My husband and I have been having a wonderful time re-watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine together. We just finished up the sixth season tonight, and were watching the extras on the last disc. Included among the extras was an interview with Nana Visitor who played Major Kira Nerys.

( Kira rules. Find out why below the cut. )

Last one! Whew!

Title: Please Remember Me
Pairing: Lina/Gourry, Zel/Amelia
Words: 13036
Plot: A lovely day turns deadly when a monster attacks, leaving Gourry to find a new purpose in life.
Warning: Major character death.

( Chapter 4: Please Remember Me. )

Title: Please Remember Me
Pairing: Lina/Gourry, Zel/Amelia
Words: 13036
Plot: A lovely day turns deadly when a monster attacks, leaving Gourry to find a new purpose in life.
Warning: Major character death.

( Chapter 3: When You Feel As If You Simply Can't Go On. )

Had to break it up because it was too large for one post.

Title: Please Remember Me
Pairing: Lina/Gourry, Zel/Amelia
Words: 13036
Plot: A lovely day turns deadly when a monster attacks, leaving Gourry to find a new purpose in life.
Warning: Major character death.

( Chapter 2: When the Dark Night Seems Endless. )

Yes, I wrote two fanfics back in the day, and in honor of the new The Slayers series, I'm reposting one. The other I'm taking down because it's my version of the fourth season, and I always maintained I would take it down if they ever did a bona fide 4th season. It's a weird thing with me.

Title: Please Remember Me
Pairing: Lina/Gourry, Zel/Amelia
Words: 13036
Plot: A lovely day turns deadly when a monster attacks, leaving Gourry to find a new purpose in life.
Warning: Major character death.

( Chapter 1: If I Could I Would Always Keep You Safe. )

Third and final essay, and the one most dated by my current knowledge of fandom (Slayers was my first on line fandom). Ironically I think it's the first essay I wrote. I must also comment that in the case of Zel/Lina, people were strongly arguing that they were a cannon couple like the Harry/Hermione people, which bothered me more than anything. Ship whatever couple you want, but don't try to argue that they're cannon just because you like them.

( My first and only foray into the shipping wars. Now I'm going to have to find some good Gourry/Lina fanfic. )

The second essay that I'm dusting off. Whoa, nostalgia trip!

( Where I gush about Amelia, Sylphiel and Gourry. Why is it that I never gushed over Zel? Hmmm... )

Many years ago, I got hooked on a series called The Slayers. It was the first of many anime series I watched. Time passed, I moved on, and then they surprised me by coming out with a 4th an 5th season! Well, I spent the last two days watching the new series. It's slow to start up, but good once it gets going, with some pleasant surprises. So now I'm going through some old Slayers stuff I wrote for a page that it long gone and letting them out to breathe.

( An essay where I gush on Lina Inverse below. )

A few years back, I worked in a field that is quickly becoming extinct in the United States. Basically I read newspapers all day looking for information that companies wanted. It was a nice gig, even if I did stop doing leisure reading for awhile at that time. While a lot of what I read was rather dry as it was a bunch of small city newspapers (where the daily activities of a pre-school class was newsworthy, not kidding), there was occasionally something very interesting. One was an article about the Winchester Mansion.

( I don't believe in ghosts in the like, but I find the mythology behind it intriguing. )

Miep Gies died today at age 100. She was one of my personal heroes, even if she never thought of herself as one. In some ways, I can see why she would be reluctant to take the title. Though she was among a group of co-workers who risked their lives to hide Anne Frank and her family, as well as the van Pels family and Fritz Pfeffer from the Nazis during World War II, the three families were found. Of the eight people they tried to save, only one, Anne's father Otto, survived.

Nothing can replace a human life, and I can't even begin to imagine what it would feel like to try so hard to save the lives of eight people and fail. Yet it is because of Miep Gies that we even know about their existence.

