A Change in Response.

I’m watching the animated version of The Last Airbender again, and tonight’s episode contained a line which I found amusing. Two young men are travelling in an airship and heading off to do something brave and honourable. They’re reminiscing about old loves:

‘My first girlfriend became the moon spirit,’ says one. (She did, too. She had to ‘die’ and become the moon spirit so as to maintain the balance between day and night. Typical anime stuff.)

‘Gee, buddy,’ says the other with a modicum of sympathy, ‘that’s rough.’

Well, I thought it was funny. I never noticed it the first time around, and I do admit to being odd.

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I might also mention that I’m re-reading Emile Zola’s ‘classic’ Thérèse Raquin. I first read it in my twenties and thought it quite splendid. That was back in the day when I couldn’t write fictional prose to save my life, but now my response is very different. Now I’m being driven half mad by the sloppy and naïve writing style, especially when he attempts the lyrical stuff which is utterly lame. I do realise that this might be more the fault of the translator, but I can’t know that. All I can know is that it’s irritating me.

What I will say in its favour, however, is that the plot is excellent – two lovers so blinded by passion that they lose all their normal sense of decency, humanity and propriety, and proceed to drown the woman’s weak and sickly husband in the cold River Seine. And thereafter follow the difficulties: the grinding fear of discovery, the guilt, the mental torment of an imagined haunting, and ultimately the utter destruction of their relationship and hence the futility of the crime. Right up my street; I understand all aspects completely. I even sympathise with the guilty pair (up to a point.)