Confessions of Fangirl

I was laying in bed last night thinking about Constantine and his feelings about Gary. Also, I think Gary may be demi-sexual. Yes, Gary has been portrayed as a bit of a dufus, but he’s also super cute, super sweet, and, while gullible, he’s not actually an idiot. Not to mention, he’s brave as hell and you can fucking fight me on that. Sure, he’s a bit of a dork. He loves his Dungeons and Dragons enough that he’s a Dungeon Master for his group of friends. But being pantsed by a Speedster or being naive enough to be stolen from by the most thieving group of people on television since the Leverage doesn’t make you an idiot. I’m hoping that Gary will get a little better treatment.

I want to write a story about Gary and JC (yeah, I’m calling him that still because his first name is too generic and his last name is too long and honestly, it makes me giggle) and their moment of “whatever” that Gary asks about when they have the “is he a virgin” discussion because I just feel there is such a goldmine there for both characters. But I also know if I write it now, it’s gonna get Jossed next week.

Granted I could just say “eff it” and just go for it anyway. It’s likely that even if I can sort of make it fit with canon that it’s still gonna get Jossed eventually. I guess there’s just always going to be part of me that wants my stories to at least fit as headcanon.

Speaking of headcanons, I really hope that Helen of Troy is back again this season. I’d really like to see more of her with the Legends. I think she’d be a great person to team up with them now and then. Part of me wants her to show up with a girlfriend from Themyscira, but my headcanon is that she’s an asexual aromantic. I may have written about this previously, but if you’ve watched the episodes she’s in, she portrays zero interest in any of the men coming onto her and no interest in the women besides loving that they are warriors. When she becomes a warrior herself, her admiration shifts some, but it never seems romantic or sexual in nature. I really want them to make that part of her character. And not in a “men have scarred me for life” kind of way, though men certainly have been the cause of a great deal of her suffering. I want part of the reason that she’s suffered so much to have been because she has never and will never return any of the (weird and creepy, tbh) romantic and sexual interest men have shown her over the course of her life.

Helen gets transported to a new millennium and she’s like, “well, at least there isn’t an actual war going on over me.” She’s just so done with everyone and everything. I love her transformation when they’re able to take her somewhere safe for her. Man, I just really love her and want her to be happy and to see her all the time.

In all the hoopla, I never got around to having my bubble bath, which is just ridiculous because I really did want to have one. I supposed I could go ahead and have one now. It’s about to be 11 pm but if I stayed in until midnight I’d have close to an hour in the tub and I’d still be in bed around my usual time. Thing is though, I don’t think I’m going to. As much as I’m annoyed with myself for not taking the opportunity when I had it, I think I would’ve made a point to have the bath had it really been that important to me to have one this weekend. I really thought I was going to want to have one this weekend, but I just ended up not making my way around to it.

Today I thought about it, but my to-do list was pretty long and I decided that I wanted to see “The Meg” again more than I wanted to take a bath I guess. I do enjoy baths a lot. Especially, with bubbles and bath bombs and shower oil, and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. But I’m just obsessed with “The Meg” for right now. Which is very aggravating because it’s only just come out in the theater. It’ll be months before it comes out on BluRay. Argh.

I’m listening to the first book right now, and so far it’s pretty good. If I had read the book first, I can say that I would probably be livid about the movie. The movie is absolutely nothing like the book. It’s about as close to the book as the “Blood and Chocolate” movie adaptation is to the source material. It’s another one of those scripts where someone read the first couple of chapters and went, “Yes, let’s make a movie! It’s gonna be great.” In the case of “The Meg,” I do feel like they did a little more than read the first chapter or two and the description on the back before they made a movie. The movie is wildly different, but I also see where they had their own answer to scenes that happened in the book.

I still have a couple of hours left to listen to, but as an example, there’s a scene 75% of the way into the book where helicopters crash into one another because they’re distracted by the shark attack and some other stuff. There’s a scene in the movie where helicopters crash, but the set up of the scene--why the helicopters are there, what’s going on below--is different. In the book, a character named Mac is flying one of the helicopters whereas in the movie he’s on the boat below. In the book, Jonas has a wife that’s cheating on him and the relationship is pretty much over and she’s a bitch. In the movie, Jonas has a lovely ex-wife who is cool as shit but things just didn’t work out between them. She also has a different name.

Actually, most of the surrounding characters are either altogether different or have different names. So far my favorite difference (and I’m sure this would infuriate me had I read the book first) is the one between book DJ and movie DJ. In the book, DJ is the son of the Asian guy who is researching all this stuff that leads to the discovery of the megalodon (Zhang in the movie, Tanaka in the book--I think in the movie the guy and his daughter are Chinese (the daughter and granddaughter are played by people from China and he’s played by someone from Tawain) but in the book they’re Japanese (Tanaka is a pretty common Japanese last name I do believe and he calls the main character “Jonas-san”). In the movie, DJ is hired to remotely pilot the rover they’ve made for this exploration who also happens to be black. I like that they have a pretty diverse crew, so I don’t mind at all that they made that change. What I’m thinking about is how important it was that DJ was the head honcho’s son in the book.

DJ dies in one and not in the other though I’m not telling you which for spoiler reasons. Rain Wilson’s character didn’t exist at all. Suyin was younger, childless, and named Terry Tanaka. Jonas was a Navy man who went on diving rescue missions as well as research and other missions in the book, but where movie Jonas gets drunk for five years, book Jonas studies Megalodons for seven and becomes an “expert.” Heller is an asshole in both, but he definitely gets to be likable in the movie where I still hate him in the book so far. I don’t think Jaxx existed. Mac has more history in the book and comes into the project for very different reasons.

