Crack the WIP

I went hunting for fic of these two a while back. Here are my two favorites.

Acts of Faith by quietly_obsessed, 4k. "I don't believe in God, but I do believe in you". Jud and Blanc fall in love during the year after Wicks' murder. A bittersweet but lovely fic in which they find some healing in each other.

fair with her firstborn on bethlehem down by hauntinghouses, 9k. Benoit Blanc comes back to Chimney Rock just in time for Christmas. In which Blanc sets out to seduce a priest and/or not have a miserable Christmas, and ends up talking a lot more theology than he wants (but no more than he ought to have reasonably expected). If you're like the religious debates in the movie were great but what if they had them while fucking, this is the fic for you.

Here are a couple of my favorite winter soup recipes. They're from cookbooks, so no handy online version to link to. So this is for you and also for me, so I can access these away from my cookbooks.

( Pork and hominy soup )

( Sausage, White Bean, and Kale Soup With Besar )

In which I’m ambivalent about several fandom-favorite shows. Oh boy!

Heated Rivalry. It was wild watching a hockey romance on my screen after writing ~350k of hockey romance fic. Literally on the tv I could see writers addressing and working within the same logistical constraints all us hockey RPFers do! And this is a show that knows hockey. From the very beginning with the joint ad shoot, I knew I was in good hands. Maybe my favorite nerdy moment of the whole show was towards the end where they’re discussing how to get Ilya on a different team, and Shane straight up starts laying out the salary cap considerations. In bed! Extremely hot of him!

I couldn’t help but think about how it must be even wilder to watch if you’re a closeted NHL player. Like damn. I was crying at the big climactic scene in ep 5, as a queer unathletic woman in her 40s; imagine what that must be like to someone who actually plays the sport and lives that environment every day. I think I saw something about a juniors player(?) coming out recently and citing the show as being part of his inspiration, and just, man.

So did I like it? Well, I enjoyed watching it and would watch it again (except probably not episode three; I feel for Scott but the whole romcom thing about murdered me, and I have negative interest in Kip). I love Ilya to little tiny pieces, and I think Connor Storrie did an incredible job with him. That “deadpan on the outside, dying on the inside” kind of character is catnip. The show also made me cry big fat tears twice, which basically never happens. I’m weak for musical cues, but actually crying over a movie or tv or book is extremely rare for me.

On the other hand, I think Shane is a much weaker character, with very little external to react to compared to Ilya’s family troubles. The entire core of Shane’s character is being anxious about things that mostly haven’t happened yet, which is difficult to build a narrative arc around. I also don’t think Hudson Williams is as strong an actor as Storrie, but it’s honestly hard to say when the material he’s working with is so much weaker. I feel like it's particularly rough because he's so clearly a Sidney Crosby expy, and Sid is so much more interesting a person than Shane is. If Shane had more Sid in him (the leadership in the room, the thoughtful and very proactive team caretaking, the weird random nerdy obsessions), I would like him a lot more.

Also, I’m sorry to say but I got bored of the sex after a while. 🙈 When it comes to live action sex scenes, less is more for me, I guess? I do appreciate, as I saw someone comment, that the show made it extremely clear what everyone’s dicks were doing at all times, even though we basically never see them.

Overall, a fun time! Not mad I saw it. Not sure it really needs a second season, when it feels like it already told the whole story, but I guess we’ll see.

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Murderbot. I read the first book a while back and was unimpressed, but I thought a change in medium might address a lot of my issues with it, specifically a sense of worldbuilding and adding more depth to the characters, even if only by being played by real live people. And indeed, I do think the show was an improvement on that score. The live actors, the flashbacks, and the necessity of building sets all added a lot to make this feel like a real world that people live in.

To be honest, the real reason I wanted to watch the show was because I really like David Dastmalchian and because Gurathin was the most interesting character in the book after Murderbot, and I was extremely well fed on those counts. The expansion of Gurathin’s character added a lot to him, to the show, and especially to the relationship with Murderbot. Holy shit, it’s like they revamped him specifically as shipbait. ( spoiler cut for those that need it )

On the other hand, the show retains a lot of the weird tonal dissonance present in the book, and without the excuse of Murderbot as an unreliable narrator. I think Martha Wells probably has politics similar to mine, and I'm confident that her representation of the extremely queer, communal society of PreservationAux was meant to be a positive one, but what we see on screen often feels like it's making a joke at the team's expense. Ratthi and Arada are the worst, because they always feel like they're about fourteen years old, but everyone on the team frequently comes across as naïve, sheltered, and neither capable of nor interested in emotionally grappling with the reality of the world they live in. The way they are loudly protective of local fauna that has repeatedly tried to kill them or threatened their lives is a good example. They come across as parodies of people who hold their professed values, rather than serious examples of what those values might look like in practice.

The exception, for better and for worse, is Gurathin, an outsider who has joined their community only recently, barely buys into most of their practices, and notably is never the butt of the joke.

And like, I recognize that this is a relatively light-hearted show! Some of my very dearest tv shows and movies are ones that mix silliness with heart, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. I think I still haven't fully figured out why this rubs me the wrong way, when those don't.

