Should I be worried?

This is probably the first time I could use the "at first I was like X and then I was like X" meme, I heard about AC3 being annouced, I was never much of a fan of that franchise. I only got into the first one because a friend at uni had an Xbox and the crusades are kinda my thang. I played AC2 but it was kinda... a man's game, with all the "hello ladies" shenanigans. I was like give me a kick ass female character please -_-, everyone was like a prositute in that game, even the nuns lol. Then I heard that AC3 was gonna be about the US revolution, of which I know nothing about, except the US won and that was the beginning of the Empire's downfall muhahaha. Anyway I thinking.... oh noooo... this is gonna be so AMERICAN -_-, UK is gonna come out like rapists and etc. The us flag on the cover kinda put me off too. However then I find out that the main character is half native/half english and I was like, maybe illicit love child of native american roots who is one hell of a looker, yes please. I have not seen older!connor but I hope he keeps his braid thingies hehe. I might just play for the hotness :P.

I'm too nice to play Skyrim.

For a while I had heard about Skyrim coming out, eventually it did and I was happy. I had played Morrowind, I had played Oblivion and so I was content to download this and play to my heart's content. I forgot however the horrible sickness I got with the other two games. I remember in Morrowind, the game used to scare me shitless, maybe it was the fact that, it's a first person perspective, I don't know but I hated it, my god how I hated that game, I'd quickly rush through dungeons using tcl, I didn't even play the end boss properly. Somehow I had forgotten about that and all I had in my memories were rosy happy times, reading books in Vivec's library. Then out came Oblivion, boy I was happy! I thought yay, another game. I enjoyed it... until the Oblivion gates opened up. How I HATED them, I wouldn't go through them unless it was plot related and even when I had to oh how I hated it. I'd tcl them too, just to get to the end.

So I realised... I hate this franchise, I hate it so much. I hate doing dungeons, I hate the darkness of it, I hate the monsters, I hate the first person view.

Of course I forgot about that with Skyrim, I even remember thinking "oh these dungeons are ace, why did I hate them before" of course now I remember -_-, I remember like a fox. I hate the Daedra, I hate how evil they are, I hate how when i'm playing the dark brotherhood, I actually feel the guilt of an assassin. I hate how death was treated. I hate the undead, oh how I hate them, they scare me, i'm petrified. I hate doing bad things, I hate the darkness of it. There's a daedra that's a ruler of rape... enough said. But I still forced myself through the whole of the dark brotherhood quests, I forced myself to do the Daedra quests... at one point you met a cannaibal and she invites you to trick someone to her lair and eat them. She insinuates that as a child, I may have eaten a sibling out of fear of starvation. At that point I think I had reached my limit.

I give kudos to Bethesda, your world is too real for me and that world scares me. I don't know if i'll go back. I think I need some nice nancy drew games to ease my nerves. I feel i've let my gender down in hating skyrim and being such a wimp but i'm sorry, i'm just too soft and too good hearted.

Little Red

From this short story easy we discern

What conduct all young people ought to learn.
But above all, young, growing misses fair,
Whose orient rosy blooms begin t'appear:
Who, beauties in the fragrant spring of age,
With pretty airs young hearts are apt t'engage.
Ill do they listen to all sorts of tongues,
Since some inchant and lure like Syrens' songs
No wonder therefore 'tis, if over-power'd,
So many of them has the Wolf devour'd.
The Wolf, I say, for Wolves too sure there are
Of every sort, and every character.
Some of them mild and gentle-humour'd be,
Of noise and gall, and rancour wholly free;
Who tame, familiar, full of complaisance
Ogle and leer, languish, cajole and glance;
With luring tongues, and language wond'rous sweet,
Follow young ladies as they walk the street,
Ev'n to their very houses, nay, bedside,
And, artful, tho' their true designs they hide;
Yet ah! these simpering Wolves!
Who does not see
Most dangerous of Wolves indeed they be?

~Source

Review: The Dwelling Place

It had happened one day at university. I finally managed to get the tv working. Only one channel worked, and on this channel was a film "The Dwelling Place" me and my flatemate both love costume dramas so we were happy to watch. We only caught the end. A young girl standing on the moors, suddenly a weedy blonde young man arrives, he askes her if another man truly had claim on her, she smiles, in a way that I had never seen, it's a refreshing smile and says that that other man loved the mill more than her. The man asks for her hand in marriage and she agrees. I'm set here, for one: the girls smile and secondly the young man, the hero, doesn't look like an ordinary hero, he's weedy, he looks like a kind guy. The kind of heroes I like lol.

