it's wild to see people say stuff like "sansa is a politician, arya is a warrior" while not being able to point out a single political act sansa has achieved, and not being able point out any of arya's "warrior skills" that isn't the handful of fencing lessons with syrio she received for like five months max lol
Politician!Sansa and Warrior!Arya are two fascinating ends of a fanon ouroboros; Neither concept exists outside of the other and neither concepts are based on the books. This fandom is just so attached to the idea of Sansa being this incredible politician, with intelligence above every other character, that her having nothing in her own chapters to support that idea doesn't stop them. That's why Arya's intelligence, skills, and entire character arc get reduced to her being nothing but a walking, talking weapon. Like you said, her "warrior" capabilities are essentially the handful of lessons she had with Syrio where her most important + relevant lesson was how to observe her surroundings. Her only "combat" training with the FM was her defending herself with a staff when she lost her eyesight. There's nothing to suggest that she's going to be a warrior, in fact we get the exact opposite. We get constant reminders of Arya's small stature and lack of strength that prevent her from fighting/defending herself in certain situations. All her kills rely on sneak attacks/stealth and she's never been in an outright swordfight with anyone. George even refrains from calling her a warrior like Robb and Jon. Brienne and Asha are examples of female characters who are actual fighters and if you compare their chapters, you can see the difference.
But then Arya's entire existence is antithetical to fanon!Sansa's. Her Harrenhal arc is what people pretend Sansa was doing in KL, her relevance to the North gets transferred to Sansa, and her intelligence and political activeness are erased so that Sansa can shine. They'll write essays on how Sansa is the most intelligent, politically savvy character and how Dany/Jon/Tyrion's arcs only exist to highlight her own ruling arc but the second someone asks them for evidence from the books, it's crickets. I don't understand why their enjoyment of her character hinges on her being the most important/intelligent one. No Arya stan is under the illusion that she's going to be the political character or outclass Dany, Jon, or Tyrion. It's just part of her story so we acknowledge it. Arya is going to have her political arc in Braavos and Sansa is going to have her political arc in the Vale, they aren't mutually exclusive. The only issue is that some people want Sansa to be the only one with a political arc and that's not the story that George is telling.
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saw your tags when Fabio was supposed to follow on Marc s footsteps, but a mess happened with his manager.
I am new what exactly happened
Okay, so. Going to gather all the information from Fabio's biography by Michel Turco.
Fabio's first ever manager was Eduardo Martin.
Essentially, Eduardo's main issue is that instead of growing Fabio's career to make Fabio better, he chose the directions of Fabio's career to better fit the promotion and marketing of his energy drink (Wild Wolf) [note : the brand never ever really came to life).
In 2011, Fabio was riding in 80cc and that's where Eduardo approached his parents. He started helping Fabio and buying him a bike so he could train for the next category. He helped Fabio secure a sit in CEV Moto3 in 2013, with the team Wild Wolf Racing. That year, Fabio also moved to Spain in Eduardo's house.
Fabio won CEV Moto3 in 2013, winning the last 3 races (championship had 9 of them).
At that time, Emilio Alzamora (Marc's manager for 18 years, until mid-2022) was working with Monlau Competition and Estrella Galicia to build a ladder to bring young riders to Moto3 and then Moto2 (they had already done it with Alex Marquez and Alex Rins).
During the 2013 season, in Albacete (so either June or September), Emilio approached Eduardo to talk about Fabio. Apparently, Eduardo wasn't liking the potential move to Marc VDS in Moto2 and the presence of Monster (remember when I said that Eduardo only cared about his energy drink brand?) and Emilio said that it took him days and days before being able to have Fabio's contract signed.
In 2014, Fabio was finally in the Monlau Competition structure and he joined team Honda Estrella Galicia 0,0. Emilio says that they taught Fabio a lot of things then, especially in the way his race weekends were structured. Fabio also got to try new bike parts that HRC was then giving to Alex R. and Marc.
The 2014 season of CEV Moto3 contained 11 races. Fabio won 9 of them and finished the other two second. He obviously got a second title that year. Please have a look at one of my fave quotes from the book, where Emilio compares Marc & Fabio at 14 years old.
In the summer of 2014, Emilio had to go talk to Carmelo Ezpeleta because back then, the minimum age to participate in a GP was 16 (note : Fabio would only turn 16 on the 20th of April 2015, the day after the 3rd round of that MotoGP/Moto2/Moto3 season). After a bunch of discussions, Emilio managed to have the big instances say that "a 15 years-old crowned in CEV could start in the World Championship even if his birthday was after the start of the season" [note : we essentially still have that rule today except now you have to be 18 and 17 years old are accepted if they were crowned champions the year prior].
Now the year is 2015 and Fabio is riding for Estrella Galicia 0,0 in Moto3. His season does not go as he would have hoped. He gets two second places in the early part of the season but finishes 10th and has a couple of crashes, ends up beat by his teammate Jorge Navarro.
Here's what Emilio had to say about the situation : "The issue wasn't Fabio but this Eduardo, taking care of him. [...] He didn't know much about racing. He only had one thing in mind : to see Fabio on top of every practice session. He wanted him to win before he had even learnt what had to be learned. This attitude didn't benefice anyone."
Mid-season, Emilio said : "His results until now have exceeded our expectations. The objective of the first half of the season is to gain experience. Some people seem to forget that he's only 16 years old."
As the season progresses, tensions rise between Eduardo and Emilio. Eduardo wants to take Fabio to Leopard Racing (they were on top of the Moto3 Championship with Danny Kent then) while other team managers are interested in Fabio, including Aki Ajo. Aki said that he was really interested in getting Fabio and that he did a lot of efforts to have him in his team. He said : "I remember that it was a real challenge and that insisted a lot, I was convinced that we could do something to help him. When I met him in my office, I immediately felt like he was the type of guy I would really like to work with. I think that he felt the same thing then but there were other reasons, coming from his management or elsewhere, that made this not happen."
