It's the little things.

[bunn]

For some reason I am howling with laughter at the 'haunted house' in this week's Sleepy Hollow.  Supposedly this house was overtaken by fearful Eldrich Forces in the eighteenth century, and nobody has spent more than a few days in it since, because it is inhabited by a Scary. ( I don't think this is a spoiler.  Or, only a tiddler, anyway.)

Here it is: http://www.entertainmentoutlook.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Sleepy-Hollow-Sanctuary-02.jpg

It's so CLEAN!  Those bricks!  I could cheerfully eat a meal off those bricks! And that paint!  It GLOWS!

Clearly the Scary has spent most of its time since 1781 scrubbing like mad.  I wonder if I can get one to move in with me...?

Of course the whole series is riddled with anachronisms of all kinds, but (perhaps because I live in a place so damp that all surfaces turn green in weeks)  this one really spoke to me. :-D

Comments

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

Dust does not exist in the world of fiction. This has often bothered me. It bothered me quite lot in Stargate Atlantis that Our Heroes discovered Atlantis after it had been abandoned for a several (thousand? million?) years and there was no dust AT ALL and everything still worked.

But, then, everything is different in the World of Fiction. Dungeons that have been abandoned for a thousand years still have candles burning in them; vasty roaring armies of a million orcs cannot be heard until you open the flimsy window that separates you from them; and necklaces come off with a single quick jerk. I guess the lack of dust is small fry, really. (But it does make me wish that I lived in the world of fiction. I also frequently struggle to remove necklaces.)

I did try with Sleepy Hollow, but couldn't really get past the revelation that people in the 1580s spoke Middle English. I would like to claim that Shakespeare stands as evidence to the contrary, but who am I to know?

[bunn.livejournal.com]

The interior of the house was at least moderately grimy, although admittedly not 'empty for two hundred years' grimy. I conclude that the Scary thinks it very important to keep up appearances, and is probably up at 7am every morning scrubbing the doorstep.

I firmly believe that hi-tech civilisations have all discovered an object that I covet : the robot vacuum cleaner that is powered by the dust it ingests!

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

I suppose it must get quite boring being Scary when nobody comes by to be scared. There's only so much satisfaction one can by by wasting one's scariness on the desert air. After you've done a few small lonely manifestations, and gone BWAHAHAHAHA! a little in the silence of the scullery, one might as well get the Hoover out and do a little cleaning, just to pass the time.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

It's weird how one can take a plot like 'the headless horseman OF THE APOCALYPSE is coming' and think 'OK, so the headless horseman OF THE APOCALYPSE is coming. And there's a timetravelling bewitched soldier. Interesting premise'.

And then you get something like Middle English in 1580 or unfeasibly clean bricks, and suddenly you find yourself all a-splutter.

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

I had a post half ready to go on just such a point on Tuesday night. Then I woke up on Wednesday and started walking into walls, and all was lost. Apparently one needs one's inner ear in order to write coherent, reflective LJ posts. (I wonder what our medieval forefathers thought about such a thing? They probably blamed the local crone, and her cat called Pyewacket, and shouted that she should be burnt as a witch for waving her wand and bringing dizziness and confusion in her wake.)

[sally_maria]

Presumably the writer lives in a desert, where the dry keeps everything pristine. I don't imagine it would actually have lasted much longer in New England than it would have done over here.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Even in a desert, surely that lovely white paint would get dusty!

Thinking on, the Scary must be more than just an enthusiastic cleaner. I think it must be a dab hand with a paintbrush too.

[kargicq.livejournal.com]

Also the house looks as though it was built circa 1980s on an upmarket estate.

THese things bother me too. I just watched "Empire of the Sun", and was unreasonably bothered about how they all kept their hair so nicely maintained in the prisoner camp. I could just about convince myself there was a former barber among the prisoners, but by the end of the film it was really hard to convince myself that the hero was finding opportunities for frequent hair cuts ... and yet /his hair never got longer/ and kept its funky slightly spiky look.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

There is something about the combination of brick colour and stark white columns that has that vibe!

[motetus.livejournal.com]

Look at those roof tiles too! I want whoever laid those to come and do my roof - now that's quality that lasts.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

And my god, those drainpipes! Ours are less than ten years old and they aren't that... pristine!

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

They couldn't even find a house with some atmospheric moss on the roof? I can think of at least two houses in my neighborhood much more terrifying than that.

A THOUGHT. Maybe the reason that the scary creature is so scary is that it makes whoever enters the house into its cleaning slave for the duration of their stay! Whenever the roof is getting a bit battered, it somehow draws in the entirety of a roofing company.

And even after leaving, everyone who has stayed in the house feels a compulsive need to clean things.

[pellegrina.livejournal.com]

I feel the same about Ripper Street. This is set in the cleanest, unmuddiest, most rainless London that has ever been seen, and someone runs down the exact same lane in every episode, Inspector Reid is absurdly anachronistic in his outlook, the special effects involve more blood than Game of Thrones, and it should have been called CSI:Whitechapel and yet... somehow it works.