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Entry tags:
5-things-association
In which I ramble AT GREAT LENGTH
from Lynne:
Arthurian legends (including Merlin! OH SHOW. <3)
I have always loved the Arthurian stories. I didn't have the same all-consuming, desperate, fanatic love for them that I did for the Robin Hood stories (you are going to have to pry me away from the upcoming Ridley Scott-Russell Crowe film WITH A CROWBAR, by the way, I don't know how I will survive Crowe in not only another honourable-leader-of-men role but ROBIN FUCKING HOOD without my heart actually exploding in my chest) -- BUT I loved them a lot nonetheless. I like that they're so damn versatile, that The Once & Future King is just as valid as Antonia Fraser's retelling, which is just as valid as the old classical versions...I like that there's a central cast and some recurring events and apart from that you can basically go to town, creatively speaking. I love that there's a love triangle, and quests, and honour, and betrayals, and destiny. I spent a while RPing Galahad du Lac against Ashie's Mordred Pendragon and we had a ball with them, because I adore the Perfect Knight archetype and wanted to fuck around with that for a while.
And Merlin is just a perfect example of how much fun you can have if you take the bare bones of legend and throw in whatever the hell you want. It's silly and unabashedly gleeful and the actors all look like they're having a ball, and the fandom is made of SOLID AWESOME. I can't write fanfic for excellent shows; I can write for the ones which give you an interesting world with intriguing possibilities, adorable characters and a strong precedent for trampling around doing, well, whatever the hell you want. And the character dynamics are interesting and distinctive enough that it lends itself excellently to AUs. Mmmm. This is such a great fandom, guys.
why kickass chicks are awesome
I think this can probably be answered best by this video and also this one, both of which I have been constantly rewatching.
However…as much as I enjoy the empowerment of women that these characters represent, as someone who is completely unable to beat someone up/handle a sword/shoot a gun in a sexy and competent manner/leap through windows/kickbox/etc., I am starting to get a little depressed at the fact that these women are largely unrealistic role models as far as their abilities are concerned (personality is another matter; I'm all for the portrayal of their determination and strength and ambition and courage). I'm starting to wish that female strength wasn't so unremittingly violent in its portrayal in geek culture, or indeed mainstream culture; not because I think violence isn't ladylike (obviously) or even because I'm an unviolent person (I'm…not). But because a) there's still a strong whiff of fetishism to it, and b) it's not realistic.
Let's be honest: I do like it when these women fight. And I like it because on one level at least it can always be taken as a metaphor for less blatant fights that real women, women who don't live in such construted and fantastical contexts, are still involved in. I like it because it does reclaim the violence from the men.
But I don't want to be Aeryn Sun or Buffy Summers or Katara or Kara Thrace. I want to be Laura Roslin, or C.J. Cregg, or Lisa Cuddy, or Elizabeth Weir, or Camille Saroyan. I want to be the women whose stuggles I can relate to, whose struggles aren't sexy but are inspiring.
I feel like I just argued AGAINST the thesis I was meant to ramble in favour of, sorry. But that's where my head is at the moment; those videos are wonderful things, but they make me reactively defensive about the fact that you don't have to be kickass to be an awesome person.
what it takes to be a pilot
Okay, I admit it, I might have something of a thing for pilots. I love that BSG plays around a lot with pilot culture (the exclusivity of it, the strong sense of team coherence and loyalty) and that the strengths it puts forwards there are things like reflexes and lateral thinking. I like that John Sheppard's personality can be summed up in the word 'pilot' and it actually goes some way to explaining him, even though he's not a simple person.
Drawing in some stuff from the last: one of my favourite female characters about whom I hardly ever talk is Kara Wade, from the movie Stealth. She's a pilot! She's strong and an excellent officer and a great flyer and all those things. But she's also feminine, funny, a bit insecure, and trapped between the role that the Navy wants her to play, the person that she wants to become, and the interpersonal relationships that she can and cannot develop. I LOVE HER A LOT. I have written fic about her. (Note: Stealth is not actually a good film, for the most part. But it's weirdly good at things like character development and realistic portrayal of relationships.)
