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Rewatched Hannibal s1-2 with A, had a great time -- and now we've stalled out partway through s3, almost exactly where I for no particular reason left off watching when s3 first aired. The narrative urgency just ... drops? and it's perfectly nice, but my attention wanders.

Now we're back in Farscape, in the peak of the cloned John era. I continue to be fascinated by the narrative choice to double the protag and just roll with it. They can do two different types of John storylines, without having to juggle continuity. And it lets them hook up John and Aeryn while still maintaining fantastic levels of narrative tension.

Read the first half of Diane Duane's The Book of Night With Moon, a 90s fantasy novel about cat wizards maintaining interdimensional portals in Grand Central Station. I like it better when they're being wizards than when they're being cats. I think bc I live very near to my cats, so fanciful bits about what they get up to when the people are away aren't as interesting to me as stories about their choices in interspecies families. But the prose is lovely, and the magic worldbuilding is pretty and intricate. (I suspect I'd also get good hometown vibes from the setting if my city was New York, not Chicago.)
lotesse: (open)
Watching Hannibal 1.08.

(I've been feeling frustration and dissatisfaction with my family; I do not know if it is legitimate. I feel as though I am not seen. But I'm less interested in proving the reality than I am in simply noticing the presence of my emotions.)

A (potential, theorized) central tragedy of human life, artfully demonstrated by Bryan Fuller: no one can save you but yourself. Even when it is not reasonable to expect anyone else to save you, help always seems to come with strings. Hannibal wants to Save Will Graham; Alana wants to Save Will Graham; Jack wants Will Graham To Already Have Been Saved so that he can remain useful and able to work. But each of these outside agents have agendas for Will, agendas that are their own and not his.

This is inevitable; how could they not? Only Will can have his own interests at heart purely. But ... he doesn't, I don't think he does. He makes gestures toward survival - he clearly knows where he needs to go vs. where he shouldn't, he tells people things like he's trying to remain accountable for his own well-being - but he doesn't follow through. (and yet, it's his self-sacrificing aspects that I find admirable. what does that say about me?)

I don't know - this all seems quite clear to me, but I've been trying to convince myself that "you've got to cross that lonesome valley, you've got to cross it by yourself" is no kind of a life-philosophy.

I wonder if it's good for me, to live within reach of my parents. I dunno that it really is.
lotesse: (open)
I'm going back in to rewatch and finish Bryan Fuller's Hannibal. I watched through the second season previously, but stopped tracking around the fourth episode - I couldn't figure out where the story was going, and thus couldn't identify hopes or fears to propel me through the matter of the story. I followed recaps and discussion of the third season, because I wanted to know what kind of a thing Hannibal was going to turn out to be. And now we know.

I feel like I approach narratives really differently based on where I think they're going. It has to do with how much I'm willing to let myself hope, and also with what the narrative is positing as the highest good. For example, one of the reasons why White Collar lost me was that it couldn't decide if it was Neal needed leashed or Peter needed freed, what kind of an ending would count as a "good one," and things got stretched tight across the polarity. So: there isn't going to be a happy ending in Hannibal; this is a study of a downfall. Will is to be empathized with, but not hoped for.

this is some bleak and gnarly analysis; tw maybe not good reading for people currently in the depths of despair  )

I wish the first episodes hadn't cued the show up as a procedural; although maybe the genre confusion is meant to be part of the effect?

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