a mite whimsical in the brainpan

So I meant to do a proper OMG YOU GUYS I'M INTO VIKINGS NOW post complete with picspam and articulate rec talk for those who aren't watching it yet, but turns out I'm too impatient and just want to flail about S02E09, so let's keep the intro brief, shall we?

I'm into Vikings now! I know some of you have been into it way longer than me - lol, you guys should've shoved this at me much harder! I also know some of you are not into it yet. To you I say, GET ON THAT, STAT. It is lovely and gritty and beautifully shot and has awesome characters and doesn't do that annoying "let's be super-anachronistic and pretend that's cool" thing that every historical show's been doing since at least Merlin.

It also has plenty to offer to active fandom.

Here's what convinced me:

1. This is Ragnar Lothbrok:



He is a Viking, doing Vikingy things. He's smirky and reckless and funny and okay, more than a little psycho at times. And sometimes he's a douche. But you root for him anyway. Because it's impossible not to.

2. This is Lagertha, his wife:



She is a shieldmaiden (hence gets to participate in all the badass Viking stuff in her own right and takes shit from no one) and is basically made of awesomesauce. If the entire show was shit, I'd still watch just for her. Girl is FIERCE.

3. This is Athelstan:



You may also know him as Grantaire from Les Miserables. Athelstan is a priest whom Ragnar takes prisoner on one of his raids and brings back home. He has an awesome character arc full of religious conflict and oodles of UST with Ragnar (Robin Hobb readers, there are lots of shades of Wintrow/Kennit here!). Which brings me to:

4. My shiny OT3:



It's fairly rare that a show offers up a convincing premise for a good threesome, so naturally I'm all over that! Sadly fandom seems to either not know how to actually do proper threesomes (all the fic I've seen so far was "Lagertha basically watches the boys get off and fiddles with herself a bit" which... no) and/or be mostly into the boys alone. Which is a compelling ship, absolutely! I just want my girl in there too *pouts*

5. Many awesome other characters, including Cato-from-Hunger-Games as Bjorn, Ragnar's son:



Perfect casting is perfect!

6. There's also Siggy, the Earl's morally ambiguous wife with the awesome eye make-up. I mostly ship her with meeeeeeeeeeeee.



Mroooooow.

I am aware that this mostly looks like "hey, watch for the pretty" but it is actually a pretty damn awesome show, trust me. I marathoned both seasons in 2 days because I couldn't stop. It is pretty grim at times (because duh, Vikings!) but never gratuitous, which I greatly appreciate after some of the crap that's been going on lately on other shows, like, OH I DON'T KNOW WHICH ONES, POSSIBLY GAME OF THRONES A LITTLE BIT YOU ASSHOLE CLUELESS DIRECTORS/WRITERS WHO DON'T SEEM TO KNOW WHAT RAPE IS. Ahem.


Anyway! Intro over! Let's flail about season two ep nine, ok???


SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT

( cut for spoilers )

Yeah so basically, it's nice to be into a show so much that you feel you could live there. And fix canon. Maybe. If you weren't so lazy. IDK how long this obsession is going to last but right now I'm just enjoying the hell out of it! :D

Dear Downton Abbey,

( Spoilers )

I really need to focus on something fun (something that isn't my boring monster job, lol) so: The lovely alsha and I just finished watching Skins series 4.

( And I intend to spoiler the hell out of this, so don't click if you don't want to be spoilered )

Anyway, GIEF NEXT SERIES NOW. *grabby hands*

I have cheated on Show *hangs head*

Okay, so I found mysteriously cheap mystery flight of mysteriousness which means I'm going to New York. YAY!!!! (Never mind that "mysteriously cheap" still means I'll be working my arse off to pay it off all year, eeeeek). Apparently this means that I am using my wee bit of spare time not to do useful things, but to watch other soaps, some of which will be representing at GOOL. Soaps not AWZ *gasps*

A wee while ago, lilithilien and I marathoned through Goede Tijden, Slechte Tijden on the fabulous GTSTfanMark's channel, and I gotta say I LOVE LOVE LOVE it. It was a bit slow to go anywhere initially but man, Lucas is such an awesome character and I love his relationships with pretty much everyone. Even the stuff that other people said was boring, like his arguments with his mum, I really, really liked. (That seals it, I will never listen to anything Anthony Langford says ever again, lol. Can't quibble about taste.) And now that the storyline is smack in the middle of high drama, scorching emotion and not one, not two, but THREE promising love interests for Lucas, I am all over it in a big way. It's funny, engaging, exceedingly well acted and just all around awesome. The only thing that utterly suucks is the music, but hey, I can live with that.

Then last night I was working late and ended up braindead but not tired, so I stayed up to watch what I hadn't seen of Gute Zeiten Schlechte Zeiten and am now caught up to current events. I had kept track of the storylines in spoilers and summaries previously and had watched part of it but hadn't really been hooked enough to keep going.

Overall opinion: Hmmmm-better-than-I-previously-thought-but-MEH-in-general. The storyline has some quite interesting parts (I actually quite dug the whole betrayal/gay-bashing thing) but I found it badly paced and populated by too many characters I just don't really care about. I really like Carsten and what Felix Isenbügel brings to the role, and his friend Dominik's a total sweetie, but those two were pretty much the only ones I really cared about, and Lenny... ugh, I have a big problem with Alexander Becht's acting. I've heard from many people that they have a problem with Lenny's character being so violent and issues-ridden - that didn't actually bother me because I like it dark, but the performance... well, let me just say that this guy should NOT go blabbing his mouth off in interviews about how he wants to get away from soap acting because it doesn't challenge him enough, lol. YOU ARE THE WEAKEST LINK, BECHT. (This makes me glad it's Felix coming to NYC and not Alexander.)

As a result, while I like some of the characters, I'm really not invested in the OTP and mostly just want to abduct Felix and/or see Carsten with a better love interest. On the whole, it was a lot more watchable than I thought after seeing some of the early clips, but colour me unimpressed.

As usually happens when I watch shows I'm less than blown away by (OH HAI, VL!), it did give me a renewed boost of OMG AWZ, HOW ARE YOU SO AWESOME *cuddles Show obsessively*

( They really like that swirly swirly ink swirl effect thing, don't they? )

Ok, the lovely alsha and I are off to watch HBP and then I can finally read all those spoilers that've been driving me... ok, largely indifferent, lol. But I still want to read them!

Now. How to get into a HP frame of mind within half an hour? Somehow I must achieve this feat. Otherwise I'm just going to sit there loudly wondering why nobody's skating and why Voldemort isn't played by Henning Heup:


And making audible EYEFLASH WHOOSH WHOOSH noises. And then I'll be killed by other cinema goers and my tiny fandom will cry (or I tell myself that it will, anyway).

Seriously, the huge disservice these morons did themselves by pushing this movie back so far? GAH. Half a year ago I was psyched out of my head for this. Now I feel like I've been going out with this movie for ages and for some lame reason we decided to hold off on the sex long past the point where it made sense, so now we've just reached this point where we're going, "Okay, fine, that special moment will not come. Let's just do it and get it over with," and then it'll be awkward and weird and we'll end up breaking up a week later, feeling vaguely cheated of the last half year of our lives when we could've been having lots of awesome sex with other people movies, and I think that metaphor has been streched quite long enough now, as has this sentence, so OKAY, OFF TO THE CINEMA! CONVINCE ME OF YOUR AWESOME PROWESS THAT WAS TOTES WORTH WAITING FOR, HBP!