Life Blog: Happy Holidays | Three Things Twilight Did Differently | Parental Guidance Suggested

 

Dear Reader,

The holidays are here again. I titled this post with "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" for reasons that you'll understand below. However, in case I'm not available later, I want to wish you a Happy Thanksgiving and a Merry Christmas (and Happy New Year and Got MLK?).

You may have noticed that I didn't post a Scary Edition media recommendation this year. Well, I started to, but then I realized that I had already mentioned many of the books/movies that would fall into that genre in recent blog posts, and I was on to bingeing less scary things.

The Binge 

The Rise of Phoenixes (Netflix Original Series)

For example, I finally finished a binge of The Rise of Phoenixes on Netflix. This is a 70-episode  Chinese TV series. If you are interested, be prepared to read subtitles. I'm the most annoying subtitle watcher on the planet because I pause a lot. First, the pros.... This is a very well-made and grand series (2018) that follows the rise of a prince and a girl whose family has been reluctantly taken in by her uncle, who is an official in the palace. With nine sons, there are more people coveting the Emperor's seat than Game of Thrones. The Sixth Prince is released from prison and is plotting to avenge the death of his brother, the Third Prince, and his mother. From the moment they meet, the Sixth Prince and the girl are destined to either work together or get in each other's way. The series has grandeur of the palace life, political intrigue, fight scenes, great characterization, humor, and romance. The subtitles are very well translated, aside from where I read that "little raccoon" should have been "little leopard," so not exactly the same thing. I wouldn't have known that before I read an article while trying to figure out what happened to one character. 

<Spoilers>Now the cons... Despite the fact that this was a beautifully made show with tons of drama, the ending sucked. Royally. After finishing, I read criticism that the authors of the TV show deviated from the happier ending of the novel. Let me put it this way.... Remember The Blacklist and the irrational bender that Elizabeth Keen went on? She starts out being a smart, capable female who is the voice of reason and later turns into an insane woman who is manipulated by a family member she only just met and goes against the one person who has been there for her for years and saved her life numerous times? Well, apparently, one of the writers pulled an Elizabeth Keen on the female main character, which earns her the award for Misleading Actress. The show further infuriates me for making the "strong female lead" stupid and irrational, which is a slap-in-the-face trope of too many shows claiming to be supportive of women. If that wasn't enough, basically, the writers destroyed the lives of every single character on the show. You had your favorite characters who had all been on the same team all fighting against each other. What kind of a sick sadist writer does that to a movie/show that is intended to be "romantic"? A disgruntled ex-Hallmark employee?</Spoilers>

Like Avril says, "So much for my happy ending."

While the show was, generally speaking, very good and very well done, I had to give it a complete thumbs down because there is no way to be content with it ending the way it does, and it's not fair to an audience to endure such a thing. It's not unlike what happened to the "jump the shark" ending of Game of Thrones, where Sam tells Jon he has to assassinate someone, robs him of kingship, which Jon fully deserved, and then exiles him to The Wall as punishment for assassinating the person Sam encouraged him to assassinate! And then Sam is all smiley and happy because he finally got his wish of being a wise scholar. I wanted to send the writers of the season to The Wall. Many of the viewers were outraged by the show to the point where there were rumors suggesting that there might be a complete redo of the final season. Although one article assured viewers that it was never going to happen, it appears that the writers are not above capitalizing on what had been a success in the earlier seasons by writing a prequel to the show. House of the Dragon is in the works for 2022. I won't be a bit surprised if writers of TROP take the same option.

Happy Endings

I feel like books, movies, and TV shows should come with a clear "happy ending" or "unhappy ending" label. I watched over fifty-two hours of film and expected an ending along the lines of Memoirs of a Geisha, where, after all of the trials and setbacks, the couple was finally together and got their wish. Apparently, TROP had a bitter writer who wanted to teach people that life ain't fair, women are stupid, and royals suck.

This is the part where I actually have something good to say about Twilight, that is, besides the fact that the movies were loyal to the books, whereas I read that the TROP novel actually had a happier ending than the show. Why the writers deviated from the source material in favor of misery is just entirely evil, but I digress. Back to Twilight.

Let Stephen King say what he will about teen romance, but here are three things that made Stephenie Meyers’s series unique in mainstream fiction, aside from making vampires twinkle in the sunlight.

1. The monster and the girl ended up together. Unlike most monster-related books and movies, it was neither a tragedy nor a horror. No one fell off of a windmill, burst into flames, or was crushed to death by a collapsing castle.

