The game of expectations

I saw two sad youtube videos this morning. Each was part of a series I follow closely, yet one struck me as much sadder than the other.
Here they are: "The Lizzie Bennett Diaries" episode 42 and Doctor Who's "Pond Life" part 5. The second one had a much bigger emotional impact than the first. Go watch them both, and then I'll tell you why.

Meanwhile, here's a picture that might help explain it.

Back? Good. Here's my thought: For one thing, I'm much more invested in the plight of Amy Pond, Doctor's Companion, than I am in the travails of Lizzie Bennett, whiny closed-minded grad student. Why do I follow her, then? Because I want to see what they do with the narrative. Doctor Who, on the other hand, is narrated by much more likeable characters, and practically an adopted religion for me. Second: Amy's troubles are bigger--her husband just walked out for no specified reason. Lizzie's best friend is moving away to take the job Lizzie herself just turned down. I'd tell you the fable of the dog in the manger, but I think you already know it.

The thing that got me thinking about this whole deal, though, was this. Notice I said "narrative" just now. The Lizzie Bennett Diaries are a direct update of Pride and Prejudice; it follows the plot exactly, with a couple of topical changes (the racelifts, the swimmers, job offers vs marriage) that make sense given that it's an update. But it's still a known narrative: I can go to Wikipedia and look up what's just happened and what will happen next.
This Doctor Who story is an entirely new thing. All I knew going in was that Arthur Darvill (who plays Rory, for those of you not yet in the know) said there'd be a cliffhanger leading into tomorrow's season premiere. He didn't say it would involve Steven Moffat punching us all in the gut, as is his executive wont. There's no prestructured narrative, from the perspective of the audience: even with all the online spoilers, everything new is totally new and surprising.

And this didn't make me feel any less like I want a hug. Oh well, I guess I'll go celebrate Bad Wolf Day early.

A little back-to-school pop culture analysis

I have returned to Pittsburgh; the big thing right now, aside from the obvious eighteen credits, is preparing all the clubs I'm on the board of for the school year. Making sure Teahouse has enough spoons (and schmoozing freshmen--when did I learn to schmooze? Must have been in China), getting on the same page with my ex about the Doctor Who Club meeting for the season premiere, three hours of tabling at the Activities Fair, all the good stuff. And I've been relaxing by picking things apart.

First, Nathan Fillion. He really is ruggedly handsome...and I've finally forgiven him, three days after seeing it, for being Captain Hammer in Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. The character of Captain Hammer takes the little bit of immature assholery that make Malcolm Reynolds and Richard Castle amusing, and makes it a defining character trait. But that's not the worst part. The worst part is that you go into Dr. Horrible expecting a lighthearted parody of superhero movies, with heroes that are heroes and villains that are villains. But about the middle of Act II, what's been staring you in the face for fifteen minutes finally slaps you: Billy's an ordinary nerd, and Captain Hammer is deliberately messing with him. And from there, the audience's expectations break down right along with Billy's sanity. And just when you think Dr. Horrible has the upper hand, the bottom drops out.

I'm sure I said at some point on this blog (and if I haven't, I'm saying it now) that I can't play tropes straight anymore. Everything I touch becomes either invoked, subverted, or deconstructed. Joss Whedon writes the same way. And as creepy as Firefly was at times, and as much as I hated Nathan Fillion for what he was doing to poor geeky Neil Patrick Harris...it's beautiful. I can't get it out of my head, not because of the scary, but because of how it transcends scary. Joss Whedon is like Neil Gaiman in that regard: he scares you, but he makes you happy about it.

Next week is the series premiere of Doctor Who. More on that then; I may also blog about "Pond Life," the series of shorts that starts on Monday about Amy and Rory trying to be normal, up until they get dragged back into the Doctor's adventures.

And the other new thing from the Moff this week: three words have been released regarding the next season of Sherlock. The words are "Rat, Wedding, Bow," and I'm fairly sure I know what they mean.