I also, um, like the movie Top Gun. Because I am shallow. And because really, there's something eternally thrilling and yearning about the idea of flight.
world travel
Ooh, well, of course I'm simultaneously sick of and fired up about this at the moment due to the recent travelganza. Travel is one of the things I want to do a lot of in my life, because the world is so huge and so varied and I want to see as much of it as I can. It educates and entertains and makes you appreciate your home. And for Australians it tends to be a big endeavour because we're just so damn far away from everywhere else that going anywhere is expensive, so you want to make the most of it. I want to see all the places in Europe that I haven't already, I want to see heaps of Asia, I want to visit Canada and parts of the US that aren't the Bay Area or DC, I want to see Africa and South America and even Antarctica if I can possibly pull it off. I also want to see new parts of Australia. TRAVEL: IT'S GOOD FOR THE SOUL.
medicine and the study thereof
Gee, this one was popular :) I don't actually feel much like rambling about medicine, because I do that on a daily basis and trying to drag my enthusiasm out of me on demand isn't a very good idea; sometimes I adore it and sometimes it's just a case of putting one foot in front of the other, figuratively speaking. I' m working harder than I worked in school and harder than I worked in undergrad, and I know that I'm going to have to keep working hard for…well, the rest of my life. (At some point I'll start being paid for it, though.) Seriously: I consider it to be a privelege to be studying for this profession, I find the material to be intellectually challenging and mostly interesting, and there's enormous scope in the work to observe the breadth of human experience and to make a difference in the lives of many people.
from Merc:
amazing writing/creativity
I've been writing fiction literally since I knew how to put words on paper, creating proper worlds and characters since I was...thirteen, probably?...and writing fanfic since I was sixteen. I don't want to ramble too much about writing here because I'm still recovering from my answers to the writing meta meme; they constitute a wide-randing amount of blather from me on the subject of my own writing. But on a simple level: every time I read a book or write a story I fall deeper in love with the English language and the astonishing, intricate, clever, subtle, hilarious, lyrical things that can be created from it. When my writing is flowing there's no feeling in the world that can match the act of creation. I would love to be published one day in the far-off future, but medical school comes first, and for now fandom is a wonderful outlet for me because not only am I keeping myself sane by arranging words, I'm providing entertainment for other people and developing my own skill in a low-pressure environment.
medical school/associated dance revue shows
Looks like this one will focus on Med Revue, which was probably one of my favourite things about last year, no matter how crazy and stressful it got at times. I'm glad I stuck my hand up to be on the production team, I'm glad I got to stretch my stage-choreography muscles again, I'm glad I met so many fabulous people and contributed to such a fun, funny, worthy piece of original theatre. It made me realise how much I miss everything related to dance and performance and being a driving creative force; helping to coax a group of people from zero to something amazing.
Australia
I have something of a love-hate thing with my country, though it usually swings more towards the love end of the spectrum, especially since I transferred my habitational allegiance from Canberra to Sydney. I still love Canberra, I'm glad I grew up there and I think it's a lovely place to raise a family/retire, but Sydney and I clicked in the same instant way that London and I did. I'm a big city girl. I love the traffic and the diversity and the pockets of gorgeous ugliness, I love the way it lights up at night, I love the harbour and the markets and the food and the shops and the way it thrives.
But this is about Australia! Which is a country the size of the USA with a population of 20 million, mostly clinging to the coastline. It's a beautiful and extreme and isolated and breathtaking place, but I think I'd feel more connected to it if I weren't such a city person; if you belong to the outback or the rainforests or the bushland then you couldn't live anywhere else, whereas I could happily city-hop the globe forever. I do think there are a lot of excellent things about this country: the government's not nearly as bad as it could be (and I voted for them! and Julia Gillard kicks ass), the health system includes some great things like the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, tertiary education is heavily subsidised and HECS means that you can go to uni even if you haven't a penny to put towards your tuition, and then have the interest-free loan monitored by the tax office and taken out of your salary automatically once you're earning a certain amount.
So yes. Even though I don't really feel patriotic most of the time, and don't consider 'Australian' to be one of the adjectives contributing much towards my personal sense of identity, I do love my country.