It’s interesting that I have a lot more background on a lot of the characters and their relationships to each other in the book, but I still don’t feel as though I’ve connected to them in the way that I connected with them in the movie.

The “science” behind the book sounds something akin to solid, whereas the movie is just total garbage hogwash. Not to mention a shit ton of problematic other plot points that the book has done a better job building.

And yet I know in my heart that I’m going to like the movie better.

Now, look at the wording there.

The book is technically better, but I enjoyed the movie immensely while I’m “not hating” the book. I know it’s sacrilege, or as close to sacrilege as anything ever really is. I do know.

But, the movie has my heart and will likely be the object of my obsession for a while. I’ve accepted this. I’d tell you to wish me luck, but y’all are more likely to need it than me because you all are the ones who have to put up with me.

The only thing I want to do is read “Romancing the Werewolf” with the possible exception of listening to more of “Timeless”... No, that might be a close third, but listening to “Romancing the Werewolf” would probably come before “Timeless” if after reading it on my Kindle. I am enjoying “Timeless” well enough. The best parts… for me… are the parts that jump back to Lyall and Biffy who are the main characters in “Romancing the Werewolf” so you can see where my head is right now. I also just picked up “How to Marry a Werewolf” but in large part because of the fact that the main guy in the aforementioned book is a packmate of the gentlemen in “Romancing the Werewolf” and it might mention more of their story. I hope to see them being sap-ily, happily in love. YES, I AM OBSESSED WITH THEM OKAY??!! But gosh darn it, they’re just so very wonderful.

I’m still checking NetGalley several times a day for Competence which takes place in the same universe and centers on two characters I’ve been desperately shipping for a couple of years now. I think they might actually get together in this next one and I would just DIE HAPPY. Just *POOF* dead. I had been wanting them to get together but only in a “Kate will ship almost any single female and many not so single female characters if she is given three seconds to think about it” kind of way. But then in the first couple of chapters of “Imprudence,” Primrose got all flustered about Tasherit letting her pet the were-lioness in lioness form. And then there was an insinuation that Tasherit would be very upset about Prim’s random engagement to some random soldier. I can’t remember which thing came first now, because all I remember is that started screaming, “PLEASE BE GAY” at the top of my lungs in my car while driving down the highway. I’m not sure that’s the kind of behavior that suggests a sound mind, but there you have it.

I don’t know if anyone else gets that kind of worked up about fictional characters being gay, but I can’t help it. I do still have my straight ships and there are a lot of straight characters I love, but because there are so many more straight characters (if you consider the history of media in general even more so than if you just compare what’s on TV today) the disparity is huge. Not to mention, a lot of what queer stories have been told have been either a) uncomplimentary aka queerness = monstrous or b) tragic and miserable… or c) both.

I remember for years that people talked about how queer people “only a tiny percentage of the population is gay” and I kept thinking… “no, only a tiny percentage of the population is brave enough to stand up to the horror that it is to be non-cishet in society.” It’s a lot safer now that it even was 15 years ago when I was reading these sorts of things AND GUESS WHAT? More people are identifying with the LGBT+ community than ever before. It’s still low, but in a study a few years ago at a college, the percentage of respondents who identified as non-heterosexual on a survey nearly doubled when they asked about sexual orientation in an indirect and even more anonymous way. Meaning likely there are a whole lot more people out there who don’t identify as LGBT+ because they either haven’t figured it out (heteronormativity is still a pervacious, ubiquitous thing), or they’re too scared to admit it.

I read another article that said a survey for bi men found that only 12% of their respondents said they were out to the people closest to them. GUYS LESS THAN 12% WERE OUT TO THEIR FRIENDS AS BI. Now, I’ll grant you that some of them likely identify as gay instead of bi. I know that happens. It happens with lesbians too because there’s so much pressure on wlw to “realize that they’re being brainwashed to like men.” And just because the world is, essentially, brainwashing women to like men doesn’t mean that they don’t like both men and women.

Wow, it looks like I got off track.

I got through that program tonight for pre-teens so that’s one thing off my list of “reasons Kate is anxious” so helpfully everything will go as smoothly as tonight’s thing did.

I need to go to bed.

I didn’t get up this morning, but I’ve decided to be at peace about that decision. What was kind of amusing was that I woke up at 5:09 am and I really did think about going ahead and getting up at that point and going about my day. I decided to sleep instead, and I think it was needed. I’m struggling with the weather and the changes in barometric pressure as it is and I think skipping sleep would make it worse.

I finished re-listening to Imprudence at lunch today and was in love with it all over again for the most part, except I was more annoyed with Rue’s inability to tell how Quesnel felt about her. It’s so blatantly obvious and sometimes she’s purposefully obtuse which is kind of infuriating. It’s fine being clueless if you’re clueless but it’s frustrating when you’re not actually clueless, especially since she’s generally pretty bright overall. Either way, I am so freaking excited about the next Custard Protocol book, Competence, is coming out in the summer and I can barely contain my excitement. It’s not until mid-July which, after waiting as long as I have isn’t technically that much longer, but I AM SO READDDDYYYY.

I act like I don’t 7,832 other books on my “I want to read and have readily available to me” list as if there is some shortage of books I’m dying to read. Because I definitely have thousands of books that I can easily access what with me belonging to three libraries, having an audible account, and a Kindle Unlimited account… not to mention owning something like 3,000 titles between physical books and my kindle books. It’s absurd, honestly, but I am who I am I suppose. There’s a lot of things I’m working on changing, but my reading habit isn’t one of them.

This headache keeps hanging around. I might actually have to call out sick tomorrow.