Happy distracting meme time: Top fives

[auroracloud]

Here's a meme stolen from thisbluespirit because we can all use some easy happy distracting content:

Ask me my top 5 of anything and I'll answer.

My note: These can be fannish or non-fannish, but if non-fannish, please nothing related to personal life(e.g. work, people, places, life events, studies), as this is a public post and I want to remain careful about what I post publicly. If fannish, also rare and obscure fandoms are welcomed, even if you and I are the only people who know about the said fandom!

Note: I've had some issues with my eyes hurting from looking at the computer screen too much, so if I take some time to answer, that may be why.

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

How about books?

[auroracloud]

This is always so hard! But I'll try. One of the things making it harder now is that I've read a lot of new books I've loved in the past few years and haven't had time to reread many of them, and I usually judge favourite-book-ness partly by whether I keep rereading it... Anyway, here's one attempt at a list, as to what comes to my mind right now. The order is rather arbitrary, though number #1 was a given as soon as I started thinking about the question. This is a terribly, terribly Anglo-centric list, whoops. Also, I'm deciding to count book series as one book if they form a continuous whole and you don't get the whole story without reading each of the books. (see #2 and #3 on the list)

1. Becky Chambers: The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet
2. Ann Leckie: The Imperial Radch trilogy (Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy. I really can't pick just one because I love the whole story together, though also the individual volumes.)
3. Martha Wells: Murderbot Diaries
4. Alexandre Dumas: The Count of Monte Cristo
5. Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone: This Is How You Lose the Time War

I really wanted to include something by Tove Jansson, but I couldn't decide what - her letters? One of the Moomin books? One of her adult books? Maybe I need to reread... Well, it's not like I don't have time for reading in the next few weeks.

[thisbluespirit]

Rereading makes such a difference! I find that an obstacle, too, not having re-read things so much so easily lately.

And, heh, nice choices! I've read at least some of everything but 3 & 5 and have liked them all, especially Monte Cristo, which was such a blast of a 19th C brick. XD

[auroracloud]

If I start getting back into my reading flow, maybe I'll get to more rereading at least, since I'm now limited to my bookshelf plus currently checked out library books. (Of course, that's still a year's worth of reading without rereads, but still, the pool of new books to choose from is slightly smaller than usual!)

Monte Cristo is a blast, agreed! And due for a reread, really. :-D

[hebethen]

Top five -- minor characters? Any fandom/media!

[auroracloud]

Sorry I took a while to reply - I love this question because I love many minor characters, but it makes it a bit hard to answer just 5! So this is just the characters who I currently want to mention - next month the top 5 may be different, or it may be the same, who knows!

1. Eugénie Danglars - The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
2. Kizzy Shao - The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers (it's an ensemble book, so it's a bit hard to say who is a minor character and who is a lead character, but Kizzy only gets a two or three POV scenes while Rosemary and Ashby have tons, so I figure she may count)
3. Fariah from the Doctor Who serial The Enemy of the World (1960s, Patrick Troughton era)
4. I need to list someone from The Penumbra Podcast but I'm not sure whom because it feels particularly hard to define who's a minor character there. Everyone who isn't Juno? Characters who only appear in one or a few stories or are always in a supporting role? I'm not sure. Basically the question is whether Peter Nureyev is a minor or major character. I'm inclined to say he's a major character, but there are a lot of stories he's not in. Basically, if we count him as a minor character then it's got to be him, if not then Alessandra Strong.
5. David Maddox from EOS10

[hebethen]

Hey, listen, minor character high five :P It is harder to pinpoint in ensembles, I agree, but having read the Wayfarer books myself I agree Kizzy counts!

[trobadora]

Doctor Who episodes?

[auroracloud]

Sorry to take a while to reply, I had to think! Note that old who serials and New Who two-parters count as one in this, so basically I'm looking at Doctor Who stories rather than episodes. I doubt many people are going around professing their love for Episode Three of An Old Serial. :-D

So, current list, which may be different in a different month or something.

1. The Enemy of the World (1967, Second Doctor era)
2. The War Games without the last 10 or so minutes (1969, Second Doctor era)
3. The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances (2005, Ninth Doctor era)
4. Mind Robber (1968, Second Doctor era)
5. Utopia (2007, Tenth Doctor era)

Note: There are a lot of Classic Who stories I haven't yet seen. As can perhaps be seen, I've watched the Second Doctor era more extensively than others. (I wanted to include stuff from other Classic Doctors, but well, that would have to be a top ten, I just couldn't not include those three stories.) The Moffat era suffers in comparison to earlier eras because I've only got around to rewatching a few of the stories from it. (And we're not speaking of you-know-whose era.)

[trobadora]

Hee! Yeah, totally agreed that it should be stories rather than episodes. That makes much more sense. And I'm delighted to see two Jack stories in there. :D

[shadaras]

Top five flowers?

Top five spaceships?

Top five animals?

[auroracloud]

These are all fun. (And general note to commenters, sorry I'm doing these out of order a bit, I'm just doing the ones that come to my mind more easily at the moment, because it's been a long day!)

Flowers: not easy! I love so many flowers! But I'll try to find the current favourites.

1. Roses. Feels cliched, but I can't help it, I just love roses. Especially their scent. I'm also really into roses as flavouring, in tea or pastries or such...
2. Lilacs
3. Trientalis europaea, which apparently is called chickweed wintergreen in English, which is a weird name for such a pretty plant if you ask me. The Finnish (and Swedish) name means "forest star" which I think is much better. They're common in Nordic forests, and I've always adored them.
4. Apple blossom
5. Tulips

(Also in the running: rowan blossoms, lilies, harebells, buttercups, bird cherry blossoms...)

Spaceships! I was kind of hoping someone would ask for this! Fandom in brackets, author in case of books.