Lucifer (I'M ORIGINAL)
For better or worse, those people who know me through![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
milliways_bar (which is a hefty portion of my netly acquaintance!) will always associate me with Lucifer; to be more specific, with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
samael_diablo, a character based in a pastiche of canons and myths who became incredibly…dense. I played him for years and he's stuck in a corner of me now, irremovable, and -- for the most part -- unchanging. There is more of myself in him than in anything else I've ever created, and he liked Chianti and sat on tables and tapped his fingers on hard surfaces before I did, but those are my things too. I used him to learn to write, and to interact with some amazing people playing some amazing characters, and to channel out the violence that builds up in me. I've been assured that he's likable and terrifying and hot and probably a lot of other wildly diverse adjectives, but I like to stick with 'an arrogant bastard'.
To see my favourite example of Lucifer in action your best bet is to read Crying Call, a.k.a. the Big Damn Crossover, which is mostly an intricate fusion of Good Omens and Firefly and Sandman, based loosely on the Firefly-era stuff that was starting to appear in Milliways. It marks the first appearance of Nicolas Rosse, advertising executive, who since then has been instrumental in all sorts of awesome Milliways plot stuff involving Gabriel Tam and Fallen!Raguel and dkakjhsndaj I still get little thrills thinking about how much fun everything involving Rosse is.
Honestly, though, that fic is one of my favourite things I've ever written. It even has Plot!
More generally, since playing him (and a little bit beforehand, I guess; when Nny poked me and said 'I'm starting a panfandom game! want to play? WHO do you want to play?' there was obviously something prodding me to pick Lucifer over all of the other characters I could possibly have chosen -- which at that point, was ANY of them) I've developed a fascination for the stories and the symbolism surrounding Lucifer Morningstar -- Samael, the Devil, the Lightbringer, the First Captain of the Host, the epitome of pride and betrayal, the original revolutionary -- in the Christian tradition, and all of the fictional versions of him that have appeared. Mike Carey's Lucifer (which uses Gaiman's as a starting point) is probably my favourite, but I love searching out books and films which have a Lucifer character, and I have at least two short stories with Lucifers in them (albeit very different Lucifers to my Milliways one).
flist appreciation
OH MY GOD. I totally forgot that I used to do this. I should get back into that, it was great fun. (Good hinting there, Merc :D)
from Del:
Rhythm in writing.
I seem to refer people to fics a lot, but: I put a LOT of my views on the importance and the personally pervasive nature of rhythm into No Sleepers Must Sleep, actually.
& I discuss it a bit here at the writing meme.
It took me a while to actually be aware of the fact that rhythm was the driving force behind my like or dislike of a poem or a line of writing, but I was clued in by the fact that iambic pentameter has always come as naturally as breathing to me. I can dash sonnets off very fast, and if I do too many at once then I start thinking in iambs. True story!
Dance as expression.
Also a true story: I can express the truest parts of myself in one of two ways. One of them is writing (see above!) and the other is dance. I have been trained in a myriad of styles: eight years of jazz ballet, four and a half of classical ballet, one of tap (AWESOME. I'd love to pick it up again someday, it feeds excellently into my love of rhythm.), and two of advanced street funk (probably the style I'm most comfortable with). I've also taken brief courses in belly dance and swing dance, and been taught bits of tango and salsa for shows. I could talk a bit more about choreography and how bored I get by most dance classes (because ten years of training at a demanding dance studio teaches you to pick things up very fast) but they're less about dance-and-expression.
Dancing is how I relieve the non-verbal emotions; largely the joyful ones, or the ones related to an excess of energy. My body responds to my instincts and to music with an ease that only extensive training can convey, despite the fact that I'm a lot less flexible than I have been in the past, and I will -- and often do -- dance to any kind of music, in any kind of setting.
I was also a figure skater for eight years (before my teens) and interestingly, sometimes I get into moods where I crave my skates and a stretch of bare rink, because there's a certain expectation of fluidity and speed built into my dance instincts due to skating almost as soon as I could walk, and -- again, despite the fact that my skating-muscles and my technical skills are so, so rusty -- sometimes the kind of movement I want is the kind that can only be achieved with blades against ice.
MEDICINE. MUAHAHA.
done!
Azula.
