Rosemary Sutcliff community

We have recently finished watching all three seasons of Warrior on Netflix!

As I said in my pre-review, it's sort of Peaky Blinders set in the late 19th C San Francisco Chinatown Tong Wars, with a generous helping of Game of Thrones-ish nudity and sex; come to think of it, there is more Game of Thrones feel to it than just that, as a large part of the plot is the rivalry and fights for dominance between two tongs. Also the fight by the Irish immigrants to be hired as laborers, when the Chinese work much more cheaply. "Fight" is a literal term here - every episode has at least one (fistfight, or knife and axe fight, or swordfight, or gunfight - or more usually, someone bringing a gun to a fistfight and having it kicked out of his hands) and two or three is not uncommon. So much fighting! Sometimes gory, though fortunately usually not pushing my limit (though a few times it was UGGGHHH yuck).

I mostly liked it a lot, though I also felt ready to be finished with it as it wrapped up. Most recurring characters were interestingly complex with very mixed motivations, though there were some stock drama bad guys, and the wealthy white men were all terrible human beings. Probably my favorite characters were Ah Toy and Chao, the most mixed-motivation characters of all - Ah Toy is the perhaps mostly lesbian madam of the bordello where the Hop Wei hang out (also an accomplished swordswoman and crafty businesswoman), and Chao is the weapons dealer who is "friend to all" tongs (for a price) and the bland and obsequious face of Chinatown to the police. But there are so many cool characters!

There is both canon m/m and f/f (and plenty of het), but my favorite relationships were the prickly platonic ones, in particular between Father Jun and his son Young Jun, and between Ah Sam (the main character of the show) and his sister Mai Ling.

One thing I particularly liked about the show was the way they handled language. In the first episode there are a few bits where Chinese morphs into English as the camera shifts, so you know that the characters are speaking Chinese, even though they are speaking English. (I think Vikings did something similar.) Some of the Chinese characters speak perfect English, but others, you can tell when they are speaking "Chinese" (fluent and casual English) vs. "English" (accented, with simple grammar). And of course when there are English-speaking whites around, the Chinese characters who "don't speak English" speak Cantonese. (Apparently the actor playing Young Jun spoke fluent Cantonese, everyone else had to learn it, and Cantonese speakers can tell :-) I also liked the slang used by the Chinese, which - I don't know how accurate it is to actual Cantonese idiom, but it added a nice flavor - the white people are "ducks", the white section of San Francisco is "the pond", sex is "sticky" (as a noun), money is "chop", a fight is a "scrap".

Probably my favorite episode was the spaghetti western one in S1, though I also really liked the arc with Rosalita Vega in S2, and the S3 banger with Chao and Lee. Warnings for basically everything, though - violence, rape (mostly implied and attempted), nudity, drugs, racism, sexism, horrible white male politicians, hopeful dreams dashed against reality.

Now we are watching S3 of The Wheel of Time, which we are up to episode 3 tonight. I'm having the problem that I don't really remember S2 because I read the books between then and now, so I'm remembering book events and trying to figure out how they match up with show events. And of course there are the very big changes that have been made in the interest of bringing it to TV.

Oh, one more thing - I was going to post this yesterday but ran out of time writing it, because last night we went to see the Cirque Mechanics show "Pedal Punk", which was amazeballs! The group was founded by two former members of Cirque du Soleil, and the show is a spectacular display of core strength, flexibility, and hand-eye coordination, all framed in an entertaining comic mime play about a bicycle shop, using props that look like bicycle parts (juggling seatposts, a penny-farthing used as an aerial hoop, etc). It's stunning and if the show is near you you should definitely see it! (Looks like from here they are going to Chandler AZ, Albuquerque NM, Alexandria LA, and then Texarkana and Houston.)