Top fives meme: answers again
Jun. 22nd, 2014 04:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lokifanI'm finished with these! It was fun. And long-winded.
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kikimay asked for my top five Angel romances. Not a huge amount here, I’ll admit.
5. Doyle/Cordy. It was a fun way to transition Cordy from the early!BtVS way of looking at demons to the AtS way, and there was a lot of charm to it - Doyle rescuing Cordy and then acting it out for himself is adorable. Not a massive ship of mine but I find a lot to like about it.
4. Angel/Cordy. Sometimes Angel is terrible to Cordy - S4 in that regard, man, I can’t even - but I like how they both grow up and kind of grow towards each other over the course of the series. Also You’re Welcome is just. Man. *weeps*
3. Darla/Dru. I like how things go with them - Dru entering as this terrifying spectre to turn her and then their excellent Lesbians of Evil turn. I love every combination of the Fanged Four but I think them especially.
2. Wesley/Lilah. Hot and fun, and I love how Wesley blatantly goes for it initially because it’s part of his Dark Night of the Soul a la Angel and Darla and how it becomes real. But he can’t believe it, won’t let himself, and it’s so tragic. And their final scenes together are magic.
1. Angel/Darla. I love this to bits. There’s the great S2 story, and the intensely memorable scenes that play on the most evocative part of the vampire mythos, the incestuous elements and the inability to create life and the idea that vampires can’t go out in the day because God has turned his face from them. Her death in that alley. But I especially love how Darla is a spectre hanging over Angel and the programme throughout, and how it becomes clear that she always was, even back in Sunnydale.
sabathea asked for my top five Diana Wynne Jones books. SO HARD TO CHOOSE. Honourable mentions to Conrad’s Fate, Dogsbody, Archer’s Goon, A Tale of Time City, Hexwood, Charmed Life, Dark Lord of Derkholm... really all the honourable mentions.
5. Eight Days of Luke. Hello to my most favourite iteration of Loki ever, as Luke. This English boy David tries to do a curse, frustrated by his treatment by his family who aren’t evil but expect him to be grateful all the time and are deeply, deep unpleasant. And this curse brings a boy his age with red hair to thanks David for releasing him from prison. They hang out and play and Luke is terribly charming and dishonest to David’s odious great-aunt and shows some magical talents - first just entertaining David with light and colour, but then with real fire. And Mr Wedding shows up and says Luke should be in prison, but if David can keep him out for eight days, Luke will go free for good.
I don’t want to reiterate the plot/premise/blurb of these books for my answer, but it’s hard to explain how much I love this book otherwise. The structure is used to absolutely brilliant effect - Thor shows up on Thursday, followed by Mr and Mrs Fry the next day :D I first read this when I was twelve or so, I think, and I totally didn’t get it until the end, but it stands up fine without it and I was SO DELIGHTED when I realised. (I was already a fan of Norse mythology in general and Loki in specific by then.) I really like that it shows Luke’s lack of morals, and how he and Odin will ultimately be on opposite sides, but Luke stays utterly sympathetic. It’s just great. And honestly David connects to Luke because they both have non-Evil families who browbeat them and scapegoat them and probably that’s part of why I connect to them both, but that element was subconscious.
4. The Merlin Conspiracy. Dual POVs, dual stories that connect at the end! A lot of really fascinating stuff around Britain and its heritage and magic I want to write a thesis on some day! Fantastic family dynamics because DWJ was just absolutely the master of them and fantastic extended comedy sequences and a really good ending. (Endings were a bit of a weakness of DWJ’s, IMO, but all these top fives have great ones.) And it’s full of the ineffable Thing that’s so great about DWJ’s novels, her worldview and her morals and her way of writing people and the amazing originality of her magics.
3. Year of the Griffin. Speaking of fantastic family dynamics, and comedy, and perfect unique little moments of whimsy! This is also a sequel the way DWJ did them - a few of the side characters from Dark Lord of Derkholm are main characters, and it’s set in the same world but a decade later and it’s a very different sort of story. It’s six friends in their first year of university, and it’s so full of charm and recognisable moments, and it’s incredibly funny. Total comfort reading.
