Falling Stars

I'm a diehard Tolkien fan. I read The Lord of the Rings at a formative age, and I fell in love with the story and the characters and the world. Probably the first canon I got deeply and passionately fannish about, before I even knew fandom existed.

So of course I wanted to see the musical, which is currently on at the State Theatre in Sydney, and will be continuing to tour.

Normally when I go to see a musical, my biggest question is, "Are the songs good?"

But I realised pretty soon, my question here was, "How are they going to fit a 1000 page book and a 9 hour film trilogy into a 3 hour stage production? (With intermission.)"

The answer? Impossible from the start, but insanely ambitious, made with love and care, and worth the attempt.


( The songs )

( The story )

( Highlights and observations )


The trailer for the NZ and AU tour:



Jemma Rix performs "Lothlórien":

Notes on Wake the Dead (Kill the Dead - Tanith Lee)

( Notes )

Notes on The Great Circle (Alliance-Union - CJ Cherryh)

( Notes )

It certainly has been A Year. A lot of family health stuff, and everything going on in the world.

( My fandom year )

( 2024 in review )

Happy New Year! Wishing you good things in 2025.

Still catching up on old posts, and this one is about Estival, the highlight of my Fallen London calendar.

This annual festival takes place in the northern hemisphere summer, and is a unique story every year. The first three years - 2021, 2022, and 2023 - had escalating drama and world-ending stakes, with players having to fight for the very survival of the city itself. After last year, the Failbetter Games team said they would need to reinvent Estival for the future, since it's impossible to keep endlessly raising the stakes, and players would just get "apocalypse fatigue". The official promo this year said:

Summer of 1899 has come around again, and with it, Estival: a time of celebration, intrigue, and, historically, disaster. This year, something stirs beneath the Labyrinth of Tigers, and London is awash with striped and toothy visitors. Closed to all visitors since the Fall, the Sixth Coil of the Labyrinth is opening at last – and the Court of the Wakeful Eye is holding a grand tournament to celebrate the occasion. The Coilheart Games will soon commence!

The Coilheart Games! An exciting idea to bring Fallen Londoners together, as well as spark healthy competition, in a carnival atmosphere. (Surely nothing can possibly go wrong?) It also took place in August, right around the time of the Paris Olympics, which gave an extra nice resonance.

I love Estival, so I always want to do a giant recap post, but that's probably why I've put it off until now. Anyway, I've just put together some notes and thoughts below. For a day-by-day recap of events:

Timeline of events (on the wiki)
Promo post 1 (before launch)
Promo post 2 (at launch)

( Notes and thoughts )

( Favourite scenes )

After a hectic Christmas Day and Boxing Day, time to dive into the Yuletide collection! And I am so incredibly lucky this year, to have received two fantastic gifts:

Title: unwritten
Fandom: Falcon Series – Mark Smith & Jamie Thomson
Tags: No Archive Warnings Apply, Falcon, Agidy Yelov, Book 1, POV Second Person, Alternate Timelines
Summary: You are Falcon. (Five timelines that never happened, all relating to the first book.)

I've been requesting this fandom every Yuletide since 2009, and finally some amazing person has made my wish come true! (Never give up your dreams!) I love a good five things fic, because it lets me have all these different stories rolled into one. I love seeing all these possible time travel adventures for Falcon and Yelov.

Title: Seasonal Companion
Fandom: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar
Tags: Major Character Death, Original Fallen London Character(s) & Original Fallen London Character(s), Original Fallen London Character(s), Urchins, The Noman, Developing Friendships, Christmas, Mortality, Worldbuilding, Child Lore, Poetry, (technically poetry), season of being exposed to the author's dubious rhyming skills, Yuletide 2024, Betaed
Summary: January 1899. A chance encounter between a Midnighter's doppelganger and an urchin with aspirations to poetry.

I've been playing Fallen London for over a decade, but I only made my first Noman this year. I kept it alive as long as I could, and though it inevitably melted away, the whole idea still hung around in my head. I love that this story captures that feeling, that a transient existence can still hold joy and friendship and meaning. (And how are any of us remembered in the end?)

Thank you so much, dear authors! You really make it feel like the most wonderful time of year.

1760 stories in 1156 fandoms in the Yuletide collection, and 350 stories in 272 fandoms in the Yuletide Madness collection. Happy Yuletide, one and all!

For all my love of anime, I know surprisingly little about its production. Animeta! is a manga by former animator Yaso Hanamura, and provides an insider view of that industry.

Miyuki Sanada is an aspiring animator, whose passion for it awoke from a chance episode of Royal Girl Pannacotta. As a newbie, she takes the exam to join N2 Factory Studio, and she starts at entry level, where we learn along with her.