Therefore I decided to get the book. Or rather my mother bought it for me because I had no money.

It turned out to be a Catherine Cookson. When I told my mother this she burst out laughing and I was a little petrubed, she told me all the plots were the same, a poor girl managing to come out on top with lots of money. I however stood by it and she got me a copy.

At first I was rather bored, a typical set up, a young girl loses her parents, she had to look after the children. They can't live in the house so they have to live in a cave on the moor. Of course there's this farmer guy, who instantly loves her because of her beauty and because she's so self-sacrificing (this will be a trope throughout the rest of the book). He helps her to building a sort of shack thing and survive for the first few months

Now I didn't mind it so much I was happy to go along with it. Anyway it started to get interesting when the twins from the manor appear. I wrote my university thesis on gender role swapping and so I was happy when she described the boy and girl twin as having their genders switched. I love that kind of hero, a beta hero, I hate alphas. In fact I prefer the woman in be in charge usually :P hehe.

Anyway the two twins have a lot to drink and go rambling when they come upon Cissie (the girl) anyway some point early on the sister (I can't remember her name so i'll call her Jo) had caught Cissie's little brother poaching and Cissie had fought her off and humilated her. So she has a go at her again when she sees her, tries to attack her, the brother gets inbetween and in some sort of Shoujo-esq trope ends up falling on top of Cissie.

This is where the shoujo-esq stops. Because he starts groping her and his sister eggs him on, because of course he's a virgin and he's scared etc. etc. Then he apparently rapes her. It wasn't explicit in the text, it was only later on when her brother tells Matt (the farmer) that I realised that he had actually copulated. Anyway, their father comes along and stops then and sends both of them away. This is the part where I stopped liking Clive. I liked him when he was sensitive and painted all day and all night. Then he does this to Cissie and I was trying to get my head around it.

I know people are weak and I know it was different back then but... I dunno. Then to add insult to injury, he goes on a ship as punishment and comes back as a jerk ass. Yeah, he comes back and sees Cissie's child who his father has taken and is all "oh well, I probably have other bastards in all the brothels i've been in herrr durrr"

The thing I like about CC as an author is that she had realistic characters with weaknesses. It's a lot for me to ask that he wasn't whoring it up while at sea, since every sailor and his dog did it (if the historians are to be believed) but he had so much potential and then he gets "hardened". I don't know how I feel about characters being "hardened". This was a huge problem for me, with Twelve Kingdoms, because Yuko stops being a sympathetic school girl and starts being a very cold, calculated and strong individual. I liked that she became strong but there was nothing left in her that was human. Coming from our era and going into a medieval type world, she has no qualms about killing other humans which she does at the beginning. In fact she becomes very boring after she has her buddhist type purifying of the mind.

Later on even after he admits he loves Cissie he still has mistresses and in this case, this book is the complete and utter opposite of Jane Eyre. It's ok that the mr. whatsisface had mistresses before Jane because he was all messed up and stuff, but after, oh no that's a big no no. I mean yes it's realistic... but is that really what I want? realism?

The ending is not at all like the movie. She marries Matt (wtf) and they have a crappy marriage (which I liked because yeah again realism) but then he dies and she mets up with the brother and he asks her to marry him. Oh and the son never loves her, ever (her son I mean) that she had with Clive. So in that respects it's kind of like Vanity Fair, except I kind of liked Amelia, despite her naivity and Dobbin <3. The thing that horrified me was the line at the end of the book however that:
"she'd been nobodies except that man's since he'd mated her"

Throughout the book I was in two minds about the rape, on the one hand it was rape on the other hand CC states several times that Cissie sort of enjoyed it. Does the sort of count? really?? I mean as a staunch Feminist can I accept this? So although I really liked this book. I feel very... confused over it.

Also If I had been Cissie I would have a) given my son away to stop my brothers and sisters from starving b)locked matthew out and never let him in again the effing tease c)never would have given my son back d) taken clive's offer of the house but refused to be his mistress and demanded marriage even if I was of lower class and needed to be "educated".

I am therefore... concerned but I read the book in two days, so I did enjoy it. I'll watch the film now and hopefully, that will smooth out the edges and make it into my favourite films list.