WHOO. I approve of this association. Azula has been one of my favourite fictional characters since the moment she appeared onscreen, and despite the fact that I have issues with the way her character arc was handled in the last season of Avatar (not WHAT happened, per se, but the SPEED at which it happened and the resultant sloppy feeling to the arc; a pity, because Avatar generally does character stuff beautifully, and everything Azula-related up to that point made my heart sing with evil joy), I retain a sincere fascination with and love for her. She's unrepentently and realistically sociopathic. She needs to be the best at everything she does. She believes in proving herself to her father, and in upholding the honour of her family. She can handle armies and politics and power plays brilliantly, but fails at basic social interaction. She can bend lightning. She's ambitous, proud, manipulative, snarky, selfish, competitive, brave, possessive, intelligent and powerful, and needs to control everyone around her.
...she may or may not be a female version of Lucifer with a lot more mental imbalance.
For further demonstration of my Azula-enthusiasm, see this post and this fic and the only fanmix I've ever made!
Man, I want to write my post-series epic. There will be tons of Azula/Ty Lee in it.
The colour red.
Huh! To me red is tied up a lot with the Lucifer thing, because of his wings/eyes/obnoxiously blood-coloured shirts. But as a colour it has really grown on me in the last few years. I own a few pieces of clothing (a shirt, a dress) in blinding bright red, and many other pieces which feature red on them somewhere, and a lot of silver-and-red jewellery. Being a blue-eyed person with dark blonde hair, I look better in my other favourite colours (purple and blue), and I liked dying my hair dark because I felt more comfortable in my red stuff.
However, as Tricia Helfer and The Red Dress Girl from the Matrix have shown me, it is entirely possible to be blonde and red-loving and drop-dead gorgeous, and though I may never attain the latter, the first two are cohabiting nicely.
from Lynne:
Arthurian legends (including Merlin! OH SHOW. <3)
I have always loved the Arthurian stories. I didn't have the same all-consuming, desperate, fanatic love for them that I did for the Robin Hood stories (you are going to have to pry me away from the upcoming Ridley Scott-Russell Crowe film WITH A CROWBAR, by the way, I don't know how I will survive Crowe in not only another honourable-leader-of-men role but ROBIN FUCKING HOOD without my heart actually exploding in my chest) -- BUT I loved them a lot nonetheless. I like that they're so damn versatile, that The Once & Future King is just as valid as Antonia Fraser's retelling, which is just as valid as the old classical versions...I like that there's a central cast and some recurring events and apart from that you can basically go to town, creatively speaking. I love that there's a love triangle, and quests, and honour, and betrayals, and destiny. I spent a while RPing Galahad du Lac against Ashie's Mordred Pendragon and we had a ball with them, because I adore the Perfect Knight archetype and wanted to fuck around with that for a while.
And Merlin is just a perfect example of how much fun you can have if you take the bare bones of legend and throw in whatever the hell you want. It's silly and unabashedly gleeful and the actors all look like they're having a ball, and the fandom is made of SOLID AWESOME. I can't write fanfic for excellent shows; I can write for the ones which give you an interesting world with intriguing possibilities, adorable characters and a strong precedent for trampling around doing, well, whatever the hell you want. And the character dynamics are interesting and distinctive enough that it lends itself excellently to AUs. Mmmm. This is such a great fandom, guys.
why kickass chicks are awesome
I think this can probably be answered best by this video and also this one, both of which I have been constantly rewatching.
However…as much as I enjoy the empowerment of women that these characters represent, as someone who is completely unable to beat someone up/handle a sword/shoot a gun in a sexy and competent manner/leap through windows/kickbox/etc., I am starting to get a little depressed at the fact that these women are largely unrealistic role models as far as their abilities are concerned (personality is another matter; I'm all for the portrayal of their determination and strength and ambition and courage). I'm starting to wish that female strength wasn't so unremittingly violent in its portrayal in geek culture, or indeed mainstream culture; not because I think violence isn't ladylike (obviously) or even because I'm an unviolent person (I'm…not). But because a) there's still a strong whiff of fetishism to it, and b) it's not realistic.
Let's be honest: I do like it when these women fight. And I like it because on one level at least it can always be taken as a metaphor for less blatant fights that real women, women who don't live in such construted and fantastical contexts, are still involved in. I like it because it does reclaim the violence from the men.
But I don't want to be Aeryn Sun or Buffy Summers or Katara or Kara Thrace. I want to be Laura Roslin, or C.J. Cregg, or Lisa Cuddy, or Elizabeth Weir, or Camille Saroyan. I want to be the women whose stuggles I can relate to, whose struggles aren't sexy but are inspiring.
