This really bothers me...

I've already posted a longer ramble about this at jumping_off, but - shocking thought! - maybe not everybody reads jumping_off, so:

Would you say that this article implies that Ashley Pharoah also thinks that the ending of LoM is 'decidedly downbeat,' or is the latter just the opinion of the writer of the article? It's clearly not a quotation, but it is integrated with a quotation in such a way as to make it seem as if the quotation was derived from a conversation that contained that characterisation of the ending...

(Hey, those of you who have the series two boxset - can anything about whether the writers of the show think they wrote a happy or an unhappy ending, be inferred from the DVD extras?)

It is strangely gratifying, btw, to read an article in which the ending is called 'decidedly downbeat.'

It is also darkly amusing to see that - if I read this correctly - Pharoah thinks we objected to the ending because it was downbeat. Dude, no. I was the woman who kept clamouring for the show to end with Sam dying! I like dark stuff; I've written some seriously disturbing fic, or so I'm told. I keep killing my protagonists, too. So, yes, kill your protagonist, by all means. Even have him kill himself. Just... don't hand me pink glasses and expect me to feel it's a happy thing.

And also, either do try to give him a proper, understandable motivation, or make it a bit more obvious that he's really, truly and completely nuts.

And don't expect me to suddenly forget everything you've previously established about him. Take a page from (some) fanfic writers' book: you have to integrate your surprising ending with what we know about the characters and their world.

Roadmap

( Now all I have to do is drive. )

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Yes, this - probably - is the breakthrough that it looks like, folks.

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And now I'm off to do some well-deserved fic writing, and then some well-deserved sleeping. (It's odd how periods of No Communication fire up my fic writing. It's like there's a circuit in my brain that works a bit like this: "Need daily fannish fix! - Check for fannish communication partners! - None available: write fic instead!")

Speaking of No Communication: I'll be incommunicado for most of the next... ten days or so, starting tomorrow afternoon. It's my free week, so I'm going to try to get as much thesis writing done as humanly possible, and that is best done in a place where I don't have to take care of the daily cooking, shopping, dish cleaning etc. I *may* pop in again for a couple of days by the middle of the week, because there's some stuff to attend to near my flat, but other than that, I will be completely offline.