Kiss My Wonder Woman

In case you somehow missed the furor, frantically produced gifsets on tumblr, or relentless advertising on The CW, Supernatural turned 200 last night, with the airing of its most recent episode. The episode, "Fan Fiction", was yet another of their "meta" episodes, the ones where Sam and Dean Winchester come face to face with fans of...Sam and Dean Winchester. The episodes, which go as far back as the fourth season, veer between hilarious self-satire and alarming visions of who they think their fanbase is. So as a viewer I was a little nervous. Add that to the fact that this episode was reported to be a musical, and I wasn't really looking forward to it.

Which just goes to show that all my years of pop culture journalism must be making me cynical, because this episode was actually pretty great. And not just because the music was surprisingly catchy, the monster of the week wasn't half bad, and the characters were fun, but because for once it actually felt like a love letter to the fans. The previous meta episodes have always felt a touch condescending, a touch angry, a touch miffed, but this one actually felt like they were starting to get it. Maybe. Hopefully.

And in case you couldn't guess, SPOILERS for last night's episode.

So the episode starts out with Sam and Dean looking for a case. Dean has been recently de-demoned and is totally back to normal (much to my displeasure because that leaves us without a plot for the rest of the season), and he and Sam are keeping their heads down and going about business as usual. Part of the business? Investigating the mysterious disappearance of a teacher at a local all girls private school: St. Alphonso's Academy.

It's not until they get to the school that stuff starts to get weird. Weird as in the teacher who disappeared was the drama teacher. And the drama club is currently putting on an original production of Supernatural: The Musical, a show based on the Carver Edlund books that are of course based on Sam and Dean's life. Like I said, meta.

The boys are utterly horrified by the musical. Partly because it's a little alarming for them to see their tragic backstory presented in a peppy opening number with shockingly low production values, and partly because they can't believe this is happening. How is this happening? Is it a coincidence? Because they can't find any sign of something supernatural actually happening. The teacher was an alcoholic with a crumbling personal life. Maybe she just passed out in a ditch.

Except she totally didn't. After Sam and Dean do their initial investigation and decide there's nothing there, another girl disappears and a pattern emerges. Both the teacher and the student who disappeared threatened to get the production shut down. Both of them were taken by a weird scarecrow with vines for hands. And both of them left purple flowers in their wakes.

At this point the brothers can't actually hide the truth from the girls running the show anymore. Marie (Katie Sarife), who wrote and directed the show, is positive she saw something supernatural dragging off her friend, while Maeve (Joy Regullano) is just concerned with making sure the show goes on. Well, actually, they're both concerned with making sure the show goes on. Which is how we figure out what the monster is.

I'm not going to spoil that reveal, or the rest of the episode, but suffice to say that things get hairy. The real meat of the episode, though, isn't the monster battle. It's pretty much never the monster battle. Instead, the interesting stuff comes in the conversations that Sam and more especially Dean have with Marie about her work.

See, the episode is called "Fan Fiction", and it's about a teenage girl who created a musical production of her favorite book series. As Marie states many times, however, it's not a literal interpretation, it's a "transformative work." In other words, she kept the stuff she liked from the original, and tossed what she didn't. In so doing she created a work that really isn't particularly true to Sam and Dean's life, but that resonates with her emotions.

All of that seems pretty on target. Supernatural is pretty well known in fandom for having a fanfiction community that gleefully ignores canon in favor of fanon, that stresses the transformation part of transformative works, and that frequently tells stories about our favorite characters getting it on already. And previously the writers of the show have kind of dissed us for this. They've created characters like Becky Rosen (Emily Perkins), a fanfic writer so obsessed with Sam and Dean and their hotness that she's willing to magically roofie Sam into marrying her.

Or they've presented episodes about fan conventions where almost all of the fans are white guys in their twenties. They've made it clear that they think their fans are really weird, very passionate, but more than a little crazy.

But up until this point the writers have never really acknowledged who their audience is or why they watch the show. My friend Kyla Gorman put it better, but the real reason we as fans like Supernatural isn't because the plot is all that good. It really isn't. It's because we emotionally connect with the characters and their feelings. We like all that manpain. We like it when they cry. We like seeing a show about two physically fit, attractive men, crying and hugging and talking about their feelings. Yes, it's great that sometimes they kill monsters too, but let me be perfectly clear: I do not watch this show for the monsters. I watch it for the feelings.

For the longest time it's felt like the writers or creators or network executives were in denial about this. Like they had some weird idea that their fans were mostly white guys in their twenties who wanted to watch monsters die or something. In fact that is patently untrue. I know very few guys who watch Supernatural, and the ones that do by and large do so alongside a female friend, lover, or family member. Face it. It's a chick show.

And that's fine. I like that about it. But even more, I like that the writers are finally acknowledging it. This episode they finally showed the fanbase far more accurately as they have before: as passionate, intense, and enthusiastic, as overwhelmingly young and female, and as capable of creating fanworks almost as good as the original.

Because, as it turns out, the musical? Not half bad. It's a little cheesy, sure, but the actual songs are surprisingly catchy, the girls are all great singers, and ending has the audience giving them all a standing ovation. In other words, while Dean and Sam don't really ever get the musical, they can appreciate it.

In fact, that's a conversation that actually happens between Marie and Dean. Dean confesses that he really doesn't understand her view of the story, but he admits that it was good to see it. It was nice to know her perspective. And while he might never really understand, he respects her right to love the story in her own way. It's a part of her, and she is allowed some ownership of it.

That seems like a very small admission, and in some ways it is, but it has been a hard fought battle to get here. To get the writers of the show to admit that while their fans might like different parts of the show than they do, while the fans might take creative licenses they don't appreciate, they are allowed to love the show in different ways. Transformative works don't have to be to your taste to be valuable.

And, more to the point, stories really do belong to everyone. Yes, there are copyright laws, but when we come down to the emotional reality of the thing, stories belong to us all. When you love something it becomes a part of you, and it definitely comes out in your writing, your art, your music, your academic papers. The things we love, the stories we love, are part of who we are. What's so wrong with that?

The act of creating a transformative work, or a piece of art or music or fiction that uses someone else's original idea to create your own story, is a very valuable part of self-expression. It's a form of recontextualizing the world and your place in it. It's a way of showing what you think is worth preserving in a work, and then also showing what you think is worth changing.

I love fanfiction and fanart and fandom. I always have. It's been a huge part of my life for the past fifteen years (holy crap I'm getting old). And while I don't always agree with another fan's interpretation of the source material, I rarely regret knowing how they feel about the work. I love that people love stories in such completely different ways. That's great.

So it means a lot to me when I see something like this that clearly shows that someone else thinks it's great too.

Also also, and this is a total side note, this episode gave a callback to one of the biggest plotholes ever in the show: What happened to Adam? As in, the third Winchester brother who sacrificed himself to be locked into the Cage with Lucifer (while technically a vessel for the archangel Michael). Sam was rescued from the Cage at the end of season five, but Adam wasn't. He's been in there for five years. Five. Years.

So it was pretty awesome when the show had a girl dressed like Adam walk onstage. Dean immediately asked, "Who's that?" And when we got the answer, we just pretty much peed laughing. Thank you show, for calling back to Adam being stuck in the Pit all this time. Feel free to, you know, address that sometime.

Sometimes, I have to admit, my life feels an awful lot like a sitcom. Yesterday, for example, featured a day of missed calls and sitcom level misunderstandings, complete with some physical comedy in the form of a chiropractor adjusting my rib injury and making me scream in the middle of his office while surrounded by children getting face-painted, and then followed by a great youth group session, after which I got loudly and violently ill all over the back steps for literally no reason. I'm just saying. Sometimes my life feels kind of sitcom-ish.

Of course, it's not hard to tell that my life isn't a sitcom most of the time. My problems are rarely solved by the end of the day, there are no improbably attractive men who bicker with me at work (because I work alone, but that's beside the point), and I don't live in an alarmingly nice apartment in a big city. I live in a perfectly reasonable apartment, with roommates, outside a big city. Because money.

The point I'm making is that when it comes to sitcoms we all have expectations of what they're supposed to be like. A lot of those expectations have to do with the humor, the physical comedy, and the ridiculous situations that come up. But some of the things we think of actually have very little to do with the form itself, and more to do with the stereotypes and character archetypes that have grown in around the form.

Take, for example, the stereotype of the "sexy Latina" in a sitcom. I can think of plenty of examples of this, but let's go with Gloria (Sofia Vergara) from Modern Family as our first and really best example. Gloria is an absolutely gorgeous woman and a very very smart one, but her character on the show is mostly toned down to a series of jokes about how sexy she is, and how she can't really speak English very well.

Aside from one memorable and amazing scene where she talks about how she hates everyone discriminating against her for not speaking her second language perfectly, the show largely allows these stereotypes to stay in place. Gloria's part in the show is to provide the sex appeal, to be the messy, passionate, intense, non-English fluent love interest.

Which is pretty par for the course for Latinas in sitcoms. Not always, but a lot. There are a lot of frankly racist stereotypes built up around the idea of Latinas in comedy. The idea that they must be sexy and interested in sex, that they must be loud and "firey" and prone to fits of rage. The idea that they are more intuitive and in touch with their emotions. All that crap that has somehow gotten tacked on to representations of Latinas in American pop culture.

And that brings me to why we're talking about Amy Santiago (Melissa Fumero) from Brooklyn 99 today. Because Amy is none of those things. At all. I didn't notice it at first, mostly because Rosa Diaz, one of the other detectives, is more my cup of tea, but Amy's characterization on the show actually really manages avoid almost all of the stereotypical problematic representations of Latinas. How?

They made her boring.

So, Brooklyn 99 is a sitcom set in a police station, mostly about the detectives and support staff working in Brooklyn's fictional 99th precinct. The nominal main character is Jake Peralta (Andy Samberg), an immature manchild who works as a lead character because no one is amused by his immaturity. This most recent season has featured a few changes to the basic setup, mostly based around how Jake has actually progressed as a character (yay!), but it's overall the same.

You've also got a full set of other awesome characters, from Captain Ray Holt (Andre Braugher), the amazingly deadpan and wry man in charge, to Boyle (Joe Lo Truglio), a detective who openly calls himself a foodie and has no issues about his lack of stereotypical masculinity. There's even Gina (Chelsea Peretti), a narcissistic administrative assistant who struggles to balance her life between school and her passion for dance. Weirdly, working a full time job doesn't really come into it at all.

My point is that all of the characters on Brooklyn 99 are awesome, but some of them are more awesome than others. Which brings us back to Amy Santiago. Amy is a classic sitcom character, albeit with a twist. She's a hardcore type-A personality, a woman who dreams someday of being a police captain (so much so that she dresses up in the captain's hat sometimes), and who proudly brags that "in high school I was voted Most Appropriate."

She's nerdy and intense and an overachieving brown-noser. She's so obsessed with getting Captain Holt to be her mentor that she'll go to ridiculous lengths to get his attention. She'll offer to adopt one of his puppies, even though she is literally deathly allergic to dogs. She'll read an eight page, single-spaced ode to his greatness over Thanksgiving dinner. She'll call him "beautiful", and say things like, "Raymond, those slacks are a knockout!" Heck, she'll even snoop through his kitchen to see whether or not he makes hummus from scratch.

She's nuts. But in a very good and refreshing way. Amy is focused on her career, stable, steady, and really awesome. Most of the jokes about Amy are about how obsessive and crazy she can. But not crazy in the way that we're used to seeing Latinas on sitcoms be crazy. Amy's insanity stems from her pathological need for her boss' approval, and her need to be the best cop she can be, dammit.

She's not passionate or firey, unless she hasn't eaten enough that day, in which case she's kind of terrifying. She's not sexy. In fact one of the running jokes of the show has Jake taking things Amy says and repurposing them as the title of her sex tape. Like, "Kind, Sober, and Fully Dressed." Or, "I'm Sorry About Tonight." Or, "Not Even Gonna Touch That: The Amy Santiago Story." The running gag is that Amy just isn't sexy.

But what's actually great about this is that Amy doesn't mind. She doesn't really care that she doesn't come off as sexy, because she doesn't want to come off as sexy. Sexy is not a thing she's aiming for. She's a fuddy duddy, and she likes it. She had to call her thirteen year old niece for makeup tips, and then disregarded them for being "too sexual". She wears pantsuits, and has no problems with that. Her apartment is full of doilies and collectable tea spoons. She's a boring person inside.

And that's great! I mean, when was the last time you saw a Latina on a sitcom who was characterized as a teacher's pet? Or as a woman so dull that she fakes a root canal to get out of doing extra work she originally volunteered for, just so she can go to a bed and breakfast with her boyfriend. Who is named Teddy. For the record.

Amy Santiago is a deeply boring person inside, and that makes for freaking excellent comedy.

It's easy when you're writing jokes to go for the most obvious one. It's easy to think that stereotypes add value to your humor because they create a shorthand that your audience probably already knows. It's easy, but it's not better. The best jokes, the best humor, comes from comedy that makes an effort. That thinks, "You know what would be really funny? If we have this detective who's really ambitious and intense, but also loves little old lady things, and isn't ashamed of that." Good comedy comes when you step outside the stereotypes and try something different.

Because women, and I hate to break this to you buddy, are people too. And people are infinitely weird and strange and hilarious. We are all just bundles of neuroses and sitcoms waiting to happen. A bad sitcom writer writing my life might make me out into a typical clumsy nerd stereotype. That's not the whole picture. Yeah, I get hurt a lot. But I get hurt because I tackled someone playing mud rugby or because I bumped into a wall in the underground missile silo because I lost my flashlight or because I got headbutted by a toddler and somehow that hurt my ribs enough for me to have to go get them fixed.

What I'm saying is that there are easy jokes you can make, and then there are good ones. Frankly, I love that the writers of Brooklyn 99 gave us good jokes. They gave us Amy Santiago, an unapologetically dorky, unsexy, practical Latina character who can't dance on a network sitcom. I can appreciate that.*

Also I love how much this show does with female friendships.

*Title of her sex tape!

I went to see Interstellar by myself on a Friday night with a kid's pack from the concessions stand (the only affordable way to get a little bit of everything) and nothing better to do. I settled in for what I already knew was going to be a long movie, but what I was hoping would include some cool lady characters and more than a little science fiction landscape eye candy. I was not disappointed.

The movie is good. If that's all you're reading to find out, then you can go now. Interstellar is a perfectly competent, entertaining film. Matthew McConaughey does a credible job holding the movie together, though personally I did think he was outshone by Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain, who were the real stars of the movie. If you're generally a fan of Christopher Nolan's brand of slightly intellectual big budget action movies (like Inception and The Prestige and of course the Batman movies), then you're apt to like this one as well.

But that's not to say that the movie is perfect. It's largely what I was expecting. Ambitious, intense, philosophical, and relentlessly white and male.

I don't just mean that because the protagonist of the film is Cooper, an all-American astronaut turned farmer who stands in for the everyman and is played by Matthew McConaughey. I mean that because, aside from the aforementioned Hathaway and Chastain, and David Gyasi as the single major character who is not white, everyone of note in this film is a white guy.

Even more than that, though, this is a movie that somehow manages to be both cosmic and incredibly narrow in its focus. We travel to the outer reaches of space, to another galaxy even, and encounter fantastic wonders, but the action on earth is contained within about a couple hundred miles in rural North America. We are never told or shown what is happening in the rest of the world, and whenever someone talks about "saving all the people on earth", we are shown images of white, American children.