Animeta! goes into detail about the nitty gritty of what goes into making anime, particularly cleanup, inbetweening, and - the holy grail - raw key animation.

* Key animation - The process of drawing the images that become the key moments of motion. The raw keyframes are the basis of motion of a cut.

* Cleanup - The process of tracing lines on the keyframes to create a clean copy, ie combining (1) the raw keyframe with (2) the animation director's corrections to that raw keyframe on (3) a new sheet of paper to create the finalised frame.

* Inbetweening - The process of adding frames in between the keyframes, so that the motion becomes fluid, not choppy.

* Inbetween checking - The process of checking the cleaned and tweened frames, to make sure they are neat and the motion is smooth. This can sometimes involve fully correcting work, ie redrawing the work from scratch instead of just correcting portions of individual frames.

All the technical details are really fascinating, and what Miyuki needs to do to level up her skills. Animeta! shows the magic of making something come to life on the screen, conveying the sense of movement and weight and emotion, the joy of seeing the three cuts you did appear in the finished movie, and seeing audiences respond in a way that gets that you put your heart and soul into it.

But. Animeta! is upfront about how gruelling the working conditions are. There's no getting past the existing reality of long hours and low pay, which leads to high turnover. Cleanup and inbetweening is piecework, ie paid by the frame. And only completed frames, not ones that have to be redone.

Inbetween checker Fujiko tells Miyuki early on: "If it takes you one hour to draw one frame, then you can complete twelve frames a day if you work twelve hours. For a TV series, N2 pays about 210 yen per frame for inbetween and cleanup. So if you're working twelve hour days with no breaks, that's 2,520 yen a day, or about 75,000 yen a month. That's before taxes, of course." (Though she later adds that there are a handful of top-tier animators who make 10 million yen a year.) And to take the exam to become a key animator at N2, the requirement is to do 500 frames a month for three months in a row as an inbetweener, or work as an inbetweener for two years and take the exam in the third year.

It's kind of depressing, in a way that most manga about striving to excel in your field isn't. Even when Miyuki progresses beyond those beginner stages and wages, there are new struggles and setbacks to overcome. The counterargument is, if making animation is your passion, is walking away something you would regret? There's no good answer to the question, except - what option will leave you with the fewest regrets?

The most recent volume came out in 2020. Even though the series is not marked as concluded, Volume 5 does end in a reasonably satisfying place, with Miyuki having made a major decision about her future.

Shaun Tan is one of my absolute favourite artists, and I'm always excited to see adaptations of his work. So when a stage production of Cicada was announced, I was keen to go.

When I told my friends, they were like, "But it's so sad!" and I was like, "What, really?" I'd only read the book once, so my memories were kind of fuzzy. I remembered the catharsis and transformation, and somehow forgot the gruelling journey to get there.

Shaun Tan notes the ambiguity (summary from his website):

Cicada is the story of an insect working in an office, and all the people who don't love him. It's a very simple 32-page picture book about the unspoken horrors of corporate white-collar enslavement... or is it? You never can tell what a bug is thinking.

Sydney Theatre Company presents it in a more upbeat way (summary from their website):

Cicada spends his days dutifully working away in a grey office. Overlooked by his superiors and overworked by his colleagues, he is getting very close to the end of his tether. But one day, looking out over the city from the rooftop of his office building, Cicada has an epiphany.

This puppet show is a collaboration between Sydney Theatre Company (where I saw it at Wharf 2 Theatre, The Wharfs) and Barking Gecko Theatre (who originally staged it at Studio Underground, State Theatre Centre of Western Australia). The cast were two puppeteers: one who performed Cicada, and one who performed most of the other characters. They were also costumed as office workers in suits, and played those roles in a few interstitial scenes.

Since they were expanding a 32 page picture book into a 55 minute stage play, I assumed that they would have to invent new content. And yes, secondary characters and subplots were fleshed out. But rereading the book afterwards, so much of it was already there! Just that a single line was unfolded into a full scene. It was a delight to see how it was done.

The play made full use of the language of theatre and the magic of stagecraft - the best of adaptation. Like scene setting through the puppeteers taking pictures out of a briefcase, which progressively zoomed in from a cityscape to street level to the interior of a single office building. Or portraying movement via a character running in place while objects moved past them.

Cicada is a cicada in a business suit. So cute and expressive! He has a glossy green carapace and big black eyes, but his face can't move, so it's really his body language that conveys all his emotion. The joy he starts off with, with his new job and his own desk, and then his reactions to everything that happens.

His nemesis is the Faceless Manager, aka Peterson Jr, of Peterson & Peterson. All the human characters are portrayed as two-dimensional walking suits, with no faces. He bullies Cicada relentlessly, including leaving a can of insect spray on his desk. But we see he also suffers from insecurity and daddy issues, and is trapped in the rat race.


