Game of Thrones 1.09 Baelor

Pride! Pride was tiring as hell, thank you Philadelphia weather! And also the main reason I haven't already done this episode review, as Pride festivities and writing a proper Game of Thrones recap is more than I can take on one Sunday. Good God. But more on that later, anyway, inside my heart is breaking, my makeup may be flaking but my completionist knowledge that if I don't review this one now the missing piece will bug me forever still stays on.

Uh, spoilers, obviously.

( I actually forgot why this episode was called Baelor until the end. )

Day Watch, Twilight Watch; Camelot

So these reviews are doubling up because for different reasons I don't really feel like I can write a comprehensive review of either, but I want to jot down I finished them all within the past few days. I think I'll keep it brief, but I'll put the Camelot (the Starz series) stuff behind a spoiler cut because I have more spoilery things to say about that. However, I doubt much of it will be that surprising to people familiar with the legends; some of it is straight from, other stuff is easy to guess.

Day Watch and Twilight Watch, by Sergei Lukyanenko: This is sort of a weird series to try and review, since I haven't read Night Watch (this one) (as opposed to the Pratchett one) (or the one by Sarah Waters) in ages and I've finally finished the next two at relia's behest. To an extent reading a book translated from another language, you don't know if you're reviewing the writer or the translator -- in this case I suspect the translator, since the series is clunky in a didn't-try-too-hard-to-translate-this sense, but I wouldn't know. I also don't know just about anything about Moscow, so I have no idea how the translation fared on the Moscow front. As a result, my only substantial review-thoughts are about the fantasy story and fantasy worldbuilding itself, and again, I've got no clue how much authorial intent and emphasis might've gotten lost in translation here.

Aside from that: they're urban fantasy books about a war between initiated agents of Light and agents of Dark, basically, and the Xanatos gambits and Xanatos roulettes undertaken in the service of this. I really dig a lot of the worldbuilding (the Dark and the Inquisition appealed to me especially) and the complicated/twist-filled plots that are set up; I was enh on the contrived Xanatos masterminds do everything devices often needful to pull off said complicated plots, because it's gotten to the point where the everyman POV characters are resigned to how little difference they can make in the hands of chessmasters, and that's no fun; I disliked how preachily in-the-right the Light protagonists always seemed to be even when the Dark was humanized somewhat, it had a a very "and goodness knows the wicked's lives are lonely!!" feel to it. But the world is cool, if you're into urban fantasy in a sort of fantasy-otherworld-war-on-civilian-turf setting, and the plot arcs are interesting and all wrap together, especially in Twilight Watch.

Camelot: Hmm. I'm not reviewing-reviewing this either (episode by episode, anyway) because I haven't actually seen all the episodes, but I've seen almost all. Overall I'd say it's better than I'd feared, not as good as I'd hoped, but at least it's, uh, better than Merlin. It should also be called Morgan, or maybe Morgan Pendragon, or The Mighty and Powerful Morgan, because she is the entire reason to watch the show. Hot DAMN is she the entire reason to watch the show.

( Tis a silly place )