Fandon Mashup | Those of Wit and Learning

Fandom Mashup is an original featured created and hosted by the lovely Micheline @ Lunar Rainbows Reviews. Each week she proposes a unique fictional scenario and then invites you to build a dream team of five fictional characters from five different fandoms to help you to complete the task. Make sure you check out Micheline's blog for more info!

This week we're choosing five characters whom we think belong in Ravenclaw! Ravenclaw's my Hogwarts House, so this was a lot of fun...

Evelyn 'Evie' Carnahan from The Mummy (1999)

I will never, ever be bored of The Mummy; it's one of my favourite films and a lot of that is down to this lady. She's bookish and scholarly and learned, but also adventurous and brave, and she isn't mocked for her enthusiasm by the people who matter. Evie wants to be an academic, so she'd definitely be in Ravenclaw.

Belle from Beauty and the Beast (1991)

Any woman who can get as excited about a library as this woman does belongs in Ravenclaw. The 2017 Belle also belongs in Ravenclaw, especially being an inventor, but I prefer the original and the 2017 Belle looks an awful lot like another Hogwarts student...

Cosima Niehaus from Orphan Black

Cosima is a proud nerd and super smart, and while I'm sure Ravenclaw is full of bookish people I think the kooky, more Luna-esque people are sometimes forgotten about. Ravenclaw will have as many scientists as more artsy lovers and I think Cosima would find a lot of like minds there willing to help her with her experiments.

Samwell Tarly from Game of Thrones

He and Belle can nerd out over the Hogwarts Library together, and if Samwell could go to boarding school it'd mean having time away from his horrible father.

Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

We know Elizabeth loves books, but that's not the reason I'd put her in Ravenclaw. For me Elizabeth is a character who encapsulates 'Wit beyond measure is man's greatest treasure'. She loves to play around with speech, is constantly verbally sparring with other people even when, like Mr. Collins, they don't realise it. She'd definitely be at home in Ravenclaw.

Who would you put in Ravenclaw?

Top Ten Tuesday | All the Single Ladies

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature created at The Broke and the Bookish. Each week you compile a list of ten books which coincide with that week's theme. You can find everything you need to know about joining in here!

Happy Valentine's Day! This week's theme is all about romance, and as I talked about my favourite OTPs last year, I figured this year would be a good opportunity to talk about the characters I think should have remained single.

Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games trilogy: Sorry Peeta fans (specifically Shannon @ It Starts at Midnight), but I hate the ending of Mockingjay. My ideal happy ending for Katniss was for her to live somewhere peaceful with Prim and if that couldn't happen then I wanted her to either live alone or die. I know that sounds grim, and I understand the comfort she probably finds in Peeta because he's gone through so much of what she's gone through, but I hate the way people use Peeta against her. I wrote a whole post about it here if you're interested.

Rachel Green from Friends: The more I re-watch Friends, the more I realise Rachel should have stayed on the plane. Ross is a pretty awful person and he consistently makes her choose between him and her career and it pisses me off. When they're first dating he's constantly looking down on her interest in the fashion industry, but if someone says they're not interested in science it's like they just told him Santa isn't real. He's a hypocrite and I don't like him, and to be honest by the tenth season I think Rachel and Joey have way more chemistry.

Juliet Capulet from Romeo and Juliet: SIX PEOPLE DIED. This applies to Romeo too, I guess, but to be honest Romeo's always seemed pretty flaky to me while Juliet has all these amazingly violent monologues throughout the play and has always felt like the more fleshed-out character to me. I understand that she doesn't just want to marry some stranger her father picks out for her, but was there really no other option for her than a whirlwind romance that KILLED SIX PEOPLE? Come on, Juliet, you're better than that.

Jane Eyre from Jane Eyre: I think Jane and Mr. Rochester have amazing chemistry but let's be honest: Rochester is a problematic fave. Let's not forget that he literally locked his wife in the attic and then lied to his second wife about it. What exactly in that scenario suggests great husband material?

Sansa Stark from Game of Thrones: In no way can Sansa's marriage to Ramsay Bolton be described as a relationship because he was abusive and she was in no way able to give any form of consent. Really I'm just angry the writers gave her that storyline at all; she deserved better than to be abused in that way, especially after already spending so long at Joffrey's mercy.

Tauriel from The Hobbit movies: I love the fact that someone thought 'we can't ask little girls to sit through 9 hours of film without a single main female character', but they butchered any progress when they created Tauriel just to act as eye candy. There didn't seem to be any depth to her character, instead she was a watered-down mix of Eowyn and Arwen.