Towards the end of August, in Misano, Fabio gets a double fracture in his right ankle and shortens his first Moto3 season. Fabio wasn't doing well then but that's when he met Tom, please see some of my other favorite quotes.
At the end of 2015, Fabio leaves the Monlau structure. Back then, Eduardo justified it by saying this : "When we started renegotiating the contract with Alzamora, the question of our liberties for the future came. The contract we were offered was engaging us for a longer time than I wished for Fabio. Leopard was giving us this freedom and everything else I asked for. The Estrella Galicia project went from CEV to MotoGP, going through Moto3 and Moto2. I understand this philosophy and I suppose it suits most riders. It wasn't fine for me because Fabio is not a rider like the others. He's a special rider and he needs to be free so he can always make the best choice at the right time. The Almazora project is not flexible enough for us."
Also, like I mentioned earlier, Eduardo didn't want long term because he didn't want to end up in Moto2 with Marc VDS. Michael Bartholemy, then head of that team, says : "This guy was crazy. He didn't know anything about motorbikes and racing. He thought he was managing Lewis Hamilton, he wanted 300-pages contracts, wanted to choose the sponsors, etc..."
We'll finish this with one last quote from Emilio, still having regrets about not being able to finish this missions with Fabio six years later [note : the book was published in 2021] : "It was a waste. We had sponsors like Estrella Galicia who had already invested a lot in the project. They were counting on Fabio to launch themselves on the international market, notably the French market. Everything fell through because of a manager not very clear-sighted... At the same time, this taught us how to better write our contracts. On my side, I'm very happy that Fabio managed to bounce back and that his talent didn't end up being wasted."
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No no get started on the whole "new adult" thing, I desperately want to hear
Ok, so here's the thing about New Adult:
It's a genre that's been emerging lately in the catalogs I view when doing frontlists (essentially just pre-orders for upcoming titles) for the book store and I'd been wondering what the hell it was. I'd noticed it was especially common in the descriptors for the romance books, but it was often the ones with that sort of sexy-but-not-full-blown-erotica kind of book that also tended to have the sort of description full of fanfic trope terms and "for fans of [usually a Young Adult title]" or "like [popular title] combined with [other popular title]!!" <- and here it's important to note that the popular titles don't always sound like they would mesh well.
And finally, FINALLY, one of these books is highlighted by the sales rep who works with us and she's got a little blurb about it and I get my first useful description of what "New Adult" is:
"Imagine the golden age of YA - The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Mortal Instruments - but aged up and spicy."
S P I C Y
Which would explain why they're not-quite-erotica type books, you see, we're not straight up PORN we're just ✨️spicy✨️
Nevermind that a lot of these books do have sex in them, but whatever, it's SPICY because that's what's popular to say on BookTok!
Oh. Right. Yeah. BookTok also gets mentioned a lot in listings for this sort of title.
And yes, this includes the Court of... books by Sarah J Maas and things like The Infatuated Fae books by Jeaneane O'Riley. In fact, I'm pretty sure O'Riley was described as a "BookTok darling" in the contributor bio part of the listing, but don't quote me on that, I'd have to look at the listing again.
Anyway, these are some of the biggest offenders regarding that whole "we will describe this with fanfic buzz terms and BookTok girlies will eat it up :)" issue.
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I have been thinking about the show and you guys a lot more, not just because we're approaching the anniversary of the end but because...it seems like LA ties keep popping up everywhere!
I know I haven't been active, but I do like coming back to see you guys on my dash even if I have no idea what you're posting about because I'm not part of those fandoms. I've been debating on coming back more -- or going back to that LOL, Z blog I started just to make sure I keep writing and staying in touch. So, we'll see.
Work has been crazy, and I just took the first actual day(s) off in a good while. I had some rough losses near the end of last year, and then huge project after huge project has meant not just working without days off but also working on my days off. Finally actually took a couple days off and did nothing. And I actually got a good amount of writing done, so now I don't want to go back. (I find I actually do get going a lot quicker if I start by hand, but my joints cramp up soooo quickly. It's always been annoying. ANYWAY.)
What finally prompted this was I was watching last night's SNL, and NCIS:LA got a mention, despite being off the air. (There was a joke about character actors and appearing on arcs on shows with titles that are only letters. There were four spots, and LA was the fourth. IT IS STILL REMEMBERED! But holy crap, how about that Hawai'i turn? Wow. Anyway.)
In the past year, small things have made me think about LA:
-Waking up to an old episode from a syndicated outdoors show (I sleep with the TV on, don't judge me) that featured Gerald McRaney talking about his acting career -- filmed years ago -- and doing outdoors stuff
-Spotting Medalion in a small spot on New Girl
-Being addicted to Disney Dreamlight Valley when I was redirecting my impulse shopping addiction into cozy gaming (that was basically ADHD-crack because of all the tasks you just have to complete!). How is this relevant? Because the only fish I could seem to catch most of the time? COD!
-Todd popping up in new commercials all the time
-Getting into Elsbeth and watching CBS shows on Paramount and hearing the little logo music after or before a show and remembering watching LA on the platform a lot towards the end
And I know there are many more, but age + too may back-to-back storms and natural disasters have made my memory even wonkier. (We currently have a joke about our "weekly tornadoes" here. It's funny because it's not completely a joke. Lololol.)
Anyway, I won't lie to say there wasn't some freedom and relief that came with the show's ending. But there are definitely parts of it I miss like you guys.
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