I feel like I just argued AGAINST the thesis I was meant to ramble in favour of, sorry. But that's where my head is at the moment; those videos are wonderful things, but they make me reactively defensive about the fact that you don't have to be kickass to be an awesome person.
what it takes to be a pilot
Okay, I admit it, I might have something of a thing for pilots. I love that BSG plays around a lot with pilot culture (the exclusivity of it, the strong sense of team coherence and loyalty) and that the strengths it puts forwards there are things like reflexes and lateral thinking. I like that John Sheppard's personality can be summed up in the word 'pilot' and it actually goes some way to explaining him, even though he's not a simple person.
Drawing in some stuff from the last: one of my favourite female characters about whom I hardly ever talk is Kara Wade, from the movie Stealth. She's a pilot! She's strong and an excellent officer and a great flyer and all those things. But she's also feminine, funny, a bit insecure, and trapped between the role that the Navy wants her to play, the person that she wants to become, and the interpersonal relationships that she can and cannot develop. I LOVE HER A LOT. I have written fic about her. (Note: Stealth is not actually a good film, for the most part. But it's weirdly good at things like character development and realistic portrayal of relationships.)
I also, um, like the movie Top Gun. Because I am shallow. And because really, there's something eternally thrilling and yearning about the idea of flight.
world travel
Ooh, well, of course I'm simultaneously sick of and fired up about this at the moment due to the recent travelganza. Travel is one of the things I want to do a lot of in my life, because the world is so huge and so varied and I want to see as much of it as I can. It educates and entertains and makes you appreciate your home. And for Australians it tends to be a big endeavour because we're just so damn far away from everywhere else that going anywhere is expensive, so you want to make the most of it. I want to see all the places in Europe that I haven't already, I want to see heaps of Asia, I want to visit Canada and parts of the US that aren't the Bay Area or DC, I want to see Africa and South America and even Antarctica if I can possibly pull it off. I also want to see new parts of Australia. TRAVEL: IT'S GOOD FOR THE SOUL.
medicine and the study thereof
Gee, this one was popular :) I don't actually feel much like rambling about medicine, because I do that on a daily basis and trying to drag my enthusiasm out of me on demand isn't a very good idea; sometimes I adore it and sometimes it's just a case of putting one foot in front of the other, figuratively speaking. I' m working harder than I worked in school and harder than I worked in undergrad, and I know that I'm going to have to keep working hard for…well, the rest of my life. (At some point I'll start being paid for it, though.) Seriously: I consider it to be a privelege to be studying for this profession, I find the material to be intellectually challenging and mostly interesting, and there's enormous scope in the work to observe the breadth of human experience and to make a difference in the lives of many people.
from Merc:
amazing writing/creativity
I've been writing fiction literally since I knew how to put words on paper, creating proper worlds and characters since I was...thirteen, probably?...and writing fanfic since I was sixteen. I don't want to ramble too much about writing here because I'm still recovering from my answers to the writing meta meme; they constitute a wide-randing amount of blather from me on the subject of my own writing. But on a simple level: every time I read a book or write a story I fall deeper in love with the English language and the astonishing, intricate, clever, subtle, hilarious, lyrical things that can be created from it. When my writing is flowing there's no feeling in the world that can match the act of creation. I would love to be published one day in the far-off future, but medical school comes first, and for now fandom is a wonderful outlet for me because not only am I keeping myself sane by arranging words, I'm providing entertainment for other people and developing my own skill in a low-pressure environment.
medical school/associated dance revue shows
Looks like this one will focus on Med Revue, which was probably one of my favourite things about last year, no matter how crazy and stressful it got at times. I'm glad I stuck my hand up to be on the production team, I'm glad I got to stretch my stage-choreography muscles again, I'm glad I met so many fabulous people and contributed to such a fun, funny, worthy piece of original theatre. It made me realise how much I miss everything related to dance and performance and being a driving creative force; helping to coax a group of people from zero to something amazing.