Marianne Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility and Lydia Bennet from Pride and Prejudice: I'm putting these two together because I think they'd be good friends if they met, and I'd love to see the two of them travelling around Europe together, Marianne could play her music and Lydia could act on the stage, because frankly they both deserved better marriages than the ones they end up in. Especially Marianne, because at Lydia can hold her own and still have a bit of fun with Wickham, whereas Marianne gets a General who, while he may be lovely, is far too boring for her.

Desdemona from Othello: Othello's a prick. That is all.

Anna from Frozen: Elsa won't let her marry a guy she's known for a day, but apparently a guy she's known for two days is fine. I don't really like Frozen anyway, I think it's full of plotholes and one day I may write a post about it, and this is one of the reasons why. It tried to be witty with its 'oh isn't it funny how Disney princesses marry men they barely know?' only to repeat the same mistake.

Snow White from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The Disney one's fine, albeit old-fashioned, but in the original tale the Prince carries Snow White away while he thinks she's dead, only for the apple to dislodge from her throat and wake her up. In other words, the original Snow White marries a necrophile. Poor girl.

What did you talk about this week?

When Does Defensive Become Pushy?

We all have our favourite books and our favourite characters, those stories and the people in them that we'd go to the ends of the earth to defend. But when does defensive become pushy?

Sometimes it can be hard to sit back while another person talks about how much they dislike the stories that we adore, or how much the characters we hold dear grate on their nerves, but do we always need to jump to the defence of the stories we love?

Everyone's entitled to their own opinion - imagine how boring the book blogging world would be if everyone felt the same way about everything! - and if a fellow reader doesn't like something that we covet, often the best thing for us to do is to just accept it and move on, because ultimately it doesn't matter if another reader doesn't love the same things we love.

This isn't necessarily the case 100% of the time. Personally I think it's great to start a discussion (a friendly discussion!) with another reader if their dislike of something seems misinformed. For example, even though I no longer watch Game of Thrones I will always defend Sansa Stark when I stumble across someone who claims they don't like her because 'she's a stupid little girl and it's her fault everything goes wrong'. Ultimately if I were a twelve/thirteen/fourteen year old girl in Westeros, I'm sure I would have made exactly the same decisions that she did, and if you can watch a show like Game of Thrones that's full of rapists, murderers and bullies in every shape and form and the character you hate most is a teenage girl, you have problems my friend.

my sweet summer child

But if I saw someone say something along the lines of 'I don't like Hermione Granger because, despite being able to do magic, there are times when she's quite close-minded, such as her initial attitude towards Luna and her inability to understand that just because she wants to help the house elves that doesn't necessarily mean they want her help and she should respect that'. That's a well thought out argument, so why would I question it? If anything I love reading opinions like that because it gives me something to consider that I haven't thought of before, and that's what's so great about the book blogging community!

That's not to say that every opinion about a story or character we have needs to be backed up with evidence - the example I used is probably a rather extreme one - because ultimately you don't have to justify your opinions to anyone if you don't want to. Mira Grant's Feed is one of my favourite novels of all time, but opinion of it is very divided. I love it to pieces, but I don't feel the need to sing its praises and shove my love for it down the throat of someone who didn't like it. One of the criticisms I often see is that there's too much world-building within the narrative and it slows the story down - I think that's fair criticism! Personally I really enjoyed all that information, but I can understand why other people found it dull and felt as though they were wading through it to get to the action.

This post simply comes from a place of personal frustration. It happens to me more 'in real life' than in the book blogging world, but whenever I've mentioned my dislike for The Great Gatsby in the past, for example, it's as though every Gatsby lover within a 50 mile radius jumps out of the nearest crack in the pavement and talks at me about all the reasons why it's the most amazing, splendiforous book of all time. And I don't care.

It's the same with anything else in life. If I told someone I don't like carrot cake, I wouldn't expect them to go and buy a slice and then shove it down my throat until I loved it because that sure as hell wouldn't make me love it. You could buy me a slice of carrot cake and ask me if I wanted to try some and I might try some, but I also might not!

Is cake a bad metaphor?

Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with the people who say something along the lines of 'Oh it's a shame you don't like The Great Gatsby; it's one of my favourites', it's the people who look at me like I just told them I tied a piranha to my shoe and kicked Santa in the face that are the problem.