2. Witch Week. Playground politics are perfectly rendered in this novel. It’s a week, and one classroom, and it’s totally engrossing and real. I have special love for Nan Pilgrim, who is meek and bullied and wonderfully imaginative and inventive, and honestly one of the very few book characters I actually ‘identify with’ as opposed to simply liking?
1. The Lives of Christopher Chant. SO MUCH love for this book. Christopher is everything, and Uncle Ralph is the best iteration of DWJ’s evil uncles for my money - omg that twist - and Tacroy! It’s got a really great ending and I love that Christopher’s parents aren’t good at being parents and kind of fuck him up, but in the end a happy ending (in which they live far away from each other) is possible. Everything about Christopher and Millie’s relationship is magic, most especially when Christopher gives Millie books and they become a window into this whole other world and Millie climbs out of her own for the chance to be a heroine of an English school story. Throgmorten is possibly my favourite moggy in all of literature. There are some truly chilling moments (the theft of the Castle staff’s magic, omg) and some utterly charming bits of comedy, but my favourite thing about this is how utterly perfect it is as a prequel. Because I read and loved Charmed Life (and reread and reread) long before I was a Fantasy Fan, and before I’d read any of her other work. Charmed Life is set about twenty-five years later and features an adult Christopher. Reading The Lives of Christopher Chant when you know Charmed Life as well as I do is amazing: most especially when you remember Cat telling Chrestomanci that since he scrumped apples as a boy, he was a thief and criminal too. And Chrestomanci quietly furious and Cat not knowing why.
Thing of wonder.
prunesquallormd decided to make everything worse by asking for my top five Diana Wynne Jones characters. Too many honourable mentions for honourable mentions! but especially Luke’n’David, Jonathan, Sophie, Elda, Kit, Derk and Mara, Millie Chant, Nick, Titus, Hayley, Querida, Benevenuto, Throgmorten, Polly, Tarquin, and Shine.
I can’t rank my bbs, I’ll just list them. Also spoilers for The Lives of Christopher Chant all over the place.
Nan Pilgrim. Nan is fat and unathletic and laughed at by the more popular girls of her class. So far, so average, though also sympathetic. She is meek and tries to stay out of everyone’s way, which is hard at a boarding school. And then she finds out she’s a witch, a powerful one. This is a world in which magic is utterly illegal and witches are burnt; it happened to her parents. But the realisation that she has magic, however little she does with the magic itself, helps her find this inner confidence. It’s not dramatic or montage-y but that just makes it better. She gets to fly, and she is so kind to her broomstick. Her quiet talent for imagination and wordplay comes out more and more, and she doesn’t mind so much when her real name (the name of the most famous witch of all time) comes out. She makes friends with an apparently silly, giggling girl who shows her bravery and resourcefulness. There is a really chilling bullying scene at one point and Nan snarks back and then she saves the world through her ability to explain the truth at speed, through her imagination and talent for making pictures with words, through her compassion and bravery. NAN <33333
Christopher Chant. Christopher Chant is a hugely entertaining adult, in his inability to remember names, his wide array of beautiful dressing gowns, his vast magical power and his way of putting on a vague expression while paying knife-sharp attention. He’s a perfect magical authority figure for children’s novels, especially given his habit of arriving and fixing things at the climax of a book but not before - he’s simultaneously very upper-class and Establishment, and full of mischief and humour and very much on the child-protagonists’ side. It’s as a kid that I love him most though. I love that he was a very attractive, charming child, and then he gets older and finds that people aren’t charmed by him any more. I love his social-climber mother and gloomy father who he barely sees, Edwardian-child-fashion, and his charming uncle who gives him sweets and who Christopher adores. Christopher blows the roof off the house of his magic tutor. Christopher finds he has magic and makes trees melt like candles. Silver removes his magic, makes him ill, and his mother’s maiden name was Argent. I just really love that, because it works as a metaphor really nicely for the well-meaning but unstoppably damaging ways of his mother, and his awful uncle. Then we get to see him as a teenager who MUST have his shirts ironed one particular way and runs away with his girlfriend without really asking what she thinks about that and is boggled by an experience of life as a servant. Christopher is honestly just unstoppably charming. The bit where he meets a young girl, the avatar of a goddess, trapped in a temple and going to die very young because she has powerful magic the adults around her want (and Christopher doesn’t see yet that he’s in precisely the same situation) and ends up giving her the girls’ school stories he hates is just. <333 There is also a deeply sympathetic though horrifying scene, which put me off salmon for about three years as a kid, that kind of thrums with hurt/comfort vibes and just makes him my favourite of all the things.