1. The TARDIS (Doctor Who)
2. Breq Justice of Toren (Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice/Imperial Radch
3. The Wayfarer (Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet)
4. Mercy of Kalr (Ann Leckie, The Imperial Radch books)
5. The Rumor (The Strange Case of the Starship Iris)

(It wasn't easy, though, there are many wonderful spaceships in fiction. But these are the ones that come to me first now.)

Animals:

1. Dogs
2. Cats
3. Birds (I know that's a broad category, but I just think birds are amazing)
4. Goats
5. Foxes, maybe? Or cows? Or octopuses? It's so hard to choose! And it's not like it's easy to compare those...

[shadaras]

Spaceships are Important, okay :D

Someday I will listen to Starship Iris properly! I think I'd need to restart from the beginning, despite having listened to a few episodes, because I've forgotten enough specifics.

[auroracloud]

They are! Both sentient and non-sentient models.

Now is a good time to start listening to Starship Iris! The second season will start in autumn, so now you have time to listen to the whole first season and still have it fairly fresh in your mind when the second season start. I'm planning to have a re-listen, myself. Though I love the show, sometimes I had some trouble following some of the plot details, so I could use a refresher - and I just want to spend more time with those characters. I don't remember how much we actually learn about The Rumor as a ship, but I get such a comfy, cozy feeling when I think about it. Anyway, the show is well worth listening to. If I remember correctly, after the intense first episode, I took a few episodes to get really into it, but somewhere around episode 5 it really starts rolling onward. So if you find it hard to get on board first, that may be good to keep in mind.

It's also one of these shows where, if you're a physics and astronomy nerd like me, it's better to just assume ansible technology exists, rather than spend time trying to figure out why they're able to communicate in real time across a distance that takes a spacecraft 6 days to fly. I remember spending unnecessary thinky-thoughts on the subject until I realized it was just a feature of the world and I'd do better not to think of it. :D

Another podcast-spaceship I was considering adding to the list was the Yellow Submarine from We Fix Space Junk.

[shadaras]

Ansible-style communication tends to bother me far less than, say, the entirety of the new generation of star wars movies where they forgot that hyperspace travel isn't instantaneous. >.> So I don't think that'd bug me.

Yeah, I think that for me the trouble is more about scripted podcasts being somewhat difficult for my brain to attend to? I'm into the concept (and femslash) enough that I want to listen to it, at least!

I don't think I know We Fix Space Junk! But I am amused by that spaceship's name. :)

[used_songs]

Who are your five favorite historical lesbians?

[auroracloud]

Hmm, the thing about my love for historical lesbians is that it's more being interested in the topic generally than it is some specific people... So I read and listen about a lot of people who don't really stand out as one specific example, but paint a really interesting and varied picture altogether. But there are a bunch of interesting ladies I also know more about, so here goes. There are probably many other deserving folks who could be on this list, but I don't know enough about them yet or am not remembering them right now.

Also, I'm going with the more historical definition of lesbian just as a woman who has romantic and/or sexual relationships with other women, regardless of what their feelings and relationships with men were. So some of these might by today's terminology count as bi, but who cares, not I, this is not a gold-star-lesbians-only list.


1. Tove Jansson (Finnish author and artist best known for the Moomin books). Because as an amazing, imaginative and perceptive Finnish* writer and artist and generally badass original lady who lived on an island with her female partner for decades, she's been such an important role model. I did have to think a while on whether I count her as historical, because she was still alive for a part of my lifetime, enough that I remember when she died (I must have been around 10 years old then). But the bulk of her work and her life and relationships happened before my time, so I'm counting her.
2. Selma Lagerlöf (Swedish author), because when I heard about her some time in high school and learned she'd had long-standing female lover and nobody realized it because it was so normal for unmarried women to live together, it was the first time I realized how many queer people could hide in the pages of history just like that, without needing to have been persecuted or sentenced for indecency or something like that
3. Sappho, because of course The Original Lesbian has to be on the list, regardless of how little we actually know about her. Her cultural impact has been enormous enough.
4. Charlotte Gushman, a 19th-century actress known for playing male roles, who had an extensive circle of female friends and lovers
5. Emily Dickinson, maybe? I love her poetry and have been really interested to learn about this side of her and also how much people tried to rewrite her history afterwards. I'm also tempted to say the Ladies of Llangollen (Sarah Ponsonby and Eleanor Butler) who eloped together and lived together all their lives in this romantic friendship that was Totally Admirable And Not Indecent And Wordsworth Wrote Poetry About It... but they're two people so I don't have room for them. (Looks like I slipped them in, anyway. ;-))

* Tove Jansson was a Swedish-speaker in Finland, so she didn't write in Finnish originally, but she's from here anyway.

[used_songs]

Thank you for such a long and thoughtful answer!

[jaggedwolf]

I gotta go with the continual small fandom of my heart, so, top 5 Starship Iris characters?

[auroracloud]

With a top 5, I don't even manage to make it outside the Rumor crew! Uh, let's try, though I love these people very much and feel bad about ranking them, so it's more like "they're all amazing but the ones higher up accelerate my heart rate more, and the order may change anyway depending on the day, the episode and other things".

1. Violet Liu
2. Arkady Patel
3. Sana Tripathi
4. Krejjh
5. Brian Jeeter

[jaggedwolf]

Aw, that's very fair, the Rumor crew is pretty great! Honestly, as much as I have my faves, this is definitely one of my "I love everyone in this bar"-type canons where the differences are pretty small.

[auroracloud]

Yes, I love them all very much! I still need to re-listen to the show (probably going to start soon, so there might be posts about it once I do!) so I have to say I don't remember most of the guest characters so well, but I did love the journey of the Agents Park and McGabe, and I quite enjoyed The Other Violet. :-)