Unsolved Mysteries

          1. The “Capitol Collection” by CoverGirl

Okay, I like makeup as much as the next girly-girl. I’ve invested way too much of my paycheck in Urban Decay eyeshadow and Too-Faced mascara. But, I also read books. I read the Hunger Games series, for example. And I have to say, I think the folks at CoverGirl are really sort of missing the point. First off, their “Capitol Collection” upholds the beauty ideals of the Capitol—presented in the book as a selfish, dysfunctional dystopia with values that are completely out of whack—and inhumane. So, by all means, let’s encourage our young girls to dress up and do their makeup like those folks. But the ads also offer a range of looks “inspired by” the various districts.

Yeah, I'm sure that's a great look for a day of planting and hoeing in Rue's hometown. 

Um, hey...CoverGirl? The folks in those districts you’re so inspired by? They’re not wearing any makeup.  They’re too busy trying to survive. These folks are pretty busy trying to eat without having to use tesserae that exponentially up the odds that their children will have to go fight and die in a gladiator-style arena. So that look inspired by the agriculture of District 11? That makes absolutely no sense.

TVD: the nation's number one employer of stand-ins. 

      2. Why Can’t They Hire Some New Actors on The Vampire Diaries?

Nina Dobrev is great. She really is. I get the whole doppelganger thing. It’s pretty out-there, but, hey, this is a show about vampires who go to high school, so it’s not like I signed up expecting logic or realism. But, come on. This week’s ep featured not one Nina character—not two—but THREE. She was playing three characters! And what’s-his-face who plays crybaby Stefan was playing two (both of whom kept having Gollum-type moments, so at times it seemed like four). TVD writers, these folks do a great job handling all the crazy you throw at them. But surely you could invent some new characters, and hire other actors to play them? I guarantee Hollywood is full of attractive young actors who could manage to say words like “the cure for vampirism” and “she’s the anchor for the spell that created 'The Other Side'” with a straight face.

3. On the Seventy-first day of Christmas, a migraine came to me...

Again this year, as though someone flipped a switch, on November first, the holiday ads, music, offers, etc. began to come flooding in. Actually, they crept in around the edges even during my beloved Halloween season. I was catching up on a DVR’d series the other day, and saw an ad for Party City for Halloween costumes directly followed by a Macy’s “holiday season” ad. Macys actually seems to have decided that as of September 1, their “season of giving” has officially started. Soon Black Friday will be August 31. Seriously, though, has anyone else done the math here and realized that if the holidays kick off on November 1, given that they tend to hang around for at least a good week to ten days after the new year, we are now looking at over seventy days of holiday madness? Yep, that’s right, the holidays are now twenty percent of the year. For all you folks who’ve already starting snapping Instagrams of elves on shelves—better pace yourself. 

Someone has a lot of time on their hands. 

4. Oddities

Has anyone ever watched this show? It’s on Netflix (which is ruining my life, by the way—or at least my word count). If you haven’t don’t start. It’s weirdly addictive. The show is about a tiny antique store in Manhattan that sells weird stuff—except I’m pretty sure the show’s title refers to the people who walk in the door.

The other day a guy paid hundreds of dollars for a giant kidney stone. I guess technically it was an antique? But: whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?

Also: ew.

5.  How will I ever finish NaNoWriMo again...now that I have Netflix?

I’d write more about this one, but season four of Sons of Anarchy is calling.

Vampire Book Club

Last night I attempted a NaNo word sprint. I ended up with more of a brisk walk...900 or so words later, my brain began to shut down. It was 8:30, after all, and by that point I’d been teaching and grading papers for going on twelve hours. 

So I turned, as I so often do, to the sparkly box with the pretty pictures that’s insidiously plugged into the wall of the same room where I try to write. And I was psyched to find that the CW was playing The Originals. Now, my love/hate for The Vampire Diaries is well documented on this blog, but I must say, for me the spinoff is much more fun these days. Perhaps because it’s not crushed under the weight of a five-year old love triangle. I mean, seriously, how long can these things go on—until something happens, like one of the guys falls in love with the girl’s infant daughter, for example.

Anyway, back to the delightful romp that is The Originals: wow, that’s a fun show. It has everything: cool setting (New Orleans), great soundtrack, attractive leads. These actors may not find themselves in the running for an Emmy next year, but they are certainly less wooden than some film actors, so there’s that.

Last night’s episode opened with a scene that was very popular among my bookish Tweeps: sexy vampires Elijah and Klaus were having some quiet reading time, and their sister Rebekah walked in and asked what was up with “vampire book club.”  But Rebekah was soon distracted from making fun of reading when she spotted Klaus’s “snack”—the poor girl bleeding out on Rebekah’s fancy carpet.

So far, I’m in, but the thing about this show—and pretty much every other stupid thing I currently watch—is that they started to lose me with a lot of Ridiculous Made Up Magic Crap.

I know, there’s loads of R.M.U.M.C in Harry Potter, and those books are pretty darn terrific. Even the movie versions are pretty good, although if Harry uttered just one more “Expelliarmus” or “Stupefy!”...I just can’t even. Learn a new spell, Harry.

Learning a new spell is not a problem on The Originals, or its parent show. It’s pretty much deus ex machina magic all day on both shows. Need to keep two characters apart for no actual reason? Invent a “sire bond”! That’s not inconsistent at all. Only fifty percent of the population of Mystic Falls is a vampire, so it’s not weird that no one’s ever heard of this nonsense before.