After the Franks, van Pels, and Mr. Pfeffer were taken into custody, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl went up to the attic and found Anne's diary lying on the floor. Ms. Gies had the quick thinking to gather the diary before the Germans returned the the attic and locked it in her desk where she kept it until the war had ended. It's worth noting that if the Nazis had found the diary, Miep Gies and the five other people who helped hide Anne Frank and the others would have been killed because they had been specifically named in hiding them. Just keeping the diary was dangerous.

When Otto Frank was liberated from Auschwitz and had returned to Amsterdam, he stayed with Miep Gies and her husband while he tried to find what happened to his family. When he learned that Anne and Margot would not be coming home, Miep Gies gave him the diary.

One thing people don't realize is that during World War II, people were not aware that the Holocaust had happened. My grandmother was a teenager at the time the war was on, and says she was shocked to learn about the Holocaust when she went to college after the war had ended. She had no idea that such an atrocity was being committed while she was worrying about the fact that her socks didn't match. The publication of Anne's diary helped open peoples' eyes to the horrors the had been perpetuated under Hitler's regime.

Anne Frank became the symbol for the loss suffered under the Holocaust, and is the most recognizable victim. Though it is but a shallow substitute for the life she was robbed of, her voice lives on.

Thanks to Miep Gies.

She wasn't able to save them. But she ensured no one would forget them. And that is heroic.

There's a lot of criticism in fandom over the way women, POC, people who are different abled, and GLBT are presented. As always, some of it is warranted, some of it is not. The saying goes that constructive criticism is important because if you don't know what's wrong then you won't know what to fix. There's truth to that. There's also problems with it.

( I'm only hearing negative, no, no, no, bad! (Any other Lisa Loeb fans?) )

One night last year I was forwarded a performance of Susan Boyle singing "I Dreamed a Dream" from "Les Miserables." I know most people expected her to be a laughing stock before she sang. I didn't. I expected her to be one of those uplifting people who showed the crowd not to judge people based on looks or mental ability. So instead of being uplifted like so many were, I was just annoyed at the fact that people still are judging books by their covers.

( This was coming long before I saw Glee but it helped put the pieces together. )

I sort of celebrate Christmas. I was raised by Secular Humanists who decided to take the "peace of Earth, goodwill to all" message of it and celebrate the sentiment. We had a tree, did the Santa thing, baked a lot of cookies, and being a musical family, sang a lot of carols. The religious aspects were never really brought to light, though my mom did read Luke (I think) to us one year.( Long winded thoughts about the supposed War on Christmas below the cut. )

Once upon a time there lived three siblings. Their names were Mary, Elizabeth and Edward. They were all the children of a great monarch named Henry, but each of them had a different mother. Henry, even though he had cut his ties with the Catholic Church, still considered himself a Catholic, with himself as the head of the church instead of the Pope. Mary was also Catholic, except she never recognized her father as the head of the church. Elizabeth and Edward were members of the new, reformed Protestant faith, albeit secretly for as long as their father lived. Why is this at all important? Because even though they were all Christian, the very fact that they chose to express their faith differently tore their family apart and nearly tore their country apart.

( Important lessons for those who believe America to be a Christian nation below the cut. )

They say that as a teacher you'll be taught. I've also learned that as you start on a journey to become a counselor, you start with analyzing yourself. You read about couples therapy, you analyze your own relationship. You actually counsel a couple, and you thank your lucky stars that you're not as screwed up as them. You do family therapy and you start reflecting on the family you grew up in. And then you learn something about yourself that was holding you back, something you thought you had conquered a long time ago. At least that's how it was for me.

( Don't usually post stuff like this hear, but I need to write this out. )

OK, so I aw 2012 with my husband last night, and since he doesn't like it when I go into a feminist bitch fest after a movie I will do so here. Basically, the movie was ridiculous, but I was expecting that. Just lay back and be amused by the mass destruction. An yes, the mass destruction was massive fun. But one thing bothered me. All of the movers and shakers in the movie were men.

