merry happy

[kindkit]

I hope those of you who celebrate Christmas are having/have had a good one.

I spent much of today muzzy and tired, after having been fool enough to take Benadryl last night (when I was feeling the kind of frazzled-tired that means I can find it hard to sleep). In my intervals of consciousness I ate chocolate (I'm giving myself a break from carb restrictions for a couple of days) and, in the tradition of Christmas ghost stories, listened to several episodes of The Magnus Archives. I've now listened through episode 55, "Pest Control," nearly halfway through season 2. I love the show enormously, but I also increasingly feel like the lore is getting so interconnected and complex that it's hard to follow. (I know there's a wiki, but I am really really spoiler-averse so I mostly avoid it.) Relatedly, I would like to ask Sims-the-writer what the hell he was thinking when he named two very different characters "Gerard."

I'm worried about Jonathan, who is quietly losing his mind. He has good reason to be paranoid, but still. And of course he is least cautious about Sasha, who as far as I know is the person entity he ought to fear the most.

I'm hoping Martin isn't secretly evil, because Jonathan needs someone to help him. And to give him hugs and possibly also kisses. (I'm not really shipping them that hard, it's just that Martin is the only person who seems to care about Jonathan. And Jonathan occasionally shows small signs of caring about him! They're the only two people in the Institute I like, so I reflexively want them to get together. And then to resign from the Institute and go and live somewhere very very dull.)

Tim is an asshole, but I confess to being amused by his complicated love life/network of informants.

Some days and several episodes after first listening, I am still freaked out by "The New Door" and Michael. That fucking laugh, my god. And the fact that he somehow lured/forced the estate agent back into the corridor maze after she escaped. It's not fair! Once you've escaped, you ought to be safe! Something about the escape that isn't really an escape is especially chilling, to me. Anyway, I think whatever sort of alliance Michael may be offering the Institute is a devil's bargain.

Returning to Christmas-y stuff: I treated myself to a copy of John Le Carré's Agent Running in the Field, bought in hardcover because it was only a couple of dollars more than the e-book. I haven't started reading it yet but I'm looking forward to it. I rewatched part of White Christmas last night and may get around to the rest of it tonight; it's frothy and fun and I do my best to ignore all the ways it's problematic because Danny Kaye brings Big Queer Energy. Here he is camping it up like mad with Bing Crosby (plot context: the sisters who normally perform this act needed to leave town hastily, and Kaye's and Crosby's characters are trying to buy them some time).

Watch on YouTube

I love Danny Kaye so much.

My plans for the rest of the evening include eating Christmas lasagne (store-bought, because I did not want to cook) and more chocolate. Perhaps I'll look at Yuletide at some point, though every year it seems I know fewer and fewer of the fandoms.

Comments

[sovay]

Danny Kaye brings Big Queer Energy. Here's he is camping it up like mad with Bing Crosyby

This is the only piece of White Christmas I ever remember and I don't feel bad about that at all.

[kindkit]

It is the most memorable bit. I have two other particular soft spots: "Choreography," which makes wicked fun of modern dance, and the dress Rosemary Clooney wears when her heart is broken.

[sovay]

and the dress Rosemary Clooney wears when her heart is broken.

It is a very good dress. And Rosemary Clooney herself is a good thing in a movie.

[princessofgeeks]

I also love Danny Kaye.

[kindkit]

*grins*

[st_aurafina]

The thing with Sasha is so well done, I was creeped out by it the moment her voice changed, and yeah. *shudders* It's so similar to the second-guessing I do all the time with face blindness that it really scares me.

Michael is a fucking nightmare, I swear to god. I'm torn between wanting to scream and wanting to punch him in the laughing face.

Tim is so that jerk guy every office has, you know? You want to hate him, but he wouldn't care if you did, and that kind of earns some respect, if you know what I mean.

[rydra_wong]

The thing with Sasha is so well done, I was creeped out by it the moment her voice changed, and yeah. *shudders* It's so similar to the second-guessing I do all the time with face blindness that it really scares me.

Yes! I saw a post somewhere from someone who'd registered the voice change (but not listened to the end-of-S1 credits) and thought it was one of those things you occasionally get where a show has to recast an actor and everyone acts like there's no difference, so they mentally retconned to "okay this is Sasha, this is how Sasha's always been" -- which is perfect for how the characters' heads are being messed with.

