Miscellanea Exotica

So, ( casting spoiler )

I haven't seen the finale yet. As a matter of fact, I haven't actually seen anything since 6x16. No particular reason, I suppose, just that I've been too tired after work on Fridays to stay up until it ends, download it, and watch it. And I've been busy on the weekends lately, so I haven't had a chance to watch them then, and after a while I just figured I'd save up 6x17-6x22 and have a marathon some time when I have a chance.

I do know what's going on, though. I've kept myself spoilered up, reading reactions and such. For this reason, I think I'll be skimming 6x20, because, sorry, even after three years of it, I still don't care about the angel stuff.

However, this leads me to a happy discovery: ( Spoilers )

Hopefully, I'll be able to pull some time together tomorrow to sit down and have myself a little marathon, because what I've heard about the finale? Makes me very, very excited to see it.

I've been looking for the Supernatural anime ever since it was released. I'm very much out of the loop when it comes to finding anime downloads, though, and it's not showing up in any of my usual haunts. So I was reduced to watching a very bad raw copy on YouTube. It's been a number of years since I watched anime with any sort of regularity; still and all, I remember enough Japanese to make out the very edges of what the characters are saying. To whit:

( Some bits that were amusing, or that I understood unusually clearly )

And that's as far as I got before the terrible quality of the video and my own frustration left me very susceptible to distraction, and I ended up going and reading fleshflutter's Rule 26 instead, when I got the notification that it had been updated. Which was another exercise in frustration -- I always forget how much I hate reading WIPs.

Anyway

I love languages. I'm not especially good at any other than English, but I love poking and prodding at them. Since Japanese is one of the foreign languages I know best -- which speaks mostly to my total ignorance of other languages rather than any particular talent for Japanese -- I like being able to dissect some of the subtleties that you get in that language but that don't translate at all into English.

Like, for instance, I was a little startled to discover that both Sam and Dean, in the anime, refer to their father as "oyaji." Insofar as I've ever seen the word translated as anything other than just "Dad," it's been along the lines of "Pops," or "the Old Man." Kind of slang-y and just a bit disrespectful. I mean, on the one hand, it makes a certain amount of sense for Dean, with his overall irreverent attitude. Still, what with his absolute devotion to John, I would have given even odds (if I'd thought about it at all) of him using freaking "chichi-ue" ("honored father"). Sam, meanwhile, I can kinda understand the irreverence, given his relationship with John, but Sam tends to use a slightly more formal, more normalized mode of speech than Dean. You can actually hear this in the anime, with Dean displaying a lower-class accent, while Sam has a more standard accent. Anyway, I would have expected Sam just to use "otousan" (the very standard, normal "dad").

One wonders if either of the boys uses "oyaji" to John's face, however. I doubt it. Although, maybe Sam. Just to be rebellious.

Less surprising were the pronouns they chose for the boys. Dean, naturally, is an "ore." As if he'd be anything else, "ore" being the way a macho young man refers to himself. Sam, meanwhile, predictably, is a "boku," which is a much milder, though still informally masculine, way of referring to oneself. He's not quite uptight enough to refer to himself as "watashi," and I'd be pissed at the implication that he was if they'd gone with that. That being said, when/if the anime gets to the events of late S3, S4, I'd be very interested to see if Sam switches to "ore." Sam post-Mystery Spot, pre-Lucifer Rising seems like an "ore" kind of guy to me. Ditto for Robo!Sam. And I'd bet good money that for S5, and post resouling, he'd go back to "boku." I'd like to see that. And I'd like to see them make a big deal about the changing pronouns. A subtlety that of course would not survive the translation, but I'd sure as hell appreciate it.

It'd be like that one scene in Please Save my Earth, where eight-year-old Rin, who is, at the same time, thirty-something-year-old Shion doesn't know whether to refer to himself as "boku," like the child does, or "ore," like the adult. When he changed pronouns, it marked an extreme change in tone -- at the time, he was declaring his love for his teenage neighbor, Alice. Using "boku," what you had was a confession of innocent love from a child to an almost-adult. When he switched to "ore," it became a very adult declaration of a very adult kind of love. It killed me that there was no indication of that change in tone in either translation, the sub or the dub, because it was brilliant and creepy.

These are the toys I love to play with.