The president? A black man. That's fine. They could have been new and original and had a black woman as president, but they didn't. Vice president? Referred to as a man. Fine. But when they referred to the Speaker of the House as a man? When we currently have a woman in the position, not to mention one who shattered one hell of a glass ceiling to get there, well I got a little annoyed.

Because all of the scientists were men, too. Everyone informing policy decision? Men. With the exception of the president's daughter who helped to preserve precious pieces of art (even though she didn't know the true reason why she was preserving art. She was doing as she was told by a man), all of the women were just there. Events were just happening to them and they were just reacting to them or following the command of some man.

I cringed when, on a plane flight, whenever the pilots saw something amazing they called the MEN up to the cockpit, but decided the little ladies could stay in the back with the children.

Let's tally up the people who were in the movie for more than one scene.

Men: President, plastic surgeon/co-pilot, pilot, business man determined to survive, writer determined to survive, conspiracy theorist who blows the lid on the operation, scientist, scientist, corrupt politician, monk, wielder who smuggles people aboard the ark...

Women: Art person. Err...mother? Never did find out what she did aside from care for the kids and berate her ex-husband. And bimbo girlfriend of the business man, a grandmother, wife of a scientist who can't cook, and oh, the sole female politician from Germany who really didn't do much. Because it's the American politicians who have a say in policy after all.

Even the little boy in the movie does something constructive in the end and helped to save humanity (really, he did) while the little girl...er...she just looked cute and got put into danger and had to be rescued.

But then, this from the same producer/director who brought us the horrible American version of "Godzilla" which had some of the worst female characters I have ever seen (only to be knocked out of place this year by "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen", but that's a whole different rant).

Really, when most disaster movies at least throw a female scientist into the mix, this was disappointing.

Those who know me know I love Broadway. So it's no big surprise that I was watching a documentary on the making of The Phantom of the Opera. Unfortunately I do not remember the title of the documentary, but that's neither here nor there. I learned a lot of interesting things. I sort of knew, for instance, that the casting of Sarah Brightman as Christine Daae was controversial because she was married to Andrew Llyod Weber (the composer of the musical) at the time, but I did not realize how angry people were about it and how badly some wanted her to fail.

What really ticked me off was one of the people they interviewed, some sort of critic, saying that among the reasons she was not good for the part was because she was not really pretty. Now he did criticize her singing, but was the comment on her looks really necessary? Her looks don't affect her singing voice at all, nor her ability or lack thereof to act and dance. And to be honest, if you've ever been to a Broadway or West End show (for you British folks) then you know you really can't see the people on the stage well, unless you're rich enough to afford front row tickets. When seeing a Broadway show, all I don't really care how the performer looks. What I want is an amazing performance.

And in the end, Sarah Brightman did not fail. In fact, the Phantom helped launch her career in which she had won many awards.

So she might now be uber pretty. What the hell does that have to do with anything? So I decided to create this post as a shout out to successful women in show biz who didn't meet the conventional standards of beauty but succeeded anyway. Feel free to leave your own favorites in the comments.

And for you Phantom fans, here's a music video featuring Brightman with the original lyrics of "The Phantom of the Opera." Let me say, thank goodness they found a better lyricist and thank goodness they cast Michael Crawford as the Phantom, because this dude nearly got it instead.

Anyway, here are a few of my other favorites, and I'm sure I'll think of more. Janeane Garofalo, Fanny Brice (going WAY far back, I don't know if anyone else will know who she is!), Ellen Degeneres, and Aisha Hinds.

It's been a little over a week since I finished watching Battlestar Galactica, and the show is still very much with me. In fact, a week later I'm still processing it. ( More random musings below the cut. )

I don't know why I did it exactly. Perhaps it was because I had finished watching "Battlestar Galactica" yesterday and felt like I had lost an old friend and wanted something to fill the void. Or may be it was the interview with Charisma Carpenter that I just watched. Or my husband's pesky questions while I was watching the interview about what happened in "Angel," questions that I could not answer. Or may be it was all three. ( Whatever it was, I finally broke down and watched the first episode of 'Angel.' )