Walking While Stumbling

Books in the old unread pile: 7

Asian Folk Tales and Legends, retold by Suzee Leong and illustrated by Arif Rafhan, is a children's book that I got when I was missing my childhood folk tale books and hankering for more regional stories. The book is what it says on the tin with simple retellings, mayhaps too simple even though it is a children's book.

That said, it's a decent mix of East, West and South East Asian retellings of folk tales, some of them familiar like the stories of the naming of Melaka and Singapura, new-to-me stories of trickster characters of various regions, romances that end tragically with one or both members of the romance turning into a plant or geographical formation, truncated stories about Hua Mulan and Badang (though I would expect all of them to be truncated, but these particular stand out because I know how long the originals are), and as a surprise of some modern stories like Hachiko. It's fine, I'll probably look for something better later.

Another book from the old unread pile I started to read but stopped was a colonial translation of Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa, which I couldn't get past the first few pages. Something about the translation itself and the footnotes kept throwing me, so I've reshelved that, though it's very unlikely I'll come back to it unless my future self has a hankering for the Kedah Annals.

Before I started watching Aryana, I read an overview of the premise which closed with the line: "As she faces her fate of becoming a mermaid, Aryana is torn between choosing the sea and the surface world of humans where her heart belongs."

Now that I have finished 134 episodes of 189, I can confidently say, WHAT. There's no dilemma in the show at all. Aryana is a human girl with human girl tribulations and doesn't think about the sea at all. Although she did for three episodes get kidnapped by Neptuna, she has otherwise barely interacted with the merfolk storyline, which only exists to explain what Neptuna and her mother are up to, for otherwise Neptuna and/or her minions would be popping up every 30 episodes or so out of nowhere like Javert to chase Aryana. Was that overview written while they were still figuring out the show, and thought that Aryana would be interacting more with merfolk storyline?

Anyway, just as I was getting worried that the tone was off for a show that's supposed to be heading into the endgame, stuff has started happening! Not immediately, cos the first half of this batch was more of the love quadrangle faffing about of Aryana & Adrian vs. Hubert & Megan; NOTHING FOR MARLON, LOL. I kind of like Hubert but have trouble buying Hubert and Aryana behaving like it's a big tragedy that they can't be together. The writers only seemed to decide that Aryana had big feelings for Hubert after she declared that they couldn't date because of Marlon and/or the mermaid thing, and to be fair both those issues also exist for Adrian, who has been friendzoned, but I'm still like, these kids are fourteen. This is crush territory, not sweeping romance territory.

But in the second half of this batch, that story has been shunted aside for the family plot to come back to the forefront, and it's moving so quickly! In one fell swoop, Victor and Elnora now know that Aryana is Victor's daughter AND that she's a mermaid! Following that, school drama forced Victor's hand to tell Megan and Stella about the paternity thing as well, though not the mermaid thing, which has given Megan's plans to oust Aryana a more sinister edge as Megan tries to befriend Aryana to find something to destroy her, yum yum delicious.

On the other side of the story they've started styling Ofelia better with subtle but still visible make-up, and that is how we know we're heading into an endgame reconciliation between her and Victor. There's been barely any of the three boys in the second half of this batch of episodes, though that'll no doubt change eventually, I'm grateful at the rapid pace and I wonder if the showrunners were told to kick things up a notch, instead of dragging out this plot further, so they paced these reveals in back-to-back episodes in order to ramp up viewer interest, and the stats on these episodes certainly bear that out.