[kindkit]

It reminds me, in a much lighter vein, of one of my favorite bits of "Sparks Nevada" from The Thrilling Adventure Hour. Don't know if you're familiar with that, but it's a comedy, and there's a running joke where various characters are temporarily impersonated by an alien spy whose voice and behaviors are nothing like the people he's replacing, but no one ever notices.

[kindkit]

I love not!Sasha's actor's voice work--how when Sasha is first replaced, you can hear the creature trying to work out how to sound human and to respond the ways Sasha would, and not quite managing, but to all her colleagues it just sounds like understandable trauma. And how she now sounds almost normal and ordinary, but never quite.

[rydra_wong]

Yay, delighted you are continuing to enjoy The Magnus Archives! I am sitting on my hands to avoid saying anything even slightly spoilery by implication.

I'm worried about Jonathan, who is quietly losing his mind.

I knooooooow.

And the fact that he somehow lured/forced the estate agent back into the corridor maze after she escaped. It's not fair! Once you've escaped, you ought to be safe! Something about the escape that isn't really an escape is especially chilling, to me.

Yeah, I had such a huge WAIT WHAT NO reaction when that happened. The horrors in Magnus do not play fair.

Relatedly, I would like to ask Sims-the-writer what the hell he was thinking when he named two very different characters "Gerard."

One of them's actually named Jared; Sims just pronounces it almost identically (that one confused me for ages).

Given that and the multiple Michaels (and half the rest of the characters being named after his friends/himself), I've concluded that Sims-the-writer is a remarkably talented writer who for some reason Just Can't Names.

(And I find this hilarious.)

Maybe if the fandom pools its resources we can buy him a baby names dictionary. *g*

[kindkit]

One of them's actually named Jared

Ah. I've been confused by that twice, then. When Gerard Keay was first introduced I thought he was "Jared," then I saw his name on the wiki. So when I heard the exactly identical pronunciation of Hopworth's first name, I foolishly assumed it was also Gerard!

I sympathize with the naming difficulties--my solution is usually to look up the most popular names from around the time the character was born--but I did also spend most of that episode trying to figure out why Gerard Keay's physical description and behavior were so completely different. *headdesk*

[rydra_wong]

I love the show enormously, but I also increasingly feel like the lore is getting so interconnected and complex that it's hard to follow.

Hopefully this doesn't qualify as spoilery, apologies if it does: FWIW, I think the lore gets much easier to follow again once you start to get glimpses of the big picture and can start to see how things fit into it.

[kindkit]

Not spoilery at all! And thanks for the reassurance. I do get frustrated when there's a vaguely familiar name and then Jonathan in his final remarks is all, "And we should cross-reference this with case LongStringOfNumbers," which does nothing to jog my memory, and I have to decide if I should find it and re-listen. But Sims is a good enough storyteller that I'm trying to trust him to remind me of all the really necessary information.

[rydra_wong]

I have consistently been too lazy to work out which ep case LongStringOfNumbers is, so I can vouch that it's not necessary. *g*

I mean, it definitely rewards attention to detail, and it's fun trying to figure out what's going on before something is officially revealed (and it's fascinating to relisten to earlier eps once you know more about what's up -- I'm currently on my second listen), but you don't have to memorize every random bit of info in order to follow it.

But Sims is a good enough storyteller that I'm trying to trust him to remind me of all the really necessary information.

He absolutely is, and I LOVE the way the show's handled its successive big reveals about its world; it's one of the things I've really been impressed by.

[snickfic]

Relatedly, I would like to ask Sims-the-writer what the hell he was thinking when he named two very different characters "Gerard."

I have an answer to this one! The answer is that he didn't, Hopworth's first name is Jared, it's just that their names are pronounced EXACTLY THE SAME. /o\

Also, 100% agree on The New Door. I love uncanny architecture anyway, but the ending is absolutely what makes it. One of the things about the people making statements is that generally they've had to survive long enough to make the statements, and so there's this sense of oh, well, at least they lived. But with Helen, we get that rug pulled right out from under us, IN REAL TIME. It's probably my favorite episode for sheer creep factor, alongside Lost John's Cave from the first season.

