RemixDuello is out omg!!

I've spent the last month and a bit bouncing up and down waiting for the remixduello stories to come out and they finally have, yay! For those not familiar with remixes, you choose or (as in this case) are assigned a fanfic to remix, and create a new story which explores the same basic plot in a different way or from a different POV.

The remix I wrote:
Memento Vivere (The Plural of Memento Mori is Memento Mori), a remix of The Plural of Memento Mori by brutti_ma_buoni. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Jenny, Buffy and Joyce, season two.

Writing this was scary, I'd never done a remix before and wasn't sure how to go about it. The fact that someone I knew had just died also made it difficult in some ways, I kept coming up against ideas and going "Nope, don't feel up to writing that", and it felt important to write something that both acknowledged death but showed people not being beaten down by it.

The remix of my story:

Memory and Time Machines by Wojelah, remixing my story The Time Traveler's Guide to Creative Anachronism, Doctor Who, River/Amy and River/Eleven. Amy had been first. Truthfully, it had to be Amy first. Red hair and soft lips and kisses that tasted just a tiny bit of tears.

I didn't have to think very hard about what to submit since "The Time Traveler's Guide to Creative Anachronism" was the only story of mine which fit the criteria. I was curious to see what the author would do with my story, if they'd focus on the timey wimey or the wacky humour or the romance (my bet was the latter, which they did, but since I'm not very good at romance I'm entirely happy with that) Anyway, Wojelah did a lovely job of capturing all the emotion I neatly avoided describing, it's a lyrical and melancholy reflection on the events I breezed through in my fic. I think they make for a nice pair, though I imagine my fic would be rather a strange shift in tone if you read it second :)

I have a headache so am not up to checking out all the other stories just yet, but I look forward to it.

Movies!

Two movies I watched and enjoyed after squee from people on Tumblr and other places. Taken together they have a whole heap of things I like in a movie :)

How to Train Your Dragon
This is a genuinely fantastic kids film. A moderately straightforward "Boy doesn't fit in, befriends powerful creature, saves the day through determination and goodness, gets the girl" narrative, and some bits rubbed me the wrong way the ways these things usually do (the major flaw being that the love interest does pretty much nothing notable once she becomes a love interest) but overall it was really well done. The hero is a genuinely sweet, decent and clever guy, there's a strong moral about the pointlessness of unnecessary violence, it's funny and well characterised, there's two kickass female characters and pretty pretty dragons. The portrayal of disability is surprisingly nuanced too.

The Losers

So this was nowhere near as good a film, but I liked it anyway. It dragged in parts and was very cheesy and B-grade, but in a good naturedly grungy way, and it felt like they took the characters seriously (apart from the villain, who fell very flat). Specifically, Zoe Saldana's character stays kickass right to the very end of the film. While the hero and villain are white a large proportion of all the other characters aren't and for this sort of film it was pretty low on cliched exotification. I liked how the violence wasn't too glossy and sanitised, while likeable the Losers felt like genuinely dangerous and slightly sociopathic people.

Also, Jeffery Dean Morgan or Zoe Saldana are remarkably badass and pretty, especially when they're together :)