Month: December 2012

The true story of my love affair with hip hop violin

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Recent experiences (well, mostly reading Homestuck) have made me revise a lot of my old assumptions about how to go about creating original female characters, about how-much-Mary-Sue-is-too-much and the like. One of the original ideas I’ve been toying with over the past year or so required two leads – one male and one female, both with some sort of background in the music industry. When I realised I was struggling to come up with a concept for the female lead, I decided to throw caution to the wind and cram everything I loved about music, dance, fashion and performance into one character.

Then I discovered that this person really exists and her name is Lindsey Stirling.

Sheer improbability aside, I am really Very Okay with this.

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jebiwonkenobi:

I think that setting Gerard up to be defeated by the thing he wanted most was very clever, and a little Doctor Who esque. I think that not informing Derek of his plan was vile and indefensible.

Scott has come a long way in terms of how he handles lycanthropy and power and responsibility. He is on the road to becoming a great hero but he’s not there yet.  

I’ve talked before about his relationship with Derek and I still don’t understand why he opted not to tell Derek anything. I get really frustrated because he’s such a sweet kid with everybody else and then Derek comes along and Scott for some reason feels that he is unforgivably evil based on little more than a general dislike and several misunderstandings. 

But trust/communication issues or no, Scott was already planning to force Derek to bite Gerard so it’s not as if Derek saying ‘no’ would have really changed anything. Derek saying ‘yes,’ however, would have completely changed the dynamic of that scene and kept it from becoming yet another situation in which Derek’s body is exploited without his consent.

For someone like Scott, who is still struggling to deal with the repercussions of his own autonomy being stripped from him by Peter, I find this behavior particularly reprehensible. I have no explanation for why some people feel that his actions in this case were excusable (much less heroic) except that the show sets us up to praise Scott (there’s a good post on that here), and in much the same way that Scott sees/excuses the behavior of the betas but not Derek, the show sets us up to see/excuse the behavior of Scott but not Derek. 

It’s sort of the same thing as the killing vs. saving Jackson argument – the show paints Scott’s dogged insistence that they save Jackson as the ‘good’ decision and many fans seem to agree, despite the fact that saving Jackson allowed Matt to continue doing murder whereas killing Jackson would have saved several people (including a large portion of the Beacon Hills police department) from being slaughtered. 

But while we’re on the subject of Scott keeping secrets that he has no business keeping:

  • Why didn’t he tell Allison that he saw her family kill that omega?
  • Why didn’t he tell Allison that her grandfather stabbed him?
  • Did he tell anyone that he was working with Gerard? Stiles? Deaton?
  • Has he told Allison that her mother tried to kill him?

Scott has a very troubling habit of arbitrarily deciding what other people need to know, and I hope that’s something that he works on and stops doing in the future as he becomes the kickass hero he’s meant to be. 

Reblogging to agree with all of this, though if you really want to underline the depths of Scott’s hypocrisy, the kicker for me is the scene at the rave in episode 8, where Scott goes off at Allison for telling her family about Jackson. He brushes off her attempts to fix things. He refuses to apologise later (though it is suggested the full moon may have had a part in that). Without that moment hanging over them, it would’ve been much harder for Gerard to isolate Allison from everyone outside her family and drive her over the edge. Then two episodes later, we learn Scott was secretly feeding information to one of the Argents all along – the exact same thing he accused Allison of doing. The hell, Scott?

Speaking of episode 8, this is also the episode that, in a big way, proves Derek right. Scott has been putting himself in terrible danger by pursuing his relationship with Allison. He wouldn’t have survived that night without a pack to support him. For Scott to go from throwing “I’m not alone” at Mrs Argent and howling for his life – to telling Derek what amounts to “you’re not the boss of me” in the finale… that really does not paint him in a good light.

I can forgive Scott for quite a lot. It’s possible he kept some of the horrible things he knew about Allison’s family because he knew she was already struggling to deal with what she knew as it was. I also feel it gets overlooked that the elephant between Scott and Derek through the whole second season is that Derek lied to Scott about helping him kill the alpha and cure himself of the bite, and even if I can forgive Derek for that, Scott wouldn’t find it so easy. But after Scott agrees to join Derek’s pack, Derek treats him with nothing but respect and good faith. Why Scott would push either of them away, throw all their best intentions in their faces and choose to deal with Gerard alone, in secret, makes no sense to me.

This is all very frustrating, because I don’t want to hate Scott. I loved so many of his scenes in S2, and I suspect there was a lot of awful stuff he was going through in the background of that season that we never got to see. I would really like to see him called out on his behaviour in S3 so it can be addressed and dealt with, but I worry it may be too much to hope for. The plot of S2 hangs together remarkably well on virtually all other counts but this one, but based on what we actually see on screen, the way the show paints Scott as the shining hero and Derek as the one with trust issues makes no sense to me.

Disqus post the second

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So it seems Disqus isn’t that big on comments from people who don’t already have their own Disqus account to sign in with, and doesn’t give you any points for having a tumblr, even when you’re using it to comment on a tumblr. This seems to me to reduce the convenience factor a good deal. Have fiddled with the settings a bit, it now seems to accept the following:

1) People who are already signed up for Disqus

2) People with a facebook/twitter/yahoo/etc account, or an OpenID linked to LiveJournal/Other journalling platforms/whatever else OpenID supports, or

3) People who are willing to enter a name and email address. Since it accepts as an email more or less anything with an @ in the middle and a .blah at the end (even obvious bullshit like a@b.com) without bothering to make you verify, I’m not sure exactly why it bothers, but at least it doesn’t require you to supply a real one and make you worry you’re signing up for a lifetime of spam.

You do need to open an actual post to see any commenting options at all – nothing shows up either on your own tumblr or your dashboard to indicate they’re there at all. So all up, despite how widely I’ve seen Disqus recommended, for tumblr use it’s still clunky and counterintuitive. Not expecting it’s going to get much use around here then, but I’ll leave it up for the time being and see if anyone else wants to bother with it.