rewatch The Untamed.  Because.

Notes on my rewatch of The Untamed, episode 1

     Yup, I'm just going to take notes right here on my blog, because I can. 🤣

    Just in case anyone happens to randomly come across this, let me take a moment to explain the following:  these are the notes of someone watching The Untamed for the second time (third time for somewhere between half and two thirds of the episodes) and who has read the original novel (Mo Dao Zu Shi, or The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation) twice.  They are the disjointed notes of someone who has written a stupidly long fanfic based on the drama's continuity, and is now carefully and closely watching the drama, looking for details and to fix any places I messed up because of differences between the drama and the novel.  Since search engines will totally grab bits of text from anywhere in a document, I'll try to avoid the heaviest spoilers (like the identity of the mysterious man, lol), but all the text that follows is a) written for my own benefit, first and foremost, and b) largely expecting that anyone else who happens to read it has familiarity with the source material.

    So proceed with due caution if you haven't read the novel or watched the show. 😉

Pride Month Reading Recap '24

    Or so I call the post as if I did any kind of build-up.

    Or, like, any posts at all other than this one.  😰

    Well.

    Anyway.

    I didn't do as much reading for Pride Month as I'd have liked, but I did better than last year, anyway.  Which I suppose counts for something?

    First up, volume 6 of the graphic adaptation of Mo Dao Zu Shi.

    Uh.

    Not a huge amount to say there, really.  Though I can at least say that the adaptation has improved compared to the first few volumes, in that it's leaving out less crucial information.

    Still can't approach the actual novel, though.

    Next...

    ...actually, I'm not sure which one came next.  We'll just say this one did and move on.

    I wanted to read something a bit more genuine than the usual light novels/manga this year (and without falling into another long-winded trap like last year 😰) so when I spotted the book above I was immediately interested.  Until I Meet My Husband is the memoir of a gay activist in Japan, whose wedding at the Tsukiji Hongwanji Temple was the first same-sex marriage in Japan to receive religious recognition.  As of the last time I checked any news on the subject (which has been at least two or three years 😰), same-sex marriages aren't fully legally recognized in Japan yet, but they are at least treated similarly to common-law marriages in some areas, thanks to the work of activists like Ryousuke Nanasaki.

    The book often made me cry to read about what he had to go through growing up, but overall it was very uplifting, because he never let things drag him down, and he stayed true to himself, and pushed to improve conditions for everyone.  Some of what he had to go through is no different from what non-hetero people the world over have to deal with:  understanding the self, trying to come out to family and friends and fearing what their reactions will be, mockery from those who don't understand (especially in childhood), etc.  But some of it was very different from what people in the West are going through today.  The time Nanasaki and his boyfriend wanted to rent an apartment together and told the real estate agent that they were a couple looking to live together, and the agent flat-out told them not to tell that to any prospective landlords, but instead to lie that only one of them was living there, and the other just pay rent under the table, because no one would rent to a gay couple.  And if I did my math correctly, this was around 2012 that they were being told this.  That would not have happened in a big city in the US in 2012.  The incident, much earlier, where one of his teachers told him it was his own fault the other students were mocking him and that he needed to stop "acting cute for the attention"...I want to say that wouldn't happen here, but I guess I don't actually know that for sure.  It was upsetting just to read about it, though.  I can't imagine having to live through it.

    There's probably a lot more I should say, but I never quite know what I should say until about a week after the post goes up.  😅

    So I'll just move on to the next one.

    I wanted to get in at least one work that was lesbian instead of gay, and ended up with this one.  It's...well, it has its share of problems, but it's overall pretty cute.  The plot is that the blonde there shows up one day to the lead's high school and informs her that she's her future girlfriend who has traveled back in time seven years so they can go to high school together.  (Well, evidently just her mind did?  It's not totally clear from volume one.  And I suppose technically there's no proof that she's not just, you know, delusional.)