2. The story didn't stop at the altar. For ages, the altar has been the end-all for fiction. Although, more recently, most Hallmark romances consider a confession of actually liking someone to be a climactic moment, and the altar is in no way guaranteed. I mean, you don't even know if the guy at least bought her dinner. Sure, watching Darcy walk across the field and confess to Elizabeth (after his initial proposal was denied) was climactic, but the ending was a post-marriage scene, which was nice, although I would have liked to see what a Pemberly-worthy wedding looks like. But I digress.... Finally, I was relieved to see at least one author willing to break this barrier and answer the age-old question: can there actually be happiness beyond the veil, or are the masters of fiction hiding some dark truth? Why did every story creator stop here as if everything after the altar was anticlimactic and goes downhill after that point? It doesn't have to be that way.

3. The girl became the monster. For centuries, the love of the girl has turned the boy from a monster to a prince. NOT the other way around. Even author Charlaine Harris guaranteed that heroine Sookie Stackhouse would never lose her humanity and become a vampire. This was one story that turned the trope on its head and the girl into the monster. I will admit that I was always curious what Sookie would be like as a vampire.

Although the movie Shrek, which came out 4 years before the first Twilight book was released, had Fiona turn into an ogre, but it was the curse and it's resolution that changed her, not her conscious choice. Perhaps it was a choice on some level, but not what she expected. I noticed some parallels between Fiona and the bear in East of the Sun & West of the Moon, with the difference that the prince was a bear during the day and a man only at night and with no one able to see his true form, although I'm confused whether it was the wife looking at the prince at night by candlelight or the fact that she spilled tallow, which she had been warned not to do, that caused the prince to have to return to the witch. If the latter, then perhaps he should have been more forthcoming in his rules, like, WHEN you talk to your mother alone, which I had to have some sort of precognition since I knew things would take a turn for the worse after that, and WHEN she tells you to look at me with the candle and not to spill tallow, I'm telling you now, because this is important, don't spill tallow!!! Instead, just, "Don't talk to your mother." 🙄 Probably intentionally vague, like most curses and the law.

You could raise an argument that at least some of the barriers shouldn't have been crossed. I wouldn't want to become the Bride of Frankenstein, and I never understood the appeal of wanting to be a zombie, which has nothing of the beauty and superpowers that Meyer's vampires possess and sounds more like a death cult fantasy. While I agree that humans shouldn't become monsters, at least in non-fiction, I can't deny that author Stephenie Meyer accomplished something I had never seen other writers do. Also, happy ending. Check! ✅

So, I'm over drama for a while. I will now turn my focus to Hallmark and trite yet guaranteed happy ending, albeit often prematurely climactic, Fireplace with Christmas Music, Home Town, or Deadliest Catch. I will write clearly labeled horror and fairy tales. I will listen to Tony Bennett and Perry Como. I will wear Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer pajama pants and eat cookie dough. If I crave drama, I will watch the Weather Channel and track earthquakes and volcano eruptions.

Keeping with Asian films, I also watched Love O2O The Movie and Empresses in the Palace.  

Love O2O (Netflix)

Love O2O is a modern fantasy (2016) where a girl and guy connect both in real life and in a fantasy RPG game. If you are seeing a flying horse on the commercial, that's the game part. :) There is no "magic" in the "real world" part, so don't be mislead into thinking it's that kind of fantasy. The show is very cute and seems to focus on being true to who you are and having self-esteem and virtues. The subtitles are clear enough to understand so that nothing is lost in the telling. It was pretty conservative, and I enjoyed it. They have both a movie and a series, each with different actors, and I watched the movie. 

Empresses in the Palace (Prime)

Empresses in the Palace could be described as Game of Thrones meets The Bachelor. I cannot remember anything specific about EITP subtitles. I was able to watch it and get the gist of what was being said, but, if I remember correctly, some translations might have been a tad awkward. Empresses was a six 90-minute episode series with a lot of political intrigue as each member of the harem schemes for power. Where the princes schemed for power in TROP, it was said in EITP that whoever ruled the harem ruled the country. The main takeaway is to stay far away from the courts and palaces and harems, at least IRL. You'll be happier or live longer. Perhaps both.

I will say that there was one particular hilarious moment in the show involving a CGI cat, clearly animated, which seemed in contrast to the rest of the show. You get a camera shot of a real Persian cat. The camera view changes to another character applying some makeup that has been secretly enhanced with feline-ferociousness-inducing flowers. The camera goes back to the cat, which is now animated. The cartoon cat growls and jumps on the girl. Despite the screaming, it's hard not to laugh.

