“Part 1” of The Rose Field was chapters 1-8. “Part 2” is twice as long (chapters 9-22), and I haven’t gotten any less chatty. So you’re getting a Post 2A and a Post 2B. Look forward to a 3A and a 3B to finish off the set.
As of this roundup, I’ve finished the whole book. Post will have light spoilers, in the notes I put in while editing. Comments are a free-for-all.
Still adding relevant BBC HDM screencaps to break up the text.
Sidenote: At some point in the middle of the original liveblog, I managed to injure my hand. Nowhere near as bad as Lyra’s — I kept an ice pack on it for the first several hours, and within two days, it only hurt if I touched/bent the injured part wrong. (The next week saw a steady decrease in which kinds of motion counted as “doing it wrong.”)
But every time I did, I remembered how Lyra’s spent this whole book with full-on broken fingers, and have an extra wince of sympathy. The only treatment she’s had is some (rose-scented) salve. She hasn’t even splinted them! Has to be a miserable, constant pain.
[Youtube]Sir_Superhero’s backstory breakdown of Wonder Man in the comics. I only ever saw scattershot appearances of the guy, never knew his whole deal, so this was cool and enlightening. (Haven’t actually watched the MCU show yet, I’ll be curious to see which parts they keep.)
[Youtube]A for Angel, a pilot for Cartoon Network that I guess was stuck in rights/development hell, and finally got released? By the creator of the webcomic Angel’s Advocate (also started but not continued, maybe because of the cartoon being in production), and you can see a lot of the character designs coming through, although the plot and worldbuilding seem pretty different. Charming and adorable.
Sporadic Phantoms, a fictional true-crime podcast…set in a 2020-AU version of the Animorphs universe. There’s something weird about The Sharing, these amateur journalists are starting to think it’s a cult, and they’re here to investigate! I’m only a few episodes in, but the continuity bonuses are [chef’s kiss].
For most of the time I was watching Cosmic Princess Kaguya, I was thinking “Well, this is cute. The animation is excellent, the designs are a lot of fun…the plot is pretty basic, and the video-game fight sequences do not need to go on for this long, but it’s still a good time.”
And then I got to The Reveal — maybe 20 minutes from the end — and thought “…wait, hold up, I might need to rewatch the whole thing now??”
Somewhere in the middle, I had actually noticed that [Character] was animated with an expression that’s very characteristic of [Other Character], and idly thought “huh, maybe they’re connected somehow.” How many more hints like that did I miss? How many can I catch now, if I watch with The Reveal in mind?
Not sure if there’s much else I can say without spoiling it! But yeah, quite good. If you like grumpy/sunshine canon f/f, with internet friendships, weird fantasy age gaps, the power of expressing yourself through virtual avatars, and the power of music, don’t miss this one.
I’m going in mostly-cold. Got spoiled for a few individual details, but the rest, including basically all the actual plot, is a mystery.
When doing the original reactions, I usually don’t stop and rewind the audiobook to make sure all the quotes are exact. For this roundup, I have an ebook version I can text-search, so I’ll try to correct them. Carefully, because I’ve only read chapters 1-17 in total, and don’t want to spoil myself by seeing search results from chapters 18-36.
For visual interest, I’ll throw in some screencaps of relevant people/places/items from the HDM TV series.
Elected Democrats are actually fighting this. It’s a shame they don’t have the numbers to just out-vote every single atrocity Republicans are hot for. Can this be the year the voters figure that out, and finally elect more Democrats?
Official AO3 announcement post is here. The number of “I’m so happy to see this, it’ll make my fandom browsing so much easier” comments are a joy to see. (The comments about “well, geez, took you long enough” are…valid, honestly.)
A lot of specific tag trees are still works-in-progress, especially if it’s a big complicated franchise. So don’t worry too much if a fandom you love doesn’t have one yet — the wranglers might still be working on it. Honestly, I’m still working on investigating all the Madoka Magica fandom syns, which is why most of the spinoffs still don’t have their own separate fandom tags. We’ll get there, I promise.
Fun little twist that’s only a problem for me: this means “more fandoms” listed on my wrangling page. The amount of work is objectively exactly the same! It’s the same amount of fic, just spread across slightly more fandom tags! But the recently-added limit is on the number of fandoms, not the amount of fanworks those fandoms get.
Current number of fandoms on my list: 1142.
Current number that have any tag-wrangling to do: 28. (Not the same 28 as the last time I posted. There’s some overlap — a fandom like Sailor Moon has new tags every week — but the others rotate, especially the “just got new tags from its first fic posted in 2 years” type of fandoms.)
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