In other words, this is movie, though entertaining, is probably one of the single best examples I've seen of the idea that a middle-aged, middle-class white American man can stand in for the wealth of human experience. Cooper is the everyman, as in the default person, and everyone else is a deviation from the form.

But, again, it's not a bad movie. It's arguably even a pretty good one.

The film starts out with a pretty simple premise: Instead of being devastated by war or evil robots or alien invasion or floods or a giant volcano, in the end what seems to be killing the earth is simply nature. The environment has turned on the people of earth, making it almost impossible to grow enough food to keep the population alive. Everyone has turned to farming, but it's not a good way to live, just a decent way to not die. One by one the crops fail until, by the time the film starts, there are only a handful of crops that haven't been eaten by blight. Everyone grows corn.

And the dust. The changing climate has created dust storms that rage across the middle of North America. Life? Is just plain hard.

Our hero, Cooper, is an astronaut-turned-farmer who lives with his kids and his father-in-law out in the middle of the countryside, trying to grow enough food to keep themselves afloat. He's not a very good farmer - he's a much better engineer - but they get by. Cooper's two kids, Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and Murph (Mackenzie Foy), couldn't be more different from each other, but he loves them both very dearly. Tom is a steady, quiet boy who takes after his grandfather, Donald (John Lithgow) and wants to be a farmer when he grows up.

Murph, on the other hand, is a brilliant, moody, complicated little girl who loves science and making things and asking questions, but is also open to the unexplained. She insists that there's a ghost in her bedroom making the books fall off the shelf in a pattern, and gets in trouble at school for insisting that the moon landing wasn't faked and then punching a kid who tells her it was.

Cooper and Murph have a special relationship. They're very close, and it's nice to see that, far from the usual movie like this where that relationship is used to humanize Cooper and nothing else, that relationship becomes pivotal for the film.

The whole thing gets started when Murph's "ghost" or whatever is messing with her room seems to actually send a message. It's a weird message, and it's in binary, but the "ghost" leaves a couple of lines of dust on the floor in specific piles that spell out coordinates. Cooper, being intrigued by the weirdness, decides to check it out, and Murph, being incorrigible, sneaks onto the truck and goes along with him.

When they get to the coordinates they find...an abandoned NORAD base? Only, as it turns out, not so abandoned. The base is actually the secret headquarters of NASA, which is still in operation, but in hiding, as public opinion would not condone the use of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on a space program when people are struggling to eat.

But, as Dr. Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway) and her father Professor Brand (Michael Caine) point out, that's exactly why the space program is necessary. The earth isn't going to be habitable for humans much longer, and it's up to them to find a new planet for us to call home.

That's where the movie really starts. After a couple of ridiculous coincidences (what are the odds that a retired astronaut would mysteriously be led to NASA just days before their final mission to the stars begins?), it's decided to that Cooper will go along on the mission. It'll be him and three scientists, including Dr. Brand, visiting three of the most promising worlds they've found in another galaxy. This galaxy is accessible only because of a mysterious wormhole that opened up out by the rings of Saturn, and its possible that we are being led into a trap by aliens.

Plus, the planets have already been visited by humans. Ten years ago NASA sent out twelve exploratory missions with one person each, and they will be visiting the most promising of the worlds. But it won't be an easy trip. It will take, at minimum, years. Possibly decades. And there's no guarantee they'll ever get home. If they do, though, Professor Brand shows Cooper that he has actually turned the NASA building itself into a space station. As long as he can solve the "problem of gravity" before they have to leave, Professor Brand will be able to take "everyone" up to space with him before the planet is destroyed, and save mankind for their new home.

The central tension of the movie then becomes trifold: can Cooper and the others find a habitable world for mankind, can Professor Brand solve the equation, and can Cooper get back to earth in time to see his daughter again.

I won't go spoiling all of these questions and their answers, because that's the bulk of the rest of the film. Murph doesn't take Cooper's leaving very well, and we get a vague impression that she's going to grow up to be a hellion before the plot jumps ahead rather rapidly. Cooper and company have trouble finding a suitable world, and run into a lot more problems with the theory of relativity than they anticipated. And, of course, solving the problem of gravity turns out to be a lot more complex than anyone imagined.

What makes the movie really work is how all of these plotlines tie into each other. Murph grows up (and becomes Jessica Chastain), who works with Professor Brand to solve the gravity problem. Their biggest barrier is that they lack data, and the only way to get that data is to see inside a black hole. Which is impossible. Meanwhile, Cooper and Dr. Brand and their cohorts go down to visit a promising planet, only to discover that the time dilation on this planet is extreme (due to its proximity to a black hole), and the couple of hours they spent trying not to die on the surface translated into decades lost back home.

The film turns into a race against time. While Cooper and Dr. Brand remain untouched by age and disease, everyone back on earth is dying and aging and falling apart. It's strangely compelling, the idea that they might find another planet for humans, and they themselves would have barely aged, but by the time they get back to earth, the human race might be extinct.

There are also a series of plot twists late in the third act, but most of those are relatively tame. I think they were supposed to be mind-blowing, but one of them, involving Matt Damon as the legendary scientist Dr. Mann and the planet he's discovered, is painfully easy to predict, and the other, involving the gravity problem, is just kind of lame. Still, the movie hums along, and eventually we are swept up into the metaphysical question of how Cooper will save his daughter, across time and through space, when she's apt to die of old age before he ever gets home.

Also the end of the movie gets kind of weird. Like, 2001: A Space Odyssey weird. It's not a bad thing, necessarily, and it doesn't ruin the movie, but it is deeply strange. Cooper, who, throughout the film has represented the interests of the everyman, ascends even further into being the messianic father figure I'm not sure we as a culture needed. His desire to save his children, especially Murph, becomes an actual physical manifestation of love (sort of) and well, it's complicated. But the idea that Cooper is always right in the movie because he's a father and he has children and because none of the rest of them can understand his pain, that bothers me.

It lessens the impact of knowing that there are twelve astronauts who went out into space never expecting to see another human face again, on the belief that they might be helping save the human race. Cooper's insistence on his own supremacy throughout the film, his relentless belief that he is automatically right because he is a father, makes Dr. Brand come across as shrewish and petty, and the other men on the team as useless and spineless. That's not a good thing.

Still, I will give the movie some credit for making the two most important characters after the main character two ladies doing science. Dr. Brand and Murph are both established as absolute geniuses in their fields, and the kind of women who get stuff done. Murph is the sort of girl who sets fire to a field so she has more time to study an anomaly, while Brand is the kind of practical scientist who may not like her circumstances but will keep going no matter what.

It's a little problematic that they're both presented as tempests ruled by their emotions, but actually the film does a pretty good job redeeming that. Murph's frustrations and anger at the men in her life are by and large supported by the narrative, because the men in her life suck. Brand's emotional reactions to the situations around her and her desire to follow her heart are actually born out when it turns out that if Brand had followed her heart, they all would have had a much easier time of things.

So that's pretty cool.

But the inherent whiteness and maleness of the narrative still bothers me. Why is Matthew McConaughey the only person who can save us all? Why is a random white guy the savior of the universe? Furthermore, why do we only ever see white Americans? Where is everyone else? Out of everyone in the entire world, why is the story based around a handful of white people in rural America? Did no other nation have a space program? Did NASA not bother trying to contact anyone else? And, seriously, why is Cooper the center of this movie?

Ultimately, the problem with this very narrow focus on a very small group of people is that it makes the central problem of the movie - the survival of the human race - feel like it's actually about the survival of a certain demographic of people from a certain part of America. The idea behind this film is universal, but the choices made in casting and writing make it feel very specific.

And that's damaging. For both people who do fit that very narrow demographic that the movie is speaking to, and everyone else who doesn't. It says that, yes, the world really does revolve around middle-class, white American men, and that everyone else is superfluous to the narrative. The story of the universe is the story of white American men, this seems to say. It also seems to suggest that no one has it harder, and no one is more qualified to stand in for all of humanity, than a white American man. And we all know that's crap.

While there is a twist at the end that suggests that the focus of the story the whole way through has actually been Murph and not Cooper, sadly, that's not actually true. Murph is central to the story, but it's never her story. It's her father's story, in which she plays a very large role. And I am, for the record, very happy about the size of her role and very happy that she's a dude at all. I've heard that originally the character was supposed to be a man, and I'm glad she isn't.

There's something wrong with taking a movie that's just spent three whole hours pounding into our heads the supremacy of this one particular white guy, only to turn it around and claim that actually the hero all along was his daughter. Nope. Movies don't work like that. Murph is amazing, don't get me wrong, but she is not the hero of this movie. That's just not how the movie was written or shot, and it's disingenuous for the story to claim she is. I would have loved to see the movie where Murph actually was the hero, but that is not the movie we got.

Still. Interstellar is entertaining, and there's a certain extent to which I cannot find fault with it for that. Yes, it's a roiling mess of weird plots, inexplicable coincidences and ideas that are never fully explained, bad science, and white people everywhere. But. I did sit through the whole three hour movie with my eyes glued to the screen, reluctant to get up even when I realized that I had to pee incredibly badly. Like, so badly. But I sat through the whole thing until the end, even when I was positive I knew where the plot was going, and I was right.

That says something about a movie. Its sheer entertainment value. For all that I can analyze this to the stars and back, there's an inherent value in the fact that it's just a plain entertaining film. I don't want to take away from that. If you go see this movie, chances are, you won't regret spending the money. However, just because I think that the inherent interestingness of the movie is a value in and of itself doesn't mean that I think all that analysis I just did is worthless. Far from it.

In a weird way, I feel like entertaining movies are actually more needing of analysis and criticism and deep intellectual pulling apart. Because these are movies that we just kind of enjoy watching, and they can contain ideas and assumptions that weasel their ways into our heads without us noticing. See, movies with an inherently high level of fun are better at sneaking ideas past us. We don't notice the sometime toxic underpinnings of these movies, because we're too busy having fun.

That's why, for all that I am a highly nerdy person who absolutely loves art films and foreign documentaries and crap like that, most of my reviews and writing is about pop culture, low culture, whatever you want to call it. I like popcorn movies, but I also think that popcorn movies are the movies we really need to be talking about. They're the ones most everyone is going to see, and they're the ones that will ultimately have the most impact on our culture. We should know what they're about.

Interstellar, for all that it's a movie about the human race and our survival and our place in the cosmos, is a very narrow movie. It's fun, and it's probably worth seeing. But it's not the kind of movie that we should be uncritically enjoying. It says a lot of problematic things, both implicitly and explicitly. It has some deep issues.

So yeah, watch the movie. But never forget what it's really saying.

Murphy Cooper gets stuff done. This should have been the movie.

Growing up, I was not the most obedient child. It's a fact that runs through my head every time I tell the Munchkin and Kiddo to do something and they just stare at me with blank faces and ask, "Why?" I have to swallow back my frustration when they do that, because I remember, I was the exact same way, and it's petty to get angry just because someone else is doing what you do too.

I didn't really think about it as a kid, though, mostly concerned with how I could get my own way. I only ever obeyed in full when there was a consequence attached to it. Like, being told not to climb the tree out back of the church? No clear consequence attached to that one, so I did it and I hit the boy who told me I couldn't on the head with a block. On the other hand, being told that I had to sweep the stairs came with the consequence of my parents being mad at me if I didn't, and so I was pretty decent about stuff like that. I was okay. Not great.

I didn't give much thought to the complexity of obedience and how we teach children to listen because I was a kid. You don't think about that stuff when you're a kid. At least, not usually. It's not been until I started taking care of children that I realized how incredibly hard it is to get a child to obey you without breaking down their own free will. How to give them boundaries and make it clear that you will be obeyed, but also to let them know that they are allowed to have opinions on things, and that are allowed to object.

It's really hard. Especially with the Munchkin, because he's three. With Kiddo, it's easier, because she's eight and susceptible to logic. I can always explain to her why I want her to do whatever it is I want her to do (take a shower, do her homework, eat something healthy, not eat anything because she just ate, not play with the kid next door who is dangerously sociopathic, etc). But with the Munchkin we're only just getting into the stage where I can explain myself to him and he can follow my logic.

I could very easily just tell him what to do and insist that he do it, centered around the (reasonable) belief that as I am an adult who loves him, I am within my rights to exert control over his life. As he is a toddler who would rather eat cookies and stick toy cars in his mouth, I would be pretty well justified in that assumption.

But here's the thing: the Munchkin is still a person, even if he is a small, sticky, unreasonable, grumpy one (who I love). He's a person who is being shaped by his experiences in life now. So I don't want him to just blindly obey me. I want to give him the tools to be able to make his own good decisions later in life, based on what he learns now.

And that? Is really hard to pull off.

Which is what brings us to the movie of today's discussion: Ella Enchanted. Based on the book of the same name, the movie is a frothy confection of jokes about fantasy movies. It's very different in tone from the book, but frankly I didn't mind. I never cared much for the book, and I like the irreverent, bizarre wackiness of the movie.

Starring Anne Hathaway, Hugh Dancy, Minnie Driver, and a whole host of other people far too famous and talented for something like this, the story is based on a simple premise: What if instead of giving "kindness" or "beauty" or "grace", some little girl's fairy godmother gave her the gift of obedience?

Hathaway plays Ella, the unfortunate child. Growing up, she always knew there was something off about her, but her mother and her nurse, Mandy (Minnie Driver), kept the exact nature of her curse a secret for years. Finally, she found out what it was, and she was devastated. Meant to be a gift to make Ella a more biddable child, the curse forces Ella to do whatever she is told. Even if what she's told to do is very personally unpleasant. Even against her moral code.

Like when she's told to stop speaking to her best friend. Or when she's ordered to hand over the necklace that's all she has left of her mother. Or when she's told she absolutely must not ever tell anyone about her curse. Ella is stuck in a life where anyone can tell her to do anything at any time, and has to comply. It's a nightmare.

The film is a comedy, though, and it follows the basic plot and outline of the Cinderella story. Ella's father gets remarried to a horrible woman (played marvelously by Joanna Lumley) with two daughters: Olive (Jennifer Higham) and Hattie (Lucy Punch). Hattie, being both smart and mean, figures out pretty quickly that something is funky about her stepsister, and seeks to exploit it as much as possible.

Ella knows that she can't keep going like this, so she figures it's time for a change. With some help from a sympathetic Mandy, Ella decides that instead of sticking around and resenting her fate, she's going to go out there and find Lucinda (the fairy who cursed her, played by Vivica A. Fox) and demand that she take back the curse. And so our story begins.

Since this is a fantasy tale about magic and fake medieval kingdoms and all that, there is of course a prince, played by Hugh Dancy. Said prince, whose name is Char (short for Charmond, but we all know it's really "Charming"), runs into Ella rather repeatedly throughout her journey, and eventually just figures he might as well tag along since it will save him the trouble of having to rescue her all the time.

Char and Ella fall in love, completely fail at finding Lucinda, run into more than a few comedy sidekicks, and all the while Ella keeps doing what she's told. Char, to his credit, does figure out that there's something weird about how Ella reacts to people, and is very careful not to order her to do anything. But then he thinks that she'll do whatever he says because he's the prince. Not the other reason.

