The Marci Rating System

So I read this post by starandrea, and then I read this accidental primer for The King's Avatar by no_detective, and THEN I read this other post by starandrea, and finally I thought 'I guess I better check this out.'

It turns out the way to get me to watch something is:

1. starandrea likes it.
2. it's described as "low stress"

Seriously, I had a blast watching 'The Untamed,' but it was not a low stress show. Everything was always GRIPPINGLY IMPORTANT and THEY MIGHT DIE or maybe just CRY A LOT FROM THE SADNESS OF EXISTENCE. Also, there was a war.

'The King's Avatar' reminds me a lot of what I liked about Power Rangers, except the fighting parts are all virtual! Even better! (Now I don't have to worry about anyone's insurance premiums, or that extremely unlucky warehouse district.)

So, my initial reactions to 'The King's Avatar' were:

1. The music is great. OF COURSE IT IS. (I laughed out loud when the opening theme started. It felt like one of those 'they didn't have to go that hard, BUT THEY DID' moments.)

2. It took me a while to realize that the Internet cafe is LITERALLY right across the street from his old job. (This also made me laugh.)

3. HOODIES. Aww.

It was a Power Rangers kind of year!  Writing (possibly especially writing about teenagers) takes a certain kind of mental energy that I am not always able to generate or sustain — as evidenced by the fact that one of these isn’t a fic at all, and the other took something like eight months of off-and-on banging away at the keyboard to come up with a story I now only vaguely remember.  

Having said that, I re-read both of these before writing this post, and it was an overall pleasant experience.

1. a fic I’m not writing
(snippets from after the Power Rangers (2017) movie)

2. Run the Mountain
(a Rise / Power Rangers fusion, because high school might(?) have been better with superpowers)

Favorite quote:  “This is high school, not thunderdome.”

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.

How fanfic and Power Rangers made me enjoy movies more, a four paragraph essay by me:

Power Rangers generally has to fit all its character development into just a few minutes in each episode, so they use tons of shortcuts. ‘These characters are best friends, you can tell because they sat next to each other.’ Or ‘these characters are dating, you can tell because they’re wearing each other’s colors.’ Which really teaches you to read into those things.

Fanfic takes this to an entirely new level. Two characters once stood next to each other? Here’s a 100,000 word story describing their epic friendship. (::cough:: Inception ::cough::) And thanks to AUs of all kinds, even the wildest explanations for things seem potentially plausible. Characters exchanged an unusually long look? Are they psychic? Soul-bonded? Share a secret past? Body-swapped? Do they have amnesia? Did they just arrive from a different universe where they work in a coffeeshop together?

So now I feel like when I watch movies, I’m not actually watching the movie that was filmed. I’m watching the other movie, the better movie, that’s sort of running parallel to the one on screen, but in my head it keeps veering off on tangents like ‘if this had all been planned ahead of time as a ruse, the whole thing would be A) more awesome, and B) HILARIOUS.’

In conclusion: most movies that I watch make more sense and are more fun when I fanfic them in my head as I go along. (I do have to remind myself to be careful about saying things like, ‘yeah, I loved that movie!’ when what I really mean is, ‘I loved the version of that movie that I made up in my head while I was watching it!’)

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.

We have returned from our FLORIDA ADVENTURE! Things I did this weekend:

1. Successfully applied sunscreen while moving through various queues and crowds!

2. Shook hands with Princess Shayla! (Okay, Ann Marie Crouch, but she was super gracious.)

3. Wore a wetsuit! (Somewhat successfully? Anyway, it was on and now it is off, so I suppose that counts as a success.)

4. Wrote a Small Number of words for nanowrimo.

5. Am now the proud owner of two sweet tourist t-shirts, which I will absolutely be wearing to work later this week!

It’s a story for me! I love everything about it! starandrea is the best!

good choices (snacks in detention), by starandrea

“Oh, hey,” Billy said, like he’d forgotten they weren’t supposed to acknowledge each other too. “Jason brought snacks, but he says not to tell anyone.”

(Also, I love the idea of the team bonding with all the rest of the detention kids, because I really just want everyone to have a nice time and be okay.)