Awful. OMG I love her. She’s the appalling little sister of Howard, the protagonist of Archer’s Goon, and she is known as Awful by everyone from the moment she, as a baby, first opens her mouth to scream :D She is the reason, incidentally, I’ve nicknamed one of my cousins Awful here on LJ/DW. The bit in her novel where she’s going up some time-travelly stairs, so we see her grow up years with each step, is just fascinating. Also there is more than one moment where she uses her powers for good, against polite and evil ladies bound by the social contract, and it’s so great.
Janet Chant. Janet Chant is dragged from our world into Chrestomanci’s, when her double in another world decides to move. Janet is super-talkative and kind and the way she deals with this new world and pretending she’s her double is intensely charming and funny and admirable. She really does her best to protect Cat, this boy she’s never met who could have been her brother, and she’s clever and imaginative and compassionate and fantastic in a crisis. She’s also possessed of a lot of generosity of spirit: having been dragged from her world and everyone she loves by Gwendolen Chant, Janet says, “I admire your sister, Cat. She thinks big. You have to admire her!”
Tacroy. TACROY. He’s the adult who joins young Christopher Chant on his dream journeys into other worlds; he’s an adult mentor, but he’s also clearly young and fun and helps Christopher with his cricket. He works for Christopher’s uncle and he tries to hint to Christopher - don’t trust this man - but he never quite says it and Christopher hears that some evil interworld smugglers who butcher and sell mermaids have been caught and he runs downstairs and it’s Tacroy. And Tacroy was forced to, he’s another powerful magician without agency. He gets handed a kitten when he’s lying about being unwell, and he puts the kitten under his chin and purrs at her. He has curly hair and coffee-coloured skin and saves a bunch of people who took him prisoner and. Man. It occurs to me now that if DWJ was a proper big fandom, Tacroy would get ALL the hurt/comfort fic. And that is undoubtedly part of why I imprinted on him this hard, along with the smile. But SO MUCH CHARM, and he gives Christopher his real name, and he doesn’t give Christopher up while his betrayed friends question him. Love.
twillery suggested my top five Harry Potter spells, with honourable mentions for Engorgio (snicker) and the beauty of Expecto Patronum:
5. Accio. MOST USEFUL SPELL IN THE WORLD, if I could be able to do one spell from HP it’d be that one, and also I really like the lead-up to the First Task in GoF and how it’s all done.
4. Hermione’s specialty flames-in-a-jar. I just really like that it’s her specialty, it’s so practical and so Gryffindor at once, and that she uses the fire in a few different situations. Also it reminds me of one of my favourite Hermione moments, ARE YOU A WITCH OR NOT? I really loved that she was so clever and competent but fell to pieces in that crisis.
3. Densaugeo. Draco hexing Hermione with a spell that made her already-big front teeth grow showed a certain sense of humour I enjoy :D /bad person
2. The silent (?) one that makes ropes shoot out of the caster’s wand and wrap themselves round someone. I mean. Thank you for making easy-bondage spells canon, JKR. It’s the best thing since the Come and Go Room.