And there's an evil uncle secretly plotting for the throne of the kingdom, because of course there is (he's played by Cary Elwes). Said evil uncle eventually figures out that he can use Ella as his assassin because she has to do what he tells her. Ella valiantly resists, not least because she doesn't want to kill anyone, but also because she really does love Char. In the end, it's her love for Char and her determination and will that break the spell. She's free! Only to have to fight to save the kingdom from Edgar's tyrannical rule, etc.

Like I said, the movie is pretty light and fun considering how weighty its premise is. It's got a strange mixture of current pop culture and fantasy tropes, the sort of thing that someone like me absolutely loves but plenty of people find obnoxious. Like, Hattie and Olive are members of Char's official fan club. And Ella is a social justice protestor with strong feelings about politics that she'll talk Char's ear off about. And it's pretty much just our world with some fairy tale embellishments on top. Which is fine. I like that. It's quirky and silly and fun.

But, when you come down to it, the subject matter really is pretty freaking dark. I mean, the movie makes it clear that up until the point when Ella breaks the spell, she literally cannot avoid obeying a direct order. She can't even put it off much. Which has so many implications that the movie thankfully didn't go into, but that I can't unsee. Like, what happens if Ella gets catcalled and someone tells her to do something sexual? I can't not think about that, because, in a real sense, that's why this movie is so powerful.

See, Ella's predicament, that of being the perfect obedient child, is a microcosm and extreme example of what I think we often actually want for young children. Especially girls. We have this cultural ideal that says that children, especially girls, need to listen and do what they're told. That women would be better off if they were "better listeners". That everything would be better if people were just orderly and obedient.

I know this is true because I've heard those words said to me. That everything would be easier if I would just do what I was supposed to do. I get told to do things on a daily basis, things I have no intention of ever doing. It's hard sometimes not to just roll my eyes, suck it up, and do the thing I've been told to do, even though I know it's not my job or not something I in particular should do. Sometimes it's just easier to do what you're told.

Only in the long run it really isn't easier. It makes you feel worthless. Like your only value comes from doing what people ask of you. Or, it can make you feel like your own needs and desires don't matter. Ella is an extreme case, but her situation really just highlights, at least for me, the dangers of teaching a child that all that is required of them is blind obedience.

Teaching a kid to obey without teaching them why and how and what the good reasons in this situation are is bad. Kids need those tools to tell them when something should be obeyed, and when it shouldn't. Kids need to know that, because adults need to know that. A child who doesn't know who and when to obey is equally scary, whether it's a kid who disobeys everything or a child who obeys no matter what. Both situations are unhealthy.

My solution is long-winded and not particularly simple or even necessarily effective. It'll be decades before I know if this worked. But I feel like it will. What I do is simply tell them why I want them to do whatever it is I'm demanding of them. I tell them everything. Seriously. Everything. I tell those kids why they have to drink that cup of water before they can go play, why they have to stop talking back and why they have to change their attitudes. It's time consuming and repetitive and really boring for me. But, I think, it's working.

Because now when I tell them to do something, they do it. Or, they argue with me. Sometimes I tell Kiddo to do her homework and she comes back by telling me that she would rather read for half an hour before she does her homework because she feels like it's stressful to do it right when she gets home. And you know what? I let her. That's good logic. Or sometimes even the Munchkin will do that. I'll tell him to get ready for nap, and he'll tell me that he would like to play for another five minutes because he isn't sleepy yet. And I let him, because he's not wrong.

It's important for kids to know how to listen to authority. I'm certainly not going to argue with that. But it's also important for them to know how and when to question authority. A big part of being a functional adult is knowing when and when not to obey. My parents did not get a particularly obedient child, but I've never really gotten the impression that they minded. Personally, I think they got something better. They got a kid who knows which rules to follow and which ones to break. Maybe I'm biased, but that's what I want for my kids too.

I would also like them to be well-read social justice warriors, but I'll settle for independent thinkers.

What is our cultural emotional thing about princesses and dragons? Seriously, what is it? They each make sense on their own, what with people discovering dinosaur bones and lacking the context in which to understand them as fossils instead imagining them as giant fire breathing lizards, and what with people always seeming to be obsessed with young women whose fathers are of high social standing. I get dragons, and I get princesses. But why princesses and dragons?

I'm sure you all could tell me the story. It's about this princess - she's beautiful of course, because they're always beautiful - and her parents love her very much. She's the perfect princess, all sweet and nice and kind and did I mention beautiful? Because that's the highest virtue a woman can have. Her beauty.

Anyway, this princess is universally beloved because blah blah blah, until one evil day the kingdom is attacked by an evil dragon. This dragon, who is generally without specified gender or purpose, destroys a huge part of the kingdom and castle before flying off with the princess in its clutches. Weirdly, the princess is not hurt or killed by being picked up in the claws of a giant flying lizard and then carried for miles somehow without being dropped or impaled by talons.

The king and queen (if there is a queen - she might have died for dramatic effect) beg the people to help them. Find us a prince! Find us a prince who can go slay the dragon and rescue the princess!

The princess must wait years in the dragon's lair, or in the helpfully provided and inexplicable tower that the dragon has thoughtfully prepared for her. Finally, though, her dreams come true, and a handsome prince - they're always handsome - comes to rescue her. He fights the dragon, and even though an entire army couldn't kill the thing the first time, this one prince manages to kill it with his sword. He saves her, and she is his. His prize. Because even though they've literally never seen each other before in their lives, she is automatically his property once the dragon is dead and they get married and presumably have lots of babies in order to secure the line of succession for both of their kingdoms, thus perpetuating a system of inequality and unsustainable economic oppression for the proletariate.

Sorry. Got distracted.

I want to talk today about a very different story. This story, Nimona by Noelle Stevenson, is the rare story where the princess is the dragon, and frankly, it's a lot more interesting than what we're used to hearing.

But before we begin, some background. Nimona started out as Stevenson's art school project. She was tasked with coming up with some original characters to draw, and a joke with a friend had her coming up with the idea of "monkpunk", or a medieval world with improbable mad science mixed in. Laser guns and knights in armor. The idea spiraled and out of it came Nimona, a webcomic still available for free online, but that will also be published in full form (with additional content) May 2015 by HarperCollins.

It's one of the great internet success stories of a good project getting the person who made it enough recognition for everyone else to see how dang talented they are. Noelle Stevenson started out as an art student with a weird project, and now that project is getting published while she works as a very much in demand comics artist and writer. She helped create and now writes the awesome comic Lumberjanes, does a special back page in Sleepy Hollow, and starting next year will be working for Marvel on the revamped Thor. So, yeah, I think it's worked out well for her. Which is awesome.

The comic itself is, however, our main point of discussion today. Here's how Stevenson describes it:

Lord Ballister Blackheart has a point to make, and his point is that the good guys aren't as good as they seem. He makes a comfortable living as a supervillain, but never really seems to accomplish much - until he takes on a new sidekick, Nimona, a shapeshifter with her own ideas of how things should be done. Unfortunately, most of those ideas involve blowing things up. Now Ballister must teach his young protégé some restraint and try to keep her from destroying everything, while simultaneously attempting to expose the dark dealings of those who claim to be the protectors of the kingdom - including his former best friend turned nemesis, Ambrosius Goldenloin. [x]

Here's what I have to add to that: The story is madcap, fun, and a little loose on the plotting. It's good, don't get me wrong, but there are big stretches that feel like filler, and sometimes it's hard to tell how it's all going to tie together. I'm very curious to read it in the final form in the book, to see if any of the additional content adds to the emotions of the story or not. But, in general, the story of the comic is solid and interesting.

The story is told from the perspective of Ballister Blackheart, but it's really about Nimona. Nimona who just randomly shows up one day and badgers Ballister until he lets her be his sidekick. Why? Well, it's hard to say without spoiling it, but suffice to say that she does have a reason, and it's a good one. Nimona's a shapeshifter, with a strong predilection for the more violent and untamable forms. She can turn into a dragon, a shark, a wolf, and she does.

Mostly she uses her powers for good. Sort of. Ballister is officially a supervillain, but the story is a lot like Dr. Horrible in that Ballister isn't the bad guy. He's not sanctioned by the government, but he has no beef with the people. His fight is with the Institution, a shady para-military organization that maimed him, stole his best friend, and is just generally super shady. Also he used to work for them.

He thinks of himself as a crusader against the Institution and for the people. One of those people? Nimona, who, because of her shapeshifting ability, is someone the Institution would very much like to get their hands on. Which would probably be a bad thing.

But what makes the story really compelling, at least for me, is who Nimona is in all of this. Because in this story, Nimona is literally both the princess (okay, technically not a princess as she is not of royal blood, but go with it) and the dragon. She has a duality of personality and literal physical form that makes her a manifestation of this trope. There comes a point in the story where Nimona is both a little girl in need of being rescued, and the fire breathing dragon the girl needs rescuing from.

My head hurts just thinking about it.

And yet I can't stop thinking about it. I mean, dang, that's deep. Nimona is the dragon and the damsel all wrapped into one. She is the thing that she most fears, and she is also the thing with the most capacity to destroy herself. She's just...it's really cool, okay?

It's an idea that I love and that I can't get out of my head because it's so true. When it comes to human nature, and that's what those stories about princesses and dragons are ultimately about, it's hard to remember that we are actually ourselves the containers of the things we fear most. As much as we want to blame our circumstances on external forces, like dragons, we have to remember that we have ownership of our lives and ourselves. In other words, your demons or dragons or whatever are yours. You own them. The dragons are you just as much as the rest of you is.

I know that's weird and deep and confusing, but that's what I love about this comic. It makes me think weird and deep and confusing things. It makes me think about the places in my life that I've chosen to be a damsel instead of a dragon, or a dragon instead of a damsel, and it makes me wonder, how do I be both? Is that possible? Is that something worth wanting?

I've never really understood our cultural fascination on dragons kidnapping princesses, but weirdly this webcomic about a foul-mouthed, foul-tempered little girl who can literally turn into a fire breathing dragon helps me get it. It's about conflict and the battle between good and evil in all of us. And, most importantly, it's about realizing that you, in fact, are the one in control of your own heart. So what are you going to do with it?

Also it's very funny.

What does it mean to be a little girl? There's so much cultural baggage associated with female childhood. On the one hand, little girls are pure and innocent and needing of protection. They're the emotional backdrop of a thousand action movies - the father must get home and save his darling little girl. On the other hand, little girls are threatening. They're creepy. They're the demons of a thousand horror movies - the family unit must save itself from the imprecations of a terrifying little girl who wants to destroy them.

And then there's Wednesday Addams. She's another thing entirely.

Wednesday Addams was the hero of my childhood. A little girl who looked sort of like me, who was pasty and awkward, but who took no crap from anyone. Who defended her right to self-determination with a vengeance if needed. Who spoke up for those who weren't given a voice. Who set fire to her enemies. I'm not saying it was healthy or tame, but she was my favorite character as a child. In a lot of ways, she still is.

She's not nice, she's not fragile, she's not kind or sweet or even vaguely pleasant. She's mean and angry and cynical and disaffected and sarcastic and snide and everything I wanted to be as a child. She's also an intersectional feminist. And a little girl. She's the best.

The Addams Family movies of the early nineties (The Addams Family and Addams Family Values) were the kind of movies that never really made sense logically, but somehow worked all the same. They were loose on plot and big on tone, with outlandish storylines pretty much just there so that the actual Addams family had something to react to.

The movies were like extended improv sessions, where we stuck the Addams family members in weird situations and got to watch how they reacted. See Gomez and Morticia go to parent teacher meetings! Watch Wednesday and Pugsley at summer camp! What's an Addams family wedding like? A birthday party?

The point of the movies was never the plot, but rather the experience of the characters in contrast to the world around them, and as long as you remember that, the movies hold up very well. They're still fun and weird and kooky and occasionally deeply disturbing. They're still deeply ridiculous. And Wednesday is still really, really threatening.

That's right, threatening. Part of why I loved these movies so much as a kid was because Wednesday, far from being a delicate flower, or even playing second fiddle to her brother, is arguably the most dangerous character in the whole story. She has a sense of apathy and morbid misery mixed in with a violent streak and superhuman strength. She's very threatening. Especially to everyone she views as, well, a threat.

Now, admittedly, most of this is coming from Addams Family Values. While I really do enjoy The Addams Family, it's not until the second movie that Wednesday's character really crystalizes, and there's a good reason for that. Simply put, in the second movie, she's at precisely the right age to perfectly subvert our expectations of girlhood.

In Family Values, Wednesday is directly prepubescent. A tween, if that were ever an appropriate word to apply to her. She's just on the cusp of developing hormonal urges, secondary sexual characteristics, and a more formed idea about who she herself will be as an adult. But, she is still a child, so she still occupies that cultural space of supposed innocence and vulnerability. She's at once both a potentially developed teen, and a fragile child.

The movie directly addresses this dissonance early on. When Wednesday and Pugsley are dropped off at summer camp - as part of a duplicitous plot to get them out of the way - one of the other moms comes up to Morticia and asks after Wednesday. Morticia responds, "Oh, Wednesday's at that very special age a girl has just one thing on her mind."

"Boys?" asks the excited upper class white woman.

"Homicide."

The expectation for Wednesday in this movie, at least the expectation of those around her, is that she fit into either one or the other roles of idealized femininity. Either she can be a pure and adorable child, something Wednesday is not naturally inclined towards, or she can be a teenage temptress, something she similarly has little interest in. Throughout the film the camp counselors try to turn Wednesday into a normal child, punishing her with Disney movies and singalongs, while a secondary plot tempts her with the offer of romance, albeit romance with an asthmatic, morbid fellow outcast.

It's telling then that Wednesday eschews both of these options. She flirts with Joel (David Krumholtz), but is very ambiguous about whether or not she wants his attention. While at one point she does say a tearful goodbye to him, using endearments and kissing his cheek I think, later she seems utterly uninterested in his existence, and admits that if someone loved her as much as he implies he does, she would pity him and probably murder him.

So, not so much the icon of seductive femininity. But neither is she a convincing child, because Wednesday possesses a level of awareness about the world and frankly alarming superhuman strength that make it virtually impossible to view her as someone in need of protection. Because she isn't someone in need of protection. She's not just virtually unkillable, she's also unconcerned with her own safety. She's not afraid, and weirdly that's much more terrifying.

Wednesday isn't scared of what might happen to her, she's only afraid of being forced to submit to cultural standards she doesn't agree with. She's perfectly willing to risk life and limb (hers and other people's), but she's terrified of Disney movies. I would say that if she fears anything, it's becoming normal.

And that's a powerful message. The idea that the biggest thing we have to fear is not abnormality but the loss of what makes us distinct. It's especially poignant coming from Wednesday, because what makes her distinct is so, well, distinctive. As Joel says when Wednesday asks if he'll ever forget her, "How could I? You're too weird."

But let's bring all of this back around again: how is Wednesday Addams a smasher of the patriarchy? Because she uses this discomfort around her, the fact that adults and her peers have absolutely no way to categorize her and her place in society, to sabotage them. She uses her place as a "child" to speak truth to power, and as a "woman" to make them uncomfortable. I mean, the best example of this, and my favorite moment of the movie, is when Wednesday destroys the camp's end of summer play.

The play is horrible, a mawkish retelling of the first Thanksgiving that somehow manages to be more offensive than usual. The main character is Sarah Miller, played by Wednesday's blonde camper nemesis, Amanda, and Sarah Miller goes on long speeches about how superior Western culture is, before admitting Pocohontas, played by Wednesday, and her tribe - played by all of the other camp outcasts.