And now I am going to go distract myself from the fact that I really, really want to read more of Rule 26, but there is no more, and probably won't be for another month or two. (fleshfultter is currently signed up for Big Bang again... which does not give me high hopes for how quickly Rule 26 is going to get updated, at least until after May.) I want to know how this can end well! With Jared and Jensen living happily ever after, and Dr. Nekrotic dying a fiery, agonizing death. Except how it'd be very hard for both of those things to happen. (Or maybe Jared sticking around to act as Nekrotic's conscience, so no more planets get burned up? Except Nekrotic needs to burn for all of that.... Goddammit, I didn't mean to get so invested!!)

So, I think I'm going to skip the ep reaction this week and move straight to the meta. This is part because I'm insanely busy this weekend, and partly because I think my reaction to this ep is a little hard to quantify, if you know what I mean.

( Spoilers for 6x05 with reference to 6x06 previews )

Um, this got kinda long. Oops? I have to say, my emotional engagement this season is a little hit or miss, but my intellectual engagement is still right up there.

So, I was going to do an ep reaction for 6x03, but it started turning into a rather long-winded meta, and I got sidetracked in the middle, and now I'm just too tired of the damn thing even to look at it. And this is a much more interesting topic, anyway.

( Meta and speculation for Sam, with some reference to future episodes. )

Once upon a time, back when I was but a mere tweeny-bopper, I watched Babylon 5. I actually began watching at right about the time that Season 5 was getting started, but back then, B5 was to TNT as Law & Order currently is. I was able to get a pretty good idea of what was going on through the reruns as I watched the fifth season first run. And lo, I was confused. The show that I was watching in reruns was awesome and epic. The show I was watching in first-run bore almost no resemblance to that other one. Several years later, when I finally got online and become involved in the already-fading B5 fandom, I learned some of the details. The show's creator, JM Strat-however-the-fuck-you-spell-his-name, henceforth known as JMS, had had a five-year plan for his show. This plan was an epic story filled with fascinating characters. However, making this show was something of a rocky road. The obstacle that concerns us here is that, going into the fourth season, the network sort of let it be known that this was the last year for Babylon 5. JMS was determined to finish his story, though. So he squeezed all the rest of his epic story arc into the fourth season. And that was it. All the major plot arcs were resolved. Several major characters died or left. Those that were left were in places of resolution. It was a series finale, and a brilliant one at that.

Then, at the absolute last minute, the network decided to renew B5. Disaster. There was no more story left to tell. The epic was over.

What to do? They had to do something, so they just muddled through. I can only assume that they hoped that whatever they could come up with on the fly would match the brilliance that had come before. If that was indeed their hope, they failed. Season 5 was a trainwreck. Beloved characters were missing. They were replaced with new characters we didn't care about. Some of the remaining characters acted in such OOC ways as to be essentially destroyed. Most of the plots were boring. It was painful to watch.

That said, Season 5 wasn't an unmitigated disaster. I frankly though that the Londo/G'Kar/Centauri Prime storylines were excellent. "The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari" and "The Fall of Centauri Prime" are among my favorite episodes of the entire series.

So, this is how I saw it. The story ended in Season 4. That was it, that was the end. Nothing else counts. Season 5 was an addendum, and counted for no more than any of the various spin-off movies or tie-in books. Which is to say: cherry-pick. Any little bits of canon from those sources that you like? Keep. Anything that annoys you? Dump. As far as I'm concerned, the Londo character arc, the Londo/G'Kar friendship arc, and the Centauri Prime story arc all absolutely happened. The Lenier character arc and the telepath story arc absolutely did not. Everything else happened, but I just don't think about it.

And so, I'm happy. I get to pretty much jettison a miserably bad extra season while keeping any bits that turned out to be good.

This is essentially the attitude that I'm taking going into SPN S6. Is it inevitable that season 6 will be as much of an abject failure as B5 S5? No, not at all. I am, in fact, hopeful. But even if it does turn out to be terrible... who cares? The epic story line that'd been building since the Pilot is over. Everything that happens from here on out is extra. If it's good? Keep it. If it's bad? Dump it. Simple.