[kindkit]

Hopworth's first name is Jared, it's just that their names are pronounced EXACTLY THE SAME.

I originally thought Gerard Keay's first name was Jared, until I saw how it was spelled in the wiki. Thanks, Mr. Sims!

there's this sense of oh, well, at least they lived

Yes, exactly. Other characters have certainly come to bad ends after giving their statements, but it's always just referenced. But with Helen it's right there, and that plus our actual meeting the bad guy and hearing his utter glee . . . the creep factor definitely goes up to 11.

[halotolerant]

'White Christmas' is a tradition for me every year, and I have similar feelings to you about it: so much that is forgettable or downright uncomfortable, but then also THAT drag scene and Danny Kaye generally bringing campness all over the place. I like to think the writers/actors knew how ridiculous the 'straighter' bits are.

You are really drawing me in with the Magnus Archives! I'm not sure about horror but I'm very tempted... After all the last audio drama I listened to on your rec was Cabin Pressure and that was AMAZING *g* I've been watching a lot of subtitled TV recently, which is good in and of itself but means you can never look away and e.g. do some knitting, and some audio drama would be perfect for that.

I've ordered myself some Cadfael dvds btw.

[rydra_wong]

You are really drawing me in with the Magnus Archives! I'm not sure about horror but I'm very tempted...

In case it's of any use -- my post here has quotes from various people on the subject of how "horror-y" it is (which is obviously an impossible question to answer, but I think the quotes give some idea of what kind of thing it is and what it isn't, so people can gauge whether it might be their idea of a good time or not):

https://rydra-wong.dreamwidth.org/732843.html

There's also good discussion here:

https://findingfeather.tumblr.com/post/189766118082/on-the-one-hand-i-do-get-what-this-post

And my personal rec post about why I love the show is here, FWIW: https://rydra-wong.dreamwidth.org/735506.html

All non-spoilery! (Apart from things like "there's a plot" and "there are characters other than Jon", which you will already have gathered from this post. *g*)

[halotolerant]

This is incredibly helpful, thank you! \o/

[rydra_wong]

Yay, delighted I could help!

[kindkit]

Cadfael, yay!

As for TMA, all I can say is that I've found the level of horror . . . mostly tolerable. But my feelings about horror in general are kind of odd--I read a certain amount of short horror fiction (basically, Ellen Datlow's annual and themed anthologies) but I don't watch horror movies and I don't generally read horror novels, because in longer form I get invested in the characters and want them to be okay. Which is starting to be a bit of a problem for me with TMA, because I've become extremely protective of and worried about the characters I like, although the showrunners have outright said that nobody is going to be okay. But I'm hooked at this point.

TMA's horror is very different from the horror of Hannibal (the only horror-ish fandom I can think of that we both know). It's not aestheticized, and there's not even the slight moral justification of Hannibal mostly choosing to eat the rude. Bad things happen to good people in TMA, and they're not turned into art afterwards. But the show's well-written and well-performed, and I think Jonathan in particular would be your type of character.

[mllesatine]

I'm also in the middle of season 2. So far a few of the things that bothered me about the set-up have been resolved. I liked how Jonathan revealed that he was scared to show how much the things he recorded bothered him. It explained his weird attitude. And it's a neat trick to say that the real statements can't be recorded digitally and so recording them with the tape recorder marks them as special or real.

I also like how the place itself seems to affect the people who work there. They might even be compelled to work there until they die?

It's the Leitner books and the involvement of Mary Key and her son (who I thought was named Michael at first) that still interest me the most. I thought the episode with her reporting and Getrude Robinson recording was really good and sets up a lot of interesting things.

I have noticed that there are some horror themes that get used quite a lot and some things that aren't there at all. For instance I don't remember there having been a story where it's a lover or close relative as the source of the horror. It's usually outside sources and it happens a lot to people who aren't close to the person reporting. Many of these reports are people seeing someone else experience something horrible. Some of it draws a bit too much from the same well for me. There have been a lot of stories about losing your way in a building or other structure, a lot about falling and darkness.

I'm also quite glad that there isn't outright torture or rape. I probably wouldn't listen otherwise.

Is White Christmas a movie that gets shown a lot on TV during the holidays in the US? I follow a fashion blog and they also do a post on that movie evey years (simply posting the same blog post from 10 years ago). I've never seen it.