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.

1. This movie was approximately 10 million times better when I could fast-forward over the parts I didn’t want to see (both car crashes, most of Rita’s scenes).

2. I tend to watch everything with closed captioning on, because reading is easier than listening for me. (Also the sound quality on my laptop is not stellar.) Very helpful in this movie!

3. Zordon’s explanation makes less and less sense the more you think about it. Alpha’s too. You had 65 million years to come up with a better plan, buddy.

4. I absolutely headcanon that Jason’s sword keeps following him around like his power coin, and he can’t figure out how to get it to go away with the rest of his armor, so when he showed up at the ship to drop it off and Zordon was all ‘You should keep that,’ he was all ‘I’ll come back for it’ on the outside, but on the inside he was thinking ‘play it cool, ha, yes, I’ll come back for it, unless it just *shows up randomly* again,’ and he thinks *STAY* at it as loudly as he can before leaving.

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.

I didn’t watch any movies this weekend, but I did spend a lot of time thinking about the new Power Rangers movie.

And since I was just saying how I hadn’t seen any fan art for the movie, tumblr has now proved me wrong!

Check out this adorable art by Cahlac!

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.

Preview review: at no point in the movie did we see Zack do martial arts and/or a superhero pose on a train. Nor did we ever see all of them except one stand on a car and look at the night sky (ie. the poster). (But the poster is still cool, and based on their absolutely terrible decision-making skills when in cars, I’m totally okay with the omission.)

Movie review, based on the four things I said I wanted to see:

1. There’s no juice bar, but I’ll accept starandrea’s suggestion of either the detention room or the mine. A bunch of kids hanging out at a mine — not even an abandoned mine! — was super weird, but I did really like that everyone except Jason had seen each other there before. It’s like the non-sports-star students all have lives too! And do stuff! (Granted, they hang out illegally at an active mine, but whatever.)

1a. Way to go Billy being the only one (apparently) with a social group of actual supportive friends and acquaintances!

2. Flinging notes at each other was absolutely the cutest thing ever, and an acceptable replacement for the jump in the air, which would have seemed very weird in this movie-verse.

2a. Seriously, though, and not entirely related — I feel like they would run into trouble relatively quickly with Jason’s house arrest thing. You can fool the technology, but he lives with three other people; by the end of the movie at least one of them had figured out that he was nowhere he was supposed to be, since his dad was driving around looking for him.

3. I would say that the coins are harder to keep track of then a watch, but they seem to keep track of themselves — very convenient! They also seem to have the happy side effect of making phones waterproof.

3a. This raises a lot of questions for me about what Jason was doing at the end with his probably-not-called-a-spiral-saber thing. Did they keep the coins? Did the coins keep them? Can Jason just not figure out how to make his weapon go away with his suit? I AM CONFUSED.

4. The zords were specifically called dinosaurs, but they were not individually named, and none of them looked like a sabre-toothed tiger (which I know isn’t a dinosaur, but that never stopped them before). I am generally in favor of More Cats, but I would have been worried about them the whole movie, so at least there were no cats in peril?

4a. I liked this movie! Way more than I thought I would!

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.

Going way back for this one: Power Rangers epic.

Earthsiege, by Rain Fletcher

[note: link goes to part 1; there are 5 parts in total]

With all of the surely memorable scenes and lines from this fic, the one that comes to mind the most easily for me is when Bulk and Skull show up in the parking lot after Billy’s gone grocery shopping.

(I still had to Ctrl+F for the word ‘groceries’ to get the exact quote.)

“Looks like a lot of groceries for just one person,” Skull agreed. “What’s wrong, Billy? Don’t feel like coming back for a while?”

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.

If it’s snowing (which it is), it must be a good time for a “a snowy Christmas at an inn with a cat” fic, right?

Missing at Christmas, by starandrea

How quaint, Merrick thought irritably. A truck stop in the middle of nowhere. He was sure it was a far cry from the airport hotel where they had planned to spend the night, and he hadn’t been particularly fond of that place to begin with.

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.