1. Expelliarmus. There is a lot around Harry as aggressor and non-aggressor and his general behaviour in the war and re: Unforgivables that I find really troubling. He commits war crimes, and pretty much gets away with it -- the fact that McGonagall, a trusted voice, calls his unnecessary use of Imperius against an enemy “noble” really, really bothers me. But ultimately the hero’s weapon of choice is the spell to disarm. Gotta love that.
kikimay asked for my top five Angel romances. Not a huge amount here, I’ll admit.5. Doyle/Cordy. It was a fun way to transition Cordy from the early!BtVS way of looking at demons to the AtS way, and there was a lot of charm to it - Doyle rescuing Cordy and then acting it out for himself is adorable. Not a massive ship of mine but I find a lot to like about it.
4. Angel/Cordy. Sometimes Angel is terrible to Cordy - S4 in that regard, man, I can’t even - but I like how they both grow up and kind of grow towards each other over the course of the series. Also You’re Welcome is just. Man. *weeps*
3. Darla/Dru. I like how things go with them - Dru entering as this terrifying spectre to turn her and then their excellent Lesbians of Evil turn. I love every combination of the Fanged Four but I think them especially.
2. Wesley/Lilah. Hot and fun, and I love how Wesley blatantly goes for it initially because it’s part of his Dark Night of the Soul a la Angel and Darla and how it becomes real. But he can’t believe it, won’t let himself, and it’s so tragic. And their final scenes together are magic.
1. Angel/Darla. I love this to bits. There’s the great S2 story, and the intensely memorable scenes that play on the most evocative part of the vampire mythos, the incestuous elements and the inability to create life and the idea that vampires can’t go out in the day because God has turned his face from them. Her death in that alley. But I especially love how Darla is a spectre hanging over Angel and the programme throughout, and how it becomes clear that she always was, even back in Sunnydale.
sabathea asked for my top five Diana Wynne Jones books. SO HARD TO CHOOSE. Honourable mentions to Conrad’s Fate, Dogsbody, Archer’s Goon, A Tale of Time City, Hexwood, Charmed Life, Dark Lord of Derkholm... really all the honourable mentions.5. Eight Days of Luke. Hello to my most favourite iteration of Loki ever, as Luke. This English boy David tries to do a curse, frustrated by his treatment by his family who aren’t evil but expect him to be grateful all the time and are deeply, deep unpleasant. And this curse brings a boy his age with red hair to thanks David for releasing him from prison. They hang out and play and Luke is terribly charming and dishonest to David’s odious great-aunt and shows some magical talents - first just entertaining David with light and colour, but then with real fire. And Mr Wedding shows up and says Luke should be in prison, but if David can keep him out for eight days, Luke will go free for good.
I don’t want to reiterate the plot/premise/blurb of these books for my answer, but it’s hard to explain how much I love this book otherwise. The structure is used to absolutely brilliant effect - Thor shows up on Thursday, followed by Mr and Mrs Fry the next day :D I first read this when I was twelve or so, I think, and I totally didn’t get it until the end, but it stands up fine without it and I was SO DELIGHTED when I realised. (I was already a fan of Norse mythology in general and Loki in specific by then.) I really like that it shows Luke’s lack of morals, and how he and Odin will ultimately be on opposite sides, but Luke stays utterly sympathetic. It’s just great. And honestly David connects to Luke because they both have non-Evil families who browbeat them and scapegoat them and probably that’s part of why I connect to them both, but that element was subconscious.
4. The Merlin Conspiracy. Dual POVs, dual stories that connect at the end! A lot of really fascinating stuff around Britain and its heritage and magic I want to write a thesis on some day! Fantastic family dynamics because DWJ was just absolutely the master of them and fantastic extended comedy sequences and a really good ending. (Endings were a bit of a weakness of DWJ’s, IMO, but all these top fives have great ones.) And it’s full of the ineffable Thing that’s so great about DWJ’s novels, her worldview and her morals and her way of writing people and the amazing originality of her magics.
3. Year of the Griffin. Speaking of fantastic family dynamics, and comedy, and perfect unique little moments of whimsy! This is also a sequel the way DWJ did them - a few of the side characters from Dark Lord of Derkholm are main characters, and it’s set in the same world but a decade later and it’s a very different sort of story. It’s six friends in their first year of university, and it’s so full of charm and recognisable moments, and it’s incredibly funny. Total comfort reading.
