beast_below | 2019 Fandom Snowflake Challenge

Day 3: In your own space, share a favorite piece of original canon (a TV episode, a song, a favorite interview, a book, a scene from a movie, etc) and explain why you love it so much.

Okay so this is way easier, and I'm sorry I'm getting to it late! This got long and… okay, let’s hope this cut works this time.

Books

-- Seraphina & Shadow Scale, by Rachel Hartman: This duology reinvigorated my love of fantasy. There is just something so flowing and conversational about Hartman's tone, and I find Seraphina a really excellent heroine. Any music-lover will really enjoy how integral music is to the characters, but even if you're not, as a non-music-person myself, I found it just as enjoyable.

Although at first I wasn't sure how I felt about her (sort of autistic-like) take on dragons, I grew to love it. Also, I really loved the romance. I felt she and her love interest really had great chemistry, and Hartman showed a mutual respect and interest between them. She also dodges what first appears to be a love triangle.

In the second book there's an excellent portrayal of a transwoman from a very open society, so her trans-ness is simply a part of her and not her main struggle. At the very end, too, there's the implication that Seraphina is bisexual, and also that the poly relationship that I'd been rooting for does indeed happen later down the line. I'm sad it wasn't on the page and is left open-ended, but Seraphina was only Hartman's debut novel and I felt pretty satisfied regardless.

-- The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman: And this is the book that reinvigorated my love for reading after a long, long dry spell. Gaiman's turn of phrase and his characters are just... incredible. There is real artistry in his words that just touches me in a way that nothing else does. A little boy who is raised by ghosts in a graveyard, and his adventures growing up. It was the story that the little goth boy in me always needed.

-- The Gormenghast Trilogy, by Mervyn Peake: What could I possibly say about Peake's fantasy of manners? His prose is some of the strangest and most captivating have ever read. At first, I wasn't sure what to think of it, but once you start to get into the flow, it's absolutely entrancing and so, so vivid. His characters are surreal and inhuman, but in ways that make them dreamlike and fascinating but while still remaining deeply emotionally real.

Oh, and it's also got the single best villain protagonist I've ever read.

It definitely is a little bit of a dense read that requires being tuned into it, and honestly I wasn't sure if I totally "got" it until the end of the first book, but the work is so worth it. They're quite possibly my favorite books.

Movies

-- The Dark Crystal: This is perhaps my favorite movie of all time. It is what sparked my love of real effects and puppetry, and the world building is just... incredible. I love to just watch it and see the world of Thra, the strange creatures and beings that live within it. And I highly reccomend watching it now if you haven't -- Netflix is putting out a prequel this year!

-- The Last Unicorn: I know that this might be blasphemy, but I actually prefer the animated movie to the books. The art style captures the story and I feel distills the beats down to their best parts. Haggard's castle is embedded in my psyche, I'm sure. And that opening song is just a classic.

Video Games

-- Axiom Verge: To call this game a "Metroidvania game" both is dead on, and totally wrong. Really, to me it is more "like what you felt Castlevania or Metroid was, when you played it as a 7-year-old and thought it was." This game captures the feeling of there being more behind the scenes, of a greater world, of hidden passages and discovery. The controls are tight, the art is gorgeous, the soundtrack is perhaps my favorite ever, and I love the main character, Trace. Even while some of the story beats are sort of expected, how they are handled and where they go I found really interesting.

Anime

-- Mushi-Shi - Next Passage: This is technically the second season, but I didn't know that going in and you really don't need to have watched the first one. (I haven't yet, but I want to!) What I love is that this series is much more like many short stories strung together. It's quiet and slow-burning, but it's got a lot of emotional weight and beauty. Plus the folklore in and created for it is just awesome for anyone who likes history or myths.

Manga

-- From Eroica, with Love: Okay, I mentioned this one in my Day 1 post, and wanted to expand a little. Like I said there: this not-quite-BL was first published in the 1970's, so you've got to sort of have an idea of what that entails. It's tropey, it's got some pretty questionable if not outright cringey humor, and the first story is... it's bad, and it's nothing like the rest.

But then Iron Klaus shows up, and he steals the show. No, really. The mangaka has talked about how he showed up and was supposed to be the bad guy, but then totally changed the series from then on out.

And he's amazing, and was amazing for his time. When Eroica was being published, Germans were constantly only portrayed as Nazis in media. Having Klaus as a sympathetic and upstanding antagonist made the series beloved and popular in Germany. How Yasuko Aoike delves into his and his family's history, how WWI and WWII impacted them, is just... really fascinating.

I have loved Iron Klaus for years, and he is well-worth the slog through the less-than-ideal aspects of the manga.

-- The Ancient Magus Bride: If you can't tell, I love fantasy and folklore. The Ancient Magus Bride is absolutely fascinating in that department for me, because it's a spin on English folklore through a native Japanese woman. While they clearly has done her research, there is just this sense of everything being new, and having this novel twist to it. Although some may be turned off by it technically being a romance, I feel like it really has way more to offer than just that, and if you look at it as the fey-bride situation it is, it even delivers a lot in that area too.