Wednesday plays along with the script for a few lines, and then takes it on a rapid detour:

"Wait, we can not break bread with you. You have taken the land which is rightfully ours. Years from now my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations. Your people will wear cardigans, and drink highballs. We will sell our bracelets by the road sides, and you will play golf. My people will have pain and degradation. Your people will have stick shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken. They said do not trust the pilgrims. And especially do not trust Sarah Miller. For all these reasons I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground."

Which they then proceed to do.

Now, this speech is wonderful because it so directly confronts all of the assumptions made earlier in the play, and because it speaks up on behalf of those who are being misrepresented, even though they are not there to defend themselves.* But it's also wonderful because it's the kind of thing that only a child could say. Specifically a little girl. I mean, if a boy said that, can't you imagine the camp directors just picking him up and dragging him off the stage? If a teenage girl were to say it, she would be ruining something for children. If an adult said it, well they wouldn't be given the opportunity would they?

Wednesday is the only character in the film who can make that speech, and it's all the more powerful for how it subverts their expectations of her. It's also worth noting that this speech is followed by a strong reversal. Wednesday, Pugsley, Joel, and the other camp outcasts (who are notably children of color and differing abilities) overthrow the camp leadership, burn the campgrounds, and are actually seen roasting their camp directors on a spit.

The idea of course being that if you're not afraid of anything, then you can accomplish pretty much whatever you set your mind to. Wednesday isn't afraid of repercussions or bodily harm, and she has the assurance that her family will support her no matter what, so she's emboldened to act out. She smashes the patriarchy, really literally, and she can get away with it because she's a little kid. No one's expecting it. Arguably by this point in the movie they really should be, but they're not.

I'm not saying Wednesday is perfect. She isn't. She's still a very privileged white girl from an unusual but still pretty standard background. She hails from a nuclear family and has never known want or hunger (except maybe voluntarily because she's weird).

But that's honestly okay. She's a slightly problematic representation of intersectional feminism, but at least she is a representation of intersectional feminism. And, even better, she's an unapologetically outspoken dissenter. She's sure of who she is and what the world ought to be, and she's perfectly comfortable telling everyone that. With a smirk and a sneer and a withering glance.

Hell yes, Wednesday Addams is smashing the patriarchy by not conforming to social expectations, being a creeptastic little girl, and inviting you to join her. Right on.

*Arguably one of the only big criticisms that can be made of this movie from a thematic standpoint is that this speech is given by Wednesday, an upper class white girl, rather than an actual Native American, but it would be hard to change that in the narrative without drastically changing the story, and I think it's worth having someone say it at least. Still, worth noting, the upper class white privileged girl really doesn't speak for everyone.

I freaking love Mako Mori, okay guys? I just feel like I should get that out there. I am not now, nor have I ever been, even close to being objective on the subject of Pacific Rim. I've written about how the movie just makes me happy on a simple and pleasing entertainment level, how it works as a denunciation of capitalism, and why Raleigh Becket is the movie girlfriend I always wanted. But up until now I've never talked directly about Mako Mori and why she is the heroine I've been waiting for, and how much I stinking love her.

Well, clearly that ends today.

For those of you who haven't bothered to click those links up there, and who didn't see any of my previous raving on the topic, Pacific Rim is an action movie that came out in 2013 and just so happens to be one of my all time favorite films. It's set in the not particularly distant future, when giant aliens from another dimension or galaxy or something, called Kaiju, have started to spill out of the Pacific Ocean and are attacking cities.

Because this is a great movie, the human race's first response is to band together and build gigantic, city-sized robots, called Jaegers, to fight the Kaiju. The Jaegers require two pilots, because they're so big, and these pilots are neurally linked to the Jaeger and each other in a process called "the Drift". The pilots use the Jaeger to kill the Kaiju, and everyone stays safe.

Except our story takes place about fifteen years into the war, where the Kaiju are coming through faster than ever, and the governments of the world have lost confidence in the Jaeger program. They're defunding it, just in time for the world to be destroyed. So Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), who is in charge of the Jaeger program and one of its most decorated veterans, comes up with a brilliant and suicidal plan. Why not just wait for the breach - the opening between our world and the Kaiju's - to open, and then have a Jaeger jump through carrying a giant nuclear bomb to destroy their home world.

It's insane and terrifying and a little stupid, and it's the plot of the movie. Now, at the beginning of the film it looks for a hot minute like the main character is going to be Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam), an all-American boy who used to be the poster-child for the Jaeger program, until an accident in a fight lost him his brother and his sense of confidence. Pentecost digs him up five years later and convinces him to be their newest Jaeger pilot, and to help with his crazy plan.

But Raleigh isn't really the main character. He's the central character, definitely, and we see the film through his eyes, but he is not the hero. The hero of the movie turns out to be Raleigh's new co-pilot, Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi). Mako is not only the hero of the story, but the one with the tragic backstory that must be emotionally healed, the compelling take on the situation, and the one who has the most to lose in this fight.

Now, it's revolutionary in and of itself for a movie like Pacific Rim to make a woman its central hero, let alone for her to be a non-sexualized woman of color. The film takes great pains even to show that Mako is a full and developed character, and goes to a lot of effort to make sure she's never shown in less clothing than any of the male characters, or subjected to the male gaze.* Moreover, Mako is the one who bears the brunt of emotional arc in the film. She is the one who must exorcise her internal demons by fighting very literal ones.

Her backstory is distinctive only in the fact that she is the hero. It's a pretty standard background for a character in this type of movie, and the sort of thing you can totally imagine the writers giving to Raleigh or even some side love interest character. She was a happy child growing up in Japan when the Kaiju came and attacked her city. Her family was killed and she was injured, but she managed to get away. The Kaiju was incredibly close to killing her when there was a big explosion, and as the dust settled, baby Mako could see that her savior was none other than Stacker Pentecost, Jaeger pilot. In that moment she vowed to become a Jaeger pilot herself and destroy the Kaiju to get vengeance for her family.

She was literally raised in the Jaeger program, adopted by Pentecost and trained to be a Jaeger pilot. She also gained degrees in engineering and was head of the team that restored their remaining Jaegers. In other words, Mako is a high ranking officer, brilliant, a technical genius, and one of the best potential Jaeger pilots in the world. Her one weakness is her anger, her rage at what happened to her family. Because of this, and because he can't bear the thought of losing her, Pentecost refuses for a lot of the film to let Mako go out and fight.

That's a lot of backstory I just dumped on you there, but I want you to take a minute and sift through it, then tell me if that sounds like the backstory of the hero. It does, right? But we're so not used to the hero being a woman of color, and we're really not used to the hero being non-American. It's great. Honestly, it's just plain great. Mako Mori is everything we're taught not to expect from a central hero, and she's pretty much perfect.

Because not only is her emotional arc indisputably the center of the film, the story also validates her choices. She wants to be a pilot because she knows she can do it. And she's right. She's the best dang pilot anyone has ever seen. She wants to be the one to go fight this Kaiju? Turns out that, yeah, she's the only one that can kill it. Mako is pretty much always right, and she's not afraid to make herself known. She's not afraid to call it like she sees it, all while being incredibly kind and respectful.

Heck, the movie makes it very clear that Mako and Pentecost have a relationship that is built not on obedience but trust and respect. Even when she considers going against his wishes, Mako understands and honors what Pentecost has done for her. She completely subverts the expectation that the emotionally damaged hero in an action movie has to be a loud, abrasive, rule-breaking white guy. She's none of those things, and she's still damn heroic.

Now, the movie does get a little bit of flack sometimes for having Mako not be the one in the end to pull the trigger. Instead, Mako's oxygen is damaged and she's jettisoned to the surface while Raleigh detonates the bomb and barely survives. They say that this indicates that Raleigh was the hero of the film all along. But I disagree with that. I think that while what Raleigh does is heroic, it doesn't negate Mako's heroism earlier. And I think that there's something very powerful and important in the fact that the movie establishes Mako as the character who is definitely going to survive. Because Mako has to survive. She's the hero, and she's the one who's going to rebuild the world.

Raleigh even acknowledges it himself, by saying, "All I have to do is fall. Anyone can fall." He knows that the hard part is over, and all that's left is to literally fall - the Jaeger has a failsafe program where if he slumps back in his harness it will jettison him in an escape pod. So when he says all he has to do is fall, he's right.

In this story, Mako is the one who sacrifices, changes, fights, and ultimately gets her emotional resolution. She's the dang hero, and it's so refreshing.

It's even more refreshing that the film adamantly refuses to include a love story. Or, well, that's not right. It does include a love story, several of them, but none that are unambiguously romantic. The story between Mako and Pentecost is clearly a love story, and it's one of deep familial love and respect. The story between Mako and Raleigh is a love story, and it's one of friendship and kinship and possibly romance, but never explicitly. I like that. How often can you say that? How often do you get to see a movie where the man and woman don't kiss at the end?

I guess, if I had to sum it up, the core of why I love Mako so much is because she's an embodiment of everything we're told not to think of as heroic. She's a physically small, soft-spoken, Asian woman. And yet, she's the one who saves us all. She sends the message that it doesn't matter what you look like or what demographic you fit, you are capable of great and mighty things. She also sends the message that people will pay a lot of money to go see a movie with a predominantly non-white cast where the main character is a woman of color.

I just can't get past that. I don't want to. I want to savor it.

*Interestingly, this film is one of the few really solid examples of the female gaze. There's a scene where Raleigh, who gets a lot more naked in this movie than Mako does, is changing shirts while Mako watches him through a pinhole in her door. Mako, meanwhile, is only ever shown in clothes that fit her position and situation, with the skimpiest outfit she ever wears being a properly fitting tank top in the dojo.

The Hunger Games seems to be the very rare franchise where each film is exponentially better than the last. The first movie was all right, but didn't fully capture the essence of the horror and fear present in the book. The next movie, Catching Fire, is good and really feels like a full and complete narrative. So I wasn't really expecting this movie to be better, I was expecting it to be about the same. I don't remember thinking the third book was anything special. Imagine my surprise when I saw the third installment and it was not only fantastically good, it was also my favorite so far. That's just...weird.

It's my favorite for a number of reasons. First off, it's by far the best put together of the films. The directing is great, and every shot feels intentionally placed. The writing is solid - I give them a lot of credit for managing to make the film feel whole and complete even though it's actually only half of the original book. And the editing is superb. Seriously, this might be the best edited film I've ever seen, and yes, I'm including all those fancy movies from film school in that. This just had such perfect timing. I want to find the editor and take them out for drinks or something. It's that good.

The acting is, of course, excellent. That's no surprise, as the acting has always been the cornerstone of these movies (like it should be), but it's worth noting that Jennifer Lawrence is really doing Oscar level work here - she plays Katniss with a sensitivity and blunt fear that makes her amazing to watch. Her Katniss is a brutalized soldier with PTSD struggling to cope in a strange situation and terrified of any new change, and it's horrible and hard to watch. Which is a good thing. Also Josh Hutcherson makes good use of what little screentime he gets, and even Jena Malone, who gets about one shot, is still weirdly mesmerizing.

On the whole, this movie works on a technical level in a way not present in the previous two films. I'm not quite sure why that is, since the first two really should have been easier logistically. They were each interpretations of complete works. But I think that by splitting the narrative into two parts for this final book, the writers gave themselves room to move.

It's easy to dismiss that as a crass business decision - after all, you can make a lot more money off two movies than one - but I think in this rare case it's worked out for the best. The division allows the story time to grow and keeps this movie from being a big action movie jam-packed with set pieces and explosions and frenetic running.

Instead, what we got was a surprisingly contemplative movie about the nature of war and identity. I'm not saying that the movie is quiet - it really isn't - but rather that there are a lot of moments of quiet in between the noise, where Katniss is forced to sit back and reckon with what has been done to her. And those are the best moments.

The narrative of this film follows the first half of Mockingjay, the book. It starts with Katniss (Lawrence) in District 13, learning how to live again and deeply mourning the loss of Peeta (Hutcherson). When she was rescued in the arena, they left him behind and she has no idea what happened to him. Gale (Liam Hemsworth) and Prim (Willow Shields) try to help Katniss cope, but neither of them can relate or even really understand what Katniss is going through. The only one who might be able to - Haymitch (Woody Harrelson) - is gone, drying out in some facility. All she has is her family, and Plutarch Heavensbee (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), the gamemaker who got her out.

Plutarch and President Coin (Julianne Moore) didn't rescue Katniss for nothing. They have plans for her. Specifically, they want to use her visibility and penchant for symbolism to make her into the poster girl of the rebellion. Everyone is primed to accept her as The Mockingjay, the symbol of revolt against the Capitol. Everyone, except Katniss herself, who has no interest in doing this. She's tired. She wants to be done. And she wants Peeta.

But then the Capitol broadcasts an interview with Peeta where he begs for peace and openly mourns Katniss, and she can't keep quiet. Even more, they take her to the remains of District 12, and she decides she can't keep silent. She will be their Mockingjay, if they agree to pardon Peeta and the other Victors when they're rescued. Coin agrees to her terms, reluctantly, and Katniss becomes a symbol.

Of course, it's not as easy as that. Plutarch and Coin want Katniss to just stand in front of a greenscreen and give a rallying speech, but Katniss has never been much of an actor. In fact, the only reason people really liked Katniss the first time around was because Peeta made her super sympathetic. Or, as Haymitch points out, people like her for something she did that was unscripted. Like volunteering for Prim or mourning Rue. Katniss is at her best when no one is telling her how to live her life.

Plutarch and Coin figure they can use that, and decide to let Katniss just be herself. Within very strict and controlled parameters. So she can fly out to the stricken districts and visit the wounded, but she'll be kept on a short leash and filmed the whole time. This turns out better than anticipated when an ordinary visit to a District 8 hospital turns into a combat situation where Katniss shoots down a plane with an exploding arrow, delivers an off the cuff stirring speech, and bonds with a hospital full of desperate people.

Katniss the poster child is born.

The rest of the film cuts between Katniss the symbol of the rebellion and Katniss the exhausted PTSD patient. Either she's full of righteous fury and being filmed as she does something heroic or symbolic, or she's curled up in a ball in the tunnels, trying to forget she's alive. Her only moments to just be Katniss, human being, come when she's focused on someone else, like caring for Prim or comforting Gale. And even then, it's clear she's barely holding the strings together.

It's clear that this dichotomy is very intentional in the film. Katniss doesn't have the luxury of being herself, because she has no time in which to just exist. She's always on call to make more propoganda videos, and as much as the filmmakers like her (especially Cressida, played by Natalie Dormer, who is really interesting), she's still a subject of study. Even her unguarded moments, like her choice to sing an old (deeply creepy) song in District 12 become the fodder for more videos. Katniss' life is not her own. Her likeness and voice are not her own. She is all image, and she is owned.

I think that's why I like this movie so much. Because while this is a theme in the other films, the idea that Katniss has been remade into something more lovable by people who want to market her, in those movies she's being changed by the bad guys. The bad guys are the ones trying to make her something she's not.

In this movie, though, it's the ostensible good guys who are choosing to step all over Katniss' identity and existence. They're doing it for a good cause, I guess, but they're still subjecting Katniss to a dehumanizing process. After all, it's dehumanizing to debase someone and treat them like an animal. But it's also dehumanizing to strip them of humanity and treat them like an idol instead.