    The main problem with it is that the brunette spends most of the first volume asserting that she doesn't want real life romance and never will.  So for most of the book it kind of feels ace-phobic, but...if the story is true and they really were lovers seven years in the future (engaged to be married, in fact!) then that's not what's actually going on.

    Anyway.

    Ennead volume 2.  So, this one almost doesn't count?  It's described as being a "boy's love love/hate" webtoon, so...it's very different from the standard depiction of LBGTQ relationships in, well, anything.

    On the other hand, hot Egyptian gods.

    And not, like, generic gods with Egyptian trappings.  It's pretty well researched.

    It's also very intense, and pretty focused on the (sometimes metaphorical, sometimes literal) battle as Horus attempts to regain his father's position following Set's murderous coup.  (Or whatever you wanna call that.)

    I remember that I saw this one before and passed it up because I wasn't sure about it.  Wow, was I wrong to have passed it up!  So good!  And the art is gorgeous.  (Surprisingly, I find the art inside is actually better than the cover art, despite that normally it'd be the other way around.)

    It's like...imagine your standard court intrigue situation, and then place the lead of an ecchi comedy into it, and you get an idea for what you're getting here.

    And did I mention the art?  😍

    Okay, so...finally, the last thing on my Pride month docket I still haven't actually started yet, largely because I realized I needed to finish rereading my 494k word behemoth fanfic before the 27th for reasons I'll get to in a minute.  But probably tomorrow I'll start reading...

    I've been steadfastly refusing to read Thousand Autumns for a while now, because the plot description on the back of the first volume reads like "Xue Yang/Xiao Xingchen:  the novel!"  But looking at the text on the back of the later volumes (the final volume comes out next week) makes it clear that it's not really (much) like that, so I decided to take the plunge and give it a try.  If I like the first volume, I'll go ahead and buy the rest of them.  (Part of the reason I decided to give it a try is that Seven Seas is translating one of the author's other novels, and its plot sounded interesting, so it'd be good to know if I like their style as an author.)

    Okay, and, short as it is, that's been my whole Pride month reading for the year. 😭

    But, to address why I'm having to rapidly read through my whole massive fanfic, the reason is that I want to rewatch the entirety of The Untamed before I start rewriting it, right?  And it turns out that The Untamed was first aired (well, if "aired" is an appropriate word to use for a web series) in 2019, so this is its fifth anniversary.  And it started going up on the 27th of June.

    So my original thought was to watch each episode on the fifth anniversary of the day it went up, only I looked more closely at the listing of the airdates of the episodes on the wiki and realized that the episodes went up in chunks of two, with a few days off between blocks of episodes, so...I mean, I could still do it that way, but it's gonna be a lot easier if I just watch a single episode every day from the 27th of June through whatever day in August that I finish on.  (I think it'd be the 15th if I watch every single day, but I might need to take a day off here or there.  Or rather I probably should take a few days off here or there so that I can finish on the 20th, the day the final episodes went up.)

    Part of the reason I don't want to watch two episodes a day is that I'll have to be pausing to take notes often, since the rewatch is largely for reasons of needing to check on various little details that I need to get right in the fic, and stuff like that.  (That's why I'm having to reread the whole fic, so I know what I need to look for in the rewatch.)  So instead of each episode taking me about 45 minutes to watch, each episode might take an hour and a half or more.  So it'll be better if I'm not committing to two of them a day.  😅

    I might actually blog about it as a process, just to give my blog some content.  🤣

    Anyway, in the "you learn something new every day" category, I learned this today when I got distracted by a deep-dive into fanworks on AO3 that are meant as guides to help others with difficult projects:

(click on image to go to the source work)

    This explains so much!

    Specifically, in Mo Dao Zu Shi, there's a scene where the drunk Lan Wangji steals a couple of chickens to give to a confused-and-amused Wei Wuxian.  In the live-action adaptation, they very specifically made the chickens roosters.  (I seem to recall the translation of the novel calling them hens, but I'd have to consult the book to be positive.  I know it did not call them roosters, though.)  And now I know why they were roosters.  😁  Just one of those moments where they were working very hard to make sure the audience understood the romance is still there, even though they weren't allowed to call direct verbal attention to it.