• "Rat" can be the Giant Rat of Sumatra, which is mentioned briefly in "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire" as "a story for which the world is not yet ready." The story of the giant rat of Sumatra has been written several times by other authors; perhaps the Moff has decided we're finally ready for the story.
• "Wedding" is most likely "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor," a relatively straightforward runaway-bride case. I look forward to their making it complex and interesting. Alternatively, John could be getting married, as he does at least once (at most thrice, depending on how you order the stories) in the original; however, since everybody but Sherlock and John ship Sherlock/John, I don't think that's likely.
• "Bow" is "His Last Bow," the very last official Sherlock Holmes story. This tells me that the series will end after episode nine.

The Moff has done his homework, and he expects us to do ours. As cheat sheets go, I wouldn't rely on this one for the final, but it's an idea of what you might study.

One more fun thing I came up with today: If David Tennant is TV dipped in chocolate, what are the rest of the New Series Doctors and their Companions? Enjoy.

Week 6: Mahjong, rain, Oxford, and the Enlightenment

It's kind of hard to get my head around that I'm going home in a little over two weeks. Except maybe I have been comprehending it subconsciously: I've been more homesick lately, and more likely to eat Western food--though having a cafe in the dorm helps with that, since in means I don't have to walk twenty minutes to get to the cafeterias on campus.
On the other hand, yesterday I had the most Chinese-y experience I've yet had here, and will probably ever have in this program: my tutor and I and a couple of my classmates spent most of the afternoon at a teahouse. The building was probably a hundred years old. The rituals of steeping and serving the tea (jasmine, by the way, and very good) may not have changed for centuries. The mahjong table was new--the electronic dice and built-in tile shuffler make it maybe thirty years old--but mahjong is mahjong, and all together it gave me a feeling I hadn't yet experienced. I've been to Tian'anmen, and to the Great Wall...but tea and mahjong are the real soul of China.
And the weather held for our excursion. There's been a lot of rain in Beijing lately. Last Saturday floods killed nearly forty people, and it's only supposed to rain more this weekend. Ah well, I guess it's a nice break from hot and humid. If it ever actually rains.
And speaking of last Saturday, that was the evening I finally watched Anonymous. It's a lovely movie; the only people I know of who don't like it are the ones who can't be buggered to put aside their pet theory about who wrote Shakespeare's plays. That the movie supports the Earl of Oxford theory only matters insofar as Edward deVere (said Earl) is a well-constructed and beautifully-acted character. (Not to mention attractive--he's played by Rhys Ifans, whom most people know from Notting Hill, and Jamie Campbell Bower, whom everyone will soon know from The Mortal Instruments.) The point of the story is that no matter who wrote Shakespeare's plays, they're still wonderful works of art, and powerful cultural icons, and a picture of the human condition at a particular point in history that still resonates with modern readers/viewers. All that good stuff.
And so it annoys me that people get bogged down in petty details, and stick to their biases to the point that they can no longer understand why anyone else sees the world differently. Which brings me to this week's episode of Crashcourse, in which John Green tells conflicting stories about the death of Captain Cook and asks whether, since transcending our own biases is so difficult, it's actually worth doing.
My answer: of course it is! As they keep quoting in Up the Down Staircase, "a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" The fact that something is difficult makes it even more important that we try to do it. Colonizing the Americas was difficult; so were uniting the United States and landing a man on the moon; so too will be curing AIDS and sending manned missions to Mars. Humans do things because they're difficult.
And learning to see things from someone else's perspective shouldn't be all that difficult. To return to the Enlightenment, which I mentioned a couple of months ago and which John Green seems to enjoy talking about: the scientists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries believed it was possible for man to see the world from God's perspective. I'm prepared to argue that we've accomplished that. Now that we can see what a god sees, why do we refuse to see what other human beings see?