If you enjoy EITP, the follow-up series is Ruyi's Royal Love in the Palace, where the Royal Mother is the victor in EITP as a younger generation of competing harem members include Ruyi, who has no interest in being in the harem. Both are based on books by Liu Lianzi. Our Western idea of a harem is women walking around dressed like I Dream of Jeannie, but that's nowhere near accurate. They're all considered wives and treated like princesses, except the main wife, the Queen.

The Rebel Princess (Prime, Viki)

I also started watching The Rebel Princess on Prime, but Prime only has 9 episodes. If you watch on Viki, you can see 68 episodes, which makes more sense since the Prime version ended before even fulfilling what the very general synopsis of the show stated, which was confusing. I'm pleased to see there are more episodes available to watch on other sources. This show has Zhang Ziyi, the leading actress from Memoirs of a Geisha. Update: I have watched the show in its entirety, and it was very enjoyable.

Parental Guidance Suggested: Please Keep all Body Parts Inside the Vehicle when Traveling to Other Worlds

Locke & Key (Netflix Orignal Series)

I also watched the second season of Locke & Key, also on Netflix. Despite the main characters being children themselves, I feel that the show doesn't quite achieve the status of "family film." I won't go into detail, but some include drugs, alcohol, and a high school kid hooking up with a 30-year-old stranger. And that's not even touching on violence, basically dying when you use a specific key, or what happens when you shove the wrong person through a portal to another dimension. Parents might want to preview the show first. My main pet peeve with the show is that super-annoying "I forgot to tell you the one thing that might save the world" bit. Or, "your bit of info is critical, so can you tell me when it's too late because I'm too busy now???" Or when the mom catches her daughter's BF with blood on his hands and neglects to bring it up. Gee, thanks for looking out for me there, Mom. Out of all of the concerns to dismiss about your daughter's bf, anything involving blood certainly falls within a different category. Basically, if people communicated better and listened, this "save the world" stuff would be totally unnecessary. It would never even come up.

However, this "dumb mom moment" falls under the extreme theory that modern moms should do their best to stay out of their kids' ways, since kids are smarter. This clearly flawed "theory," is the catalyst behind most plots and life-risking misadventures. Then again, if parents did their jobs, most fiction books would not exist since they usually answer the intended-to-be-rhetorical question, "What could possibly go wrong?"

(I could ramble further into this debate about moms staying out of the way, but I'll spare you and move on.)

All that being said, Locke & Key is interesting and answers most of the questions that arose in the first season, and there is a whole new cliffhanger that sets up the next story arc for a potential Season Three.

The concept behind Locke & Key is not unique. The Lost Room was probably the first time I really noticed the concept being used, and it had several different objects originating from a missing hotel room and having various magical properties. If you haven't seen it, I believe the show was a Syfy channel original miniseries, and it was definitely bingeworthy. Most everyone I know who watched it eventually purchased the DVDs. On a similar note, in middle-grade books, 100 Cupboards by N.D. Wilson involved an attic room that had tiny cupboards that were like windows to different worlds or different places in another world or a combination of the two. There was a dial that could be set to the desired cupboard number, and that location could be accessed by going downstairs and through the portal in the parents' bedroom. The problem was when someone changed the dial upstairs after another person had gone through the portal downstairs, which is usually an issue when you have kids traveling to other worlds without parental supervision (refer to paragraph about the necessity of keeping parents in the dark above). House of Dark Shadows, first in the Dreamhouse Kings series by Robert Liparulo, was another middle-grade book with a concept involving doors and portals to other places. Likewise, in The Books of Elsewhere by Jacqueline West, the main character is able to travel within the paintings of an old house by using magical spectacles, so the paintings operate as portals. In all of the cases, there is a Wonderland appeal to the portals, yet they are also traps with unknown dangers from which the innocent must attempt to escape, which is an old, old story. It could be argued that this appeal/danger could be a metaphor for the lure and risks of carnal pleasures, which was far less ambiguous in books like Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. (Thank you, Mr. Bradbury, for your transparency.) And if that metaphor doesn't work for you, please refer to the deception that took place in the Garden of Eden.

Final warning to unwitting characters: please tell your parents so they know where to look for your body.

On that note, the authors of Locke & Key (whether the show or the original graphic novel by Joe Hill, son of Stephen King) cast an extra spell that prevented adults from remembering magic, which basically rendered them useless in helping the children to get out of the fixes they found themselves in. That is, unless they used a special magic key to unlock their memory. (Or the recovering alcoholic mom relapses, which enables her to witness magic and remember it, so, naturally, the kids want her to stop drinking. 🙄 She's onto us, man. Let's convince her she's just drunk.)

And, on yet another note, I was browsing for the perfect fireplace video on various platforms and finally found one that featured a nice fire with instrumental holiday music. Oddly enough, it was rated PG. 😑