Arduinna

Apparently more than 40 days of posting every day wasn't enough to ingrain the habit, as my one-day "no, really, it's okay if I take a break" amnesty for myself promptly turned into 20 days barring a couple of brief Yuletide interruptions, during which my brain started sliding right back to "eh, that's not important enough to post" about things, and "eh, I'll post something tomorrow".

Partly I blame tv, of which there is suddenly far too much - and there's more starting up over the next couple of weeks. I'm already behind! I'm going to have to start weeding things out pronto. It's so hard to break my old conditioning that I should watch all the genre tv I like even somewhat, because what if there's never any more, and what if I don't know what other fans are talking about (only you can cure fannish illiteracy!), and and and. But there's always more, and the options are either to watch ALL the tv and not have time to do anything else, or watch some of the tv and maybe be able to get into discussions or read(/write) fic or watch(/make) vids, too.

Also, though, I've been way more social than usual in the last few weeks, both fannishly and otherwise. I used to know more fans in the Boston area, but we drifted off in different directions years ago and lost touch, so mostly I just hang out with the same very tiny crowd with occasional out-of-town visitors (not helped by my sky-high levels of introversion and homebody-ness *g*). But it's good to meet people, which is what I/we have been doing lately. Good dinners, good conversations, faces to go with names on the internet. Win! It just also takes up a lot of my social energy that would otherwise go into interacting online.

October has also been Wedding Month; I had a post-elopement reception to attend two weeks ago for a dear niece (and her equally dear new husband <3), and last weekend was a friend's wedding, which I'd been looking forward to all summer and which more than lived up to expectations. Both were huge fun, but also pretty social-energy draining.

But really, a lot of it is the tv. I get home at night and there's hours of catching up to do, and then I'm too tired to do anything else.

Still, some stuff I can't give up:

Person of Interest, because oh my show. ♥ ♥ ♥ I've seen that other people are having some issues with this season so far, so mostly I'm just ignoring other people's posts and the chat comm, and avoiding the IRC chat (woe); POI is my happy place and I want to keep that. (So in this one case, please don't comment to point out all the things I should be unhappy about. *g*) I get that people think it's weaker this season, and I just kinda don't care. Which is not to say I'm being all 'yay weak show!'; just, I'm generally pretty happy to go along for the ride if the show has built up my trust, and this show has done that in spades.

Last season was SO tight and intense, but it was also wrapped up in a way that specifically said there's a whole new world, where no one really knows the rules anymore, and anything can happen. If they'd gone straight for a storyline as tight and tense as last year's, it would have started to ring false, in a JJ Abrams way where the only point becomes the tension. Beyond that, the show's underlying theme has always been "you can choose not to be alone - you can choose to trust", and people learning to do that, and making connections that open them up to more connections and more trust.

This year is the payoff for that, with an unreal degree of openness and communication for this little crew - but none of that is going to be neat and tidy. It has to be so weird for them, adjusting to this new life, just like the old life, except not really. They're all feeling their way - so having the show per se feeling its way into this new world is also working for me.

The thing that's fascinating me most is the quiet rivalry between Shaw and Reese, and what that's doing to his head. He spent a lot of years working with Kara, who wouldn't accept anything but the best, and now here's Shaw, who's at least as good as he is, and who's actually working hard to impress Finch (because Shaw also believes that only the best get and keep the good jobs). I think having her there is undermining some of the confidence he'd gained with Finch -- which in the end is a good thing, because "Harold loves me because I'm the best" isn't true; Harold loves him because he's him. He has zero reason to be jealous of Shaw when it comes to his relationships - and yet he had that smug little "nyah-nyah" face when Bear trotted away from Shaw and toward him. He genuinely thinks he's in a silent battle for the affection of his loved ones here. *pets him*

I'm also pretty damn impressed with Fusco, and his willingness to keep Shaw from stabbing that bank officer with a letter opener, and not just that but to do it in a friendly kinda way, despite her having used him as an unwitting shield not long earlier. He's comfortable with all of this now; his life may be weird, and the people in it even weirder, but they're his friends, dammit. He's blossoming under the trust they've given him. <3

So really, I'm okay with all of them sort of fumbling around trying to figure out who fits where, and when, and what the best way is to get work done. This trust thing is new to all of them (except Carter, who's learned to distrust, and to reach outside her official team/squad for support, and that sometimes you need to go it alone for a while).

