Entries tagged with spoilers

Entry tags:

Back to Wicked

My husband the horror fanatic is watching something about Amish hauntings - that may actually be the name of it, Amish Haunting(s?). It's kind of bizarre. I've spent some time with a couple of Amish people and I have trouble believing they'd approve of that, but who knows. (It's not like I know them spectacularly well. They just always seem pretty grounded to me.)

I finished the History of LotR #3 (which is called The War of the Rings) - these are big fat books and so every one of those I finish seems like a victory. Now I just have #4, which I've already started - it's called Sauron Defeated.

So, did I mention this already? We are about to go see Wicked again. It will be Rob's second time and my third - I suggested it because I've been watching YouTube videos about it, and I finished my re-read of the book since the last time I saw it, and I'm just sort of trying to fit all of that together in my head. (One unspoilery detail I've noticed: did other people pay attention to Elphaba's glasses? Sort of an s-curve sort of thing, I've never seen any like that before and I've worn glasses since I was eight or something. Somebody's probably got a contract to sell copies of that, how much you wanna bet?)

(Totally spoilers below for Wicked book vs musical vs movie + speculation. Remember too that I don't even really know anything about the musical, I've never seen it.)

(Later!)
OK, I totally enjoyed Wicked again. Something I got from the videos I watched was that (as in the book, and I guess also in the musical, according to Wikipedia) the Wizard is actually Elphaba's father - BUT the movie may have hinted at this early on by having Goldblum's voice doing the singing at the beginning as her mother's lover (just, like a line or two). I thought it did sound like him but it's hard to be sure. Rob & I both also felt like when he meets with Elphaba later, it sort of seemed like he knew that. If he actually gave her mother the green elixir then he should be pretty certain, really! Anyway, we had fun trying to figure all that out.

Entry tags:

Rosemary and Rue (October Daye book 1, part 2)

(I decided the trees icon was about as fairy-like as anything I had either here or on the old Livejournal - I had a lot more icons there, back in the day, and they're still there so I go crib from there occasionally - so that's what I'm using for these entries, assuming I remember!)

Part 1 is here, and this starts with chapter 6 of Rosemary and Rue.
Again: SPOILERS!

Chapter 6 picks up with Toby reviewing her options after leaving the Queen's knowe. Obviously the Queen has no intention of getting involved. Other courts are equally dangerous. It's not a mortal problem - the police already have the murder case but they have no clue what's actually going on. She doesn't want to go to Sylvester, her duke, or at least not yet, although she knows she'll have to eventually. There are other fae: the Luidaeg; Lily from the Tea Gardens - but she eliminates those too. The only other thing she can come up with is a place and a person from her past: the place is called "Home" and the person is an underworld figure named Devin, the sort of guy who takes in teen changelings and uses them for "favors." (It says a lot about Toby's state of mind to me that she thinks this is her best option.) She was one of Devin's kids, once, but since her mother is a sort of fae celebrity, she got treated somewhat better than most. She was "his lover and his pet and his favorite toy," she says. Sylvester eventually got her out of that life, and she's barely seen Devin since.

Chapter 7 - "Home" itself is a sort of dive where Devin and a bunch of teenage changelings live like Lost Boys (and Girls). Toby immediately gets into a squabble with a couple of kids in the front room: siblings, Manuel & Dare; they are Tylwyth Teg/Piskie quarter-bloods. Apparently in the years while Toby was a fish, the Queen tried to shut Home down, but Evening stopped her. This surprises Toby; she would've thought Evening would consider the place beneath her. Toby also reminisces about how she thought she was in love with Devin at one point, and he persuaded her to promise him that she wouldn't marry her (now ex-)fiance until their daughter Gillian was old enough to make her Choice or she turned 13 (which strikes me as creepily specific). Now Devin wants her to back off the investigation - but she doesn't tell him about the binding, so he doesn't know she has no choice about it. He agrees to help, but not for free, naturally. The form of payment is left unspecified.