    ....huh.  I just realized what's lacking in my Pride Month reading this year:  things originally written in English.

    I've got a volume of a Chinese web novel and a volume of the comic adaptation of a Chinese web novel, a Japanese memoir, two volumes of Japanese manga, and a volume of a Korean webtoon.  (At least, I think it said it was Korean?)

    Actually, maybe what's really odd about that is that it's sort of normal for me?

    Like, I seem to read a lot of translated works.  (Especially since getting hooked on danmei novels.)

    So maybe that's not totally strange, then, but...

    Oh well.

    At least it's better to read a lot of translated works from other languages and cultures than to never read them, right?

    (And it's not like I never read anything originally written in English!  At the same time that I bought several of these, I also bought a book on the history of Mesopotamia.  As a first step on my research for rewriting book four of the Atalanta and Ariadne books.  I just thought I shouldn't read it until after Pride Month was over.)

Wild

     Okay, this is going to be a weird one.

    Yesterday, my brother and I were at my parents' house.  Nothing big going on, we just end up over there at least once a week, because...well, because.  It's the sort of thing that maybe didn't feel so weird when we were in our twenties, but is starting to feel decidedly abnormal now that we're both in our forties.  (Heck, I'm almost to my fifties at this point.)  On the other hand, it typically includes a free meal, so...

    Anyway, there we were, at our parents' house, and they wanted to watch something.  Rather than the most recent episode of Doctor Who, it was suggested that we watch a movie.  And my brother had been wanting to get the rest of us to watch the Jack Black movie School of Rock since none of the rest of us had seen it.

    So that's what we watched.

    A bit pat in places, and I disliked the stereotyped depiction of the gay boy, but it was overall fun, and I appreciated that despite the "date" and stuff they didn't do a standard Hollywood forced "romance" between Jack Black's lead and Joan Cusack.  (As an aroace person, I'm particularly rankled by forced romances in movies.  Let people stay single, ya jerks!)

    Anyway.  What I wanted to talk about was my double-take moment during the end credits.

    There were, naturally enough, lots of song credits at the end.  And one of them was for the song "T.V. Eye."  Listed right after songs by Marc Bolan and David Bowie, just where you'd expect to see Iggy Pop, right?

    Only the reason I did a double-take, the reason I forced my father (who always handles the remote, even at times when it 100% does not make sense for him to do so) to rewind so I could look at the song's listing again, was that the "performed by" credit didn't say "The Stooges" or "Iggy Pop and the Stooges" or whatever else you would expect it to say.

    It said "Wylde Ratts."

    That's one of the names Curt Wild's band goes by in Velvet Goldmine.

    More importantly, it's the "performed by" credit for Curt's songs in the end credits of the movie, and the "performed by" credit on the Velvet Goldmine soundtrack for "T.V. Eye."  (Sadly, the soundtrack does not include "Gimme Danger," so when I did an expanded soundtrack for Velvet Goldmine (for my own personal use only, ofc) I had to get my brother to grab the audio off the DVD of the movie and prepare it as an .mp3 for me.  Wish I could have done the same thing for "T.V. Eye," actually, since the performance in the movie is better than the one on the soundtrack, but unfortunately there's a huge chunk of dialog over the guitar solo.)

    Meaning that they didn't use Iggy Pop's recording of the song, they used "Curt Wild's" recording.  So that if they had used the vocals (they obviously didn't, 'cause I would have noticed that!) then that would have been Ewan McGregor's voice.

    Which is epic.

    I went to IMDB and looked all over the place on School of Rock's page there, to see if there was any mention of the Velvet Goldmine connection, but there wasn't.  Which is kind of disappointing.

