It starts with doors.
Friends! Hello!
I’ve been thinking a lot about magical houses recently. To be honest, I’m nearly always thinking about magical houses, as magical houses are my very favourite thing, out of all the things. No matter the genre–fantasy, horror, sci-fi (because what is a starship is not a space-faring magical house?)–it can only be improved by a sentient house.
Surprisingly (because in retrospect it seems incredibly obvious), I only put together fairly recently that I like the things I like more if there’s a magical house in the mix, and perhaps not so surprisingly, the revelation came with assistance from fanfiction. I started reading Harry Potter fic for the first time literally the week that “What We Pretend We Can’t See” was posted, which is not only an incredible fic in the fandom, my favourite fic of all time (it’s arguably my favourite book), but also features a mad, wonderful magical house and is built around incredible magical house lore. It set a dangerous precedent, but also opened my eyes to my love of magical houses.
Doctor Who? Magical house. Stargate Atlantis? City-sized magical house. Howl’s Moving Castle? Duh.
(I’m skipping over artificial intelligence narratives here, because they deserve their own space, and reducing something like Ancillary Justice to “I like this because the spaceship is smart” would be doing it a grave injustice, but my enjoyment of them absolutely comes from the same place. That place is places-have-personalities-whether-they’re-actually-individuals-or-the-result-of-impressions-left-by-the-people-who-live-in-them. More on that in a bit.)
This specific time of intense thought about magical houses was brought to you by The House with a Clock in its Walls, which I went to see and enjoyed so much (the house is VERY magical!) that I borrowed the book from the library to read. The house in the book is much less magical than it is in the film, but that seems to be the case in a lot of properties (Howl included!). Adapting a book with a magical house? Time to ramp it the heck up. (Shout out to my screenwriter friend who worked on a television adaptation of a book which has a magical house in it and assured me that in her script, the house was much, much more magical.)
All of the things I’ve discussed here are made magical via different means, but the long and short of it is that I’m not picky when it comes to defining magical houses. I excitedly watched the pilot of the new Charmed remake last night, and the house in that show isn’t magic at all–merely filled with magical people. Forgive me a moment of new age woo-woo-ness here, but as much as I love a sentient building, it’s the people in a home which make it magic. My house is a little bit magic. Your house probably is, too.
Dog Thing
Mixed Media
A good movie: The Brothers Bloom. I was in the mood to watch a terrible heist movie, but neither of the Now You See Me movies are streaming anywhere, so I settled for a good heist movie, featuring one of my favourite people: Rachel Weisz. I hadn’t seen it in years, but it remains a delight.
A good book: Sylvester by Georgette Heyer. A few years back, Richard Armitage recorded audiobooks of three of Heyer’s works, and my library has all of them. I started with Sylvester and liked it so much that forcing myself to save listening to it for a long car trip was truly a challenge. It’s a delight, and explains so well why an entire genre of romance novels sprouted from Heyer’s work.
A good tv show: Guardian. I am fully obsessed with this show. Is it good? No. Well, half of it is good. Half of it is laughably bad CGI, just-okay-to-outright-bad acting, and clumsy and meandering exposition. But the other half? Damn, y’all. Guardian is a Chinese drama adapted from a web novel. The novel is a romance between two men, one human, and the other an extremely powerful ghost. The show isn’t a romance on the surface, except that it absolutely is. There’s pining, there’s reincarnation, there’s waiting tens of thousands of years for each other, there’s life-risking and sacrifice and–it’s so good and the actors who play the two main characters so talented that it full supports the rest of the show. I watched all 40 episodes in under a week. I’m now reading the novel. The first 5 episodes are on youtube (start here), but you’ll have to hunt for the rest. It’s worth it. Send me a message and I can tell you where I watched.
A good album: Be the Cowboy by Mitski. There was a period of time during this last month wherein I was listening to this album, in full, at least once a day. I adore it.
A good fic: “my heart broke lose on the wind” by sarahyyy. This is a Guardian fic, an AU in which Shen Wei is a professional chef with a youtube channel in his space time, and Zhao Yun Lan is a disaster who gets challenged by his coworkers to cook something for their team youtube channel. It’s just end to end a delight.
Also, in the vein of youtube AUs: “Necrophilia* and Other Crimes” by aceklaviergavin. Yuri!!! On Ice, Buzzfeed Unsolved AU.
Lastly
I LOVE THE NEW DOCTOR WHO
bye!