Chapter 8 - When Toby gets back to her car, she hears a noise and finds that it's a rose-goblin, a sort of cat-shaped fae creature that's actually an animate rosebush, thorns and all. It's carrying a key on a string - one that she's seen before, when she tasted Evening's blood. (Oh yeah, I wasn't being super-specific in the last entry and I didn't mention that part. Let's just say that Toby can get information by tasting blood - icky but useful, I guess!) While puzzling over the key, T. talks about how the number 3 is sacred in Faerie: 3 courts, 3 rulers, all that. There's a saying that there are three roads to every destination: the easy way, the hard way, and the long way - and Evening had a business called Third Road Enterprises, probably referencing that saying. Toby decides she needs to go take a look at Evening's offices.

Chapter 9 - What Toby finds in Evening's office suite (hidden in a file cabinet) is a very rare magical object: a "hope chest." There were once said to be 12 of them, made by Oberon himself, and they can supposedly change the balance of a person's blood, and make them completely human or completely fae. (You can see why that would be tempting for a half-fae like Toby.) She isn't really sure she believes this, but she also thinks "you can trust the ones you hate" - meaning Evening, I guess! (She and E. were more frenemies than real friends.) Something whispers in the back of her head, maybe from Evening's memories: The key will open the way in Goldengreen (which is Evening's own knowe). So that's probably another place she needs to go.

So, in chapter 10, she takes the hope chest to Tybalt, because he's a pureblood and won't be tempted by it, and as a Cait Sidhe, he's not a subject of the Queen. He's not happy about taking it, but he promises to keep it safe, in a binding way - and this is not something I'd ever particularly paid attention to before, but I went back and wrote down the words of the binding:
Tybalt says:

By root and branch, by leaf and vine, on rowan and oak and ash and thorn, I swear that what is given to my keeping shall remain in my keeping, and shall be given over only to the one who holds my bond. My blood to the defense of the task I am set, my heart to the keeping of the promise to which I am bound.

and Toby responds:

Broken promises are the road to our damnation. Promises kept are the meeting of all our myriad roads. And such a meeting will my promise be.

(Or maybe both of them say that last bit. It's unclear.)

(I can't say anything about why I think that's important without getting all spoilery, but people who've read further into the series will surely understand!)

Part 3 is here. (I guess I'm going to have to do an index eventually, but if I do I'll go back and add links!)

Entry tags:

Rosemary and Rue - October Daye book 1, part 1

(See here for a bit of background on this!)

Rosemary and Rue
by Seanan McGuire
published 2009 (note that there's a 2019 anniversary edition with some new material, which is what I've been using lately)

This is a plot summary plus commentary, basically. It started out as just notes for myself so it's not necessarily consistent in level of detail, etc.

Generally, these books are about a secret world of fairies (or fae) who live among us. (This pretty much explains itself as it goes.) They are set in and around San Francisco. There are currently 18 books so there's a lot of stuff to talk about if I'll stick with it!

This book starts on 6/9/1995 (for the prologue), and then skips to 2/23/2009 (which would have been more or less "present day" at the time it was published).

If you haven't read these books then be aware that there are definitely SPOILERS!!!!!
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
(just want to make that clear! - although I'll try to go easy on spoilers for later books in the series)

(Note that I'm putting new names - and species, etc - in boldface the first time I use them.)

Prologue: In 1995, Toby (short for October) is working as a private investigator, and is trailing a fae named Simon, whose magic smells of smoke and rotten oranges - you don't need to memorize everyone's smell, just know that what fae & part-fae people smell like is important, in this tale. (Think of it as sort of a signature thing - everyone smells a little different, and people who are related by blood generally have similar scents.) She trails Simon to Golden Gate Park, where he meets a woman named Oleander - who's 900 years old, Toby says, but still looks like a teenager. There, Simon turns Toby into a fish (a koi, specifically), and kicks her into a fish-pond. And she stays there, in fish form, for fourteen years. She snaps out of it, suddenly, in June 2009.

Chapter 1 picks up six months later. Toby is working as a checker at a Safeway near downtown SF. The first customer we see her checking out is someone we later learn is called the Luidaeg, but Toby doesn't know her yet, at this point. (She is buying gourmet ice cream and Diet Coke.) In between customers, there's some backstory: Toby's parents were a fairy woman and an Irish accountant, so T. is half-fae, a changeling in this book's terminology. The second customer we see is a childhood friend named Mitch, and this is not a coincidence: her old friends keep trying to draw her back into their circle, but she's pushing them away.

