Long time Hoydenizen Deborah has blogged on both sides of the Tasman, at her own place, and on Larvatus Prodeo, The Hand Mirror and The Lady Garden.
I bought a couple of Sharpe DVDs a few days ago, because Sean Bean.
But which Sean Bean is best? Sean Bean as Boromir: fighter, forthright, a leader, but felled by the Ring? Sean Bean as Sharpe: witty, wily, brave, courageous and not afraid of anything? Or Sean Bean as Lord Eddard Stark: noble, loving, loyal, but leading his family to ruin.
Boromir of Gondor, Richard Sharpe, or Eddard Stark?
Lord of the Rings | Sharpe | Game of Thrones
The ultimate test: marry, shag or chuck off a cliff.
The same test for another British actor: Helena Bonham-Carter. Helena Bonham-Carter as the tempestuously charming and changing Lucy Honeychurch? Helena Bonham-Carter as the practical Queen Elizabeth, supporting the man who never thought to be king? Or Helena Bonham-Carter as the villanous Bellatrix Lestrange?
Lucy Honeychurch, Queen Elizabeth or Bellatrix Lestrange?
A Room With A View | The King’s Speech | Harry Potter series
And in a further twist, my daughters have just introduced me to shipping, making the OTP (one true pairing) between two characters. Is it St Elizabeth (Stark and Queen Elizabeth) or Honeysharp? Borotrix or Bellastark? Or perhaps it’s Starkerssharp, or Lizzystrange. Of the 15 possible combinations, which ones are OTP?
Hoydenizens may recall that two of these characters have featured previously in Marry, Shag or Chuck off a cliff. Bonus points for remembering who, and the company they were keeping on those outings.
So what would you do? We’re all agog! Or you could just talk about your favourite entertainments, since this is just a hook to hang some pop culture on.
Categories: arts & entertainment, fun & hobbies
Otterday! And Open Thread 
100 books by women in 2016 
Today was a singing day 
Hoyden About Town 
Okay, after some tough decisions I’m going to cliff Boromir, shag Sharpe and marry Stark. Sharpe looks like he’d be fun but short term and Stark has Winterfell which would be nice to see before Lady Cat did me in. Or the place was trashed etc.
I’m then going to cliff Lucy Honeychurch because she looks like trouble (not familiar with her actually), have lots of fun with Bellatrix Lestrange until something terrible befalls me and marry Queen Elizabeth because who would turn down a supportive partner.
I would ship Sharpe and Lestrange because I think that would make the most interesting couple.
Well, I’d be cliffing Stark, because I really don’t know the first thing about him, and from what I’ve heard of the Game of Thrones series, I don’t think I want to learn.
So that leaves me with a choice of Boromir or Sharpe to marry. Boromir has the unfortunate in-laws (although quite frankly, it might be a case of “the love of a good woman” which could fix up a lot of that) and winds up heading downhill very rapidly as a result of not having much of a stabilising influence in his life. So I think I’d probably shag Boromir (there are two canonical periods where the opportunity is available – one of which is in the month or so between the Council of Elrond in Rivendell and the departure of the Fellowship; the second is the couple of weeks they spend in Lothlorien recuperating from the loss of Gandalf).
This leaves me marrying Richard Sharpe, which is not such a bad thing, despite his canonically being listed as having “the sense of a dead sheep” when it came to women. The trick there is not to really be overly fussy about fidelity, be willing to let him run off and play with his mates (particularly Lord Wellington), and to show a certain amount of blindness to the more blunt side of his nature. On the good side, he does buckle a swash very convincingly, and he’s got a certain inarticulately romantic charm when it comes to things like household repairs and renovations.
I can’t comment on the Bonham-Carter characters, because the only one I’m at all familiar with is Bellatrix Lestrange, and she really struck me as being a bit too far over the insanity event horizon for my comfort.
Cliffing all of ‘em, sorry. Nothing against any of the actors or characters but Marry and Shag only have one answer for me. 🙂
Hey Kitteh, if you don’t want to play you’ve got to talk some pop culture! What about them Oscar nominations, eh?
(folks who do play can always talk about the Oscars, or some other entertainment they like, too)
Wow. There’s a difficult choice.
If I was interested in men, Richard Sharpe would definitely be of the shag variety, much as I love him he has a wandering eye and a bluntness that would probably get frustrating in the long term.
I could see both Boromir and Stark as being good, loyal partners. But since I have to cliff one of them, I’d vote for cliffing Stark and marrying Boromir. Stark might make a more considerate husband/father but his enemies are of the ‘kill-the-whole-dynasty’ variety whereas Boromir’s might cut him to ribbons but they’re not likely to go after his family specifically (just humans generally). This also means I’d get bonus Faramir and Eowyn as my brother-and-sister-in-law. And the pressure of ruling the kingdom is all Aragorn’s.
As for Helena Bonham-Carter, I’d definitely shag Bellatrix Lestrange. It’d be life-threatening but probably worth it even if you died horribly.
I have no idea who Lady Honeychurch is but there’s no way I’d be marrying Queen Elizabeth. I admire her fortitude but she makes my teeth stand on edge, so I’d definitely push her off a cliff and run away very, very fast. So, I’ll marry Lady Honeychurch, and enjoy the period costume.
I’d marry Lucy Honeychurch and have adventures with her in Italy, and I have to just interject here, because I love the book A Room With A View! And someone once compared a younger me to the character, so emotional resonance/faithfulness. I am very sad nobody else seems to have read/seen it! Cliff Bellatrix because homicide is not my fave activity, which I guess leaves me shagging the Queen mum?!
Also, am torturing myself by rereading Anita Blake. So much less interesting 2nd time around, now that the fascination of the world isn’t brand new and shiny, and I can see how truly poor the writing is.