Stand Up

A blogger writes about how the Globalization effect is changing our media and making us brain dead, to American tropes. I couldn't agree with her more.

I’m tired of plots that value individualism and egotism above all else; of heroes that always have to be the masters of their own fates, to be active and not take anything that life deals at them lying down (whereas most of the time, we lie down, we accept, we deal with what we have been given); of heroes that have to be strong and only take marginal help from others to solve their own problems; of heroes that have a destiny, and of movies and books in which breaking up with all traditions is good so long as one finds and follow one’s own path (there are a lot of cultures where breaking up with traditions isn’t necessarily a good thing, and no, this doesn’t mean that they’re evil and backward). I’m tired of how genre(s) put(s) a disproportionate value on heroes who are active and not passive (and, by extension, belittles and dismisses every use of passive voice, and always asks for sentences to be frenetically punchy); of how the most important thing that can happen to a person is to be “given their own story”, as stories weren’t made up of a mosaic of people all interacting together; of how teams exist only either as a background and foil for a single hero, or as a compendium of individuals, each fighting to be outdo each other in stupid displays of heroism

Thankyou~

Now i'll return to my Chinese novel, my Japanese tv show and my European books.

Ponderings

Man I loooove geeking out about Berserk! it's one of the few things that can make me talk for a long time LOL. Me and an old friend recently got in touch and what brought us back together was us geeking out together about Berserk. I usually like to remain on the outer fringes of a fandom, so I didn't know apparently there's going to be a film??? and even maybe a second season. I was like what? but yeah I was happy.

ONE DAY.

Right now i'm researching my own novel about the nature of leadership and king hood. I downloaded the Leviathan off Librevox and have been listening to that. Once again I need to re-listen to the Prince (narrated by Chip from tampa florida LOL) and check my Analects of Confucius. I'm going to type virtue and kingship into google books and see what comes up.

Secondly, somewhat berserk related, i've been thinking about dark fantasy and masculinity. I recently bought the Witcher 2 game (however guess what I can't play it because of the LAG). I think that these sort of medieval worlds devoid of morality is interesting. Is this based upon a warlike world? where masculinity must be exaggerated and rape is used as a weapon? So the differences between the sexes must be exaggerated? I think of the differing versions of femininity in Beserk, with Casca and Charlotte, both of whom are destroyed by male sexual desire and vengeance. About how the lower classes are portrayed in the Witcher, drunken, lewd and bigoted, whereas the nobility are again epitomes of masculinity, killing and sexing and killing and sexing. I need to research this!

Hard Times

My flatmate just texted me from America. She told me that she got an email from our university, telling her she had failed her degree. I sat for a few seconds in shock. Of all people, she shouldn't have failed. She's smart, really smart. I know she fudged up in the last few months but still. Sometimes i'm so mad at my uni, I failed my first year, and my other friend Alex also failed in the second year. My university is a bitch.

Another thing I want to complain about. Though I love said flatmate very much, for a long time she started going on about her body to me. She'd keep going on about how she hated her thighs and her tummy, how she had all these spots, dark circles, the way her hips were too fat and how she had to get rid of that horrid cellulite. I love my body but for some reason all her negativity got to me, I started looking in the mirror picking out my own flaws, when I went swimming yesterday, a past-time I usually enjoyed all I could think about was judging my body and being jealous of other girls there. I was horrified at myself, this isn't me. I have a very positive view of my body, I don't base my worth upon what men want, I don't judge myself based on my sexual experiences and beauty, I base myself on my morale acts and personality.

In order to remind myself of this I joined a tumblr group called "hellyeahdangerouscurves" and it was great, pictures of beautiful curvy girls. However I then started to judge myself based on them! and so many girls on this tumblr were sending in pictures of themselves (beautiful pictures) and writing underneath how much they hated their body and were trying to lose weight. I couldn't bear that negativity, so I deleted it from my feed.

I feel bad about this, bad that I let my flatmate get to me. I see that women who are insecure in their bodies also judge other women based on their weight. That's what I did and I refuse to do it anymore. I love my body and it makes me mad, to live in a world like this.

Thank goodness for fatshion chic and skorch, for all the bloggers I follow. For the magazine Kickback, for my own mother who never criticise herself, for everyone who feels content in their own skin.