On her way home from work she sees a kelpie, a fairy horse; she also talks about how everybody tells her her name is weird - and I'm guessing that would happen a lot when you're a supermarket checker named "October" - even in San Francisco. - It's almost dawn, and dawn strips away fae illusions. (Very uncomfortable for somebody like Toby whose magic is weak.) She meets Tybalt, King of Cats (currently in human form), who seems to make a specialty of tormenting her. He calls her "little fish," mockingly. (When he changes to cat-form, he seems to fold inward, and there's a popping noise and the smell of his magic - and then he's a tabby cat.)

Chapter 2
When she gets home to her apartment, there's a teenage boy slouching in the doorway - I believe we'll learn later that he's called Quentin, although he's not named here. (Pale-blond hair, Canadian accent, so yes.) He calls her "Lady Daye" but she says it was "Sir Daye" when it was anything. Quentin works for Sylvester, who a duke and is Toby's "liege," in the medievalist terms the fae use, but the message he gives her is not phrased as a direct order, so she ignores it and goes to bed.

She dreams about her mother, Amandine, playing "fairy bride" with Toby's human father. Toby was born in 1952, making her 57 here. (She is not immortal, but even changelings live much longer than a regular human. The books never really discuss how old Toby appears to be, but clearly it's much younger than she actually is.)

Fae children are protected by "baby magic" which keeps small children from giving themselves away - but at some point it fails, and then a changeling is given a choice of whether to be fae or human - this is called the Changeling's Choice. It was Sylvester who came to give "the Choice" to Toby, who was 7 at the time. She said, "I'm like Mommy," and they pulled both her and her mother through to the Summerlands (part of Faerie) and burned down the house so that her father would think they both died. Toby's mother didn't want to go back to the Summerlands, and she blamed Toby. She was happy playing fairy bride. (Note that if the child chooses to be human, they are killed, to prevent them from revealing the existence of Faerie. So not really much of a choice.)

Toby dreams about being a fish. She says sunlight hurt, even as a fish, and maybe that helped her remember that something was wrong, that she wasn't really supposed to be a fish. The spell gave way at dawn one morning, just over 14 years after it was cast. (7 is a magic number, and 14 is 7x2, after all, maybe that's significant? I don't know.) The pond she had been imprisoned in was just outside the Tea Gardens, which in this world is a knowe (a "hollow hill") maintained by a water-fae named Lily, who knows Toby. She stumbled naked in that direction, not really understanding what was happening, and Lily must've been there, Toby assumes, because someone cast a spell on her so that she looked human by the time the police got there.

It took her a while to understand how much time had gone by. The police think she was kidnapped. Toby obviously can't tell them about how she was a fish, so she falls back on "I don't remember" instead. And she's devastated. She had a fiance and a small daughter, who's now a teenager. They think she abandoned them, and naturally she can't tell them the truth either.

It was another fae noble, a woman named Evening, who picked up the pieces of Toby, found her a place to stay, tried to help her get her PI license back, etc. It's important to know this because...

Chapter 3
Later on, when Toby wakes up, there's a series of phone messages from Evening - they start with "Pick up, dammit," and go downhill from there. The last message is a spell, a binding. Toby must investigate Evening's death (even though Evening's clearly alive and talking as the spell is cast) or Toby will die, too.

Chapter 4
Toby goes to Evening's condo - a very expensive place. The police are there. Since Evening is a pureblood fae, the body the police have found won't actually be hers. Fae bodies don't decay, so to hide this, there are creatures called night-haunts, whose job is to come to the scene of fae deaths - they eat the actual body and put a simulacrum in its place, which looks exactly like the deceased, but behaves as a human body would. This is one of the workarounds that fae culture has developed to avoid being found out.

Chapter 5
Toby finds evidence that Evening was killed by iron bullets and a knife. She realizes that she needs to go to the local queen with the news; Evening was a countess, and the fae have customs for this. The Queen of the Mists rules Northern California, as she has since 1906, when her father died in the great earthquake. (There was apparently some doubt about this at the time, but Evening helped the new queen get established.) The queen has no name (which is why you will see me refer to her as NQ, for Nameless Queen). She hates changelings, and Toby more than most, because Toby was too successful, and because Sylvester forced the Queen to knight her - thus she is officially "Sir Daye."

