The Desert Mermaid

Aaagh. Never fall asleep just after reading one of Slacktivist's Left Behind posts. I was having weird Nicolae Carpathia dreams all night.

Props to my subconscious, though, for casting Tommy Wiseau in the role of Carpathia. It's truly genius casting. Suddenly the weirdass inflection and tone for Carpathia's dialogue makes perfect sense.

I just realized, while reading the latest Left Behind (usually) Friday from Slacktivist, that it's entirely possible that Jerry Jenkins accidentally wrote a brilliant story.* All you've got to do is assume that back in Book 1 Antichrist Nicolae Carpathia** completely destroyed the free will and rational minds of our POV characters, Splint Chesthair and Slate Fistcrunch Buck Williams and Rayford Steele.

Once you come to that conclusion, all their self-congratulation for thinking of themselves as enemies of the Antichrist while they take jobs with him and constantly do his bidding makes chilling sense. They THINK they are in control, and they THINK that all their completely insane decisions to aid and abet him are their OWN ideas furthering their agendas of opposition, when in fact he's the one pulling the strings. What you're reading is their warped, self-delusional spin on how they remain good guys while totally in the thrall of the bad guy. And it also explains Nicolae's apparent laxity when it comes to tyrannically ruling the world--he's actually just infiltrated folks' minds on a far subtler level than we expected. Crafty bastard.

Hey, it adds an element of drama to an unbelievably daft (but educational!) series. I can dream.

Incidentally, I found out they're doing a reboot of the Left Behind movies, and Ashley Tisdale, voice of Candace in Phineas and Ferb, is playing Chloe Steele. I would have no idea how to feel about that, but it doesn't matter because Nicholas Cage is playing Slab Bulkhead Rayford Steele, and so I am too busy laughing uproariously at the awful appropriateness of this addition to his already bonkers career. You go, crazy Cage man!


*The one he wrote on purpose is completely terrible, however; make no mistake.

**Yes, really.

Okay, y'all, the Rifftrax for Breaking Dawn Part 2 is a goddamn MASTERPIECE. I may have to turn around and watch it again, because it had me doubled over laughing so hard.

Also, Dear Michael Sheen: I WILL BE YOUR FRIEND. Come find me and we will have sparkly shenanigans together. Wear your silly old-timey battle gear. Maybe we can go find nobleplatypus and go to Disneyland! IT WILL BE REMAAAARKABLE

Oh, yeah, I can totally see why they had to split a story as epic as Twilight: Breaking Dawn into two movies. It definitely money needs all that money time to properly money tell the story.

And the part I was looking forward to the most as a certified antifan was not nearly insane enough. Though I suppose it’d still be extra insane for anyone who didn’t read the books, because the movie didn’t stop to explain just why the vampire-gnaws-a-C-section-through-his-beloved bit was necessary. Your story may be stupid, but that is no excuse for sloppy storytelling!

The Rifftrax was darn good, though. The Wahrwilf reference alone made it worthwhile, but I admit I was rather gratified when they cheered the brief appearance of Count Fabulous at the end. Like me, they know who the real star of this story is. We can only hope he steals the hell out of the spotlight in the next one.

The Book: Mermaid: A Twist on the Classic Tale, by Carolyn Turgeon. Wouldn’t you know it, just as I’m explaining to people that Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid is Teen Supernatural Romance, along comes a retelling that plants it firmly in the Teen Supernatural Romance category.

The Plot: Human princess Margrethe and mermaid princess Lenia are both trying to win the affections of the same dude, Prince Christopher. Margrethe wants to marry him in order to end the bitter war between their two kingdoms. Lenia wants to marry him in order to score an immortal soul, something God apparently forgot to give to merfolk. Thank goodness for loopholes!* Oh, and they both love him, I guess.

The Twist: The twist is that Turgeon wants to explore the character of the Other Princess, the one the prince actually winds up marrying. And it works—Margrethe is an excellent character, analytical and romantic at the same time, intelligent, and brave. Unfortunately, Turgeon forgot to make any of the other characters interesting—which is a crying shame, since adding in a tentative friendship between the two princesses before the whole “turning human” bit goes down was inspired.

Mostly, though, it made it difficult to believe either of them was really in love with the prince, whose two main personality facets were an interest in The Odyssey and horniness. I’m trying to figure out if such a lack of character was a clever bit of gender-bending (I’ve lost track of the number of books and movies that have two guys vying for the affection of some woman with all the personality of a blow-up doll), or just a failure to make a character work. Either way, though, I think I’d have preferred it if Turgeon had left the “love” part out entirely and just gone with the ulterior war-end and soul-get motives. It would’ve felt more honest.

One more twist at the end is how the mermaid secures “immortality.” I was indifferent to Turgeon’s solution, but I do think it was smart of her not to go with the original ending where good ol’ Crazy Hans completely lost his shit and had voyeuristic angels vaporize the mermaid and explain that if you disobey your parents she will be doomed to drift around the world bemoaning her fate like Jacob Marley for WAY longer than necessary due to some weird contract with God. Good move, that.