It doesn't help that this movie makes it clear revolution isn't nearly as sexy as it sounds. While the previous two movies build us up to a fervor, demanding war and action and a fight, this film buries us in images of horrific injuries, brutal decisions, and agonizing terror. War is not fun. It's bloody and messy and horrible. We're not allowed to forget that here. It's like the film is saying, "You wanted a revolution? Here you go. I hope it's what you were prepared for."

Since this is very much the message of the book, I felt quite happy with the interpretation here. That war is horrible no matter what side you're on, and that violence might be necessary, but it is never good. Scenes of the people rising up against their oppressors are always a little jarring. We've been conditioned to cheer at scenes like that in other movies, but here the image always shifts a little too quickly to Katniss' haunted face, and we're reminded that there can be no happy ending when violent means are used to effect change.

Perhaps that's why I, as a pacifist, like this movie so much. It's so unequivocally against war, while still making it clear that something needs to change. It doesn't try to moralize or give solutions, it just sort of shoves the whole mess in your face, as if to say, "Here. This is what you wanted, isn't it?"

Like I said above, though, there are more reasons I like this film than just the technical proficiency it displays. I love these themes, and I love that the movie makes it a priority to really unsettle its audience. Perhaps the most jarring moment in the film is when we see the full version of one of the propaganda videos Katniss has been filming.

It's good, clearly well done, but at the very end a giant title pops up on screen: Join the Rebellion! And it's done in the exact same font and style as the posters that advertise this movie. Like, literally. The marketing poster that we've been seeing everywhere? It's the propaganda poster of Katniss as the Mockinjay that District 13 is using to drum up support.

In other words, the film draws a clear correlation between Katniss as heroine of this movie and Katniss as a symbol of the revolution. It refuses to deny her complexity, and in so doing makes the audience pretty freaking uncomfortable. That's a good thing.

I also want to commend the film for its handling of a potential love triangle. While the Gale-Katniss-Peeta triad is talked about a lot in the media and promotion of the film, it's really not a big part of the story. We've been clear since the second movie who Katniss would choose. It's not that Gale's not nice and all, and he's clearly in love with Katniss, but he just doesn't get it. Katniss and Peeta are bound by love and shared experience. There is no one else in the world who can understand what they in particular have been through. There is no choice. And the movie really represents that. There's never a question given, and I appreciate that.

I have more to say on all of these things, but I guess I'll have to leave that for another article. It's a good sign that there are so many facets to this movie. It's not a dumb action movie at all, nor is it worth the denigration these movies sometimes face, where people complain about how shallow and stupid and "teenage girl" they all are. Shut up. This is a great movie and you know it.

I suppose I'll leave with this: the film is a meta-examination of how we understand narratives and how we process tragedy. Katniss is shown going through a very public mourning process, while she and her image are also used to promote a war she doesn't actually really want. More than that, we're shown how the people of Panem see these images and react. If the movie is about anything, I'd say it's about this.

About how we consume and process the media and the narrative we're given. And how maybe we should do a little more process and digging and thinking for ourselves. Because if we want to live in a world that really is free, we need to learn how to live without propaganda, without spin, without "prep teams." We need to learn how to accept the narrative that is already there, without creating one of our own.

Also the ending is brutal and great.

Last night the Grand Jury came back regarding the unlawful shooting of Mike Brown in Ferguson, MO. The Grand Jury declared that Darren Wilson, the officer who shot Brown, was not guilty of any wrongdoing. I'm not the most educated person on the situation, and you can read much better analyses of this whole situation here and here and here.

I sat up last night trying to think of an article for today. It's Tuesday, and I normally talk about children's media on Tuesdays. I like to emphasize how important it is to be mindful of what media we show our children, because stories shape who we are and who we will become. I talk a lot about the value of showing kids media from diverse cultures and media with different races of protagonist and media that exposes them to whole new ideas about the world. I do this because I believe it's really important. I do this because I believe talking about it makes the world a better place.

But this morning I'm tired. I don't know what to say. I can't think of a movie to talk about, or a series of adorable children's books, or even a stupid show on PBS that I could blather on about for fifteen hundred words. All I have is sadness and resignation. The understanding that no matter how far we have come in the past century, there is still further to go.

I'm sad. I'm really sad. So, I did what I always do when I'm sad, and I listened to a sad song. Not just any song, though. I listened to what might be the saddest song I know, and also the most hopeful. The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, by Bob Dylan. Here, I've embedded it below. Take a listen.

If you had trouble catching the lyrics, here's what it's about. The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll is a song written almost entirely out of newspaper articles - verbatim, in a lot of places - regarding the real life incident where a rich white man beat an African-American woman to death in public and received only a six month sentence.

On the surface it's kind of a horrible song. As the lyrics openly state, William Zantzinger killed Hattie Carroll for literally no reason and was never in any meaningful way held accountable for his crimes. It's easy to equate this to Darren Wilson and Mike Brown and the Grand Jury failing to indict.

But if you only look at the surface, you miss the larger meaning of the song, and that's the part that gives me hope. Because while William Zantzinger never faced any substantial legal ramifications for his actions, this song followed him for the rest of his life. Think about that. For the rest of his life, everyone knew his name and knew what he'd done. They never forgot.

More than that, though, the song makes a very important and valid point. Just as much as it's about never forgetting what William Zantzinger did, it's also about remembering who Hattie Carroll was. The song is called The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, not "The Horrible Actions of William Zantzinger". It's about her, and it helps us to remember a woman whose life was cut short. A woman who might easily have been forgotten.

As humans, it's hard to have a clear view of what justice is or should be. We are, by our natures, blinded to the hearts and motivations of others. We don't know everything. We understand right and wrong, but we can easily be swayed by sympathy for those we feel are "like us" or when we feel someone is being unfairly attacked.

I think what Darren Wilson did was wrong, and he deserves to be tried in court for his actions. However. I also believe that more than just not forgetting what Darren Wilson did, we need to remember who Mike Brown was. We need to remember who all of them were, the hundreds of black men and women who have been killed and whose families have never seen justice. We need to remember them, because they are the ones who really matter.

Remember Mike Brown. Remember Hattie Carroll. And please, please, please, remember that they were both children once. Children who wanted to grow up and be amazing. Don't we all deserve that chance?

Vulnerability is not historically one of my strong suits. It doesn't come naturally to me. There are some people I know who can just go deep right off the bat, who barely need an introduction before they're talking about their hearts and feelings and the deep desires of their existence. I'm not like that. I can tell you the surface stuff no problem, but the real meaningful intensity is hidden under layers of defense mechanisms and humor. It takes me a while to go deep. I'm not naturally gifted at being vulnerable.

Which is why it's very hard when God specifically asks you to be vulnerable. For an indeterminate amount of time. Just to wait and be open and exposed and vulnerable. To wait quietly with a soft heart.

I'm not good at that. Which is exactly why for the past month God has been asking me to do it.

This past week I finally got around to watching The 100, a show I've been meaning to catch ever since it premiered last year. It's exactly my brand of crack: a dystopian young adult show with intrigue and feels galore. Totally my thing.

Only I wasn't really anticipating that it would be so completely my thing. Like, so much my thing that I watched through the entire first season and first five episodes of the second season in about three days. I really did not expect to love it as much as I do. And for a while there I was kind of confused about why I love it so much. It's good, but from an objective standpoint I can see why it's not great, and there are lots of other things I could love just this much if not more. Why this show? Why The 100?

The 100 is a show on The CW, which should give you some small idea of what it's like. It's a fusion of Battlestar Galactica and The Hunger Games, adapted from the young adult novel by Kass Morgan. It's about the remnants of the human race, almost a hundred years after a nuclear apocalypse devastated all life on Earth, living in orbit on a giant space station called The Ark.

The Ark, which was built out of the combining of all twelve space stations in orbit at the time of the nuclear war, houses several thousand inhabitants. Its purpose is to preserve the human race for another hundred years so that they can all go back down to the surface of the Earth and restart society. It's a weird transitional place and people, with strict rules and customs. It is also, as it would happen, dying.

That's right, The Ark, which sustains all known humans, is failing, with the life support system only having a couple more months before it gives out entirely. They need to do something drastic, and fast. Their solution? Send one hundred of the juvenile prisoners (there are no adult prisoners as a first offense is punishable by death) to the ground to see if the Earth is habitable yet.

And that's where our story kicks in. We the audience ride along with the hundred prisoners and get super invested in their survival, as well as what it means for the people on The Ark. But most of all we get invested in two particular people: Clarke Griffin (Eliza Taylor) and Bellamy Blake (Bob Morley).

Clarke and Bellamy represent the two opposite ends of the spectrum for characters on the show. Clarke is a child of (relative) privilege, the daughter of the Chief Medical Officer and Chief Engineer of The Ark. She grew up well educated, well loved, and certain of her place in the world. In fact, Clarke's only crime was believing that the people deserved to know that The Ark is dying. When her father discovered that fact, he tried to tell everyone and was executed for it. Clarke then followed in his footsteps, and was imprisoned. She's a freaking political prisoner, strong idealist, and privileged to boot.

She's always dreamed of the ground, and when she gets down there Clarke is the first one to start thinking in terms of practicalities. She wants this to work. She needs this to work. She knows firsthand how bad the Ark's systems are, and wants to save everyone on board. It has to work.

Bellamy, on the other hand, has lived a life of hardship and sadness. The defining moment in his life came when his mother had a second child - Octavia (Marie Avgeropoulos). Since that was against Ark law (every woman is permitted only one child), Bellamy and his mother kept Octavia hidden for fifteen years. Bellamy's entire life revolved around his sister, raising her and keeping her safe. He jeopardized his own life and sabotaged himself in order to help her. And, in the end, it didn't work because she was found and sent to prison. Their mother was executed and Bellamy was left alone to work as a janitor.

When the news starts to trickle down that the Ark will send one hundred prisoners to the ground, Bellamy does whatever it takes to get himself on the ship. In this case that means attempting to assassinate the Chancellor (Isaiah Washington) just so he can be on the drop ship. When they reach the surface Bellamy quickly rises to a position of authority, and uses it to rile up the other prisoners against The Ark. After all, it never did anything good for him. It ruined his life and made his sister a fugitive. Why would he ever help them?

Clearly Clarke and Bellamy don't get along well at first. They have completely different backgrounds, styles, and motivations. Clarke wants to save everyone. Bellamy wants to make sure his sister is safe. But they're both charismatic, decisive leaders. And, eventually, they end up in a tentative co-leadership with all of the hundred following them like ducklings.

They defend their ducks from threats of all kinds: attacks, revolt from within, medical emergencies, supplies running out, even the threat of The Ark trying to further run their lives. They make an excellent team, always pushing each other back and forth until they can find the best solution. Always testing each other, always challenging each other.

It's rough watching them duke it out for the first six episodes or so, but after a while something changes. They stop arguing so much - they still argue, just less - and they become a team. They lead together. And then it gets awesome, because you start to see that all along Clarke and Bellamy were changing each other. Learning from each other. Making each other better people.

It's funny, because technically Clarke has a love interest in the show, and Bellamy is supposedly all about his sister. But when it comes down to it, the real love story on this show is between two completely opposite people, and it's about them learning how to live and lead together. And it's great.

More than that, they believe in each other so thoroughly and completely. Clarke believes that Bellamy has the potential to be a great leader, to care so deeply, to be the man she knows is inside him. And Bellamy looks at Clarke like she's the sun. Like she's everything good and true and powerful in this world and he would rather die than let anyone make her believe she isn't. They know each other better than they even know themselves. Heck, there's even a scene where Clarke literally holds his hand while he faces up to the terrible things he's done in his life. They confront it together, because that's what partners do.

I mean, I literally started watching this show because I kept seeing gifs of the two of them on tumblr and I could already tell I was going to love their story. At the beginning of season two I wanted to squeal because it was so clear to me that Clarke kept asking herself what Bellamy would do and Bellamy kept asking himself what Clarke would do. They made each other better people. That is both really good writing, and also something I actually want in my life.

Like I said above, there's a reason why this show captured my mind and heart so completely right now. I'm in a point in my life where God is asking me to be vulnerable and patient, and to wait with a soft heart. It's difficult. I'm not good at it. But I know that the reward for doing these things will be good. It's always good. God doesn't disappoint.

Watching the show, though, I realized what I was waiting for. I'm waiting, I need to wait, for someone who looks at me like Bellamy looks at Clarke, like Clarke looks at Bellamy, someone whose influence in my life will make me more of the person who God has intended me to be.

It's hard to be vulnerable at the best of times, but it's especially hard to be vulnerable about heart stuff like this. I like to pretend that I've got it all together, but I really really don't. I'm a mess. Especially when it comes to thinking about letting someone see exactly how much of a mess I am. I want to know that there's someone out there who will look at me like I hung the stars in the sky, like they know exactly who I am supposed to be and can't wait to see me be it. I want to be known. Don't we all?

But the hard thing is that God has told me to wait. To hold back, to be patient. To keep that soft heart, and to let everything happen. It's insanely difficult, but watching this show was like getting a picture of what it could be. An idea of what that could look like: growing, learning, becoming alongside someone else. Us against the world. I want that so much it hurts. I appreciate any taste I can get.

And in a weird way, watching those two idiots fumble through a platonic relationship with each other (that had better become canon romantic, seriously) makes me feel better. It's comforting to see characters who want what I want, who are like me. It gives me hope. I'm not saying I know any better than I did before how to wait patiently and hope well for the things I want, but I am saying that it's moments and shows like that remind me it's okay to want it at all. It's worth it. It's good.

Even if the waiting sucks.

In terms of improbably Christian Bale casting, I'm now torn about which is worse. I mean, casting Christian Bale as Moses, the Middle-Eastern religious leader who was absolutely definitely not white, is pretty bad. But then for years my standard has been the casting of Christian Bale as Jack Kelly, a down on his luck New York street urchin in the early 1990s Disney musical Newsies. And I can't figure out which one is less convincing.

But for all that Christian Bale is woefully miscast and the whole production feels like a school play rather than a gritty historical drama, Newsies remains one of my favorite childhood movies. Maybe it's because it's a musical and it's dang catchy. Maybe it's because I relate extremely closely to one of the secondary characters, a Jewish kid who likes school and can't keep his mouth shut. Or maybe it's because this charming, weird, silly movie is entirely about the rise of the proletariat and Marxism in action.

Truth be told, it's probably that last one most of all.

Newsies is based on actual real life historical events, but it detours rather strongly from them. The story focuses on the 1898 newsboy strike, when a huge contingent of New York's child labor went on strike in order to form a union and demand better working conditions from their capitalist overlords. The best remembered part of the strike was that of the nascent Newsboy's Union, which mostly picketed Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World.

Newsboys were a pretty important part of New York culture at the time, since newsstands were illegal and the papers came out twice a day. Everyone bought their paper from the local newsie. Mostly the newsies themselves were homeless children who used this position to skim a little off the top and make a living for themselves. The problem came when the newspaper decided to increase the cost of the newspaper for the newsies, without changing the ticket price for the customer, as well as refusing to buy back an unsold papers.

It's a lot of background that gets into turn of the century working conditions and labor stipulations, but the really salient point here is that for these kids, selling papers was the only way to survive. And when the captains of industry decided they could squeeze a few more pennies from their labor force, the kids rose up and actually shut down the city of New York.