2. Witch Week. Playground politics are perfectly rendered in this novel. It’s a week, and one classroom, and it’s totally engrossing and real. I have special love for Nan Pilgrim, who is meek and bullied and wonderfully imaginative and inventive, and honestly one of the very few book characters I actually ‘identify with’ as opposed to simply liking?
1. The Lives of Christopher Chant. SO MUCH love for this book. Christopher is everything, and Uncle Ralph is the best iteration of DWJ’s evil uncles for my money - omg that twist - and Tacroy! It’s got a really great ending and I love that Christopher’s parents aren’t good at being parents and kind of fuck him up, but in the end a happy ending (in which they live far away from each other) is possible. Everything about Christopher and Millie’s relationship is magic, most especially when Christopher gives Millie books and they become a window into this whole other world and Millie climbs out of her own for the chance to be a heroine of an English school story. Throgmorten is possibly my favourite moggy in all of literature. There are some truly chilling moments (the theft of the Castle staff’s magic, omg) and some utterly charming bits of comedy, but my favourite thing about this is how utterly perfect it is as a prequel. Because I read and loved Charmed Life (and reread and reread) long before I was a Fantasy Fan, and before I’d read any of her other work. Charmed Life is set about twenty-five years later and features an adult Christopher. Reading The Lives of Christopher Chant when you know Charmed Life as well as I do is amazing: most especially when you remember Cat telling Chrestomanci that since he scrumped apples as a boy, he was a thief and criminal too. And Chrestomanci quietly furious and Cat not knowing why.
Thing of wonder.
prunesquallormd decided to make everything worse by asking for my top five Diana Wynne Jones characters. Too many honourable mentions for honourable mentions! but especially Luke’n’David, Jonathan, Sophie, Elda, Kit, Derk and Mara, Millie Chant, Nick, Titus, Hayley, Querida, Benevenuto, Throgmorten, Polly, Tarquin, and Shine.I can’t rank my bbs, I’ll just list them. Also spoilers for The Lives of Christopher Chant all over the place.
Nan Pilgrim. Nan is fat and unathletic and laughed at by the more popular girls of her class. So far, so average, though also sympathetic. She is meek and tries to stay out of everyone’s way, which is hard at a boarding school. And then she finds out she’s a witch, a powerful one. This is a world in which magic is utterly illegal and witches are burnt; it happened to her parents. But the realisation that she has magic, however little she does with the magic itself, helps her find this inner confidence. It’s not dramatic or montage-y but that just makes it better. She gets to fly, and she is so kind to her broomstick. Her quiet talent for imagination and wordplay comes out more and more, and she doesn’t mind so much when her real name (the name of the most famous witch of all time) comes out. She makes friends with an apparently silly, giggling girl who shows her bravery and resourcefulness. There is a really chilling bullying scene at one point and Nan snarks back and then she saves the world through her ability to explain the truth at speed, through her imagination and talent for making pictures with words, through her compassion and bravery. NAN <33333
Christopher Chant. Christopher Chant is a hugely entertaining adult, in his inability to remember names, his wide array of beautiful dressing gowns, his vast magical power and his way of putting on a vague expression while paying knife-sharp attention. He’s a perfect magical authority figure for children’s novels, especially given his habit of arriving and fixing things at the climax of a book but not before - he’s simultaneously very upper-class and Establishment, and full of mischief and humour and very much on the child-protagonists’ side. It’s as a kid that I love him most though. I love that he was a very attractive, charming child, and then he gets older and finds that people aren’t charmed by him any more. I love his social-climber mother and gloomy father who he barely sees, Edwardian-child-fashion, and his charming uncle who gives him sweets and who Christopher adores. Christopher blows the roof off the house of his magic tutor. Christopher finds he has magic and makes trees melt like candles. Silver removes his magic, makes him ill, and his mother’s maiden name was Argent. I just really love that, because it works as a metaphor really nicely for the well-meaning but unstoppably damaging ways of his mother, and his awful uncle. Then we get to see him as a teenager who MUST have his shirts ironed one particular way and runs away with his girlfriend without really asking what she thinks about that and is boggled by an experience of life as a servant. Christopher is honestly just unstoppably charming. The bit where he meets a young girl, the avatar of a goddess, trapped in a temple and going to die very young because she has powerful magic the adults around her want (and Christopher doesn’t see yet that he’s in precisely the same situation) and ends up giving her the girls’ school stories he hates is just. <333 There is also a deeply sympathetic though horrifying scene, which put me off salmon for about three years as a kid, that kind of thrums with hurt/comfort vibes and just makes him my favourite of all the things.