All that didn't prevent me from enjoying it overall, though. I laughed a lot. I also thought Skarsgard did great. I've not liked him before, but tbf that was in Infinity Pool and The Northman, and it's possible I hated those in general and not because of him. Anyway, I think the more he gets to be a weird little (big) guy, the better he is, so he's great as Murderbot.

And unlike Heated Rivalry, this is clearly dying for a second season. I'm glad it's been renewed.

Wuthering Heights (2026). Young woman is torn between her love for the best friend she grew up with and her wealthy new-money neighbor.

I enjoyed this a lot. Emerald Fennell's visual spectacle is always on point, and in particular the costumes and sets are fantastic. There are a bunch of amazing set pieces, and the artificiality of Linton's mansion and the wardrobe he gives Cathy vs the organic squalor of her home and childhood were really effective IMO in contrasting several different binaries at once. I loved every single ridiculous dress. I was also really into Cathy and Heathcliff's starcrossed love. Heathcliff is so gone on her, and even when he's trying to be manipulative, he mostly comes across as desperate. (When he approaches Linton's ward Isabela in hopes of making Cathy jealous, he is the most gentlemanly ravisher you have ever met.) And Cathy is clearly equally gone on him, even if she gets in her own way sometimes.

I think the script could have used some work. For one thing, several secondary characters' motivations were left as exercises to the viewer (Cathy's father and especially her companion Nelly); like yes, I can form theories about why they did what they did, but maybe a little less subtlety here is in order. Also, just to make Cathy and Heathcliff feel a bit more complex as characters and/or to just make their relationship more toxic or at least complicated. Honestly, my main criticism here is that Fennell, against all expectations and especially considering her work on Saltburn, doesn't go nearly as weird and batshit as the story could support. The visuals yes, the character dynamics no.

Overall, though, a good time. I ship it and immediately went looking for fic. (There were 15 fics in the tag, half from before the movie even came out, and half the new ones were crossovers. RIP.)

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The Tunnel (2011). An Australian mockumentary about a news crew that goes into abandoned subway tunnels underneath Sydney looking for a story.

I'm always interested in mockumentary horror, as opposed to your standard found footage, so I was excited to check this out. Unfortunately, the longer I sit with it, the less I like it. First of all, the whole point of the mockumentary aspect is to add depth, context, and contrast to the found footage, but IMO the interview clips here were almost extraneous. There were one or two nice moments, like when they have the anchor listen for the first time to what another crew member in the tunnels had heard through his head phones, but there was very little else that we couldn't have gotten from the found footage itself. The news investigation framing all felt a little off as well; the supposed pretext for going into the tunnels feels a little overheated. "Politicians fail to give updates on big proposal" does not feel like the red flag for a huge scandal, and various other aspects that were treated as potentially newsworthy just weren't, IMO. Also, surely the most terrifying part of underground horror is the threat of getting lost? I was astounded by how little a concern this was in the movie, even when they were running around without any care whatsoever for where they were.

What really killed this for me, though, was the gender politics. As with so many found footage type movies, there's one female character, the news anchor, and everyone else is male. (Why is this????) There are repeated assertions from the guys both in the found footage and the interview segments that the anchor doesn't know what she's doing, doesn't deserve her position, and probably is fucking the station director. And what do you know, they're right, several people die because of her ambition and poor judgment, not to mention how she goes into crying hysterics several times. In 2011!! Just brutal.

There's a behind the scenes doc about the movie that I managed to watch five minutes of, and before I turned it off, it was entirely about what genius fundraisers the creators were, and how they "disrupted" the Australian film funding model by "inventing NFTs before they were big." (They raised funds by ~selling frames of the movie to donors.) So... yeah.

The movie isn't entirely without merit; there's some great found footage moments. If you just want to watch people stumble around underground being chased by unknown monsters, you could do worse. But a very qualified rec.

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Prince of Darkness (1987). Per Shudder, this John Carpenter movie "follows a group of quantum physics students in Los Angeles who are asked to assist a Catholic priest in investigating an ancient cylinder of liquid discovered in a monastery, which they come to find is a sentient, liquid embodiment of Satan."

NGL, I watched this because I really really wanted to see a movie about the liquid embodiment of Satan, and now I have, I guess. This was just bad. There are some memorable moments; I loved the dripping fluid floating upwards and that the canister (OF FLUID) was locked to "only open from the inside." The dream transmissions for the future were honestly rad. The bugs and creepy-crawlies everwhere were really effective sometimes. There's also a fun sense of claustrophobia as the night goes on and things close in around the characters. Also, frankly, the devil and Jesus as extraterrestials who came to take over and warn Earth, respectively, was neat! I wish the movie had gone harder on that!

OTOH, the eventual romance began with the guy being such a creeper that I was sure he was being set up as a villain, and then he's a big old sexist to her right before he asks her out, and I hated that. The demon instapregnancy was so predictable and tedious. One of the guys repeatedly has homophobic comments made to and by him, and also he's weirdly racist to one of the girls, and this is all for no apparent reason except as a characterization note. And overall the movie was just slow and lacking in charm. I would love to see this exact premise from someone who was actually good at writing characters.

I definitely wouldn't recommend this to anyone unless they were interested in specific elements of the plot or if they're a John Carpenter completionist.