Last night’s episode featured such a pileup of made up crap, that even though I was watching it for a fun escape from my boring life, a part of me had to wonder at what point I’d stop buying in. Forget suspending disbelief: at a certain point, it’s just about how much crazy you can process.

The first layer, the main characters are the first vampires, which their mom sort of invented with some kind of spell. They also have every power you can think of, including being able to brain-warp other vamps. AND one of them is half werewolf. AND AND he magically impregnated a werewolf girl.

So far, I’m hanging on...but then there’s this whole witch-war, and a witch who’s magically linked to the pregnant werewolf, and a witch from the other army or whatever kidnaps the other witch and shoots her up with a MAGICAL NEEDLE that will kill the werewolf/vampire baby.

 

Dressy vs. Casual Witches+ Magical Needles

There was also magical rope at one point, but I digress. Essentially, I’m just wondering how much crazy CAN a show pile on, before the story collapses beneath the weight of the R.M.U.M.C?

I have no idea, but I’m dying to find out. I’m just rooting for the magical hybrid miracle baby. That little monster’s going to really complicate matters, if you ask me. 

Transformation Stories

Thanks Game of Thrones. Now it’s super awkward: I have to like/root for a character who pushed a little boy off the top of a tower without a second thought.

Is it possible that an actual human could change this much? To go from extreme selfish bastard to the kind of guy who’d jump, one-handed and unarmed, into a bear pit? This moment got me thinking about the way long running series tend to try to redeem the irredeemable character.

IRL, if someone rips the heart out of guy’s chest—like Damon on The Vampire Diaries—it’s not okay. But then again, there are no vampires—or werewolves—in real life. So maybe when you’re dealing with the supernatural, all bets are off. This rule would allow Game of Thrones to turn Jamie Lannister into a super nice guy. Or a white walker, or possibly even a dragon. The only really important rule in fantasy is that everyone must have some sort of accent, preferably British.

Actual people are a whole different story. A few years ago I was clearing out my old room, sifting through the detritus of my childhood: cassette tapes by the hundreds, an alarming number of stuffed animals—and then I found my fifth grade journal. Soon after finding it, I had no choice but to destroy the thing—because it was far too revealing of the fact that my personality from fifth grade to now is essentially the same. True, there are loads of surface changes. I can drive, I’m not freakishly shy. I’m much taller. But in essentials, I fear, I am very much as I was at ten.

Maybe people only change significantly when they go through something extremely drastic. Or when something gets chopped off. I did undergo a tragic perm my senior year of high school which led to a substantial amount of hair breakage, but that’s probably not the same thing. Characters in books and shows tend to have to deal with a lot worse than bad hair decisions. Maybe life-altering events can change the essential nature of a person. Or maybe not. But it sure does make for compelling TV. It’s also easier to forgive the cute ones, who always seem end up cast as the bastards with-a-secret-heart-of-gold. I, for one, fall for it every time. Even though I’ve stayed the same, I love a good transformation story.

The Quibbler

I favorited a tweet last week about The Vampire Diaries. One of my tweeps observed that Elena—who’s a vampire—was carrying water on her hike, asking, “Why are you carrying water, Elena? Do you drink water?”

I laughed when I read it and was like, hehe, I noticed that too—go us! But then a few days later I read Dalton Ross’s article in this week’s EW: "How We Transformed Into Nitpick Nation.” Ross points out that we don’t just watch TV anymore, we nitpick: our fingers are on constant alert poised over our keyboards, ready to point out the next gaffe or implausible scenario.

He’s not wrong. I mean, I was feeling all smug about noticing that a vampire doesn’t need water, and feeling a sense of community that I wasn’t the only one. Meanwhile both of us clearly watch a show every week that’s about not only teenage vampires but also werewolves and the only reason Elena was hiking in the first place is that all the characters are currently on some ridiculous nature quest LOOKING FOR A MYSTICAL CURE FOR VAMPIRISM.

Why isn’t that the part that bothered me?

I could go all smarty pants and claim that I’ve engaged in what Coleridge called the willing suspension of disbelief in order to enjoy the story. And I could claim that the audience has a right to expect that the writers will adhere to self-consistent rules within the confines of the crack-smoking crazy universe they’ve created. That’s great and all, but I’m afraid it still doesn’t change the fact that Ross is right—I’m part of Nitpick Nation.

I think nitpicking probably goes with obsessive fandom like soup with crackers. First, if you watch something more than once, you’re going to notice little stuff. If you make your hobby splicing scenes into gifs, you’re going to notice even more. And then there’s the fact of the online forum. In Olden Times, when we might have discussed our favorite shows in person at school or work the next day, it was perfectly acceptable to rehash major plot points. But by the time you log on to Tumblr, the major stuff will likely already have been covered. We all want to contribute something new to the conversation. So we need to look closer. It becomes important whether or not our characters are carrying logical beverage choices. For example. 

Ross also points out in his article that entertainment used to be viewed as disposable. We were watching a movie on the National Film Registry in my Media Studies class last week. One of the archivists mentioned that one major studio actually threw away all their silent films in the fifties, because there was no thought that anyone would ever want to see them again. Imagine the idiot who made this decision in a room full of modern-day film history buffs. They’d tear the poor dude into pieces. Today, we watch and re-watch. We buy blu-rays, we download. The notion that a given piece of entertainment is only designed to fill one hour of airtime, and then never be viewed again is a thing of the past. This truth makes programs such as Buckwild or Dance Moms more difficult to understand.

But maybe no matter how much we nitpick, some mysteries just can’t be solved.