Sometimes I see people putting little disclaimers at the top of blog posts apologising in advance that they're going to be talking about how they didn't like a particular book or a particular character, and I hate that. Why do we have to apologise for the way we feel? More importantly, what could have warranted that apology other than a past experience in which a fellow reader has been very vocal about how shocked and appalled they are by our opinion?

Of course there are the cases in which another reader may be more informed than we are. For example, if I were to read a book in which a character had an abortion and, for the sake of this argument, I thought their decision had been wrong, I think it's perfectly fair for another reader who may have had an abortion to pipe up and tell me I was out of order because everyone's body is their own, and unless you are in a situation like that you can't possibly decide what's right and what's wrong.

One of the things I love most about the book blogging community is discussing the books I love (and the books I don't!) with fellow book lovers, and I whole-heartedly believe that book bloggers are some of the friendliest bloggers on the internet. We all have the right to defend the stories we love and we all have the right to talk about what we didn't like, but sometimes we also need to take a step back before we jump in with our defence and respect each other's opinions. Think how boring blogging would be if we all felt the same!

What are your thoughts on the matter?

Monthly Wrap-Up | April 2015

Is it just me or did April fly by? It went so quickly! It's actually a little scary how quickly 2015 seems to be going, so I try not to think about it too much. Things at work got a lot busier last month, but I still managed to read quite a bit and have a pretty good month!

Ms. Marvel, Vol.2: Generation Why by G. Willow Wilson, Adrian Alphona and Jacob Wyatt (4 Stars)

Reviewed here!

Copperhead, Vol.1: A New A Sheriff in Town by Jay Faerber, Scott Godlewski and Ron Riley (4 Stars)

Reviewed here!

Well-Read Women by Samantha Hahn (5 Stars)

Fables, Vol.1: Legends in Exile by Bill Willingham, Lan Medina, Steve Leialoha, Craig Hamilton and James Jean (2 Stars)

Reviewed here!

Little Beach Street Bakery by Jenny Colgan (3.5 Stars)

Reviewed here!

American Vampire, Vol.2 by Scott Snyder, Rafael Albuquerque and Mateus Santolouco (4 Stars)

Reviewed here!

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (4 Stars)

American Vampire, Vol.3 by Scott Snyder, Rafael Albuquerque and Sean Murphy (4.5 Stars)

Reviewed here!

The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler (2 Stars)

As you can see I'm still loving graphic novels - in fact I enjoyed all the ones I read bar one - and I was able to read a bit more work from Shirley Jackson and Jenny Colgan. Very, very different authors, but I enjoy both of their books!

GAME OF THRONES IS BACK AND I AM VERY NERVOUS.

I'm very, very, very worried about Sansa and I want to take her away from all of the creepy men in her life. I want her and Arya to let Brienne take them to Dorne, and then I want the three of them to stay there in the land where they don't hurt little girls.

STOP HURTING HER!

As always I'm tired of the constant female full-frontal nudity. Do we get to see any dicks? Nope. Now I'm not saying I want to see a dick because, sorry boys, they're not particularly attractive, but I think it's only fair we get male full-frontal nudity, too. I'm sick of the way women are treated in this show, and I know a lot of people wonder why I watch it if there are so many issues with it, but the truth is none of these issues are going to be solved if we all just turn a blind eye. If something's wrong we have to acknowledge it and try our hardest to fix it, not just pretend it isn't there.

On the completely opposite end of the scale, I also watched the 1995 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility last month. I'm probably never going to get around to reading all of Jane Austen's books because unfortunately I've never really enjoyed her books that much, but I do enjoy the storylines whenever I've watched an adaptation in the past. I love Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet, and it was certainly a nice film to sit back and watch, but honestly I found it a little boring and I didn't particularly like the ending. I feel like both Marianne and Elinor deserved better.

I bought myself the season 2 boxset of Orphan Black and I've been watching that again, along with my Dad, in preparation for season 3 which isn't in the UK yet. Boo! It's such a good show, and so far my Dad seems to be enjoying it, too, which is quite something! I think I get my fussiness about TV shows from him...

This has nothing to do with watching Season 2, this is just one of my favourite Felix quotes.

Oh, and my brother-in-law went to see The Avengers: Age of Ultron. I thought it was alright. It was entertaining enough to watch but I'm not a massive superhero fan, although I do love the new Ms. Marvel comics. I'm more of an X-Men girl than an Avenger girl.