This strike actually helped lead to the institution of strict child labor laws and the introduction of child welfare. It's kind of a big deal. Granted, while the first strike was successful, subsequent strikes were less so, and eventually the position of newsie was eliminated by the creation of newsstands.

Still, it's an interesting part of American history. Not really what I would have picked for a plucky children's musical, but what do I know? I'm not a Disney executive.*

The musical follows a highly fictionalized and frankly kind of insulting version of the story. Gone is the gender and racial diversity actually present in the New York newsboy community at the time of the strike, and instead the main characters are all clean, sweet, fresh-faced white boys. There are a few token characters of color in the background, but all the girls are gone. There are literally only two female characters in the whole movie.

Our main character is Jack Kelly (Christian Bale struggling with a New York accent), a veteran newsie who decides to take a mouthy new kid under his wing. The new kids, David (David Moscow) and his brother Les (Luke Edwards), aren't like all the other newsies. They have parents and a home (albeit a two room tenement). David is only out selling papers because his father got hurt on the job and didn't have a union to protect him. David is now the sole breadwinner for his family while his father heals.

Jack, on the other hand, has no family to speak of, but he insists that he does have parents. They're just out west in Santa Fe. When he saves up enough money, he's going to buy a train ticket and go meet them. And that pretty much concludes our character development and background for this movie.

Like I said, the majority of the action in here centers on the strike. When Pulitzer (played hilariously by Robert Duvall) raises the price of papers, the newsies are dejected, but its not until David points out they could strike that they take it seriously. It takes Jack getting behind the idea for it to stick, but soon the whole thing is snowballing. Other boroughs of the city join in, and soon there's a city-wide newsie strike.

But the street urchins are hardly a match for the power of capitalism, and Pulitzer bribes the mayor as well as all the other newspaper chiefs to join him in resisting the newsies. The boys are broken and nearly crushed as Pulitzer sends goons after them, their families, their livelihood, even throwing some of them in jail.

Finally the boys decide that the only way to fight Pulitzer's power is with the power of the press. They get their reporter friend, Bryan Denton (Bill Pullman), to write up a bunch of articles on the use of child labor in New York, and then they print them out and have the newsies distribute. The plan works, and soon the entire city screeches to a halt as children everywhere walk out of their jobs and join the mob. Pulitzer agrees to their demands, and everyone is happy.

This is, as said above, a highly fictionalized retelling of the story. It's grossly emotionally manipulative, weirdly discordant in tone, and just generally a mess. I love it, though. I mean, it's silly and shallow and the boys all look far too freshly washed to be street urchins, and everything is so clearly a soundstage, and Christian Bale spends the whole movie sounding like he's got a mouth full of marbles, and the only girl in the movie is a prissy, prim, bland love interest, and I don't care because I love it so much.

It doesn't matter how outdated and clearly fake the whole thing is, whenever I hear the songs, "Seize the Day", "Carrying the Banner", or "The World Will Know", I want to grab my sign and join the picketing. This movie hits me where I live, where the workers of the world must unite against the oppositional forces of oligarchy that put profits ahead of lives.

What can I say? I've always been a soft touch.

So clearly there's a lot about this movie that doesn't really work. But there's even more that does. And for all that I think it's a cheesy silly film, there's a lot of value in making a movie about labor relations that can be really easily understood by children. Because that's what I was when I first saw this film. A kid. I was probably about seven, and I fell so in love with the movie that I actually wore out the library's copy. By the time we were all switching to DVDs, the tape would go all soft during the finale because I'd rewound it so many times to watch again as Jack and David got one over on Pulitzer.

For all that I really didn't understand the actual economic underpinnings of the movie (let's be real, all that stuff about profit margins and margin of loss is still confusing to me), I understood the struggle. It was patently clear that the kids in this movie were being exploited, and that was bad, and it was hard to fight back because they didn't have any power, but when they all worked together they were able to do something amazing.

And, yeah, that probably did contribute to making me the bleeding heart liberal I am today. But is that such a bad thing? No! I'd actually argue it's a really really good thing. I mean, this is a mainstream movie, a Disney movie for crying out loud, that actively and openly supports the labor movement. That calls out corporations and exploitative practices. That admits to the power of the people.

Heck, this is a movie that openly admits and supports the idea that a free and public press has the power to spur social movements forward. The idea that literacy and access to education will radically change how people think and act, and the idea that the only barriers standing in the way of progress are our own selfish interests. Plus it's a movie where the heroes are all homeless children and immigrants, standing up to the rich white capitalists of the day. So that's nice.

It's a movie that gives you hope. And it's a movie that calls up that part in all of us that wants to change the world for the better. As much as I think they could have made a better film if the writers had decided to just make a straight drama, without the songs or the stagey sets or the comic relief casting, I'm not sure it would have been better overall. Because Newsies is a clarion call to every kid I know. That says, "You can do mighty things, as long as you do them together."

And I don't know about you, but that is absolutely definitely something I want my kids to know.

Medda feels like she dropped in from a completely different movie.

*Unless they want me to be. I have my resume ready and waiting.

I'm not sure what I think of Reign these days. Last season I was boundlessly optimistic about the show. The first season felt like the female-centric historical fantasy I've always wanted, and I was duly happy about that. I still think that's what the first season was. But the second season is turning out a bit different. And not in a good way.

In this new season, it feels much more like Mary and her ladies have taken a back seat. The plotlines that previously revolved entirely around them are now driven by their male counterparts. Mary's agency as a queen has been undermined, and she now finds herself being constantly overruled by Francis. But that's not the real problem. The real problem is that as an audience we agree that Francis should overrule her. Mary's making a mess of things on her own.

It's this development that most irks me. The idea that Mary, Queen of Scots, is actually such an incompetent leader and so naive politically that she keeps getting herself and the kingdom into dire trouble that only her husband can get her out of. It's really frustrating, because all of last season we spent building Mary up as a cunning and shrewd political manipulator, only to tear it down in the last three episodes of that and first few of this one.

For example, in the first few episodes of this season, France is beset by the plague. Francis runs off to help Lola, who is having his child, while Mary stays and rules at the castle, keeping order over the panicking nobles and trying to halt the spread of the plague. While she's at court, a nobleman comes to her with a request: in all the chaos and confusion, "accidentally" send one of the other nobles to be locked in with the plague victims. In other words, this guy wants to assassinate his rival.

Mary is naturally incensed, and refuses. But Catherine, now the Queen Mother but still dangerously powerful, says she should. The noble who put the hit out, young Lord Narcisse, has a very powerful father whose lands supply the castle with grain. If they don't acquiesce, Narcisse will starve them out. But Mary refuses to be a ruler who cowers before her nobles, so she refuses. Then Narcisse has the man and his family killed anyway. So Mary takes justice into her own hands, and locks young Lord Narcisse in with the other plague victims just has he wanted to do to his rival.

Only only only, his father finds out, there's political backlash, and all of a sudden we're faced with the idea that Mary is absolutely terrible at politics. I mean, here she is basically ruining the country! Francis and Catherine have to manipulate and maneuver in order to get the nobles to back down, and the whole time everyone keeps telling her that she shouldn't have done that, that everything would have been better if she just left it alone.

That's not a good message to send. And it doesn't make for very good television either.

See, I watch this show because I enjoy the power fantasy. I enjoy watching a young woman rule two countries and do it extremely well. I watch it because Mary makes me feel good about being a girl. Seriously. We don't get very many political role models, and having one who is both a real historical figure and also the culmination of so many princess fantasies is freaking awesome.

It's a problem that this season has seen fit to dramatically reduce Mary's agency and effectiveness as a ruler. And the worst part is, she's not alone. This has happened to all of the women this season. It sucks.

Lady Kenna, whose sexual freedom and silliness was sometimes annoying last season but always very interesting, has been reduced to a sweet, nice bride complaining that her husband doesn't come home enough. I love Bash, and I love Kenna and Bash together, but there's something very disheartening at seeing a character like her taken down to just being a window dressing for a powerful man. Bash's actions determine all of her storylines. She exists only in relation to him.

By that I mean that all of Kenna's new storylines are about her reaction to Bash's actions. She doesn't get her own plots anymore, she just bounces off of other people.

Or take Lola, whose storyline last year was definitely the most soap operatic (and that's saying something). While Mary and Francis were broken up - because Mary was trying to get Bash legitimized so he could become the next King of France and so that Francis wouldn't die - Lola and Francis slept together, just the once. Immediately afterward Mary and Francis got back together, and Lola discovered that she was pregnant.

She hid her pregnancy for a few episodes, until she tried to get an abortion and Mary found out, then Mary and Lola hid it from Francis for a while, then he found out, and then he went after Lola. Now, that part I don't mind so much, because it was an interesting plot point. But here's where we get to the really frustrating part of the new season: Francis, as the new King of France, has complete control and sway in his country. Lola, a recent widow and not particularly powerful lady, has just born his bastard child.

Francis can do or say anything he wants about that child. If Lola gives the child a name, Francis can give him another one. If Lola tries to leave the country, Francis can prevent her. Which, in fact, he does. Lola wishes to go abroad, where she and her child can live a peaceful life, away from court. He'll have a respectable name, because she married quickly enough for him to probably be her husband's son, and she can live away from the drama and angst of the French crown.

But Francis doesn't want that. Can't want that. So even though Lola has made it very clear she wants nothing to do with him, nothing from him, and even though she has actively asked him to send her away, and even though Francis' own wife has begged him to let Lola go, Francis forces her to come back to the castle and remain there. Not only that, but he chooses to tarnish Lola's reputation by claiming the child as his, and by there doing binds her to himself for life.

And the thing is, I think we're supposed to understand why Francis is doing all of this? Well, I guess I do understand, but that doesn't make me more sympathetic. Francis just tramples all over the desires of literally every woman in his life, and we're supposed to applaud him for it. He does things without their consent, makes choices that don't involve them, and generally acts like a whiny child. Trust me. I know whiny children, and that's what he acts like.

And finally there's Greer, whose plotline I feel most hopeful about, but that has made me the most frustrated so far. Greer, if you will recall, is the noble lady who fell in love with a servant boy, and was subsequently caught and punished. Because her virtue was in question, Greer feared she'd never be able to marry, but she found someone who still loved her: Lord Castleroy. And then her former love, Leith, found glory in battle, won Francis' favor, and ended up becoming a minor noble.

Leith comes back and begs Greer to go away with him. But she doesn't. She stays loyal to Castleroy, because he stayed loyal to her. And I support that, actually. Castleroy is, from what I can tell, the only genuinely good man at court, and he has pleasantly liberal ideas about how women should hold property and be in charge of their own romantic futures.

Unfortunately for me and for the story, Leith doesn't go away. He sticks around, making trouble for Greer and Castleroy, both intentionally and unintentionally. It frustrates me because it feels like the writers are trying to pull drama out from where drama should not be, and it bugs me that they can't think of anything more interesting for Greer to do than to be a human pinball going back and forth between her suitors.

Urgh.

The women of Reign have so much potential. They're all fantastically cast, interesting characters with different strengths and abilities. It's devastating to watch them all flounder about in storylines that don't tap their potential and instead reduce them down to being playthings for the men around them. I hate that. I hate that so much.

Not just because it undermines my appreciation for the show, or even because it makes me feel like maybe I can't actually have all that agency I so desire, but because it makes for a genuinely worse show. Seriously. The show would be better if the women were given more to do.

Like, we've already established that Mary is politically savvy and aware. Well, how about actually having her do the right thing for once? Or how about her actually succeeding? Instead of making a four episode arc about Mary's failures, why not give us something meaty to deal with: have Mary take on Rome and win. Have her chart new territories, and have Francis be the one unsure and blundering. After all, she's been Queen a lot longer than he's been King. And it's not like we have to worry about the historical accuracy. Trust me. No one cares.

Lola has been established as a brilliant tactician and spy for Mary, so why not use her to that end? Instead of all the baby drama, use Lola for what she's good at: getting information. Even better now that she and Mary can be seen to be at political odds with each other. She can manage the nobles for information and report back to Mary, but because Lola is the "King's Mistress", no one ever suspects that she and Mary and in it together.

Greer's marrying a wealthy and successful businessman, and Greer has always been painfully practical. Why not have Greer and Castleroy slowly work their way into the treasury and start dealing more realistically with the Crown's debts. Having Greer work her charm and Castleroy his ledgers in order to get the Crown in the black would be incredibly compelling, and would be really fun.

Heck, even get Kenna using her talents for the kingdom. She's eminently charming, in a way that Mary never will be because Mary is a Queen, and she's married to the King's half-brother. Use her! Sic Kenna on recalcitrant nobles and ambassadors and let her give them the charm offensive until they succumb to Mary's wishes.

In other words, use their potential in the story! There is nothing so frustrating as a show that doesn't know what it could be. Reign has the potential to be amazing, but right now it's just okay. And there's something very insulting about that. It seems to suggest that we as an audience will accept "okay" because we don't realize there's anything better to be had.

Well, I won't. I refuse. I want a show that actually takes me seriously and represents its female characters well. And I'm willing to make a hell of a stink to get it.

Besides, it's always more fun when Catherine and Mary are on the same side and plotting together.

In my recent breeze-through of The 100, I was happy to find that the majority of the main cast on the show is pretty diverse. There are only a few main characters who are unambiguously white, and even fewer of those are dudes. There are a ton of women in leadership positions, and some of them are good at their jobs, while others are bad. Even the background characters present a pleasing level of gender and racial diversity, and as those characters become more developed in the coming episodes, it makes me happy to think that we are continually getting to see a decently representative slice of the human race. It's not perfect, but it's better than usual.

But of all of these characters, the one I love most, for reasons both clinical and sheerly emotional, is Raven Reyes (Lindsey Morgan). Not introduced until a couple episodes into the first season, Raven has quickly become not just an important figure in the story, but probably one of the most beloved characters overall. And there's a good reason for that. She's freaking awesome. (Warning: MAJOR SPOILERS for The 100 so far.)

The first thing we ever learn about Raven is that she's a gifted mechanic - literally the best mechanic. The youngest zero-g mechanic in fifty years. And what's even better, she knows she's that good. She gets the sort of intro that Tom Cruise would beg for in an action movie, skipping out of zero-g in a full space suit and sassing at the engineer she's working with. But Raven isn't just incredibly daring and athletic, she's also brilliant. And, notably, really willing to question authority.

But seriously, let's not skate right past the brilliant thing. Because it's a pretty rare thing to have a woman of color, especially a Latina, presented as the best most smartest at anything, but especially not at a STEM field. She's not some greasy mechanic either. Raven is a fully qualified mechanic and could probably be an engineer if she didn't think engineers were useless eggheads. For crying out loud, Raven rebuilds a hundred year old escape pod and uses it to launch herself from orbit because she is fearless and perfect and the best. And it works.

Those are just the things she does while she's up in space, with relatively solid access to tools and time and parts. Once on the Ground, Raven has to make radios out of toy cars and spare parts, then manages to make contact with a freaking space station. She sets up a video relay to talk to the Ark. She does all of this using stuff that's just lying around, a hundred years old, and with only one other person in the camp who can even splice wires.

Let's not forget either that she later makes bombs. Like really efficient scary good bombs, and she can even make them when she's been poisoned or shot or is dying of hemorrhagic fever. Raven's not just "good with machines" or "pretty smart, for a girl", she is hands down the most useful member of the hundred, and they recognize that. When Raven gets hurt the entire camp screeches to a halt to help her get better, because if Raven doesn't survive, then none of them will. How awesome is that?