The royal knowe is on the beach in San Francisco. The Queen knows she's coming - although not why - and she changes Toby's jeans into a ballgown before she ever gets inside. Toby says her ritual piece ("Evening has stopped her dancing") and the Queen is shocked and then angry.

(I was thinking about why NQ would be so angry - I don't think she and Evening were buddies - and it occurred to me that maybe she was somehow dependent on Evening for something other than just getting her on the throne in the first place. I don't know what that would mean exactly, but it does make sense.)

Anyway, she refuses Toby any help, and Toby runs away - because the Queen is dangerous when she's angry. She is part Banshee and she can actually kill with her voice.

Part 2 is here.

Entry tags:

October Daye again

During Holidailies in December, I talked a couple of times about the October Daye books by Seanan McGuire. I have gotten to be more-than-just-mildly obsessed with these books. I talked about it with at least one other person who is a fan here, and I poked around the edges of the October Daye fandom - there's a wiki, for one thing. But I had already started making fairly extensive notes that were a combination of plot summaries and commentary before I even looked at that. These are books about fairies, pretty heavily based in folklore, but mostly my notes are more about the lore within the books. I am just starting to dip a toe into the actual folk-history related to this.

I've decided that since I have all this stuff, I really should put some of it up online. I should also make it very clear that I'm no expert about folklore in general - I was an English major once upon a time, and I'm sure they had folklore-related classes which I could have taken, but I didn't dip into that area. (My degree is in Liberal Arts, which I'm aware is completely out of fashion these days. I took the most classes in English Lit and also in Government but lots of other things as well.) Anyway, if I don't lose momentum I'm going to start typing this stuff up and putting it up here. It's mostly my own take on all this although as I said, I have looked a little at what other fan-made sites are around. (On the whole what I read didn't make me feel like I was wildly off-track with other people's takes.)

So this is just a little intro for if you see this stuff popping up and wonder what I'm up to. There will definitely be spoilers.

Entry tags:

Questions about October #17

This is a list I made while I was reading Sleep No More. I kept noticing little things that didn't match up - and we knew the second book was coming, so I started making a list. I thought I had thrown this away but I found it again and I thought it was sort of interesting, now that I've read both books.

The "gap" list (questions after reading October #17) - But some spoilers here for 18, so beware!

The broken window - I assumed this would turn out to be Tybalt or somebody and of course it was
Why are there purebloods (Dame Altair etc.) out robbing people? To me that part is really odd.
A couple of different characters said somebody had made potions for them, and I kept assuming that must be Walther, but no, apparently it was Simon. So, what, Walther is back in Silences being a princess? - it's mentioned in passing that he's making potions for Silences. Unclear about whether they're cool with his current gender.
I loved the bit about how Titania mourned for the Merrow. (Not hardly.)
I guessed that the Queen of the Mists here was the same one it used to be, the crazy one - I usually call her NQ in my notes, for Nameless Queen. But the story they tell about her background is a little different in the alt-universe - she's now "born of a distaff line" rather than just being passed off as Gilad's daughter. I guess somebody learned from past mistakes!
How did August and Simon get to Golden Shores? - with Tybalt & Gin, apparently
It's supposed to be a "family secret" that Amy & co. can take all the fae out of a person (right? that's the part that's controversial?) so why does Etienne know? DrunkSylvester told him? - yep!
it's just really hard sometimes to sort out what out of all this is just false memories and what is true!
re Luna: one of her parents is Maeve's child (dad) and one is Titania's (mom) so I guess maybe that's why Luna is such a raging bitch without the kitsune skin to calm her down
We see Eira asleep, but "Eira" is also at Goldengreen, so that one must be Cass or Karen, I would think. Come to think of it, maybe that's why Simon now thinks Eira is "wonderful."
October sees Blind Michael as being flickery, which is what Garm says illusions look like - I wonder if Toby is developing a talent for that, now!

Entry tags:

Misc. television, no spoilers

We're watching the 2nd Dr Who special, and boy, it's different in tone from the first one, isn't it? Wonder what the 3rd one is going to be like. (Also: "mavity" - ha.) (I'll refrain from saying more right now.)

