Stuff

[shipperx]

*    I fail.  I didn't finish my Nertz fic on time.  I'm still working on it.  Hopefully I'll have it in a week or so.

*    Had the Annual Homeowners Association Meeting yesterday... damn.  Still president.

*    Did take advantage of the phenomenal spring-like weather for the weekend (which is gone away now) to prune some of the roses.

*    Big Love  Seriously why are we supposed to root for Bill again?  Isn't what Margene revealed when she said that she just would have been an unwed 16 year old mother had she not married Bill saying that Bill knocked her up while she was babysitting.  She was SIXTEEN!  And given the age of her oldest, doesn't that actually make her the same age as Bill's oldest son and daughter?   WHY are we supposed to root for this turd again (Though I did laugh my butt off at the wives bitching at him giving them guns for Christmas and that none of them wanted guns, and couldn't he have just given them a washer and dryer instead?  Anyway, dude, he knocked Margie up when she was SIXTEEN!!! 

*  Downton Abbey Whoo!  Looking forward to the upheaval of WWI.   Maggie Smith was rather awesome.  Edith and Mary are first rate bitches to one another.  You know the problem isn't the rivalry per se, that's rather expected. It's that each is so heedless that they have no qualm trying to ruin one another's lives and whoever else is  involved is just cannon fodder!  Anna is awesome.  Love her.  Sybil will probably become a nurse or something during the war (hope nothing terrible happens to her).  Are we going to see a seachange in O'Brien now that she knows what a horrible person she is?  And did I mention that Maggie Smith was awesome?  I look forward to Series 2.  Hurry. 

* Still haven't had a chance to see this week's Fringe (damn you Charter!)  But I did record that Sunday night rerun of it so I can watch it today.

Comments

[shapinglight]

Re: Downton Abbey, I'm wondering if the show will just skip over the war so they can get to the 1920s and have Mary and Sybil swanning around in flapper frocks.

Also, I think Mary was really stupid to ruin Edith's one chance of marriage like that. She was nearly rid of her. Now they're probably stuck with each other forever.

[mollivanders.livejournal.com]

You know the problem isn't the rivalry per se, that's rather expected it's that each is so heedless that they have no qualm trying to ruin one another's lives!

It's really interesting because it'd be very easy to hate both of them but I can only cheer for Mary in light of what Edith did. Just... irreparable. And tit for tat's worked for centuries so...

I really expect Sibyl to become a nurse and would be very excited to see that happen :)

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Except the Mary was actually being rather cruel to Edith's suitor, who didn't deserve to feel humiliated. Neither Edith nor Mary think of the collateral damage of their actions. They just go after each other. And if Mary really wanted to be rid of Edith, why not let her to go along and marry the man that Mary did not want?

I also had a few problems with the Mary/Matthew situaiton because, did I miss it, or did Mary ever explain about Pamuk? For once her grandmother gave (still classist) but sage advice. If Mary wanted Matthew she needed to tell accept him while there stood the chance of his being poor. Between her not telling him what the real impediment was and her at last partially taking on board Lady Rosamund's instructions not to attach herself to a country lawyer, Mary really dug herself quite the hole. (I suspect the war will throw everyones plans out the window, so who knows how any of it will eventually turn out).

Sybil really is her parent's child. For all her 'radicalness' she's by far the kindest and nicest of the kids.

[mollivanders.livejournal.com]

I finished the series a couple weeks ago and tackled why Mary didn't tell Matthew about Pamuk in this post. I agree she might have been better if Edith had married Sir Anthony but I can see not wanting her sister to have any satisfaction on that score in light of what she did. And at least Mary reserved her cruelty to Edith - what Edith did could have damaged Sibyl's chances and her parents standing so in general, I find Edith blacker on that count.

Plus she and Mary had always had a rivalry and Edith took it a step farther. That's how tit for tat works - once someone ups the punishment, the other parties will retaliate harder, and so forth.

But I talk more about it in my post.

