Weretwin powers, activate!

TRU sent my 'we're gathering your order and sending it' notification. Here's hoping Meowlody and Purrsephone aren't victims of poor quality control.

Wish me luck? And now, naptime.

Joys, small and televised

Ahh, the assorted mysteries of my mind shall spill forth and you'll wonder why you missed me at all. :p

Yesterday's thing of joy was cold Dr. Pepper. I'm normally a Pepsi girl (with a serious long term thing going with Cherry-Coke on the side. It's okay, Pepsi understands.) but every so often you want something different and that's when Dr. Pepper steps in. I swiped the one that's been sitting in the back of the fridge for about a month now and it was heaven. So good. Like I said, the little things.

Today's thing of joy is the sheer twistiness of Pretty Little Liars. I'm focusing on the twistiness so that I can use PLL again (and again) as the days go by, but also because it's rare that a show can manage to shapeshift so convincingly from one scenario to the next. I admit I have two ways of dealing with a show I love. I either watch obsessively and take notes (literally) and bitch to high heaven when things go WRONG (Charmed), or I'm along for the ride and probably not the viewer spending hours trying to decode the Super Secret Messages.

PLL actually forces me to do both. I watch closely because it's a mystery, but I'm also content to watch and love, so I do very little bitching about the show either while I'm watching or afterward. Most of my bitching, in fact, has been the way they want you to bitch, in that you're stunned that they did something and you can't wait until next week to find out whether it's true or just another twist in the story.

If you need a refresher course, I'm happy to oblige. Pretty Little Liars is based off the book series of the same name written by Sara Shepard. It happens to be one of the few adaptions where the television series is better than the source material. Don't get me wrong, the first... however many books are like crack; you keep reading and get all twitchy when you reach the end of one book and don't immediately have another to read to answer all the questions you now have. However, the book series has the Liars being incredibly horrible people at times doing incredibly stupid things. The show realizes you should want to root for your heroines and adjusts things accordingly. More importantly (yes, really), it realizes that some of the best moments in the books are when the Liars are actually friends again. So the TV series starts with their friendship splintered and puts them back together again, with moments of tension causing the breaks to reemerge. TV!Liars are friends. Book!Liars, not so much.

Before the series officially begins, Queen B Ali has gone missing. A year later she's found... dead. The Liars have begun receiving threatening texts and messages in other forms from a mysterious person called A. A could be just about anyone, and yet as the series spans over two seasons, each "aha! must be them!" moment is thwarted by unexpected character growth or someone else looking infinitely guiltier. Characters you write off completely as one dimensional, evil, and hopefully A so they can get themselves killed or carted off to jail or something reveal something that alters your perception of them.
Take Mona, for example. She's the bitchy sidekick to Hanna's flawed Queen B. Mona's never met a putdown she didn't like and is quick to put the rest of the school in their place as payback for years of being picked on prior to her big makeover. She's incredibly cruel to certain characters (I love you, Lucas!) and even meddles in Hanna's love life to disastrous results. Thing is, you realize just how bullied Mona actually was during Ali's reign and how the Liars really did do nothing to stop her, and at the same time you realize how much she does care for Hanna. So while it would be really easy for her to be the bad guy with no redeeming qualities at all, she actually pulls some out of her magic bag just when you thought there was no hope at all.

"A" will be revealed next Monday and at the moment I can only really cross one person off my list and even that person could have an accomplice, which would put them back in the running. This show has massively surpassed my meager expectations and is more than worth a looksee the next time they marathon the first season online.

So many twists!

In other news, remind me to check to make sure the pizza charge has fallen off my account (not processed) by Friday.