Dammit, this world could have been so INTERESTING. Instead it’s badly written softcore porn (which becomes hardcore in later books, I seem to recall…)
Heh, I’m with Kitteh on this one… Cliffing them all, because I don’t want to marry or shag any of them! 😀
Um, pop culture, pop culture… You know that song “some nights” that was all popular recently? My choir s doing that, in six part harmony!
(Eh, that was a half-arsed attempt at pop culture, but I am too excited by this essay question I have for a course starting next week where I not only get to talk about Roman empresses, but also feminist historiography pertaining to said empresses! Hah.)
My choices would be pretty much the same as Brightbear’s. Also I am not interested in the Oscars, except somewhat in the frocks.
I’ve always struggled with Anita Blake, but more for the violence than the sex (except where the latter strays into the former).
I’m always somewhat interested in the nominations, because they don’t always follow what has been most strongly marketed here, so I sometimes find out about films to which I might otherwise not pay that much attention.
I haven’t seen Lincoln yet, which I want to – and I seem to have missed out on seeing Hitchcock in the cinemas, which annoys me.
Pop culture … um … does it count to say I’ll probably catch up with A Single Man when it’s on SBS next week? And that I wouldn’t mind seeing Lincoln, not because Daniel Day-Lewis does anything for me (see above, lol) but because I like Lincoln?
There had better be cats, though. Lincoln was a cat person. I want historical accuracy with cats, dammit!
For the Nebulas (sff counts as pop culture, right?) I’m predicting Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 because it is the only one of the six novel nominations to have been written by a white man. (I gather it’s also quite a good book.) I’m happy and pleased there’s starting to be so many nominations of women and/or non-white authors. I do wonder how much Scalzi (as president of SFWA) and team have been responsible for that.
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/02/20/this-years-nebula-award-nominees/
SFF definitely counts as pop culture!
I don’t know about Lincoln. I saw a trailer for it when I went to see Les Mis and I got the impression it was pushing the ‘Lincoln put his life and his political reputation on the line to end slavery’ when I’ve always been given to believe he went to war to keep the Union together, not necessarily to end slavery (in fact there’s some quote by him that says pretty much that).
Re: Lincoln
Didn’t see the trailers, but I did see the movie.
No, it doesn’t say that Lincoln went to war to end slavery. The focus of the movie was on his struggle to get the Amendment to the US Constitution that outlawed slavery (the 13th) passed. This took place during the last few months of the war (and Lincoln’s life), after it was clear that the South would lose but it was not clear how much longer (and how many lives) the war would take.
The business of “saving the union” and “ending slavery” is complicated.
* Lincoln was personally opposed to slavery and his party (the Republican Party) had as its founding platform opposition to slavery.
* The South seceded over the issue of slavery. They saw Lincoln’s election as a defeat for their “slavery now, slavery forever, slavery everywhere” ideology.
* Lincoln couldn’t “go to war” for any reason, since he was only one person. He needed to give the population a reason for them to go to war. They would not have been willing to fight a war to “end slavery,” but they were willing to fight to “save the Union.”
* One of the critical plot points in the movie is that people were not willing to support outlawing slavery if doing so would prolong the war. They hoped the South would see the handwriting on the wall and negotiate: capitulation in return for not outlawing slavery.
To get the amendment passed, Lincoln had to convince the people of the North that the South was not willing to negotiate. (He also had to deal with the slave states that did not secede.)
John Scalzi has some updated Oscar predictions
I worte the post… and then never got around to saying what my own m/s/toac preferences were.
Definitely shag Sharpe, if only for the alliteration, but also because he’s just too feckless for my taste. But fun. Throw Stark off a cliff – all that overstretched and misguided loyalty, which has resulted in the ruin (thus far) of his family. And marry Boromir, who was felled by the Ring, but he was a leader, and loyal, and seemingly kind, and very much wanted to protect his city. Mind you, I think Boromir in the extended version of the movie is a bit more sympathetic than Boromir in the canonical books, but that’s because Peter Jackson really is rather better at doing human motivation and emotions than Tolkien was.
As for the women… shag Bellatrix (she’s too dangerous to be around for too long), throw the queen off a cliff (because boring), and marry Lucy Honeychurch, because at least she could play the piano for me.
But the OTP of the lot… there’s several plausible possibilities, like putting the queen and Stark. I think I would go for Sharp and the queen, in a kind of Austenesque scenario, where he would liven her up, and she would make him more bloody responsible. But then he would be no fun…
All of which reminds me that I think that my daughters are intrigue by shipping the Harry Potter characters because they just don’t believe in Hermione and Ron. Maybe if JKRowling had put a little more effort into showing how Ron’s goofiness, and somewhat more relaxed nature, was just the right sort of foil for Hermione’s somewhat tense brilliance.
Could it be partly because we are used to the leading man getting the leading lady Deborah?
I haven’t seen Lincoln, but I do know one of the academics who acted as an advisor, and she’s a very solid women’s historian (although her influence was likely limited in many ways). I don’t know what she thought of the final thing. Another friend of mine, who is a historian of US slavery during this period, thought it was far too sentimental, jingoistic and ‘great white men’ history – what you expect from Steven Spielberg taking on a US President really, so wasn’t very impressed. I don’t really enjoy historical biopics so I’m going to avoid. I personally enjoyed Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Slayer, if you would like an alternative recommendation.
I don’t know about that. I positively hated Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Urgh, yeah, I hated that too! I never even made it through the whole book; but, at least for me, that was mainly because it was SOOO badly written. I’m not selling A.L. Vampire Slayer as high art or anything, but I went in expecting little and came out pleasantly entertained.
Admittedly Mr angharad did see it, and said it was better than he was expecting. I’m actually not a huge fan of going to the cinema, so I’m not crying out for something to see.