Lessons from Abroad: middle of week 4

Almost halfway already. That's a good feeling, oddly enough. The charm of being somewhere exotic and foreign didn't last long...Beida is already just a place to live in. Beyond that, here are some of the things I've learned this week:

• Food from Sichuan province might be hot, but Korean food is as spicy as it gets. One evening last week, I ate at a Korean restaurant on campus. The beef dish I got turned out to be right about at my limit for spicy things; I couldn't eat more than a bite or two at a time. And apparently they make it even hotter in Korea. So I have decided to set a new scale for measuring spiciness, measured in bibimbites (bbb); one bbb is how much my tongue and the roof of my mouth hurt after one bite of that dish (which was not in fact bibimbap, but I needed a cool name). The next day, I ate Sichuan-style liver (it may even have been beef), which was about 3 bbb--that is, it took three bites for my mouth to hurt as much as I remember one bite of the Korean beef taking.
• I'm a lot less picky about food than I thought I would be. I'm still avoiding pork and shellfish where I can, but where I can't I'll eat pork. Various kinds of tofu are also getting less weird for me...and there's some spicy things I find I can eat, because I paid for them and don't want to waste money.
• Thought 1 from homestay: Elderly Chinese people are a lot like elderly Jewish people. I had dinner this evening with my homestay family, an older couple, and the wife was very bubbe-like, urging me to keep eating, making most of the conversation, and occasionally repeating something I'd said to the husband, who wasn't really paying attention. It felt familiar, and was therefore nice. The food was good too--kind of a mild beef chili-soup-thing over beef noodles.
• Thought 2 from homestay: Personal comfort doesn't really seem to be a factor in ordinary Chinese people's lives. My evidence: the beds. Living in the dorm, I thought my bed was uncomfortably hard. Then I moved into the homestay, and discovered how much less comfortable beds could be. The dorm beds now seem nice and soft, and I imagine my bed at home will be heaven. If it's not already too soft.
• The Chinese seem to have a mostly positive stereotype of Jews: they think we're especially smart, and I hope I've met my hosts' expectations in this regard.

Before I go, here's a picture of a Lucky Bird. They're as common on the Beida campus as feral cats, or (for comparison) slightly less common than pigeons in Pittsburgh. And they're prettier than pigeons.

Lessons from Abroad

I've been in China for two weeks already, for an eight-week intensive language-learning program at Peking University, and I'm already getting a decent picture of how urban Chinese society works. I've been so busy lately I almost didn't write this, but here are some lessons I've already learned:

• Americans are neat freaks. In China, there's no assiduous cleaning of restaurant tables and bathroom stalls; certain places will always smell terrible to the average American nose; and if you hand-wash your clothes, it's hard to get the stains out. This is okay. Except that I plan on buying more shirts when I come home to the American standard of cleanliness, because I'm never going to get those beef broth stains out of my light-colored shirts. (Noodles in beef broth behave like spaghetti in tomato sauce; and you'll always be wearing a light-colored shirt when you eat either.)
• Food is fun, when it doesn't get all over you. For one thing, Chinese politeness standards are not American; it's perfectly acceptable to slurp noodles, which I can't seem to do neatly, hence the stains. Still usually fun. For another, chopsticks are awesome things. Third, there's so many exciting dishes, from baozi (the big round dumplings) to chicken soup with the meat still on the bones, to Peking duck in little rice pancakes. (That was an awesome day.)
• You don't need to understand everything that's being said to you to get what's going on. However, when someone is talking directly to you, you'll always wish you could remember all your vocabulary.
• Sunny days are to be appreciated...of course, as with everything else, there are exceptions. We've been lucky enough to have four blue-sky days in a row, but that makes it hotter. Best way to get around that: carry an umbrella. They were invented for the sun, you know.
• Get as much sleep as you can; the teachers will run you ragged.

And with that, I'm gradually off to bed.

Nerdy knitting and conspiracy theories

Note: SPOILERS for the first Harry Potter book and Series 1, 3, 5, and 6 of new Doctor Who.

So I've finished another scarf. No, not a third Fourth Doctor scarf...I'm using the leftover yarn from those to make a blanket, and to be honest, I need a break from that pattern. So I found something new: a prime factoring scarf pattern. I got the idea from this wonderfully creative blog. Basically, each color represents a prime number, and you combine the colors to get composite numbers. For mine, 2 is green, 3 is purple, and so on.

It starts with 2 at the lower end and goes up to 75. 5 is light blue, not white.

I'm also in the process of making matching tube socks, because this is an opportunity to try making socks. We'll see how that works out.