[nutmeg3.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on Edith being the worse of the two and deserving what she gets. Her cruelty went beyond sisterly feuding and into the realm of gratuitous, and I can't blame Mary for striking back. And it will be interesting to see if there are repercussions (and what they are) or whether the war will render everything moot.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

I guess it's the way that Mary went about it that supremely irked me (not that I'm defending what Edith did). Mary has a way of taking admiration for granted and she does, as her father noted, pick and put-down men as toys. She didn't particularly care for her initial fiance and didn't mourn him a bit. It was an arrangement and no more and she never even took notice that it might seem a rather attractive arrangement to someone else. She dismissed on suitor. Then another. She cannot decide whether or not she wants Matthew, especially if he's sans her inheritance (though I do believe that having to confess the truth about Pamuk was a huge factor there as well), and yet she blithely hurts this man -- again -- because not only has she turned down and avoided him before but now she's cooking up a story to make him feel as though he's being humiliated behind his back. Worse, the way she spoke about him had not a little to do with the way that she views him, because she was initially avoiding him almost exactly the way she's saying her sister is. And this man has done nothing to her except admire and be nice to her. There were ways for her to call Edith a bitch (like, say, call Edith a bitch or expose Edith's machinations to their parents) without hurting the feelings of some man who has never done an unkind thing to her (but to whom she's been unkind more than once).

Mary's father was right when he points out that Mary heedlessly thinks of other people as her toys who are there for her to play with as she needs or doesn't.

What Edith did was mean. It was. But so is what Mary is doing. They both treat each other like crap, and neither of them are as good at heart as their parents or Sybil.

[nutmeg3.livejournal.com]

I do wish Mary could have avoided hurting the guy (whose name I don't remember), but in terms of treating men like toys, I think she's learning. I think her feelings for Matthew are genuine, and she's started realizing what her behavior may have cost her. I also think her vacillation makes sense in the context of the time, in that she's always lived at a certain level of luxury, and the truth is, she has no idea whether she can live without that and not make both her lover and herself miserable. It's easy from a modern perspective to say she should just say yes, but the constraints of the time might have made that a foolish choice. I think she should have talked to Matthew about that, but there would go all the romantic tension. Still, I don't think her choice was as clear as my heart wants it to be.

Similarly, the only way I can ever accept the ending of My Brilliant Career, even though every time I see it I wish it could be diifferent, is to look at it through the lens of historical context. Harry can tell her they'll go to the city and do everything she wants, but the truth is, whenever she got pregnant, she wouldn't be able to go out in society, just for starters.

So I don't think Mary's being willful or acting on whim at this point. I think she has a genuine dilemma and no idea how to deal with it. And on top of that, she still has the spectre of Pamuk - and her feeling that she has to tell Matthew about him - to contend with. It's no wonder she's a mess, really.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

I really don't have hard feelings about the Matthew thing except that her Grandmother was right, insofar as her delaying that way would definitely cause Matthew to resent it (not that I'm condoning what her Grandmother suggested either.) But all of that, I understood.

My primary issue with the ploy she pulled at the garden party is, having already treated this man as a pawn before, she does so again. I don't really see her as being any better than Edith. Edith wanted to hurt Mary so much that she did something that could have hurt many people (but apparently hasn't because it didn't seem that anyone -- save possibly Mary -- had suffered particularly due to what she had revealed. Still, Edith overlooked that by hurting Mary she could easily be hurting other people. By the same token, Mary's revenge against Edith was... to make a perfectly innocuous but thus far nice widower feel like crap while she implied people were mocking him behind his back.

Mary could have had revenge again Edith by revealing to Grandma and Mamma what Edith had done. Grandma would have given Edith hell. Instead, Mary's method of revenge was to hurt someone else so as to hurt Edith. Revenge against Edith was justified. Humiliating a kind man in order to do so was bad form.

Both Edith and Mary need to stop behaving like spoiled brats.

[nutmeg3.livejournal.com]

Looking forward to your thoughts on Fringe, and I'm glad you were able to nab it.

[rahirah]

Don't worry about it, there's an extension...

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Yay!

I still have to write an ending, and then it all has to be edited.

[powerofthebook.livejournal.com]

Every time I try to get back into reading about Big Love, I keep coming to the conclusion that Deadwood's Al Swearengen was a pimp, a murderer, a thief, and probably all sorts of bad things that never made it to the screen - and yet he was far more likeable.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

This is true.

Most unintentionally hilarious scene in Sunday's Big Love was Bill's whining prayer to God about why he tested his family so.

Erm, hey, maybe it's because you're a hypocritical jackass who does incredibly selfish things that hurts your family, Bill!

[powerofthebook.livejournal.com]

One would think he'd get a clue after his eldest daughter got as far away from the family as she possibly could...