I had a great blogging month in April. I took part in the A-Z Blogging Challenge for the very first time and I did it! I was really proud that I actually managed to schedule my posts so I was never typing something up at the last minute, and though I missed a few days (three, I think - I couldn't think of any authors whose surname began with Q, U or X) I wrote something for the majority of them. The only thing I really failed at was regularly looking at other people's posts, which is very naughty of me, but to be honest I just wanted to take part in the challenge to see if I could do it, and I could!

Because I was on such a blogging high I wrote a bunch of other blog posts, too; not only for April, but for this month, too. I have a lot of posts scheduled already, which is good because May's going to be a very busy month at work.

It was Easter last month - hooray! I had a pretty quiet Easter, not that it's a holiday I've ever done anything special for, it was nice to get a few days off work. My sister and her family came to visit and on Easter Sunday we all went to Folly Farm, which is a diabetes-inducing name of a local zoo/farm. There's everything there from pigs to giraffes to lions to owls, and it was a really nice day weather-wise, too!

I found myself in Swansea a couple of times last month, too. For any of you who might not know I live in south Wales, and one of my friends from my MA course recently moved back to Swansea (she did her BA there, but her MA in Lancaster like me!) so it's been nice to have a friend nearby. The two of us went to a book launch together - the launch of New Welsh Short Stories, published by Seren Books where I work! - and then on the last Sunday of the month I travelled through to Swansea to go to a new book club that my friend has started.

There were six of us in total who turned up - which actually worked out really well because we read The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler, which just so happens to have six main characters! - and while I knew two of the ladies already, one of them being my aforementioned friend, I also met some really lovely new people. It was a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to the next meeting where we'll be discussing Terry Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment!

The book club doesn't have a theme exactly, but those of us who attended the first meeting are all really interested in gender, feminism and sexuality, so if that sounds like your kind of thing and you happen to live in the south Wales area why not join us? You'd be more than welcome! Check out the Facebook and the Twitter.

How was your April?

Is Daenerys Westeros's Henry VII?

Many of you may already know this, but George R. R. Martin was inspired by the Wars of the Roses when he began writing his A Song of Ice and Fire series. The Wars of the Roses were fought between the Houses of Lancaster and York, a war that culminated in the decisive Battle of Bosworth which left Richard III dead, thus ending the line of the Plantagenets, and sat Henry Tudor on the throne, thus beginning the Early Modern age.

By no means do I think A Song of Ice and Fire is merely a fantastical retelling of historical events, but it's difficult not to notice little tips of the hat to figures and events in history which inspire and influence some of the characters in the series.

At first glance, Daenerys Targaryen and Henry Tudor couldn't be any less alike. Daenerys is a beautiful young woman - quite literally the Mother of Dragons - whereas Henry Tudor is a shrewd and ambitious young man who whole-heartedly believes in his claim to the throne. That's where their similarities begin. Henry believed the English throne was his birthright - his mother was a descendent of Edward III, while his father's half-brother was Henry VI - while Daenerys was told similar things about Westeros by her brother, Viserys, thus instilling in her the adamant belief that the Iron Throne is rightfully hers.

Both Daenerys and Henry grew up across the water, waiting patiently until they could build up an army to travel across the seas and take what they believe to be theirs.

Pembroke Castle

Daenerys was born on Dragonstone, not in King's Landing, and when her life was threatened she and her brother, with the help of some loyal retainers, were able to escape to the Free City of Braavos. Henry was born in Wales, in Pembroke Castle (his uncle, Jasper Tudor, was Earl of Pembroke), to his incredibly young mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, who was only 13 years old when she gave birth to him. When Henry was 14 and Edward IV, a Yorkist, came to the throne, Henry fled to Brittany for fear that staying in England would be too dangerous for him.

Elizabeth of York

He stayed mostly in Brittany for the next 14 years until he decided the time was right to take the throne from the increasingly unpopular Richard III. Henry pledged to marry Edward IV's eldest daughter Elizabeth (you can read more about Henry and Elizabeth's relationship here!). His betrothal to Elizabeth was important as, with the supposed deaths of her brothers, she was the heir to the throne should her childless uncle die. Daenerys is also certainly no stranger to marriage for the sake of conquest, and much like Henry and Elizabeth's relationship, her relationship with Khal Drogo was genuine affection which blossomed within an arranged marriage. 