Oh, I also saw someone somewhere say (before I stopped clicking on links *g*) that it was bugging them that Harold kept going to the safehouse and meeting the Numbers, that with Shaw there along with Reese and their regular backup, there would just never be a reason for Finch to leave the library or anywhere else he wanted to run things behind the scenes. Which -- yes, true. But what if he doesn't want to stay in the library? He's been learning to change, too, from the shadow man who trusted no one and always worked through intermediaries, to the guy who gets in the plane and flies through a hurricane to help, bribes a doctor, steals a baby, arms himself to physically break someone out of prison, assists in a surgical procedure to save a life. They're all changing and growing, in their own ways, because of their connections to each other.

And now that Root is loose, things should start pulling together more in arc-y terms, which should also give everyone a more focused role to play. Which should start happening tonight! (If I can get this posted before it airs...)

Elementary: still fun, although I'm still not fannish about it and probably never will be. But I'm always happy to realize my DVR recorded it and I have it to watch. <3

Haven, which never pissed me off last year the way it did some people, and which this year has been making me incredibly happy. ♥ ♥ ♥ Duke & Nathan! This season is the relationship between them I've always believed was there. I'm glad Audrey's back, but honestly would have been okay with Lexie staying Lexie, and Duke turning into Nathan's de facto partner for the Troubles cases as they kept working together all over the place until either Lexie remembered or got more integrated as herself.

I get why Duke didn't tell Wade anything, but he screwed that up; as soon as it was clear Wade just had no intention of going, and he got dragged into the Troubles, Duke should have explained. (I also totally get why he had other, more important things on his mind, though!) But man, with Wade's daddy issues and belief that Duke won the parental prize (which, wow), there was no way he wouldn't want to have Duke's "power". Although clearly, he is played by the Ice Truck Killer for a reason, because man, his instant choice to start stabbing people in the gut is... really not good. At all. And is mostly just kinda serial-killer-y. Of course the rush of power is going to be too much for him to resist, if he was stabby even before he first touched Troubled blood.

I feel bad for Jordan, but she pretty much did set that in motion, and also, wtf, why would she not just touch him with her bare skin? Even a glancing touch of a fingertip would have incapacitated him so she could have run. Gah.

Vince was married? Did we know that? I didn't know that! But also wtf, of course your wife is going to leave you if you have her dad murdered because you think maybe she might possibly develop a Trouble you might possibly not like or be able to deal with.

Five years from now (or whenever), we're going to look back and realize that the Teagues brothers were who this show was ultimately about all along, man.

Grimm, which is back this week (yay!) and which I expect to continue making me happy *g* Certainly the commercials are. <3

The Voice, about which I'm not at all fannish, but which I enjoy a lot. My favorite part is the blind auditions, where I'm not invested in anyone (and don't even watch the backstory bits, so I don't know what sad stories people have), and everyone has an equal shot, and I can just enjoy it all no pressure. But it's still fun even when I have to ff through stressy bits, or worry about people being knocked out. Some of the battles so far have been amazing.

Stuff that I'm sticking with for now, but that may wind up being cut:

Sleepy Hollow. I enjoy this a lot while I'm watching, in all its patent absurdity, but it's juuust on the borderline of levels of scary horror I'm not comfortable with (I can cope with it fine, but it's not my preferred method of relaxing/unwinding). So dunno. I'm still watching for now, because hey, fun. But I'm not fannish about it in the sense of wanting to see what people are saying about it, or seeking out fanfic, and it may wind up fading away for me.

White Collar. I'm less frustrated by the repeated formula than mollyamory, possibly because I've been frustrated by the formula for several seasons now and am sort of inured to it. It's USA: formulas are what they do, and they're not going to change that. But also because they did make one really big underlying change to it that helps me deal: for the first time, Neal isn't doing this because of His Painful Past Oh Noes. This isn't about Kate; it's not about his dad (at least not directly). It's about Peter. And that? Makes me really happy. So I'm still in for the ride.