But I don't just love her for her brain. I also love how Raven loves herself.

Like I said above, Raven comes down to the Ground, risking death in a firey explosion, because her boyfriend was one of the hundred and is down here too. Said boyfriend, Finn (Thomas McDonell) thought he'd never see her again and moved on, falling in love with Clarke (Eliza Taylor). When Raven shows up on the Ground it's an awkward situation for everyone. Without even knowing it she puts the kybosh on Finn and Clarke's relationship, but she also knows something isn't right with her own.

And here's the thing: she handles it like a champ. Seriously. It's a horrible situation where really no one is to blame but no one is happy, and Raven recognizes that. She doesn't drag Finn or Clarke over the coals. She gets upset, but she doesn't freak out. After taking some time to process, she decides that she'd rather Finn be with someone he really loves than be with her out of obligation. She refuses to settle for a love that's anything less than perfect. She doesn't let him stay with her out of guilt, she tells him to leave, because "You don't love me the way I want to be loved." Take a second and think about how much you want to love yourself like Raven Reyes loves herself.

Which is not to say that nothing is ever messed up in her head again, because later that episode she tries to have revenge sex with Bellamy (Bob Morley) to make herself feel better, but she acknowledges that's what she's doing. She admits that it's unhealthy, and what's more amazing (to me, at least), she totally admits that it did not in fact make her feel better. Instead of fixating, from that point she just moves on.

Heck, Raven refuses to let anything slow her down, not even when she's been shot and the bullet is pressing on her spine. She pulls herself out from under the engine of the rocketship (after having continued to do the very important thing she was trying to do), and actually pulls herself to walk over to Clarke and get help. Because Raven Reyes is terrifying and amazing. The only reason she ends up allowing herself to be kept on a stretcher is because the bullet might move around if she walks.

And then, while bleeding out, she proceeds to talk someone with no technical experience through literal rocket science. Successfully. And she survives multiple continued aggravations of her wound, and being left on her own to die for two days.

After it's all over and she can assess the damage, Raven is upset to find out she's has substantial nerve loss in her legs, but she spends maybe an episode upset about it before strapping on a brace and going. And how can you not love that? How can you not love a character whose reaction to being crippled (as she puts it) is to mourn the loss, then move the hell on. How can you not love a woman who has no time for anything getting in her way, not even the loss of one of her limbs.

Also, she did undergo spinal surgery while awake and under no anesthesia. She's so wonderful.

But this is the frosting on the cake for me: Raven is defined by her relationships with women far more than by her relationships with men. Yes, she's the most special awesome wonderful person on the show, a veritable Mary Sue (which I am using as a compliment and synonym for female power fantasy), but she doesn't get to that point by ignoring or tearing down other women. Far to the contrary. Raven is surrounded by powerful, cool women and she loves that.

Here's a rundown of Raven's relationships with men: she dated Finn and then dumped him when she realized he didn't love her how she wanted to be loved. She slept with Bellamy to make herself feel better, but when it didn't make her feel better, she let it go and now they're friends. Other than that? She talks to Jasper sometimes, and she gets on pretty well with Wick...

But the defining relationships she has are with women. Clarke. Abby. Even Octavia. The women in her life matter so much more than the men, and those are the relationships we care about. With Clarke, they both got past being two spokes in a love triangle, and ended up becoming best friends long after the triangle was dead and buried. They respect the hell out of each other, and give us a vision of what real friendship between awesome ladies can be.

Abby (Paige Turco), on the other hand, is the mother figure Raven never really had. An older woman who believes in her whole heartedly, who will support and love her, and who encourages her to follow her passions. Abby is the one who realizes that Raven is a genius and gives her the tools to get down to the Ground. More than that, Abby is so sure that Raven can do it, that Raven will do it, that she lets herself get arrested and possibly be executed so that Raven can go.

Once on the Ground, it's interesting to watch Raven have to play go-between for two women she loves and respects. She's caught in the frustrating middle ground of Clarke and Abby's contentious relationship, but she doesn't let it eat her up. She just says exactly what she means to both of them, and tries to force them to work it out. It doesn't always work, but she tries.

And let's not forget that this character who is the biggest badass, the best mechanic in the history of ever, and sexy as hell, is a woman of color. She's not white. She's young. And she's completely unapologetic. When I talk about good representation, this is what I mean. I mean this. I just want to build a giant arrow sign so that next time someone asks me how to write a female character or a character of color I can point to Raven Reyes.

She's not perfect. She's better than that. Raven is a fully realized, well written, brilliant character. She feels like the kind of person you could meet out in the world, but more than that she feels like the kind of person you want to meet out in the world. The kind of woman I would love to have as a friend. She's aspirational, without being anything less or more than human. She's exactly the kind of woman I want my future daughters to look up to.

Hell freaking yes I love her. And you should too.

Never leave me.

Here is a thing that is true: there is no truer thing than love. Not lust or passion or excitement masquerading as love, not some weak watered-down nicety or even kindness. Love, real love, is true in a way that makes other truths seem incomplete. Because love, real love, cannot lie, and isn't afraid to get its hands dirty. Real love is about sacrifice. Real love is true no matter how fictional it is.

Which is good, because, at times, love is super freaking fictional. Or maybe it's that fiction is full of love? I'm a philosophy major and I don't even know. What I do know is that sometimes I need to be reminded of what really is, and what it really should be. And that is and should be are meaningless words next to the unfettered reality that is our lives, whether we plan them out or not.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that I watched The Brothers Bloom for the second time yesterday, and that movie is deep. That movie is true, for all that it is literally about lies. And that movie is entirely about love, even when it seems like it's just a silly adventure story.

It's kind of the best.

So, The Brothers Bloom is a quirky little indie that came out in 2008, directed by Rian Johnson (who also did Brick and Looper and has been announced as the director of some upcoming Star Wars sequels). It's a mobius strip of a movie, with the plot all convoluted and the whole thing revolving, explicitly and implicitly around the relationship between two brothers: Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) and Bloom (Adrien Brody). Let's see if I can summarize this without making my head explode.

Stephen and Bloom are orphans, cast off into the foster system as children, and grew up only ever being able to rely on each other. They figured out early on how to make trouble, but it was much harder for them, or really much harder for Bloom who is the main character here, to figure out how to fit in with the other children and simply be happy. Stephen, an insanely clever boy, decided that the best way to do this, to help his brother and profit himself at the same time, was to create a con.

The con was basically that they'd turn a tidy profit exploiting the local kids, but that Bloom would get to play with said kids while the con was in process. Being told to play a role opened Bloom up to be able to reach out to other people, and Stephen considered the con a success.

And then he never stopped. For the next twenty years, the narrator tells us, Stephen and Bloom worked as con artists. At one point they ended up in St. Petersburg and learned their trade from a ludicrous and cruel Fagin character: Diamond Dog (Maximillian Schell). Later, they struck out on their own (after thoroughly burning bridges with DD), and became con men in their own right. They even picked up a partner, the ineffable Bang Bang (Rinko Kikuchi).

But as time wears on Bloom starts to resent Stephen. He gets frustrated with how his brother scripts every single part of his life like he scripts his cons. As far as Bloom can tell, nothing in his life has ever been real, has ever been unscripted. He wants to get away from his brother and try to live a "real" life, one with no writing, no roles, and no Stephen.

Obviously Stephen is not okay with this. His brother is his life. He loves his brother. And he thinks his brother is making a huge mistake.

So, after letting Bloom stew for a few months, Stephen comes up with a plan. One last big con to get everyone what they want. They'll make a huge splash, go out with a bang, and then Bloom can go off and live his unscripted life. Only, of course, things are never that simple.

SPOILERS

The con is pretty cool, all things considered, and deftly demonstrates how good a writer Stephen truly is. Their mark is a wealthy heiress who is both bored and lonely. Penelope (Rachel Weisz) has millions of dollars, lives on a gorgeous estate, and is a complete wreck of a human being. Declared allergic to most of the known world as a child, she spent her entire youth and adolescence locked up in her house, hermetically sealed, bored out of her mind. Then, when they found out what was wrong with her, her mother got sick, so she stayed to care for her. Leaving her where she is now, a thirty-three year old woman who has never left home and longs for adventure while being slightly unable to hold a conversation.

Also, because she was so deeply bored, Penelope kind of managed to become an expert in just about everything. She can juggle chainsaws while riding an extended unicycle, make a pinhole camera out of a watermelon, and even breakdance.

The con involves taking Penelope on the ride of her life. Bloom inserts himself into her life and floats the whiff of romance and adventure in front of her, tantalizing her with the idea of going to look for antiquities in Greece and Paris. Then they bait her with some stories about them being smugglers and an offer to go after and steal a very old manuscript. Penelope buys it all, hook, line, and sinker. She's caught, and happily so, because the adventure is so much fun.

But Bloom feels bad, because Penelope is a genuinely lovely person and they're planning to con her out of rather a lot of her money. Stephen insists that she won't miss it, because Penelope will be getting what she wants: an adventure. And the perfect con is the one where everyone gets what they want. Bloom, though, is a pessimist. He's dour and depressed and unhappy. He is, as Penelope so colorfully puts it, "constipated in the soul."*

Now, I won't go ruining how it all works out, because a lot of the fun of the movie is trying to untangle what of the action on screen is part of Stephen's plan for the con, and what is, so to say, "real". Bloom's obsession with finding something unscripted is admirable, but a little bit of a wet blanket, and the real fun comes from seeing Penelope come alive as she's told more and more lies. The thing is, as Penelope herself points out, she doesn't care that they're probably lies. She wants them to be true, and that's enough for her.

The movie builds and builds, pulling out twists and stops until we finally get to the ending. See, throughout the whole film we've been asking a question: how much of what is happening is part of Stephen's plan? We get glimpses of things that don't seem to be intentional, like a telegram from Diamond Dog that Stephen immediately burns, or when Penelope gets arrested in Prague for blowing up a castle, but we're never really clear on how much is meant to be there. What is the end game? What is real?

We as the audience don't know. Well, we don't know until the very final absolute end of the movie. The last two minutes, to be precise. And the ending completely blows me away. It tells us full what is real and what is not, but in a way that allows us to still ask the question. More than that, the ending calls into question everything else that Stephen has done throughout the entire film, suggesting that even the things that were not "planned" were part of the plan.

MAJOR SPOILERS

The ending of the movie, since it reveals what is real and what is not, is obviously a pretty big spoiler. But it's hard to talk meaningfully about the film without saying it, so here goes. At the very end of the film, Stephen drags the gang back together one last time to pull off another con. Penelope, having now learned that she was truly conned, is now totally on board to become a con artist, while Bloom continues to drag his feet about everything. Bang Bang is pretty much just silent and somehow also snarky, which is her thing.

Stephen's final plan takes them to St. Petersburg, where Bloom and he learned to be conmen but were also quite literally abused by Diamond Dog. Bloom is still pretty traumatized by what they went through, but Stephen promises to protect him, and insists that they can't make the con any other way.

Things start to go off the rails pretty quickly, though, when it becomes clear that whatever Stephen's plan is, this isn't how it was supposed to go down. Stephen is kidnapped and held for ransom, Bang Bang disappears, and Bloom and Penelope are left to figure out what to do. Bloom kind of thinks its another of Stephen's stories, just another con, but Penelope would rather hand over the money and be safe than worry about what's real.

The thing is, it both is and isn't real. Because at the meet where they're supposed to hand over the money in exchange for Stephen, a gunfight breaks out. Bloom is able to finally overcome his fear of Diamond Dog and take action, but in so doing, he gets into the line of fire. Stephen tackles him down and takes a bullet in the back for his brother. All very poetic and cinematic and pat, right?

Then Stephen gets up and jokes with Bloom for a minute before sending him on his way. It was all a ruse, right? All a bluff. Now go live that unwritten life you want so badly, and I'll see you when I see you. Bloom and Stephen finally see each other the way they're supposed to, and Bloom leaves a happier, lighter man.

And then Stephen dies of a gunshot wound.

I just...it's hard to explain this scene if you haven't seen the whole movie, but take it from me, it packs a wallop. The slow dawning realization that Stephen would do anything for his brother, up to and including dying for him, and the way that he can't bear for Bloom to be sad, even if it means denying that he is dying in his last minutes so he can give his brother one last card trick? Ugh. It's intense. And good.

It's true.

What I said up there in the beginning about how this movie makes me think about sacrificial love comes from this last scene, because this last scene recontextualizes the whole movie for me. I mean, we know from the beginning that all of Stephen's cons are about Bloom, but in this one we slowly come to see that this con is about Bloom becoming his own man. There's also a possibility, and I like that it's never explicitly confirmed or denied, that Stephen knew he would have to die at the end of this con. That he wanted to go out like this.

Personally, I think he did. There are little breadcrumbs of it throughout the film. The telegram from Diamond Dog. The way we see that Bloom is so utterly afraid of DD and so utterly incapable of confronting him. Stephen's almost pathological need to cure people's problems with cons. Stephen's need to protect his brother at all costs, even if it means intentionally bringing DD down on himself so that Bloom can live a free life and never be chased by his demons again.

I don't know if that's what we're supposed to think happened. But it doesn't matter. Because this is the version I like best. This is the version that is true, whether or not it's real. Because this is the version where Stephen loves Bloom in a way that literally and completely transforms Bloom's life.

Stephen loves Bloom in a way that is whole and complete and let's be real, completely unearned. Bloom doesn't love Stephen that way. Bloom can't even conceive of loving his brother like that, without any reservations or stops. Bloom loves his brother the way that most of us love each other. With caveats and holds and addenda that make it clear that yes, he does love him, but when he says he'll do anything for Stephen, what he means is anything within reason.

Stephen will do anything for Bloom. Anything at all. He will die for his brother. But, even more, he will help his brother learn to live with his death. He will live a life that revolves around making his brother understand how loves he is. That's how Stephen loves his brother. That's how love is supposed to work.

And in a very real sense this movie is about Bloom learning how to love like that.

The way that Stephen loves Bloom seems kind of crazy and intimidating and a little weird to us as an audience. He's so obsessive and intense and focused on Bloom. Stephen really doesn't think about himself at all in the movie, and you can tell. I mean, there's all this subtextual stuff about Stephen being in a relationship with Bang Bang and we can assume that Stephen probably has other things in his life, other friends, but really his whole life is about Stephen.

And that seems weird until you realize that Stephen (and to a less explicit sense, Bang Bang), already knows exactly who he is and how loved he is. Stephen is capable of focusing all of his time and energy and life on helping his brother because he doesn't need to justify himself. He is loved, and so he can pour that love out. In other words, Stephen is the most secure human being in the history of the planet, and that's why he's able to devote his life to his brother.

I'm not, for the record, saying that I can or do love anything like the way that Stephen loves Bloom. I would very much like to, but the fact of the matter is that I am nowhere near secure enough for that. I am not sure enough of who I am and how loved I am to be able to put it aside and love others with that fullness and intensity. But I want to. I really really really want to.

I think, though this I'm less sure on, that Bloom wants to as well. I can imagine that growing up with Stephen as a brother, with a brother who loves you that much, could be kind of crazy-making. Because all at once, Bloom doesn't know how loved he is, but he also seems to resent how much Stephen loves him. He resents the implications of Stephen's love. He resents the idea that he owes his brother something for this love. Not that he does. Not that Stephen has ever tried to collect. But Bloom feels both underloved and indebted, and he hates both of those feelings.

