Smart Podcast, Trashy Books Podcast

304. “You Have a Type and it Might be Mullets” – Sarah, Amanda, and Elyse are VERY Silly About Books and Villainy

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like when we hang out in a room together, well, this episode is for you. And if you need a lot of silly laughter, this is definitely the episode for you.

While we were at Romantic Times BookLovers Convention in May, we recorded two podcasts, which I should not ever do again because it makes the editing quite a challenge. This is Part One, which is Incredibly Silly.

We recorded after dinner one night, so we’re Sleepy and Goofy (and perhaps also Doc and Dopey – I’m definitely Doc and Dopey). We talk about books we are interested in or have seen at RT, and then we get really silly. Our discussion includes:

1. Why does Amanda have a weakness for Val Kilmer?

2. How does Amanda rank the Hemsworths in order of physical density?

3. How does Amanda rank the Real Housewives franchises in terms of quality?

4. How bad of a style icon was Anita Blake?

5. How many Alfreds were there in the Batman film franchise?

6. What fanfics are Elyse and Amanda’s favorite?

7. Which Backstreet Boy was Amanda and Elyse’s favorite?

8. Can Amanda and Elyse find a villain hero that interests me? (Spoiler alert: nope).

This is what happens when Sarah, Amanda, and Elyse get really silly, and stop making sense. And given that this has been A Rough Week, we hope you enjoy our completely bubbly, goofy, discussion.

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Here are the books we discuss in this podcast:

You can find Amanda on Twitter @_ImAnAdult, and Elyse @ElyseIndeed.

We mentioned Lee Pace in Breaking Dawn, and here are two pictures, both ridiculous.

And of course, Val Kilmer as a nerd.

Val Kilmer lounging on grass surrounded by books with his shirt open halfway plus there is a LOT of mullet

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This Episode's Music

Peatbog Faeries Live at 25 album cover - a red lit stage with hands in the air from the crowd in the foregroundOur music is provided by Sassy Outwater. Thanks, Sassy!

We’ve been playing tracks from the Peatbog Fairies’ live album, Live @ 25, and it is seriously fun.

This is Shifting Peat and Feet by the Peatbog Faeries.

You can find this album at Amazon and iTunes.

And you can learn more about the Peatbog Faeries at their website, PeatbogFaeries.com.


Podcast Sponsor

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Transcript

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This podcast transcript was handcrafted with meticulous skill by Garlic Knitter. Many thanks.

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  1. Ren Benton says:

    This podcast has everything. I did laugh a lot. Thank you, ladies.

    I have a list of real people and fictional characters provisionally classified as INTJ, and half of them are all the way awful, but the other half are all the way awesome. Badasses all around, but on the far, far poles of good/evil. I assume this explains why I often don’t even recognize villains as villains. I look at most fictional conflicts like sports — the two sides are opponents, but who you root for is about who has your sympathy first, not the relative value of the other side. Which is why I dislike OBVIOUS villains. If *I* can’t see that the other side has a valid point, however warped it may be, the “bad” guy’s characterization got skipped in a misguided effort to force hero sympathy. Seriously, folks, there’s no harm in making the villain BETTER than hero. The more strongly I feel about SOMEBODY, the more I care about the story, period.

    By the time I read the first Anita Blake book, I was unhappy with UF’s shift from woman-hunting-monsters to woman-fucking-monsters, so I was really excited that the first book was sexless! Thankfully, someone sat me down for a talk before I went any further.

    My favorite Val Kilmer movie is Top Secret. It is a treasure trove of terrible puns. And a musical.

    In the forgotten teen crush department, one of the premium channels is running promos for a tennis documentary, and young Andre Agassi is giving me feels despite my lifelong allergy to mullet.

    For your Lee Pace needs (with less preposterous hair), I recommend watching The Fall. I love the story, but it’s also catnip for fans of scenery and costume porn. (Bring tissues because that little girl is a brutal crier. My heart is made of stone, and she destroyed me.) The Hobbit was such an awful movie that I refused to watch another one in that series, but a friend kindly assembled all the clips of Lee Pace (with MORE preposterous hair) being a bitchy elf because I needed that in my life.

    Hot villains: Armitage as Ghisborne in Robin Hood? I haven’t watched it, but I’ve read compelling arguments that he’s a way better romantic choice than Robin until the writers got miffed that he was overshadowing the “hero” and made him definitively solve the problem of Marian. (Instead of hating Ghisborne, fans hated the writers, so that backfired a little bit.)