Australia
I have something of a love-hate thing with my country, though it usually swings more towards the love end of the spectrum, especially since I transferred my habitational allegiance from Canberra to Sydney. I still love Canberra, I'm glad I grew up there and I think it's a lovely place to raise a family/retire, but Sydney and I clicked in the same instant way that London and I did. I'm a big city girl. I love the traffic and the diversity and the pockets of gorgeous ugliness, I love the way it lights up at night, I love the harbour and the markets and the food and the shops and the way it thrives.
But this is about Australia! Which is a country the size of the USA with a population of 20 million, mostly clinging to the coastline. It's a beautiful and extreme and isolated and breathtaking place, but I think I'd feel more connected to it if I weren't such a city person; if you belong to the outback or the rainforests or the bushland then you couldn't live anywhere else, whereas I could happily city-hop the globe forever. I do think there are a lot of excellent things about this country: the government's not nearly as bad as it could be (and I voted for them! and Julia Gillard kicks ass), the health system includes some great things like the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, tertiary education is heavily subsidised and HECS means that you can go to uni even if you haven't a penny to put towards your tuition, and then have the interest-free loan monitored by the tax office and taken out of your salary automatically once you're earning a certain amount.
So yes. Even though I don't really feel patriotic most of the time, and don't consider 'Australian' to be one of the adjectives contributing much towards my personal sense of identity, I do love my country.
Lucifer (I'M ORIGINAL)
For better or worse, those people who know me through
milliways_bar (which is a hefty portion of my netly acquaintance!) will always associate me with Lucifer; to be more specific, with samael_diablo, a character based in a pastiche of canons and myths who became incredibly…dense. I played him for years and he's stuck in a corner of me now, irremovable, and -- for the most part -- unchanging. There is more of myself in him than in anything else I've ever created, and he liked Chianti and sat on tables and tapped his fingers on hard surfaces before I did, but those are my things too. I used him to learn to write, and to interact with some amazing people playing some amazing characters, and to channel out the violence that builds up in me. I've been assured that he's likable and terrifying and hot and probably a lot of other wildly diverse adjectives, but I like to stick with 'an arrogant bastard'. To see my favourite example of Lucifer in action your best bet is to read Crying Call, a.k.a. the Big Damn Crossover, which is mostly an intricate fusion of Good Omens and Firefly and Sandman, based loosely on the Firefly-era stuff that was starting to appear in Milliways. It marks the first appearance of Nicolas Rosse, advertising executive, who since then has been instrumental in all sorts of awesome Milliways plot stuff involving Gabriel Tam and Fallen!Raguel and dkakjhsndaj I still get little thrills thinking about how much fun everything involving Rosse is.
Honestly, though, that fic is one of my favourite things I've ever written. It even has Plot!
More generally, since playing him (and a little bit beforehand, I guess; when Nny poked me and said 'I'm starting a panfandom game! want to play? WHO do you want to play?' there was obviously something prodding me to pick Lucifer over all of the other characters I could possibly have chosen -- which at that point, was ANY of them) I've developed a fascination for the stories and the symbolism surrounding Lucifer Morningstar -- Samael, the Devil, the Lightbringer, the First Captain of the Host, the epitome of pride and betrayal, the original revolutionary -- in the Christian tradition, and all of the fictional versions of him that have appeared. Mike Carey's Lucifer (which uses Gaiman's as a starting point) is probably my favourite, but I love searching out books and films which have a Lucifer character, and I have at least two short stories with Lucifers in them (albeit very different Lucifers to my Milliways one).
flist appreciation
OH MY GOD. I totally forgot that I used to do this. I should get back into that, it was great fun. (Good hinting there, Merc :D)
from Del:
Rhythm in writing.
I seem to refer people to fics a lot, but: I put a LOT of my views on the importance and the personally pervasive nature of rhythm into No Sleepers Must Sleep, actually.
& I discuss it a bit here at the writing meme.
It took me a while to actually be aware of the fact that rhythm was the driving force behind my like or dislike of a poem or a line of writing, but I was clued in by the fact that iambic pentameter has always come as naturally as breathing to me. I can dash sonnets off very fast, and if I do too many at once then I start thinking in iambs. True story!
Dance as expression.