    Anyway, I just felt like that was the sort of thing I ought to share with the world. 😅  It's not crucial, deep or meaningful, but I, personally, found it interesting.

    And wild.

IWSG: um

    I an at a weird lull in my writing life.

    It's not writer's block, though.  It's more like being without a project.

    I mean, I kinda have a project, in that I started the script for a goofy visual novel, but...it's not really the same thing, since I feel no particular obligation to finish it, not even an obligation to myself.

    I do have a lot of story ideas sitting around waiting for me to start working on them (or in the case of most of them, "start fleshing them out to be sufficient to work on"), but...most of them are likely to turn out to be really long.  Hopefully not as long as the one that I spent eleven months writing, but it's not impossible.  (There is also the terrifying possibility that some of them might end up even longer.)

    That massive work is kind of one of the reasons I don't want to start any potentially long projects, actually.  Because I plan to start work on its second draft in August (it's fan fiction, y'see, and I plan to rewatch the source material starting near the end of June) so I don't want to be deep in the middle of some other project.

    Probably what I should do with the intervening time is to start the heavy research that I'll need to put in before I can rewrite book four of the Atalanta and Ariadne series.  In that book they visit Babylon, so I need to know what it was like in approximately 1237 BCE.  (Yeah, I actually have a date that specific.  Though it's never used in the books themselves, obviously.  But I needed to know what year it was to know what else was going on in the world during their travels.  (Also, I had to assign specific years to a great many events in the past in order to have a definite chronology for the most pertinent events in Greek mythology so that the novels will remain consistent on those various points.  Also so I'd know how old the various surviving Greeks who took part in the Trojan War are.  And how long it had been since various events like the exploits of Heracles, etc.)  Especially when they visit Egypt in book five.  😅  Fortunately, that'll be a lot easier to research when I get there, since I just have to look up the late reign of Ramses II.)

    For the moment, I am (somewhat to my shame) mostly just letting my brain unwind with video games. 😅  Though that kinda makes me feel like a fraud as a writer...

    I realize that this has not been much of a post, but unfortunately this month's suggested question is not one that I have anything to say about, so...I didn't really have anything else to talk about.

A to Z Reflection

 

    Hmm.

    What to even say?

    I mean, a lot of the individual posts were things I had fun with, though I'm not sure how well I fulfilled my intention on the theme I chose for myself.  I mean, yeah, I wrote 27 posts about characters I have written about, one for each letter of the alphabet, but it ended up being more of a parade of "I enjoy this quote so much" and less of an actual discussion of the character or any facet of writing for them.  In that regard, I think the F and R posts were probably the most successful, because I actually did address more points than just "I enjoy this passage about this character."

    The fact that it mostly just swapped back and forth between my Greek mythology-inspired novels and my Mo Dao Zu Shi fanfic was also not cool.  Unfortunately, I don't actually have that much else that fit the qualification of "available online or hopefully will be available online someday."  I guess if I'd tried harder--or been willing to accept smaller characters--I could have found characters from more diverse works to use.

    So, it's like...I finished the challenge but I also kind of feel like I failed somehow?

    More importantly, I was so fixated on it that I got very little else accomplished over the month of April, and was so exhausted by the process that I barely ended up visiting anyone else's blog--though I did at least visit a few!--so it sort of...defeated the purpose?  Even worse, I was getting stressed enough about it that I ended up triggering my heart palpitations, so that's excessively bad.

    Overall...

    Overall I think I can't even contemplate doing this again unless my heart condition ever becomes truly resolved, instead of merely "less intrusive," which is where it's been for the last...I dunno, six to eight months?  (Doesn't help that my doctor is no longer with the hospital (the reasons for her departure were not explained to me) and I have way too many social phobias to be able to easily call another one.  Plus all the tests indicated that there wasn't actually anything wrong with my heart, so it's like...wtf?)

    *sigh*

    This has not been much of a post.

    But I don't really feel like I have much else to say, either.