    Riku in Kingdom Hearts is not a villain any more than Mickey Mouse is. Wash your mouth out with soap. (See also Axel.)

    I’ve only seen the first Thor and the first Avengers, and I am COMPLETELY sympathetic toward Loki, and if I’m not supposed to be, they should have cut the two shots in Thor that cemented his status in my mind as an innocent victim. “Villains” who became such after being fucked over by the “good guys” will swing my loyalties faster than you can say “but what about.”

  2. Arethusa says:

    I had no idea Lee Pace was in Breaking Dawn. Who was he?! (I’ll google.) He was the best part of The Hobbit for me besides Freeman as Bilbo. I prefer my elves jerkish. All the anime mentions made my week. The eye patch guy? The fan fiction spiral notebook. You guys are the best.

  3. genie says:

    Back in high school, I also had a spiral notebook of fanfic that was passed back and forth with a friend. It was technically my journal for 10th grade English class, and I have no idea what on earth we were actually supposed to be writing but occasionally there is a random English assignment in the middle of everything. We had to turn them in from time to time, so I guess my teacher read it all. She never criticized us at all. She was great.

  4. Trix says:

    Been battling a bug all week, so this is my first attempt at conversing with the humans in a while…sorry if the segues get random!

    First off, as a hockey fan, I say there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a good mullet! Of course, I tend to like the ones that make guys look like ’70s surfer boys (maybe with a bit of feathering on the sides?)…the cast of MIRACLE did it right. Too short on the sides is a common, bad mistake.

    I’m so easily spooked that I’ve never really read any vampire fiction, though I do love Mary Hughes’ Biting Love series, which is more comedic, like an eccentric small-town indie movie where some of the population just happens to be paranormal. (Exception made for Sean Michael’s LOVE IS BLINDNESS, but I still just consider that an m/m romance with added complications for a blind vampire hero.)

    I remember all the kids in my fifth-grade summer acting class having all these TOP SECRET! in-jokes…it was on a free preview last weekend, drat it, should have seen it.

    Racking my brain to think of villains I prefer…I remember the ghastly, short-lived Canadian hockey-themed soap MVP (which had been badly bowdlerized by the time it came here, apparently, but apparently there wasn’t much quality difference). The cast was all so dead-eyed that I found myself rooting heavily for Peter Miller as villainous hockey player Damon Trebuchet for two reasons: 1) he was the only one who really COMMITTED to this tripe and 2) I hated everyone else so much that I liked watching him torment them. (Of course, it was all driven by drug abuse and personal tragedy, which ended in a cliffhanger reminiscent of JULES ET JIM. Even though I was thrilled when the show got canceled, I would have watched another season for the sole reason that the creators promised to have a hockey husband in season 2.) Everything else is kind of retroactive…for instance, I was a huge ADVENTURES OF PETE AND PETE fan in high school, and went to a podcast taping for SF Sketchfest in January. Rick Gomez played Endless Mike (one of the closest things that show had to a villain), and was so hysterically funny and lovable that night that I suddenly felt the urge to go back and watch all his episodes, see if I misjudged poor Mike…

  5. Stefanie Magura says:

    The best in Sexy charming British villains is probably James Mason in North by Northwest. And that movie had Cary Grant as the hero. And villains aren’t my favorite either.

  6. Stefanie Magura says:

    And the Hemsworth brother in West World is Luke.

  7. Crystal says:

    Fun Anita Blake fact, or cringe-worthy story. Take ya pick.

    My dad and I were (are) huge Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans, and toward the middle of its run (around 1999-2000, I think), Dad and I would of course try to find other entertainment that hit that same target. Lo and behold, here’s me finding the Anita Blake books, before they were wall-to-wall boning and going, “Hey, these are fun! Read these, Dad!” Yeah, that got, um, super-weird about Blue Moon in. Dad and both stopped reading right around Obsidian Butterfly and we just never speak of it. I never gave him Merry Gentry, because YEAH NO, and he doesn’t care about faeries anyway.

    *I was able to redeem myself later on by alerting him to the existence of the Dresden Files and Simon R. Green’s Nightside series.

  8. QOTU says:

    Sarah, don’t feel bad, I’m not into villains, either.