Also a true story: I can express the truest parts of myself in one of two ways. One of them is writing (see above!) and the other is dance. I have been trained in a myriad of styles: eight years of jazz ballet, four and a half of classical ballet, one of tap (AWESOME. I'd love to pick it up again someday, it feeds excellently into my love of rhythm.), and two of advanced street funk (probably the style I'm most comfortable with). I've also taken brief courses in belly dance and swing dance, and been taught bits of tango and salsa for shows. I could talk a bit more about choreography and how bored I get by most dance classes (because ten years of training at a demanding dance studio teaches you to pick things up very fast) but they're less about dance-and-expression.
Dancing is how I relieve the non-verbal emotions; largely the joyful ones, or the ones related to an excess of energy. My body responds to my instincts and to music with an ease that only extensive training can convey, despite the fact that I'm a lot less flexible than I have been in the past, and I will -- and often do -- dance to any kind of music, in any kind of setting.
I was also a figure skater for eight years (before my teens) and interestingly, sometimes I get into moods where I crave my skates and a stretch of bare rink, because there's a certain expectation of fluidity and speed built into my dance instincts due to skating almost as soon as I could walk, and -- again, despite the fact that my skating-muscles and my technical skills are so, so rusty -- sometimes the kind of movement I want is the kind that can only be achieved with blades against ice.
MEDICINE. MUAHAHA.
done!
Azula.
WHOO. I approve of this association. Azula has been one of my favourite fictional characters since the moment she appeared onscreen, and despite the fact that I have issues with the way her character arc was handled in the last season of Avatar (not WHAT happened, per se, but the SPEED at which it happened and the resultant sloppy feeling to the arc; a pity, because Avatar generally does character stuff beautifully, and everything Azula-related up to that point made my heart sing with evil joy), I retain a sincere fascination with and love for her. She's unrepentently and realistically sociopathic. She needs to be the best at everything she does. She believes in proving herself to her father, and in upholding the honour of her family. She can handle armies and politics and power plays brilliantly, but fails at basic social interaction. She can bend lightning. She's ambitous, proud, manipulative, snarky, selfish, competitive, brave, possessive, intelligent and powerful, and needs to control everyone around her.
...she may or may not be a female version of Lucifer with a lot more mental imbalance.
For further demonstration of my Azula-enthusiasm, see this post and this fic and the only fanmix I've ever made!
Man, I want to write my post-series epic. There will be tons of Azula/Ty Lee in it.
The colour red.
Huh! To me red is tied up a lot with the Lucifer thing, because of his wings/eyes/obnoxiously blood-coloured shirts. But as a colour it has really grown on me in the last few years. I own a few pieces of clothing (a shirt, a dress) in blinding bright red, and many other pieces which feature red on them somewhere, and a lot of silver-and-red jewellery. Being a blue-eyed person with dark blonde hair, I look better in my other favourite colours (purple and blue), and I liked dying my hair dark because I felt more comfortable in my red stuff.
However, as Tricia Helfer and The Red Dress Girl from the Matrix have shown me, it is entirely possible to be blonde and red-loving and drop-dead gorgeous, and though I may never attain the latter, the first two are cohabiting nicely.
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-has nothing actually useful or insightful to say-
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I think this is even better, except maybe for the part where Robin Hood has an exponentially greater chance of getting attractively muddy and disheveled. Oh well.
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In an attempt to clarify all the confusion from a few months ago about Russell Crowe playing multiple roles, Scott was eager to say that he had changed his mind, and that Crowe will simply portray the famed archer who rises from an unlikely background.
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*flails in mixed glee and disappointment*
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Plus, all they need now is Paul Bettany (maybe as Alan-a-Dale? he could just do Chaucer + guitar) and it will be my perfect movie.
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I never realized before this post that blonde hair + blue eyes + red would maybe make a person look like Superman's outfit ...
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1. Lucifer
2. crimson
3. Shakespeare
4. capability
5. ot3+ ... es
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If I didn't adore you I'd hate you. I have NO SENSE OF RHYTHM whatsoever. I have never been able to construct metrical poetry of any sort. *sulks*
Outa sheer morbid curiosity, when you have spare time in some mythical future, read something of mine and tell me if my (lack of) rhythym hurts your head and how? (Therefore pick something short. One of the Merlin or Arthurian drabbles, maybe.)
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yeah, I'm done.
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I know what you mean! It's like, what more is there to do? Like I love His Dark Materials TO THE DEATH, but I've never really been interested in seeking out HDM fic.