and the world is still sleeping

I've watched a lot of media that shamelessly rips off other media, either the basic concepts or the plots wholesale, and a lot of time I roll my eyes or think it's funny, but when I saw that there's an Indonesian tv show that rips off H2O: Just Add Water, I got mad. :/

I think it's because although Just Add Water had its own success and is beloved by a particular generational subset, it's not an international mainstream famous kind of show, and ripping it off feels like they're being sneaky, taking advantage of an indie work that not many people know about. Unlike, say, Magik Rompak which rips off Now You See Me, or the kajilion Hindi films that rip off Hollywood blockbusters and you know exactly what's going on. (The two Top Gun: Maverick rip-offs made me laugh so hard.)

This isn't even the first Just Add Water rip-off I've seen! I watched the Romanian Sirenele recently, which is exactly that, but that one is also a vanity project with less than half the production value of the original show, and in the comments of where the show is uploaded on youtube, plenty of people are calling them out for it. I don't even like Just Add Water all that much, I don't know why I feel particularly offended on its behalf.

I thought I could start watching that Indonesian show alongside Aryana, but now I feel like I have to finish watching Just Add Water first so I know where the shows diverge.

Edited to add: I have started a H2O: Just Add Water rewatch!

I got this book ages ago but shoved it to the back of the drawer because I'd read another book by the author, Amy Licence, that was filled with silly but annoying mistakes. I'd put the author on my No Go list, but I already had this book in the pile, is the problem.

When I finally picked it up to read, I was already not inclined to be generous. Second impressions are even worse because the title is already obnoxious -- the book isn't about royal babies around the world, but royal babies in the UK, from Empress Matilda in the post-Conquest, down to the George, the eldest of the latest batch. Then the spread of births is uneven, too, with Licence skipping whole generations but then specifiying three of Henry VIII's kids: the short-lived Henry, Elizabeth, and Edward. Because Tudor supremacy, I guess. This isn't bad in itself, but just added to my annoyance of a bias.

It's a quick read, though! There is a throughline there of how royal births and birthing procedures evolved over the centuries, with Licence mentioning new expertise and publications that changed the way births were handled. There's the tug-of-water between male surgeons and female midwives, which eventually led to male midwives but also female midwives becoming more outspoken and publishing their own works. Then the horror of the Victorian era where all the nitty gritty of giving birth becomes taboo(ish), and the modern era with its overexposure to a ravenous public. But this throughline isn't consistent, as there are some chapters where Licence skips the birth details entirely to focus on the political situation of the baby's parents and the significance said baby would have or could have had (like if Henry VIII's first son with Catherine had lived). It's an okay book but I was not inclined to be nice about it.

Another book from the back of the drawer, this one Antara Sejarah dan Mitos, which I got from a book fair ages ago and did not read because I felt ill-equipped to handle it. I'm still ill-equipped to handle it, but I have read it! As expected it's an academic text, by Prof. Emeritus Ahmat Adam, collecting a few essays he'd written that are critical of the use of Sejarah Melayu by other historians as a historical text, as opposed to a piece of literature that combines history with myth.

As a layperson it did take me a bit of effort to get through. I'm not even that familiar with Sejarah Melayu in itself! So I did learn some things along the way (like Melaka's diplomatic relationship with the Ryukyu islands), even if I could not appreciate the nitty gritty of Ahmat's criticism, a lot of which seems to come down to historians not translating the texts accurately (due to Jawi lettering and also by assuming the text is purely Malay instead of also using Sanskrit, ancient Javanese and other languages), not considering the different versions of the text tell a story in itself, and of not corroborating the text with other sources.

Ahmat has a particular bug bear about Hang Tuah, in arguing against the persistence of that name over the more accurate Hang Tuha or Hang Toh, and a near-angry argument against treating Tuah as a historical figure instead of a mythological one. I can't speak to his text-based arguments, but his major cultural argument is an old Malay belief I did not know about, which is the taboo of speaking and writing a person's real name. I assume it must have faded from practice during colonial times, but one of Ahmat's specific examples was that people would call someone by their relation to someone else, eg. "father of Mahmud", which is something my grandmother did, because she only ever called my grandfather as "father of [his eldest child's name]". Were those echoes of an earlier taboo, but no longer as sensitive in the era of romanized writing and documentation?

Ahmat continues to specify that Hang Tuah is clearly not someone's literal birth name, and from there his argument Hang Tuha was created as a literary Laksamana figure that symbolised the ideal over reality, like King Arthur I suppose, and that some of the references in the text using his name were akin to referring to a powerful man as "Caesar" or a generous folk hero "Robin Hood", i.e. they are not literally said figures, but the reference is made in order to highlight specific traits. And then he continues to demolish recent arguments of the discovery of Tuah's supposed tomb, and the non-critical inclusion of Tuah in historical tourism. Fun things! But a lot of it out of my wheelhouse.