The other thing on my mind is, as usual, Doctor Who-related. Today, though, it's about the fans, and a crazy theory I've just learned about from a credulous Facebook Friend. Like most conspiracy theories, it was bizarre, paranoid, and easily refuted by someone who knows the literature.

Here's a video that presents the theory that Rory Williams is either the Master or his son. I'll give you some time to watch it. In the meantime, here's a picture I found on deviantart that combines my love of knitting with my love of Doctor Who.

Done? Okay. I don't know about you, but I went through a phase where I believed conspiracy theories. Fortunately, it coincided with my Harry Potter phase, and since then I've learned to think critically. (I do love Harry Potter; I'm just not obsessed with it anymore.)

I'll go through this point by point. At 0:21, speaking of Harry Potter, the author of the video compares the Master to Voldemort's possession of Quirrell, suggesting that he would hide in a weak mind, like Rory's. Rory? Weak? Bollocks. Have you been watching the show? Go say that to his face, you...*ahem*

At 0:35, he notes that Rory has become more assertive, even to the point of being violent, and claims this is the Master's personality showing through. However, it's interesting to note that Rory was deleted from history in the last season, then was recreated as a plastic Roman. He even admits that this is a traumatic experience, that he represses because he's having trouble dealing with it. But we can tell that he's dealing with it: by "A Good Man Goes to War" he is completely comfortable putting on the role of the Last Centurion, and in "The God Complex" he is shown an exit instead of his greatest fear (noted later in the video). The prison knows that he fears nothing, because he is the Last Centurion. He doesn't even fear losing Amy, because as the Centurion he can protect her from everything. And just in case I need to say it, the Master wouldn't deal with such an experience. He'd bottle it up and let it feed his madness.

At 0:50, Rory complains of a "banging" in his head ("Let's Kill Hitler"), which Amy jokes is Hitler wanting to be let out of the cupboard. Note to the author of the video: This is a joke. Amy is snarky like that, and that's part of what I like about her. Anyway. At that moment, Rory has just witnessed Mels's regeneration into her River Song form, at very close range. He has therefore been exposed to vortex energy. Given the violent reactions of worse-protected minds (namely, Rose's and Donna's) to vortex energy, Rory's headache is at least normal and at most a testament to how tough he's become. And NOT the Master's drumbeat.

In the paragraph on "The God Complex", the author guesses that the Doctor's fear has to do with the Master. This is reasonable. He decides that the "TARDIS alarms" are making the same noise as they did when and only when the TARDIS was hooked up to the paradox generator in "The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords." This makes less sense, if only because I've heard the cloister bell a third time in the New Series, in the Children in Need special "Time Crash." That's the story where we learn it's the cloister bell. It's rung other times in the Classic series, not always to do with the Master.

The assumption in this paragraph that makes no sense at all is that because the Doctor recognizes the person in the room, it's Rory. In the words of the Tenth Doctor, what? What? It doesn't have to be Rory for the Doctor to recognize him, or her or it for that matter. My guess is that it was either the Master or the Valeyard. More likely the Valeyard, because the Master, as far as I can tell, has nowhere to get more lives from, and the Valeyard claimed to be the Twelfth (or twelfth-and-a-half) Doctor. My interpretation of that scene, now that this video has prompted me to think about it, is that the Eleventh Doctor's greatest fear is becoming his own worst enemy, and he'll rely (as he always has) on his Companions to keep him from falling.

Moving on: at 1:30, the author claims that Rory is not the Master, but instead the Master's son by Lucy Saxon. True, Rory's parents are only ever mentioned in a deleted scene from Series 5; however, that's only slightly less than Amy's parents get. For most of Series 5, they've been erased from history, and they only appear as proof that Big Bang Two has restored the timeline. Then Amy and Rory go traveling again, and when they return home the Doctor has given them their own flat and they go off and live as a married couple. The lack of parents is meaningless in this context--and note that it has never been the norm for the Companion's family to have a major role in the story; this is only a regular thing in the RTD era (New Series 1-4).

Now, about Lucy Saxon. There is no evidence anywhere that she's pregnant, nor that the Master has more than a pretense of affection for her. (He indirectly calls her a pet.) That she gave birth between "Last of the Time Lords" and "The End of Time", in which she is implied to have died, is a long shot; and during that time she had no access to time travel, so the hypothetical baby could not have aged twenty years in the space of one or two, and cannot be Rory.

