"I come not to bury Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, but to praise it ..."

If you hung out around the bargain books section at any time last year, you probably saw a copy of this book lying around. Big, single-colored (usually black) with just the name, author and a bird on the over. But most likely you didn't notice it unless you noticed how often it appeared. And if you did, you were like, "What is this book? Why have I never heard of it? And what right does it have to be so huge?"

The book has a pretty impenetrable description on its front flap, so I'm going to try to do a Yahtzee Croshaw-style summary.

It's the 1800s in England, but it's actually a fake England where a bunch of people used to be magicians but aren't anymore. Now anybody who calls themselves a magician just studies it. An old magician (Mr Norrell) who can actually do magic appears, and decides he should be the only magician because he's kind of a boring prick. He also establishes himself as working for the fake England government by selling out the wife of a minister to an evil faerie, but that's OK because nobody knows about it and he's helping fake England beat Napoleon.

Meanwhile, a young guy (Jonathan Strange) hears a prophecy saying he will become a magician and this will bring doom. Not even bothering to try to avoid sleeping with his mother (metaphorically), the young guy walks straight into the predestination paradox and decides he'll become a magician. He's inexplicably good at it, and Mr Norrell decides they should be BFF until they get into a tweedy scholarly pissing match about whether or not they should incorporate this one super-magician who had a Raven fetish into their work. This eventually leads to a break-up and they settle their differences by ushering on an apocalypse. Oh, and the evil faerie continues to do evil and the book has a lot of footnotes for every magical term the author made up.

[/lame imitation Yahtzee]

If all that doesn't sound like blockbuster book material, the publishing company didn't think so either. So they decided to release this book with the message that it was awesome but also tried to hide what the book was actually about. Of course, they were also hoping to sell it as literary fiction, because it's written in faux-Regency style, and not as fantasy, even though that's what it actually, y'know, is.

I've already wrote about how I think the critics pegging it as "Harry Potter for adults" and Neil Gaiman's recommendation also may have worked against the book, since people who actually bought were expecting something like Rowling or Gaiman's work and found it wasn't to their taste. So ... yeah.

But guys, ignore my sarcastic Yahtzee-style plot. Just know this. If you don't like classic novels, you probably won't like this book. Except for the war scenes (which are written less like mythic Tolkien-esque battles and more like how the media depicts actual war), there isn't any action until the last sixth of the book. So for many it might be 400 pages of set-up to 200 pages of happenings. Also, even before that, the first third of the book mostly concerns itself with Mr Norrell, who is surrounded by interesting characters (Goths might get such a kick out of his servant Childermass that they might get disappointed that he doesn't do so much. Heck, there's probably a woobievision Mary Sue fanfic out about him now.), but since he's a prick it's not so much fun. So ... this book requires a lot of patience to enjoy, which others may not like.

But I did! So I'll go into detail.

( Here be spoilers )

It's only been two hours since my last essay, time for another one!

So thinking about JS&MN made me think I should look for stuff on Y!Gallery a.k.a. the "Just When I Thought I'd Seen Every Bizarre Fetish in the Universe ..." site. This search was unsuccessful. (Always thought the search system was a load of crap, but nevermind.) So I decided, "Hey, let's check out the Silent Hill stuff."

What I Found Included
1.) Lots of Portraits of Pyramid Head. Some stuff of him having sex with James. I have to admit I was rather unperturbed by all this. Of course, I'd already gotten a somewhat of an inoculation when I found a link to not even a fanfic but QUOTES from a fanfic of a Pyramid Head/Mary Sue fanfic. They were so, so, so gross. So gross I wanted to puke and not in that way that everyone says "Oh, that made me want to hurl" but in that "Holy shit, I actually do feel the bile rising in my stomach and feel sorry that I ate for once." I actually think what made me puke was less descriptions of actual sex but more the descriptions of Pyramid Head's mental speech about how he loved Mary Sue so much he wanted to rape her. And also their spawn's mental speech along the lines of, "Like all boys, he was starting to have feelings of wanting to rape girls." So ... anyway, I'm inured to the simple yaoi these days.

2.) Lots of Pictures of Henry and William from SH4. Standard good guy/bad guy shit. Also not surprised it exists.

But I was surprised at ... was how CUTE most of the fanart was. Well, Pyramid Head was less cute than not. But most of it was, like, "Chibi-squee compacted with lame awesome inside jokes." For example, the serial murderer telling his in-game victim, "Tut, tut you have too many shoes" or James smiling happy while he's on Pyramid Head's leash or other bizarre cuddly, wuddly, you-want-to-think-the-artist-is-doing-it-ironically-but-I-bet-they're-not stuff.

Meanwhile, cuddly wuddly fandoms, like, say, PowerPuff Girls, have fanfics of angsty deep-osity and incest (but DON'T MAKE BUTTERCUP A MOM YOU BASTARDS!!!). And it's like ... are you guys watching the right shows?

( If you don't knock it off, I'm going to turn this fandom around right now! )

Anyone else want to share something which has a completely incongruous fandom?

Oh, and one good thing about Silent Hill fanart. It inexplicably led me to this