Anybody else have problems with AMC+ lately? Apparently it's a known issue, but my husband the Walking Dead fan really cares. It stops at the loading screen and just doesn't go anywhere. There's steps you're supposed to follow but so far it hasn't worked. We'll get it sorted out eventually, I'm sure. Every age has its frustrations, I guess.

(Once in a while I stun some much-younger person by telling them about how I remember when we got five channels instead of just three, just for fun. Around... 1970, I think?)

I tend to just start writing and then decide what I'm talking about, so apparently tonight I'm talking about TV. We watch most of our TV on Fubo, because that's the one that has most of the sports stuff, but we still have Disney+ and the Max/Hulu bundle and (some of the time) AMC+. No Netflix, we seem to be able to live without that one for the most part. We were going to cancel Max but then they did that bundle thing that was pretty cheap so we kept it, and I've been watching OLD Dr Who episodes (meaning Nine/Ten/Eleven, not the ones even older than that) ever since. I guess if I keep going I'll get back to Twelve and Thirteen eventually. I'm just trying to hit the highlights at the moment.

Typically we both watch a ton of news, but that's so depressing right now that I can't sit and let it run all day like I'm prone to sometimes. I just dip in & out of it occasionally. Which is probably better for me anyway!

Oh, here's another weird thing: every time we exit Fubo, it takes us to freaking UFC fighting. I don't know why. Surely that's not really the default.

I think I'll go watch the rest of the Longhorn game from yesterday. (I got spoiled by e-mail before I ever even turned the TV on - thank you, University Co-op.)

Entry tags:

Marvel stuff

I'm not really managing the daily thing here, but at least I'm posting, right?

(possible spoilers below, although I'm trying to be relatively careful)

Let's see, well, since I stay up really really late, I got to watch Hawkeye twice before I went to bed. I really liked the conversation between Kate & Yelena, that was funny. (That's not really a spoiler, as I see it, since if you're watching you already know Yelena's there from last week. And it was pretty much common knowledge that she was going to appear at some point, if you've been paying attention to Marvel fandom generally.)

I did kind of emit a little squeak, at least, about that picture at the end.

I've liked all the Marvel series this year, but I like Hawkeye enough that I'm thinking about whether I like it better than WandaVision. Maybe not, I liked WandaVision a lot, but I like Hawkeye a lot, too. Loki still reigns supreme, though. - And I guess Falcon & the Winter Soldier is at the bottom, although I liked it quite a bit, too. (I actually watched most of it a few days ago, as a matter of fact. I can't remember exactly what prompted me to do that.) What If...? kind of seems like a different class of thing because it's episodic (well, mostly) and animated. I can't think where I'd put it with the live-action ones, But I liked it a lot too.

Spider-man has never been my favorite Marvel thing, but we still have tickets to see No Way Home this weekend. (I don't dislike Spider-man, I just don't identify with him that much. Except Miles Morales, he's the exception there. In fact I think I've watched Into the Spider-verse like three times lately.) Even if I hated Spider-man, I'd probably still go see NWH because it's Marvel, and we know there's all kind of crossovers. You miss too much if you miss anything Avengers-related.

Entry tags:

The Believer: The Mandalorian Chapter 15 (spoilers!)

I repeat, SPOILERS, not for the new episode but for last week.

Well, it's almost midnight on Thursday and that means The Mandalorian finale is on in a couple of hours, and since I haven't talked about this past week's episode yet, I might as well do that a little. It was really good. It might have been the best episode yet, in that it really hung together as a narrative and was like a little bitty action movie, really, part Fury Road and part Inglourious Basterds (so I'm told, I haven't ever actually seen the latter - I really need to do that). It pretty much redeemed the character of Mayfeld, which I don't think anybody who saw the episode The Prisoner from last year expected at all, and we actually got to see Pedro's face for more than a hot second, and there was, amazingly, no Baby Yoda whatsoever, other than that he got mentioned a few times, and I didn't even mind that, to my surprise.