The last point the author makes is something I had to stop and think about. Why is Rory not surprised that the TARDIS is bigger on the inside? Turns out Rory gave us the answer: He researched the latest scientific theories. It's been two years between the Prisoner Zero incident and when Rory first enters the TARDIS; the reappearance of the time traveler that your girlfriend has been obsessed with all her life and who everyone thought was imaginary inspired him to do his homework, if only so he could keep up with Amy.

So we've got everything that Rory isn't. What, then, is he? Here's what I think.
Rory is an ordinary person whom extraordinary things have happened to. He's been kicked around by life, but always put back into the game one way or another (dream worlds, universal reboots, CPR, you name it (damn you Moffat!)). And he's learned to accept what life throws him at; and this way he's become a total badass. And through it all, he never loses his humanity, always loves Amy, never stops doing everything he can both for her and for the universe. He's a hero: the Harry Potter, the Philip Pirrip, the Candide of the Doctor Who universe. He's a Companion's Companion, and the story has nearly always been about the Companions.

Let's keep discussing.

Eat Drink Man Woman: thoughts after the first hour

I've started watching Chinese movies to brush up on my listening skills before I go study abroad in Beijing. Right now, I'm working my way through Eat Drink Man Woman, a '90s Taiwanese classic about a retired chef and his three daughters. I'm about halfway through, and it's already left me with some frustrating impressions.

First of all, the characters have started to bug me: why don't they communicate, instead of just talking? The second daughter, an airline executive, is about to be promoted and sent to Amsterdam. That evening, she goes to her somewhat-boyfriend's apartment, makes him a huge fancy dinner, and reminisces about learning to cook and how her father was so much nicer of a person when she was younger. The boyfriend tries to cheer her up by being silly, but she gets irritable. At that point, in the second daughter's place, I would have told him what was behind all this emotion. (Edit: She did tell him at some point, and then she tries to tell her family and gets cut off, and doesn't try again.)
The father doesn't communicate either. When the second daughter sees him in the hospital, in the cardio department, she's shocked and scared. He didn't tell anyone he was going in for a checkup, and she thinks something is seriously wrong.

My second impression is that the movie is about a conflict between tradition and modernity. The second daughter, especially, is torn between career advancement and making her own way on the one hand, and filial piety and keeping her father happy on the other. Then in the next scene, she complains to Lao Wen (a family friend) about how her father "exiled" her from the kitchen, where she could have become a master chef, and forced her to continue studying. Lao Wen tells her that her father did the right thing, to which she responds "Why did no one ever ask what I wanted?"
Simple answer: because that's not how things work. Even in 1990s Taiwan, the traditions of the mainland prevail at home. She should be glad women are allowed to be airline executives, and get the promotion she's likely to get! But again, the modern role her father wanted for her twenty years ago is conflicting with the traditional role he wants/needs now, and she's afraid of what he'll think of her moving away.

The pressures of modernity are also felt by the other two daughters, whose stories I've seen before in separate movies: the first daughter is a teacher receiving anonymous notes as a prank by her students, and the third is caught up in negotiations between her friend and the friend's ex, in a typical teenage romantic comedy of communication errors. However, they don't seem to be feeling the pressures of tradition as much, so the second daughter is the one with the most interesting story, and the one of the three that I'm most frustrated with.

The third impression I'm getting of this movie is not, in fact, a frustrating one: I'm understanding a lot more than I thought I would. They speak fast, and I rely heavily on the subtitles, but there are places I can tell what they're saying, and that it differs from the subtitles. Like they don't use the formal speech patterns I've been learning (though again, this is Taiwan, not the mainland), and like the scenes where the little girl (another family friend) calls the chef "Mr. Chu" in the subtitles. She's really saying "Zhu yeye" (Grandpa Chu). And that's linguistically neat, and she's cute, and her interactions with Grandpa Chu are a fun spot in a movie that has so far otherwise been quite emotionally heavy.

Perhaps I'll post more of my impressions after I finish the movie.