  9. Karen H near Tampa says:

    If anybody is interested, the original cover for Amanda Ashley’s Sunlight, Moonlight was Fabio (front cover only, the stepback was somebody else). And, yes, I still have my copy for that reason. The reprint version above is model Sam Bond. (I’m into good looking men and still pick up books because of a gorgeous guy on the cover. I have found some really good authors that way, as well as some duds.)

    Enjoyed reading this. Ya’ll crack me up!

  10. MaryK says:

    I’ve been reading Anne Bishop’s Others series. She needs swag that says “All roads travel through the woods.”

  11. Violet Bick says:

    Re Lee Pace: I always get him confused with Zachary Levi. It took me a while to figure out it was because I started watching them on tv at the same time (Pace in “Pushing Daisies” and Levi in “Chuck”). Plus, they both have roles in big film franchises (Pace in The Hobbit and Levi in the later Thor films).

    Re vampires and David Tennant: Has anyone seen “Fright Night”? It also stars Anton Yelchin.

    Re villians: I think the “hero villian” has been around for some time in book series. I remember him showing up in Jude Deveraux’s Montgomerys and Jo Beverley’s Mallorens way back when, and now more recently in Kresley Cole and Sherrilyn Kenyon. Maybe it’s more common now in paranormals and urban fantasy?

    Next week, Ilona Andrews’ “Iron and Magic” comes out. I can’t wait to find out how Hugh d’Ambray is redeemed(?) as a hero.

  12. MaryK says:

    @Kareni – Cool

  13. MaryK says:

    Lee Pace was the villain in Guardians of the Galaxy. Not that I think he was redeemable, just that he was definitely the villain in that one.

    I wonder what Sarah would think about Riddick in Pitch Black. That movie is scary so he might not be an option.

  14. Stefanie Magura says:

    I was reminded after posting my first comment of the movie Notorious which is supposed to have an antihero played by Cary Grant and a somewhat sympathetic villain played by Claude Rains. Haven’t seen it yet, but I get the feeling Hitchcock liked this kind of trope as well since he directed it. Also, I get that Grant was a favorite of Hitchcock’s. There’s a movie called Suspicion, where Grant famously, enough to where you don’t have to see the movie to know what happens, thinks of murdering his wife, and the studio was like “no it’s Cary Grant. We can’t do that.”

  15. Kate says:

    Thank you, Violet! I had no idea who Lee Pace was til you mentioned Pushing Daisies. I loved that show. Looking it up just now I see also that the narrator was Jim Dale who did such an excellent job on the Harry Potter audiobooks.

    As a kid I had a huge crush on Boba Fett. Meeting the child version was the lowest point of the prequels IMO (aside from Jar Jar Binks, of course).

    There’s a popular K-drama series called Goblin: the Lonely and Great God. It stars the same lead actor as the excellent Coffee Prince which I’m almost done watching.

    Currently listening to Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology and his version of Loki is a bit more nuanced than some others. I have managed to dislodge the picture in my head of Chris Hemsworth as Thor in favor of the improbably blonde Vincent D’Onofrio from Adventures in Babysitting.

  16. I’m a little late since I only finished listening to the podcast while getting ready dor work this morning.

    Personally, I am not big on the villain/hero, but Spike from Buffy has a special place in my heart. He starts out as a villain and makes his way to hero, but even when he was bad he still had some humanity. I always loved when he shows up at Buffy’s house in Becoming Part 2 because he didn’t want Angel and Dru to actually cause the apocalypse.

    As for fanfic, I had a spiral boubd notebook abd later a computer with some stuff I wrote in it. I do remember posting Alias fanfic to a forum back in 2003, but mostly I wrote General Hospital fanfiction and no one wanted to read that. LOL

  17. LisaJo885 says:

    Just listened to this episode this morning, and I’d like to share that the first Merry Gentry book is currently $2.99 for Kindle and Nook. So, there you go.

  18. Christine says:

    Real Genius is the best movie ever. I can’t listen to Tears For Fears “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” without thinking of popcorn.

  19. chacha1 says:

    fwiw Lucius Malfoy is a dunce, but Jason Isaacs as Lucius Malfoy is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

    also fwiw I was crushing on Christopher Plummer from the very first time I saw The Sound of Music. He is was and ever shall be effing gorgeous.

    and finally a recommendation for those attracted to Englishmen: watch The Wine Show. Seriously. I don’t know anything about Matthew Goode, Matthew Rhys, or James Purefoy, as actual people … but put any combination of them in a room talking and I am there for it.

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