Awful. OMG I love her. She’s the appalling little sister of Howard, the protagonist of Archer’s Goon, and she is known as Awful by everyone from the moment she, as a baby, first opens her mouth to scream :D She is the reason, incidentally, I’ve nicknamed one of my cousins Awful here on LJ/DW. The bit in her novel where she’s going up some time-travelly stairs, so we see her grow up years with each step, is just fascinating. Also there is more than one moment where she uses her powers for good, against polite and evil ladies bound by the social contract, and it’s so great.
Janet Chant. Janet Chant is dragged from our world into Chrestomanci’s, when her double in another world decides to move. Janet is super-talkative and kind and the way she deals with this new world and pretending she’s her double is intensely charming and funny and admirable. She really does her best to protect Cat, this boy she’s never met who could have been her brother, and she’s clever and imaginative and compassionate and fantastic in a crisis. She’s also possessed of a lot of generosity of spirit: having been dragged from her world and everyone she loves by Gwendolen Chant, Janet says, “I admire your sister, Cat. She thinks big. You have to admire her!”
Tacroy. TACROY. He’s the adult who joins young Christopher Chant on his dream journeys into other worlds; he’s an adult mentor, but he’s also clearly young and fun and helps Christopher with his cricket. He works for Christopher’s uncle and he tries to hint to Christopher - don’t trust this man - but he never quite says it and Christopher hears that some evil interworld smugglers who butcher and sell mermaids have been caught and he runs downstairs and it’s Tacroy. And Tacroy was forced to, he’s another powerful magician without agency. He gets handed a kitten when he’s lying about being unwell, and he puts the kitten under his chin and purrs at her. He has curly hair and coffee-coloured skin and saves a bunch of people who took him prisoner and. Man. It occurs to me now that if DWJ was a proper big fandom, Tacroy would get ALL the hurt/comfort fic. And that is undoubtedly part of why I imprinted on him this hard, along with the smile. But SO MUCH CHARM, and he gives Christopher his real name, and he doesn’t give Christopher up while his betrayed friends question him. Love.
twillery suggested my top five Harry Potter spells, with honourable mentions for Engorgio (snicker) and the beauty of Expecto Patronum:5. Accio. MOST USEFUL SPELL IN THE WORLD, if I could be able to do one spell from HP it’d be that one, and also I really like the lead-up to the First Task in GoF and how it’s all done.
4. Hermione’s specialty flames-in-a-jar. I just really like that it’s her specialty, it’s so practical and so Gryffindor at once, and that she uses the fire in a few different situations. Also it reminds me of one of my favourite Hermione moments, ARE YOU A WITCH OR NOT? I really loved that she was so clever and competent but fell to pieces in that crisis.
3. Densaugeo. Draco hexing Hermione with a spell that made her already-big front teeth grow showed a certain sense of humour I enjoy :D /bad person
2. The silent (?) one that makes ropes shoot out of the caster’s wand and wrap themselves round someone. I mean. Thank you for making easy-bondage spells canon, JKR. It’s the best thing since the Come and Go Room.
1. Expelliarmus. There is a lot around Harry as aggressor and non-aggressor and his general behaviour in the war and re: Unforgivables that I find really troubling. He commits war crimes, and pretty much gets away with it -- the fact that McGonagall, a trusted voice, calls his unnecessary use of Imperius against an enemy “noble” really, really bothers me. But ultimately the hero’s weapon of choice is the spell to disarm. Gotta love that.
