alias_sqbr

Elementary! It's a modern version of Sherlock Holmes set in New York and three of the first four episodes have been great (the third was irritatingly generic serial killer plot, ug. Hopefully there won't be more of those)

Crust! We ordered from them last night, I got Peking duck with Hoisin sauce and vegetables (and no cheese or chili) and it was GREAT. Probably the best cheese free pizza I have ever had. The gluten free and vegetarian options are apparently great too. Unfortunately they couldn't tell me the ingredients of their meat marinades, so peking duck is probably the only one I'll be brave enough to try, but I can live with that.

Kaleidoscope! There was an issue with AO3 and it went unanon but just in case that gets fixed, I shall keep my super secret writers super secret identities a secret :)

Anyway: I got two fics and they're both great! The writers gave me exactly what I asked for.

Seven Wishes for Charlotte Lu: Lizzie Bennet Diaries
and
General Studies of Division: D.E.B.S.

I also really liked
My Teacher Is A Gangster: Gokusen
and
Era of Red Happiness: Twelve Kingdoms

I've been in a really fantastic mood recently, I feel really optimistic and comfortable in my skin. It is VERY STRANGE.

emma_in_dream came over with her kids today which was great, I was a bit too sleepy to be very good conversation but there was much discussion of My Little Pony and eating of cherries and it was very nice.

Yesterday I decided to take a break from "Twelve Kingdoms: Skies of Dawn". She's deconstructing typical fantasy heroine by having a couple of female characters who are convinced that they are oppressed special snowflakes who Deserve To Be Saved From All This and slowly learn responsibility and perspective. Their journey can be painful to watch, especially since Fuyumi Ono is sometimes heavy handed with both the oppression they experience and the "Stop feeling sorry for yourself" rhetoric.

Random internet clicking led me to Demon Princess. And it sounds very silly and way too porny for me, but...cross dressing lesbians! Morally ambiguous demon women who Learn to Care! Sacrifice for the greater good!

So to distract myself I read The Dark Wife by Sarah Diemer, a lesbian retelling of Hades and Persephone that I'd heard was good.

...and in this Persephone really is an oppressed special snowflake who Deserves To Be Saved From All This. She's nice enough, but spends the middle portion of the book being incredibly passive and dull with absolutely no life goals beyond pining after Hades (she is slightly more interesting by the end) It's the sort of romance where everything revolves around the two main characters and their feelings for each other, (eg the mortals are oppressed, but they're stupid helpless ingrates who just show how nice Hades is for helping them anyway) that's not my sort of thing but it's ok for the genre. The deconstruction of mythology was ok and certainly fit what I know of Greek myth, you don't have to deconstruct very much for Zeus to be a bad guy. Be warned the story includes both rape and attempted incest.

Although the basic plot seems to be the same, it is moderately different from the anime. I've heard some of the choices the anime made criticised, the one that's even more obvious reading the book is the bizarre choice to keep the plot point that Yoko's appearance changes, but not actually change her appearance. Here she is with "dark red-brown hair" and here she is with vividly bright red hair and completely different features (if you can't see the pictures: she has the same face and dark-ish red hair in both :))

But this really is a clunky translation. I'll see if I can dig up some of the better fan translations for the other books since they're not in the library system regardless.