( Spoilers )


I have to wonder what the kids in the audience made of it. A distorted depiction of corporate life? Or an accurate one?


Links:

Cicada (Shaun Tan's website) - Illustrations from the book, and an essay about his inspiration and ideas.

Digital program (Sydney Theatre Company's website) - Background on the stage play.


Trailer:

Dear Yuletide Writer,

Thank you so much for offering to write a story for me! I love all these fandoms, and I'm keen to see what you do in them! I've provided some prompts in case you're looking for inspiration, but I'd also love to see whatever other ideas capture your imagination.

For me, it's about the characters and their interactions. I'm not a stickler about researching canon details, as long as the spirit of the characters and the flavour of their world is there. I want to see adventures that might have been, or missing moments from between scenes, or a slice of their daily lives, or where the future might take them.

LIKES: Some of the things I enjoy in stories are: undying loyalty, personal bravery, risking self to protect others, displaying cool competence, big damn hero moments, special everyday moments, banter, hijinks, confessions exposing emotional vulnerability, conversations loaded with unspoken meaning, tough people showing a soft side, and soft people showing a tough side. Some of my favorite tropes and genres are: amnesia, angst with a happy ending, animal transformation, arranged marriage, bodyswap, cosmic horror, curtainfic, five things fic, getting together, hurt/comfort, marriage of convenience, mystery solving, requited pining, road trips, sex pollen, slice of life, stranded together, and time travel.

DISLIKES: I generally prefer optimistic stories in exchanges, so I'm not keen on anything that is brutally violent or hopelessly bleak. However, I don't mind darkness during the story, as long as there is a glimmer of light at the end. Endings that are bittersweet or ambiguous are also fine.

DO NOT WANT: Noncon, underage, bleak endings, crossovers, setting change AUs like high school, coffee shop, or omegaverse (but canon divergence AUs are fine).

RATING: I am open to gen or ships for these characters. For the latter, I'd enjoy anything ranging from unresolved sexual tension, to getting together, to established relationship. I'm fine with explicit sex, but it's usually not the most important part of the story for me.

STYLE: I'm fine with first, second, or third person. I'm fine with past or present tense. I'm fine with stories of any length, including stories that start in media res or consist of a scene that implies a larger plot.

POV: I'm open to stories from the point of view of a different character from the ones requested, especially if they provide an interesting perspective on the requested characters.

INTERACTIVE FICTION: I like interactive fiction and would welcome it.

AO3: I have gifts enabled and am open to treats.

I've listed more details under each individual request.

I hope this helps. Have fun writing!

Yours sincerely,

meteordust
(AO3 name Serenade)

***

( Request 1: Falcon - Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson (Falcon, Agidy Yelov) )

( Request 2: Fortress Series - CJ Cherryh (Tristen, Barrakkêth) )

( Request 3: Fallen London (The Noman) )

I started watching Babylon 5 thirty years ago, and always meant to get back to it someday. I restarted it two years ago, wrote up my thoughts on the pilot, and watched a handful of further episodes. I know I scribbled down notes on those too, but hell if I can find them now.

In any case, it feels way too daunting and deterring to commit to writing up reactions to every episode. So I'm just going to start watching again where I left off, and only post about it if the mood hits me. Because I really don't need another excuse to put this off again.

( Spoilery reactions )

I'd never heard of this musical before, but apparently it became a viral hit during lockdown? So when the Hayes Theatre put it on several weeks back, I thought it would be worth checking out.

The premise is that six teenagers wind up in limbo after a fatal accident on an amusement park ride - and have to compete in a singing competition for the chance for one of them to return to life.

I had no idea what to expect - was it going to be a downer, or at least bittersweet, or was there any hope of it being ultimately uplifting?

Overall, it was a fairly enjoyable experience. Though it was unsettling to see the characters in school uniforms, which emphasised just how young they were.

It worked well as one act with no intermission. Each character got a song, where we learned about them and their hopes and dreams, and they also revealed more of themselves through their interactions between songs.

Highlights for me were:

* "Noel's Lament" - Noel doesn't want to sing about his unglamorous job at Taco Bell, but about his fantasy alter ego, Monique Gibeau, a tragic prostitute in post-war France. Melodramatic and funny.

* "Space Age Bachelor Man" - Ricky's song about his own fantasy life of being the saviour of sexy alien cat people. Fun and inventive.

* "The Ballad of Jane Doe" - Jane's song about not knowing who she is or what her life was. Haunting and dramatic. (Apparently in the original production, she flies on stage? Here, they used revolving mirrors to create a sense of illusion, and it worked really well.)

( Spoilers )