This week, I read a couple of harrowing books, both fiction and non-fiction, and in between watched Soul, the Disney movie reccomended to me, which turned out to be delightful - both visually (it's amazing was Pixar does here) and in terms of characterisation. Our hero is Joe Gardner, a music teacher wishing he could be full time jazz pianist, voiced by Jamie Foxx, and early on I thought the story would go for another rerun of the basic It's a wonderful life premise, but no, the story goes into another direction. His sidekick-slash-co-lead whom he acquires later on is called 22, voiced by Tina Fey, and we get Angela Bassett voicing jazz saxophonist Dorothy Williams in a supporting role. As Disney/Pixar heroes go, Joe is endearing yet flawed, and believable as a passionate musician to me, which isn't always the case when films depict artists (yet avoid giving more than a nod to the type of art that's supposed to be essential to their lives). You can tell where the broad story is going, but there were some great twists and turns in between, and I really enjoyed watching this in between creeped out by some 18th century people.

I also would have enjoyed the Borgias rewatch I had planned, but alas it turned out my DVDs, which I had not watched in years, possibly since a year after the show ended, are of a terrible quality. One episode was barely watchable, and the next dissolved into blackness. This does not make me happy panda.

Much more importantly: no sooner was I happy that my parents had been vaccinated that Astra Zeneca (first shot) , which they were vaccinated with, was no longer allowed to be used in Germany. So you might say I had a very mixed week so far.

When does Elementary start again? I miss my favourite Holmes & Watson!

In other news, a few links:

The Good Wife:

An interview with Archie Panjabi about playing Kalinda

Disney movies:

An interesting bucking-the-trend reading of Frozen's Anna and The Little Mermaid's Ariel respectively

Once Upon A Time:

Simon Says (1601 words) by deemn
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Henry Mills & Emma Swan, Evil Queen | Regina Mills & Henry Mills
Characters: Henry Mills (Once Upon a Time), Evil Queen | Regina Mills, Emma Swan
Additional Tags: Character Study
Summary:

Henry's perspective of pre-canon, Season 1 and part of Season 2, told in drabbles.

Stories that focus on Henry's shifting perspectives on his two mothers are still rare, given these are two key relationships of the show which arguably motivate more actions on said show than most others. I love this one, though I wish the author had continued it beyond the first third of s2.

Together with a Young Companion, I saw Tangled yesterday. It hasn’t dethroned The Princess and the Frog as my newer Disney fave, but it has more than set to rest the fears I had last year when hearing Disney changed the prince to a Errol-Flynn type rogue named Flynn in order to make the film more appealing to boys. Turns out that Rapunzel is still firmly at the center of the film and there is some neat gender cliché subversion going on with the Flynn character. My Young Companion loved it, squeed, laughed and yelled in all the right places, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself, too.

( Mother knows best )

Recently I rewatched some West Wing episodes (from early s3, and the one where the Republicans call a tax for millionaires "the death tax" to lobby against it made me go "zomg, Sorkin and friends really were prescient sometimes!"), and aside from revelling in dialogue, character affection etc., it reminded me of a suspension of disbelief problem of mine. It's there in several fandoms. In The West Wing, it affects the Sam-Toby relationship as presented in fanfiction. Now, Sam isn't the only character to fall unter the WW "out of sight, out of mind" category, i.e. once he's written off the show, he doesn't get mentioned by anyone anymore. In fact, Sam's exit is far more carefully executed then some other examples, in that he stops being a regular mid-season 4, but the fallout of his departure continues to be made an issue of for the rest of s4. (As opposed to Mandy, who simply disappears post s1 and never gets referenced again, Ainsley who does get to come back once or twice post early s3 but otherwise doesn't get mentioned again, either, Danny who in the years of his absence gets referenced once that I recall but no more, while once he's back we go immediately back to where he and CJ left of, etc.) Once season 4 is over, however, Sam is not heard of again until the very end of the show. Now, in s7 Toby's fall from grace is a big, big thing we see everyone react to. We get to see Josh call Toby throughout his campaigning, which makes for gradual reconciliation; we get the big "have it out" scene with him and CJ. What we don't get, neither as a scene or via a reference in dialogue, is any sign Sam was either unaware of what happened with Toby (unlikely, as it made the national headlines) or that he was aware and tried to contact Toby at any point, or that he was aware and deliberately decided not to contact Toby. It would have been easy to slip a reference to Sam into one of Josh's and Toby's phone calls, for example. Or in Sam's and Josh's conversations in the last episodes. (BTW, their scenes did the trick of convincing me Josh and Sam kept in contact off-screen. See, it can be done.) But Wells & Co. chose not to. So fanfic where Sam and Toby post-s4 are still close friends rather breaks my suspension of disbelief.

Now this isn't a WW-only phenomenon. In several shows, a close friendship suddenly basically disappears, either because the characters leave or because the writers for some reason or the other can't be bothered anymore. Cases in point: Spike and Dawn after the opening two parter of s6 of BTVS, Garak and Bashir after "Our Man Bashir" on DS9 (i.e. s4 - OMB was the last episode to feature them in a close relationship, they they do occasionally appear in the same scenes later on) until the very last episode, Cordelia, Wesley and Gunn after Disharmony in s2 (as I once said to likeadeuce, any scene between them post-Disharmony might as well have happened pre-Reunion, with the closer bond that developed during the time they were sans Angel being ignored). There might be Doylist reasons for this - for example, in the Garak/Bashir case persistant rumour in ST fandom has it that TPTB were discomforted by the perception of the two as lovers. It can be completely accidental - I think it was Jane Espenson who said this about Spike and Dawn, that in the writers' minds, their close friendship continued until Seeing Red, the scenes just didn't happen. But honestly, these Doylist reasons do not help on a Watsonian level. Don't help me as a viewer, I mean. Basically I have to decide either to assume a lot of missing scenes which I make up in my head, or to accept these friendships for some reasons dissolved, and then come up with a reason. In the case of Cordelia, Wesley and Gunn it's easiest, because at least they still were portrayed as friends per se until Wesley's mid-s3 arc, so I can tell myself they continued to be close until that point. With Garak and Bashir, however, I couldn't buy later season stories were they were still having daily lunches and were still as close as they were in early seasons anymore; it both jarred with what I saw (plus, you know, in late s5 there is even an episode where Garak sounds openly jealous about all the time Bashir spends with O'Brien, which he does bring up early in Empok Nor, so it's on screen canon), so I had to come up with possible reasons why not. (In my own take on the pairing, I let the enstragement start with Broken Link and Garek's attempt at genocide in this episode.) And with Spike and Dawn, the "they still continued to be close until the AR, we just didn't see it" explanation didn't wash, either, so basically my interpretation was that once Spike started his affair with Buffy, he spent less and less time with Dawn.

What do you do, oh flist? When characters are portrayed as good friends in canon (doesn't matter whether or not you also ship them in a romantic sense or see the relationship as platonic or the family type of bond; there just has to be an on screen closeness that awoke your interest), and then these characters cease to have scenes together, and don't reference each other in dialogue anymore, either. Do you go the denial route - "they're still friends, we just don't see a lot of scenes"/"they're still friends, I reject on screen canon" - or do you accomodate for the changed on screen circumstances in your perception of the relationship(s)?

***

And on another note, to wit, one of yesterday's two big subjects, the Marvel/Disney merger: out of all the responses, I this one best. Because I feel like having a sense of humor this morning.:)