Catherine of Valois

His first attempt to invade was unsuccessful, but with the support of the French - after all, Henry's paternal grandmother was Catherine of Valois - a second invasion was successful, landing him in Pembrokeshire, near his birthplace, where the Welsh people fervently supported him. Some of them even believed him to be Y Mab Darogan - "The Son of Prophecy" - a figure from Welsh legend who would free the Welsh from English oppression. Previous contenders for the title were figures such as Llywelyn ap Iorwerth and Owain Glyndŵr, who may be familiar to those of you who are fans of Maggie Stiefvater's Raven Cycle.

Henry was no fool. He knew exactly how important Welsh support would be if he was to take the throne from Richard, and so when he met Richard on the battlefield he brandished the Welsh flag on his standard. We're pretty much all familiar with the Targaryen sigil, right? Unsurprisingly, their sigil is a dragon. How many of you outside of the UK are familiar with the Welsh flag?

The Welsh flag

Yep. Turns out Henry had a dragon on his flag, too.

I think we can all agree that Daenerys and Henry are not at all replicas of one another, but I think there are certainly enough similarities there to show the historical influences on Martin's epic series.

What do you think? Are there any other characters you think have links to certain figures from history?

What's Up Wednesday! | 16/04/14

What's Up Wednesday is a weekly blog hop created by Jaime Morrow and Erin L. Funk as a way for writers and readers to stay in touch!

What I'm Reading

At the weekend I finished my first Shirley Jackson novel, The Haunting of Hill House, and I really liked it; I'm really eager to read more of her work now, particularly her short fiction - I still haven't read The Lottery!

I'm also currently reading three other books: I'm still reading Maria V. Snyder's Scent of Magic, I'm about a third of the way through Essie Fox's The Goddess and the Thief (which is a great read for fans of Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone) and I've just started Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, for the third challenge in the Hogwarts House Reading Challenge! I've been meaning to read Good Omens for a while now, so I'm really excited to have finally started it! 

What I'm Writing

Honestly I've been a bit naughty this week because I've barely done any writing. I've started to realise that the LGBT retelling of Beauty and the Beast I've been working on could be stretched into something longer than a short story, but I don't want to start writing another novel when I'm still working on Bloodroot and Bracken.

I've also been making notes on a shiny new idea I've had this past week, which is also historical/paranormal fiction. I can't seem to be able to break away from the genre, but I don't care!

What Inspires Me Right Now

Again, reading! So far April's been a great reading month for me, and there's nothing more inspirational than learning from published writers!

What Else I've Been Up To

On Friday I went to see Noah. It was... interesting. It wasn't the worst film I've ever seen but it wasn't spectacular either; it was nice to see the story of Noah being portrayed in a darker way, it is basically an end of the world story after all, but it felt as though the director had had too many ideas that he simply mashed together, meaning that the end of the film felt like the end to a different film than the one I started watching at the beginning.

Before I went to the cinema I had a look in The Works and came out with three books for only £5 (how could I resist?). I got myself copies of Stephen King's The Green Mile, Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora, and Charlotte Brontë's The Professor. I'm not a big fan of Stephen King's novels but I really like the film adaptation of The Green Mile, and I've heard great things about the book.

Then on Saturday I met up with two of my friends in Cardiff, neither of whom I've seen for quite a few months, so it was lovely to catch up! I always enjoy going into Cardiff - the shops are great - and while I was there I bought myself a little jar that looks like a honey pot (it's so cute!) so that I could make myself a TBR jar.

I've been wanting to make a TBR jar for a while now, and the bonus challenge for Ravenclaw in the Hogwarts House Reading Challenge is to make a Ravenclaw-themed book jar. So after I bought my jar I bought some blue paper to write all of my unread books on (shockingly, I own 128 unread books!), and then I made a blue and 'bronze' easter chick; I'll just pretend they're eagle chicks!

And of course I'm still watching Game of Thrones and Hannibal, and they're both so good! The latest episode of Game of Thrones was just brilliant, whereas the latest episode of Hannibal broke my heart a little bit. Poor Dr Chilton, he's grown on me. 

I've also started watching The Crimson Field, which is a historical drama about a group of women who journey to France during the First World War to work as volunteer nurses. I've only watched the first episode so far but I really enjoyed it, and I highly recommend it!

I feel like I could use their expertise myself, the past couple of days one of my wisdom teeth has been really sore, so it looks like I'm going to have to go to the dentist and see if it's growing through like it should be or if I need to get it removed. Hopefully it feels worse than it is!

What's new with you?