The episode was called The Believer, but it was pretty vague about who it was talking about. My theory is that that was deliberate. The character who was most a believer was the Imperial captain, but we don't really care about him, it's more about the other two. Mando is working himself up to believing in family again, maybe, and Mayfeld, the ex-Imperial who had clearly stopped believing in the Empire quite a while back, is maybe getting some sort of belief system to replace that one. Something like that.

The other characters were relegated to background status here. We got to see the inside of Slave One, which was interesting, and Boba's repaired armor, and Fennec and Cara seemed to bond a little - apparently mostly because they both like to shoot things. So it was both lots of fun and really well-done, and I'm not sure it's really my favorite episode ever (I haven't put much thought into that question, I'll have to come back to that) but it's certainly one of the best, overall.

This one was short - thirty-odd minutes, I think? The new one is reportedly something like fifty-seven minutes - "a movie of the week!" Rob said when I told him that. I'm trying to keep my expectations in check for the finale. Jedi? Evil Baby Yoda? The guesses are all over the place. I have no idea, which is kind of cool. (I really don't want Evil Grogu, but I doubt Favreau and Filoni are going to listen to me. And it's too late now, in any case.)

Entry tags:

Book report

(Possible spoilers here, although I tried to be relatively discreet!)

I was poking around in old entries last night, and I found where I said in 2018 that I had read the first Expanse book, and I enjoyed it, and also that I had no idea where the series was going. Now I can't even remember the name of the first book. I'm going to have to go look it up. (later - it's Leviathan Wakes. I get those names mixed up.) Anyway, I have now read all of those books there currently are to read, which I believe is eight out of projected total of nine. And I love all of them. I think if I had to pick a favorite I would pick the "middle" one - book 5, which is called Nemesis Games. It's got incredibly harrowing stuff going on in it, but I love the way the characters all fan out at the beginning and later come back together. I looked on Goodreads and apparently the ninth and last book is set to come out next October. It's called Leviathan Falls, they say. (Maybe that will help me remember the whole "leviathan" thing!)

Another series I've been reading since 2018 or so is Seanan McGuire's October Daye books - from hard sci-fi above we go now to fairies. I love both, honestly. I said in 2018 that I had already read nine of them. She puts out one a year and is now up to 14, and I have read them all multiple times. She has a contract for another three, I read. And I'll keep reading them as long as she cares to keep writing them! I got to the big reveal in the last book and had to go way way back (book 4 or 5, I think?) to find where that plotline quietly started. So I've been reading and re-reading a lot.

I've read other stuff, too, and I have a good list because as I mentioned last night, I now have a reading journal. Maybe I'll come back to this topic later, but this is enough for tonight!

Entry tags:

Endgame, and other updates

I meant to post about Endgame sooner than this, but I've been sick. When I went to see the MDA doc the other day, I had a slight temperature (99-ish) - they seemed slightly alarmed, but I said that I had had a sore throat for a couple of days and they seemed mollified - and then that was followed by coughing and some sneezing, so I imagine it was a virus of some sort. (Oncologists seem a bit jumpy, in my experience so far, but I guess having immunocompromised patients will lead to that.) I was trying to work through it, but finally I called in sick on Friday. I try not to call in sick more than I can help, because somebody has to be there to replace me if I don't come in. Luckily there was somebody willing to cover for me. And I'm still coughing a bit, but I'm finally feeling better now.

Since we're already on the health issues, I will tell you about the other medical updates - I still haven't started the radiation treatments, because they were waiting on the test to come back to see whether they thought I would benefit from chemo. The RadOnc doctor was very firm on having chemo first if I needed it. But the test finally came back and my oncotype was low, my doctor said, which I guess means not as invasive? (i didn't think to question it at the time). Anyway, no chemo, yay! And I have another RadOnc appointment next week and I assume we'll finally get the radiation treatments under way shortly after that.

SPOILERS BELOW...

I liked Endgame a lot. We have actually been twice - on the first day and then again yesterday.

( big spoilers under this cut! )

I'm ready to go a third time. I imagine it will be a couple of weeks before I can talk Rob into it again, though - he's not as big a fan of multiple rewatches as I am.

Movies seen in 2019:

1. Bumblebee

2. Into the Spider-verse (second time at this one)

3. Lego Movie 2

4. Captain Marvel (twice)

5. Shazam!

6. Avengers: Endgame (twice)