shine aqua illusion

I waffled for weeks on whether to get the Humble Bundle of James Tynion IV's stuff (as of posting, there's five days of the offer left), before finally getting it and forgetting how weird my brain gets when I binge on creepy media.

BASICALLY, I should not have read The Department of Truth before bedtime. Even when I got Nice House on the Lake, I don't read a whole volume in one go! There's such a thing as pacing things out! Plus I made the other mistake of reading Deviant first without processing the consequences of it only being volume 1, i.e. the story is not done.😢

I picked up Claudia Gold's Women Who Ruled: History's 50 Most Remarkable Women quite a while go from a warehouse sale, and it's languished long enough that I've mostly moved on to other topics, so making myself read this was both a tiresome nostalgia trip and a breezy rehash (each lady gets 4 to maximum of 9 pages each).

The book is Western Europe-centric so it's a big chunk of familiar names, and I would've been more patient about it if she hadn't included Lady Jane Grey. (Really????) Of the ancient-to-early modern era it covers, there's just the one ruler from the Ottoman empire, two from China, two from India, and none from non-ancient Egypt Africa. But I did get introduced to Margaret I of Denmark and hopefully I can get a biography of her one day.

I'd read Gold's biography about Henry II of England a while back and enjoyed it, so I was a little surprised by some of Gold's choices in how to describe the controversial reputations of some of the women, because she's kind to Thatcher and Marie Antoinette, but is very much not to Isabella of France and Empress Cixi. This just may be a consequence of writing a list-type book where there's only so much time to spare to research the individuals Gold maybe doesn't know as well, but it is a bit of a shame.

I'd finished Raya Sirena a few weeks ago (what a nothingburger of a show, ultimately) and thought hey, I'm in the mood for some other mermaid media. H2O: Just Add Water unfortunately just left Netflix, and I didn't feel ready to start on season 2 of Siren without a recap. So, A Mermaid for Christmas, a made-for-tv rom com that was only ever available on Amazon prime until I finally found an alternate stream, it is.

Me: This is going to be so bad. SO BAD. SO SO SO BAD.

[half an hour later]

Me: Actually this is pretty funny, some of the jokes are legit, and some of the line readings are pretty good! Problem is, it's not zany ENOUGH, and it's hampered by a tiny budget that doesn't give it the glistening zany feel of a DCOM or Netflix Christmas film. It's not "good" but it is self-aware and managed to pull off lampshading jokes that usually sound embarrassed or tryhard, but here feel like they're bringing the audience in for the joke, and it's kinda charming for that. It's still not "good" and offers almost no eye candy for mermaid fen, but I had more fun in general than I did with Raya Sirena, so that's something.

Edited to add: I felt oddly unsatisfied that the movie was middling fine and that I kinda enjoyed it, so I ended up browsing listlessly for a bit and ended up watching the 2020 CN film Legend of Mermaid and it was so awful! Exactly the kind of bad I was looking for! And all is right with the world.

Edited again to add: I figured I might as well watch the sequel Legend of Mermaid II, and... oh? This one's actually fun! And funny! And has actual character arcs! And a villain twist that makes sense! And two things that felt like plot holes turned out not to be! Bonus majority female cast vs. the first movie's sexual menace towards women! This is legitimately a good movie, and much better than A Mermaid for Christmas even, what a wonder it is when there's good writing, what the heck.

What a rollercoaster.