We Are Committed To Sparkle Motion: Here in this novel we learn that mermaids are pale white, cold, marble-hard, difficult to destroy, and glittery. First they came for the vampires, and I did not say anything because I never liked vampires. Then they came for the angels …

Down In Fragment Rock It took me a while to form an opinion on this book because I kept tripping over badly-placed sentence fragments the author mistook for lyricism. Now, normally I like sentence fragments, but that’s because they’re supposed to help a story flow. This time around it was like when you stumble over something and have to go back and inspect the ground to see what you hit. I had to keep stopping to make sure I hadn’t just missed a predicate somewhere.


*For those of you who only watched the Disney version, this bit is straight out of the original story. As is the part where she will feel like her legs are being stabbed FOREVER, and where giving up her voice means the witch hacks out her tongue.**

**Neither Andersen nor Turgeon seem to realize that this doesn't actually remove your voice; it just makes it very difficult to articulate anything and you sound weird and alarming. They keep claiming she laughs silently, or that she can't scream. Turgeon does describe how Lenia can taste food after losing her tongue, which is true to a very limited extent, but I'm not sure if she did that on purpose or not. I'm guessing not, because the food has a LOT of taste.

Oh, man, y’all, somebody in HarperTeen’s marketing department needs a raise.

Look what I shelved today:



That’s right. They Twilified Romeo and Juliet. And also Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre and a bunch of others.

Do you think this works? Does slapping a big red thing on a pitch black cover and typing in fancy font actually trick teenage girls (and frustrated housewives) into reading any damn book they’d previously spurned? Maybe we should try Gothing up the covers of books like On the Origin of Species and see if it’s true! I really see no downside to tricking people into reading that.

At least there’s some color on these, though. The YA novels are looking increasingly gloomy lately. Every cover is washed-out greyscale. Although that is starting to serve as a warning: if you see a grey cover, you’re safe in betting you’ll find a bland normal girl torn between her One True Love, who is TORMENTED because he is a demon/vampire/fallen angel/demigod/time pirate as well as a jerk, and some other red herring rival dude, who is also a jerk. It’s just when this cover style starts bleeding into books I like that we have a problem. Can you just picture Beka Cooper looking all sad and greyscale, with bright red rose petals falling from her hand? Or god forbid Tiffany Aching and the Nac Mac Feegle?

Okay, yeah, neither can I. Nor can I picture that with my own OGYAFE. But if it does ever happen, I suppose SOMEBODY will read them.

They just won’t know what hit them.

You know, before Twilight came out, I have to admit I never appreciated the sheer creativity with which the Harry Potter fandom’s batshit is imbued.

I mean, Twilight fans are batshit, but it’s a sort of vanilla batshit, the kind where you just insert yourself into the protagonist’s place and relive the story replete with fantasies of nice sparkly missionary position sex, or sit around insisting that your fandom is the BESTEST fandom.* If you’re really creative, you lust after the werewolf instead, but mostly the batshit is a matter of intensity.

There doesn’t seem to be nearly as much in the way of fans astrally married to the villainous sidekick vampire who sometimes manifests himself through the fan’s pet hamster to inform the fan that the original author is out to eat all their sweets and steal their paperclips. You just get varying levels of “MINE MINE CHARACTER ALL MINE” and “THIS IS THE ONLIEST BOOK.”**

Which strikes me as doubly funny since Twilight itself spirals from a self-insert Mary Sue self-indulgence to full-on psychodramatic crackfic.

I dunno, maybe there’s an Inverse Law of Crackiness, or maybe it’s just that Twilight appeals to a particular group of people without much interest in changing things up. Either way, though, I want to go back and salute the Potterfans. You guys still win, no question.


*I remain with the theory that many Twilight fans have an unnervingly narrow breadth of knowledge. cleolinda’s posse once suggested that Twilight fans, unlike other rabid fans, do not launch from their fandom into other fandoms, which explains their whole Stephen King fiasco.

**Although that can be pretty entertaining, I must admit.

Dear Stephenie Meyer,

On behalf of all us Twilight lolfans out there, I would just like to thank you for creating this train wreck. From the bottom of my heart I send you warm sentiments and a glow of complete, unabashed fondness. I don’t know if you realize that it makes my life a little more interesting to know that somewhere out there, whole hordes of women and young girls are declaring Stephen King’s assertion that you can’t write* to be motivated entirely by jealousy that your book got made into a hit movie, and furthermore challenging him to write a bestseller if he thinks he’s so great.

With warmest regards I remain,
Yours in schadenfreude,
Amelia

(The appalling lack of pop culture awareness regarding Stephen King has led lolfans to a new theory on Twihards, as expressed in the second-to-last paragraph of this entry by cleolinda: that the more crazed Twilighters actually have not read any other books, which is why they get so vehemently defensive about this one: they have nothing to compare Meyer to, doubled with the fact that if you insult Twilight you are saying that they have 100% bad taste in books. An interesting theory, and one that may shed a lot of light on the oddness of so many true fans.)


*Which is totally true. I figured I should at least try to read the books. I think I got to, maybe, chapter 5.