    (But that's why I won't be entering it into the Reflections bloghop.  No point in subjecting other people to the boredom...)

IWSG - Yikes!

 

    Normally, I pre-write these days in advance, but this month I've been so distracted by April A-to-Z that I totally forgot. 😰  So I'm gonna have to hasten out a post that will likely be even sloppier and more disjointed than usual.

    I've been in a bit of a muddle all month, but it got worse about...hmm...I want to say about a week and a half ago?  Somewhere around there.  Unlike on my computer, on the browser on my cell phone, I keep a whole bunch of tabs always open so I don't have to mess around with bookmarks and stuff.  And one day I opened the tab that is always aimed at the back-end of this blog so I could keep working on my April A-to-Z posts when it gave me this message that it couldn't load any of my data.  The posts, pages and even statistics all said that.  I wrote it off as a momentary glitch, and went about my business, but then it still said that four or five hours later.  Everything was still there--if I clicked the "view my blog" button, I could still see all my content--but I couldn't access anything, so I was afraid my blog had been frozen pending deletion, or at least pending an investigation into whether or not it needed to be deleted.

    So at that point I absolutely started panicking.  I tried using the help page to see if my blog was disabled, and came to the conclusion that my account was disabled (despite that I could log into my email just fine) and tried to start the appeal process, only since the account was not, in fact, disabled, obviously that didn't work.  After freaking out for a couple hours, I managed to download a full back-up copy of my blog....and then noticed a new help page indicating a way to get an indicator that a blog (rather than an account) was disabled and how to appeal that decision, so I went back to the back-end page...and everything was totally back to normal.

    I still have zero clue what happened.

    What I do know is that I figured that if my blog was going to be disabled, it would be because of the work of (fan) fiction I had posted on some pages, so I reverted them all to draft and across three days painstakingly copy-pasted the text from the blog (where it had received various minor edits in the year it had been up) to AO3.  (Where, ironically, it's gotten more kudos than it got views on the blog...)

    Anyway...my heart palpitations are definitely exacerbated by stress (at this point, I think it's safe to say they're not caused by it, though I still don't know what did start this condition) so that needless to say caused my heart to start misbehaving for a couple of days straight.  (And that was after I'd already had some issues because I was working too hard at the April A-to-Z process!)  So that was all kinds of not fun.

    Um.

    That's so not a writing thing, even though it's tangentially related.

    I didn't mean to go into so much detail.  (This is why I normally pre-write, so I have time to start over if I get derailed and run off on a tangent like this.)

    Anyway.

    I'm also very distracted because I'm in the final stages of getting The Martial Maenads, the third in my more-or-less YA series, ready for release.  I finished writing the glossary for the interactive version, but I'm using a different program for code entry now (because I learned the program I used to use has a habit of accidentally deleting your saved code!) and it was giving me all kinds of problems yesterday, triggering another heart palpitation, from frustration more than stress.  (Doesn't help that my computer is evidently too much of a potato for that program, and it chugs constantly when it's open...)  I should be able to finish getting the glossary into the code today, and then I just need to write a couple of post-novel mini-essays, maybe, or maybe I just need to write up that pre-novel essay on the alternate theogony that got introduced in book two?  Well, either way, that shouldn't take too long.  And then I only have to reread the novel twice--once in the Ren'py version and then once after posting the text online, since I find I can spot a lot of new errors by looking at it on my phone on AO3--and make any needed changed, then it can finally be released into the world that doesn't actually care in the slightest about it.

    I'm looking forward to finally getting that released, because I told myself "no more writing new things until after the release!" to force myself to stop goofing off by writing more fanfic instead of working on my actual release.  (Bad enough that I was putting so much into blogging over April that I barely touched it until the blog posts were all written...)  It's kind of weird how not writing can cause just as much stress as writing can.

    Aaaaaaand I feel like I have said nothing of any relevance to anyone, but I can't think of anything else to say. 😭  I'll try to get next month's post pre-written so it will be less of a gibbering mess.