Once Upon a Time. I was less taken with last season than I was with first season, but not enough to stop watching this year. I still feel like it's gone places I'm not as happy with, in that the storyline this year may technically be three mothers off in quest of their child/grandchild/step-great-grandchild, but the emotional weight is all on fathers this year, especially father&son relationships and how those echo back and forth through time across the generations. It's not just Rumple & Bae; it's Rumple and his father, Hook and Bae, Bae and Henry, even David, who's shifted from "must protect Snow" to "must protect my family". There's barely anything actually happening among the women (other than Mulan, which was an amazing scene, but still left her to leave on her own, heartbroken, to follow a man's orders instead of making a life with her beloved). But I'm still watching every episode, and enjoying them, so for now at least, here I am.

Stuff I've either given up on, or probably will in the next week or two:

Agents of SHIELD; it's entirely possible that by the end of the season it will have shaken out into something I'd like more, but right now it's not there. I just don't care about any of the characters, and several of them actively annoy me. Which makes me cranky, dammit, because MCU is one of my fannish happy places, and I wanted this to be part of that for me. Hmf.

Likewise Blacklist; I liked it a lot right out of the gate, and that hasn't changed, but I don't particularly like any of the characters as people, and weirdly, the dual plot they have going on of "bad guy shows up to help catch bad guys" and "bad guy has Mysterious Connection to Precocious FBI Agent" is too much; I think I'd like the show better if it were about one thing or the other, but right now it's too much neither fish nor fowl for me, and trying too hard to be both, so I'm not actually getting invested in either plot.

Although mind you, I say that having seen all of two episodes - but it took me three weeks to get around to watching ep 2, and eps 3-5 are sitting on my DVR unwatched because I just don't care enough, so. I think that's a pretty good sign it hasn't grabbed me enough.

It's a pity, too; I think this is a great role for Spader. He does smug superiority so well! And I really do like that the FBI agent (Kate? I think?) is also a sociopath; that was an unexpected touch and one I appreciated a lot. But it's not enough, I don't think.

And also likewise Once Upon a Time in Wonderland. I'd been cautiously hopeful about this, but man, nothing about the premiere grabbed me, really. I'm sort of intrigued that the Knave is a time traveler -- but I don't care about why or how, particularly.

I dunno, maybe it was a matter of me having the wrong idea going in, but I think what I was hoping for was a show about a younger Alice and her adventures -- I mean, clearly this girl has had a million adventures! I would like to see those! I'm less interested in a lovestruck older teen (?) haring off to find her true love, without whom nothing matters at all. I know the OUaT schtick is true love, but man. Enough, already.

I could also have dealt with something that went more into the notion of Alice being institutionalized, and playing with the border between madness and surreality. But they didn't go there, either, and I don't expect them to given what we saw in the pilot; that Victorian asylum was the cleanest, quietest, politest Victorian asylum I've ever heard of. (Although I admit to a VERY twitchy modern-day reaction to them asking a woman they sincerely believed to be insane to sign a surgical consent form, without telling her what the surgery would entail. WTF, if she isn't mentally competent to be sent back to her father, she isn't competent to agree to a freaking lobotomy! So that bit actually did feel more period-appropriate. But it didn't feel like that was being presented as something awful in those terms. It was more "oh look how much she's given up on life, with her beloved gone", which.)

The only other moment in the pilot that really caught me was also unfortunate, in a very different way. It was the Red Queen saying "Jafar" -- which non-rhotically sounds like "Jaffa" -- as Jafar turned around with his staff thing that happened to look exactly like the helmets of Apophis's Jaffa in SG1. So I had a very startled moment of wondering why this man in Wonderland was serving Apophis....

So yeah, this one went right off the pile, sadly. Oh well.

I feel like I'm forgetting a dozen different things, but I've been writing this for days, and need to post it to clear my mental queue so I can maybe start posting other things.

And now there is new POI to watch!