All that being said, I'm not sure why everyone's flipping out over the spoilers. Pretty much everything I've read so far sounds pretty good. There's one or two things that give me pause, but even those things might turn out not-so-bad. And there are a couple of things that were mentioned that have made me out-and-out excited.
( Cut for spoilers, just in case anyone actually somehow reads this )

When you come right down to it, I am a geek. Specifically, I'm a geek who loves lists. Kind of always have been. When I was, say, about eleven, I decided to pull out a notebook and make a list of all the books I owned, title and author. For the record, I'm pretty sure the number hovered around 800. Yeah, I had a lot of books. But, see, knowing how many books I had, and which books they were, and where I had them stored (I had so many, I had to be rather creative in regards to storage) wasn't enough. I had to know how many pages they all had, and how much that added up to. So I spent days going through every book I owned, writing down the page count, and then even more days going through with a calculator adding it all up. And then I wanted to know how many words that was, so I started trying to come up with an estimated wordcount per page. Looking back on it, I might have been (and might still be) just a little OCD.

When I got my first computer, and discovered spreadsheets and databases, well. Things started getting a little out of hand.

Then I got into fanfic and discovered del.icio.us. My obsession with tagging is actually a little frightening.

In the spirit of my obsession, I spent a couple of days going through the upcoming Big Bang descriptions and posting dates, and created a database of the ones that I thought looked interesting. I'm currently resisting the temptation to start creating multiple tables and adding several new fields of descriptors, like: Have I read anything by that author before? If so, did I like what I read enough to save it to delicious? If not, did I like it, but just not enough to save it? Am I interested in reading the fic because the description sounds good, regardless of the author, or am I willing to look at it because I trust the author regardless of whether I found the description interesting? Or is it a fic with an interesting description written by an author I trust? Am I really eager to read the fic, or is it just something I'll take a look at? And so on.

But anyway. My point is that I figured out how many Big Bangs I'm currently planning on at least attempting to read (112, for the record). And that got me thinking. I still have a bookmark folder filled with fics (mostly Supernatural and CWRPF) that I want to read but haven't had a chance to get around to. The folder is quite large. I'll never ever lack reading material. But, I knew that a few of the fics in that folder were Big Bangs from previous years. So, I decided to go through and tag all them, to see how many. It took all night, but I finally discovered that I still have 38 Big Bangs from 2009, and 11 from 2008 bookmarked and waiting to be read.

But figuring out how many I had waiting to be read was not enough. It got me thinking: how long would it take me to actually read all of those? And wordcounts are much more useful in figuring that out than just numbers of fics (after all, a fic of 100,000 words would take considerably longer than one of 20,000). So I went through every one of the Big Bangs that I have bookmarked, and put the wordcounts into a spreadsheet (separate columns for 2009 and 2008), and added it all up. I have 2,158,612 words (give or take, since most of the given wordcounts are approximate, and even I'm not obsessed enough to go through all of them to get accurate counts, even with my handy-dandy wordcount addon for Firefox) worth of fic to read. In addition to the 112 fics (minimum of 20,000 words each, so a minimum of 2,240,000 words total, with an absolute guarantee that pretty much every single one of them will be over the minimum, with many of them being considerably over) for this year.

And still my obsessive geekery is not satisfied. I have read that the average mass market paperback holds an approximate average of about 300 words per page. My own investigations (which involve pulling random books from my shelf, counting the words from a random line on a random page, and multiplying it by the number of lines on the page) suggest something closer to somewhere between 400 and 500 words per page. In the spirit of compromise, I decided to divide the wordcounts by 400. Which means that for previous years' Big Bangs, I have approximately 5,397 pages worth of fic to read. At an average of perhaps 400 pages per novel, that's about 13.5 novels. For this year, there will be a minimum of 14 novels worth of material. If I assume that the average wordcount for this year will be similar to last year, and that the 49 wordcounts that I currently have in my spreadsheet offer at least a semi-valid sample, then the average wordcount will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 44,053 per fic. So, for 112 fics, that's 4,933,970 words. Which boils down to about 31 novels.

This has actually been kind of embarrassing. I swear, I'm not actually obsessive compulsive. Except possibly where it comes to my delicious tags -- 16 bundles holding 1,498 tags might be a little excessive for most people, particularly given how often I feel compelled to go back through my 800 bookmarks to add entirely new descriptors.

And for those of you playing at home, this post has been 957 words long.

So, I suppose I should just go ahead and do my post on the SPN S5 finale.
( 5x22 )

God. Between this and class, my brain is officially fried. And also, this has pretty well run longer than some of the codas I've read in the last week. And I still have more to say. And I will, inevitably, say it. Tomorrow. After finishing up my game of Civilization.