A huge part of his arc in the movie is learning how to love someone well. Penelope, for all that she was sheltered as a child and stunted as an adult, has chosen to love and live well, and that comes out in her as a person.

She loves openly and freely because, as she says, "This was a story about a girl who could find infinite beauty in anything, any little thing, and even love the person she was trapped with. And I told myself this story until it became true. Now, did doing this help me escape a wasted life? Or did it blind me so I didn't want to escape it? I don't know, but either way I was the one telling my own story..."

Bloom needs that. He needs very much to choose to love Stephen even though he doesn't know how. He needs to choose to let Penelope love him and let himself love her. He needs to stop trying to measure up to Stephen's love, and just accept how incredibly loved he is. He needs to understand the idea that you are not loved because you are beautiful, but you are beautiful because you are loved. That loving a thing or a person or an idea makes it lovable, not the other way around.

There's a lot that I find Biblical and spiritually important in this movie, and in the story of Bloom and Stephen, but I'll boil it down to this: I know that God loves me like Stephen loves Bloom, and I know that most of the time I react to God's love like Bloom does. I run, I complain, and I fester about the frustration of being unable to match up against such ineffable love.

But when I do all of that I completely miss the point. I miss the fact that love is not a competition. I don't have to be able to love God as much and as well as he loves me in order to be worthy of that love. I can't. That's why it's called grace.

Instead, I have to learn how to let myself be loved. I have to learn how to accept the love that God offers, and then, secure in how loved I really am, offer it to other people. Because that's the only way this really works. Love is endlessly sacrificial, not in that it demands sacrifice, but in that it willingly gives of itself and in so doing creates more.

When you know just how loved you are you are fully capable of loving others. And that's who I want to be. I don't want to be Bloom, bumbling and wandering and complaining about how all of this is fake and cheap and a scam. I want to be Penelope: staring at the world in wonder and insisting that even if it's not "reality", it's still absolutely beautiful. I want to come alive in how loved I am, and learn how to love others like that. I want to be a Stephen, a Penelope, a Bang Bang. Because that's the better path, by far.

And, as my first step, I have this to say: I am very very loved. And I love you very very much.

"There is no such thing as an unwritten life, just a badly written one."

*This is a paraphrase. The actual line is much funnier and more full of swears.

I will be the first to admit that I am not the right person to talk to all of you about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). I quite literally failed high school chemistry, and I would have failed college calculus were it not for the kindness of a professor who awarded extra credits for "effort." Not kidding. I am smart, sure, but not in a particularly STEM oriented way.

That having been said, of course, over this past week I found myself thinking more and more about the media that's gotten me interested in science over the years. Late Saturday night, as I sat hunched over the toilet in our bathroom ruing the fact that I was succumbing to the family gluten allergy*, I took comfort in the fact that I knew pretty clearly what my digestive system was made of. Not because I've ever really studied it, or because I have an abiding interest in my bowels, but because I saw an episode of The Magic School Bus twenty years ago and I still remember how it all works.

If that's not success in educational television, I don't know what is.

For those of you either too old or too young to remember, The Magic School Bus was both the best and the weirdest offering of educational television in the nineties. It aired from 1994 to 1997 and was singularly responsible for making sure I caught the bus on time every day in fourth grade. If I got the first bus home, I could make it back in time to see the last five minutes of an episode, and that was totally having to sprint.

The show, which you can now find on Netflix, much to my glee, has a very simple format that it follows pretty closely. The main characters are the members of Ms. Frizzle's elementary school class - I think it's third grade? - and each episode is structured around a particularly memorable field trip the class takes. Simple, basic, easy. Every week the kids learn about a new aspect of science, and so does the audience.

The hook is that the field trips aren't the kind of thing you get to go on every day. Ms. Frizzle (voiced incomparably by Lily Tomlin) is a magical teacher and she has a magical school bus (also, apparently, a bus driver's license). When she takes the kids on a field trip to learn about the solar system, she doesn't take them to the planetarium, she takes them into space, so that they can bounce around on Mars and float past Saturn. She shrinks the bus down to explore a digestive tract (the episode I was thinking of in that wonderful moment), or she drags them all into an ant hive, or in one memorable instance, she takes them surfing in a volcano.

In other words, the trips are completely ludicrous and outrageously awesome. They are exactly the kind of field trips I wish we'd gone on when I was in school. Instead I just got dragged to Plymouth Plantation, Sturbridge Village, and the Salem Witch Trial Museum like every year. Every. Single. Year.

More than just wish fulfillment and occasional stretching of reality, though, the episodes actually do a really good job of giving kids a solid understanding of the basics. Yeah, the solar system episode implies that one can actually survive on the surface of Mercury, or even that one could travel the entire solar system in a day. Which is not true. But the episode acknowledges this in an epilogue that features the now adult characters answering viewer questions.

And while it is silly and full of wish fulfillment, The Magic School Bus is informative and fun. It tells you things about science that stick with you for years. Decades, in my case. Because the episodes all feature the kids getting out there and experiencing the topic, children watching are far more likely to care about the subject material. The show makes it cool to like science, and that is surely a good thing.

Even better, for all that this show is just an excuse to go on awesome science adventures, the writers clearly took time and effort in delineating the characters we would focus on. The cast is diverse, both racially and in gender, with equal numbers of girls and boys, and a very solidly non-white cast. Each kid has their own personality, and those personalities are never stereotypes or offensive or even bad. They're just normal kids.

Each kid has his or her own name and defining feature. You've got Arnold, the scaredy-cat, Wanda, the daredevil, Dorothy-Ann, the know-it-all, Ralphie, the jock, Phoebe, the bleeding heart, Carlos, the class clown, Tim, the artist. But even these defining features fail to capture the complexity of the characters. Like, Tim is super artistic, but he's also really snarky. He and Carlos like to tell jokes, but Carlos prefers puns and Tim has a very dry sense of humor. Ralphie is all athletic and sportsy, but he's also a daydreamer and sensitive.

In other words, like real people, these kids have dimension and a fullness of character that you don't often see in television, let alone animated kids' shows.

And, of course, there's always Ms. Frizzle. She's who I wanted to grow up to be (and I feel that to some extent I have succeeded). While she's certainly a colorful character, and it's easy to think of her as a plot device to keep the show moving, what I find most interesting about the Friz isn't her incredible wardrobe of themed dresses, her intense sense of irony when choosing field trips, or even her near godlike omniscience, but rather her motto: "Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy!"

I mean, seriously, can you think of a better motto than that? Especially for an educator to be constantly spouting?

It's a really simple sentence, but I honestly feel like Ms. Frizzle's motto is genuinely profound. Take chances. Make mistakes. Get messy. These are all aspects of living a good life, a real life. And Ms. Frizzle makes it abundantly clear that not only is risking failure absolutely worth it, it's also frequently the only way to succeed. After all, if you fail, that just means you learned something about how it doesn't work. And that's often much more valuable than getting it right on the first try.

I think in a lot of ways, The Magic School Bus served as an antidote for me. It was the complete opposite of the school I was actually attending at the time. While said school, which shall remain nameless, was lovely and gave me a very good education, it didn't teach me how to live like this silly little show did. My school was all about rules and authority and learning the facts because those are the facts we tell you. And that has its place.

But Ms. Frizzle's classroom was all about learning by screwing it up. Doing the worst thing possible and figuring out how to use it to your advantage. My school taught me what the scientific method was. Ms. Frizzle taught me why it was worth knowing. There's a difference there, and it's a big one.

Now, I'm obviously not suggesting that instead of elementary school science classes we should just have everyone watch episodes of The Magic School Bus. I'm not saying that. What I am saying is this: Getting kids excited about science takes more than just telling them facts.

If you want a child to want to learn something, and it seems increasingly that we do want our kids to learn science and go into STEM fields, then you have to help them understand why it matters. Maybe that's through a silly educational show. Maybe it's by helping your kids do wacky science experiments at home. Maybe it's something else entirely.

But it is something. As adults we have a responsibility to make sure that kids understand the world they live in. Not just because we want them all to grow up to be scientists and software engineers and doctors, but because we want them to know who they are and what the world is made of. We want our kids to know how the world works and why the sky is blue and what happens when stars explode. It matters that they know that, because it matters that they wonder about it. Kids naturally do wonder about that, for the record. It's not such a stretch to figure that they'd like to know you wonder about it too.

For me, watching The Magic School Bus and having parents who eagerly answered my fifteen kajillion questions about the world didn't lead to a career in the sciences. That's just how the cookie crumbles. But I do know that knowing this stuff makes my life richer. It makes it more worthwhile. And it makes it more exciting.

Ms. Frizzle might be fictional, but I'm pretty sure she's the best teacher I ever had.

Also possibly a Time Lord.

*This is the worst day ever and I am very sad about this. I love bread so much. So. Much.

To be totally honest, I don't actually feel like I can do full and complete justice to this topic. Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (and sequels) is one of the most complex and baffling characters to arise in the past twenty years, and everyone and their mother has mixed feelings about her. But I've been mulling on this topic for almost a year now, and I worry that if I don't write it now, I never will.

The reason why all of us are all befuddled about Lisbeth Salander (played by Noomi Rapace in the Swedish movie and Rooney Mara in the American) is deceptively simple. Basically, she appears to be the feminist, kickass heroine of a book/movie series where she fights against institutionalized racism, sexism, and the abuse of power. She's a vigilante for women in need, a cyberpunk savior. So in that sense, she's everything we've been waiting for.

But she is also defined primarily through her relationship with the much more milquetoast Mikael Blomkvist, a reporter who happens to be hired on to investigate a cold case. Mikael, who is played by Michael Nyqvist (Swedish films) and Daniel Craig (American film), is a nice guy, but not actually all that interesting in and of himself. He's a moderately attractive, middle-aged, decently intelligent reporter whose one solid attribute is his ability to find trouble.

When he's hired on by a wealthy industrialist to solve the decades old murder of the man's niece, Mikael hits a ton of brick walls in the investigation, and eventually needs help. In the book, that help comes from Lisbeth, who has hacked his computer and is monitoring his actions for her own reasons. She reaches out to Mikael with a solution to his problem, and he in turn tracks her down and asks her to help. In the American film, however, it is Mikael who decides that he needs help, and it is he who takes the initiative to track down Lisbeth.

This reversal speaks to the larger problem with Lisbeth as a character. Because aside from the mostly sensationalized plot in the book, the real story revolves around Lisbeth and Mikael's relationship. Which is fine, theoretically, but in this case it's a little messed up.

Here's why.

Lisbeth Salander is an interesting character precisely because she is so screwed up. The product of an incredibly unstable childhood (with an abusive/potentially murderous father and a victimized mother), Lisbeth has been labeled as "troubled" and now lives as a ward of the state. She is not considered adult enough to hold property or conduct her own affairs. And instead of getting a caregiver, she is given a mostly disinterested caseworker.

The plot for the first book/movie, which is the one we're concerned with today, deals explicitly with Lisbeth's relationship with her caseworker. Her first worker, a kindly older man, mostly let her run her own life. She could work at her job, control her own money, pay her bills, and all that. Lisbeth liked that, and she liked him. But then her caseworker has a stroke, and she is assigned to someone new.

This new man, Nils Bjurman, uses his position as her legal guardian to systematically take over Lisbeth's life. Now, instead of being mostly independent and only nominally a ward of the state, she is completely lost.

All of her money, all of her work, all of her life goes through Bjurman, who uses this leverage to extract sexual favors from Lisbeth. The violation increases in severity and scale, until finally Bjurman lures Lisbeth to his apartment and savagely rapes her. Having foreseen this probability, Lisbeth brought a hidden camera with her, and now has a tape of her rape. But instead of using this to turn Bjurman in to the authorities, she uses it to concoct her own revenge.

Filled with rage, Lisbeth breaks into Bjurman's house and assaults him, tying him down, blackmailing him, and finally tattooing the fact that he's a rapist on his chest.

From here, she is then immediately embroiled in Mikael's investigation and soon into that enters into a sexual relationship with him. She's the aggressor and initiator, but it's still uncomfortable as an audience and a reader, because you have to wonder what her headspace is right then.

Anyway, the rest of the story paints Lisbeth as an avenging angel, a liberated woman who is haunted by her past but still fully capable of self-determination. And that's great.

The problem I have with the whole story is that I can't get past a single thing: this book, and these movies, were written by men. These are men's interpretations of the motivation and actions of a female victim of sustained sexual abuse.

I'm not sure why, but that kind of bothers me. A lot.

I guess it bothers me because so much about the relationship between Mikael and Lisbeth feels like the wish fulfillment of a middle-aged man. Lisbeth is considerably younger than Mikael, being in her early twenties, and is an emotionally damaged and "troubled" young woman who latches onto the middle-aged man who offers her stability and safety. Lisbeth loves Mikael long before he ever considers the possibility, and she reveals a frightening willingness to do anything for him.

More than that, the whole idea of Lisbeth as a character feels like something a man dreamed up to make himself feel better. Like, she's hot as hell, but desperately wants approval. She's dark and mysterious and cool, but also really damaged and fragile and needy. She's dangerous enough to provide a thrill, and soft enough to need a big strong man to take care of her.

And let's not even get into the whole thing in the later books where Lisbeth gets a boob job in order to "feel better about herself". Urgh.

The thing is, Lisbeth as a character has the potential to be a really interesting examination of a woman taking her life back after suffering horrible abuse. She's a sexual assault and abuse survivor, and she's strong and badass and cool, in charge of herself sexually and in all other ways. I want to love her.

But I can't. I just can't. Every version of her that I see feels like it's been filtered through so many lenses of male approval and sexualization that it makes me cringe. Take, for instance the American version of the story. David Fincher, the director, openly admitted that he cast Rooney Mara in the part because she felt so innocent and fragile. He had a strong hand in developing the look of the character, and it was his choice to put Mara as Lisbeth on the posters topless, with only Craig's Mikael preserving any of Lisbeth's "modesty" from the viewer.

It twists the whole concept of Lisbeth's body modifications, which make sense when one thinks of her as a victim of sustained sexual violence (tattoos and piercings are often used as a way of abuse victims to reclaim their bodies), into something more about the viewer than Lisbeth herself. Her piercings, her tattoos, her clothes - in this context they aren't something Lisbeth has control over, but something that the director and the writer have determined will titillate the audience and therefore should be included.

It's the knowledge that however much we want to view Lisbeth as a feminist hero, she is defined not by herself in the story, but by her relationship to the men in her life. Both the ones actually in the story, and the men who have a direct hand in shaping her story. It's really discomfiting. It kind of freaks me out.

Still, I don't know. I just don't. I don't know how I really feel about Lisbeth because there's still a big part of me that likes her. I want to love her, to embrace her, and to appreciate a woman who hunts down other people who hurt women. She's a pretty objectively interesting character.

If only there weren't this lingering stink of coercion over her. If only I didn't feel like she was always being controlled, coerced, manipulated into giving consent. If only I didn't feel like she was a figment of the middle-aged male imagination: the hot young thing who thinks you're all that and a bag of chips, who'll do anything for you, who will be the coolest girlfriend you've ever had, but who is so damaged that she needs you.

If only it weren't for all of that, I could totally love Lisbeth Salander.

This week's Strong Female Character Friday is a guest post from Trey Stewart!

I don’t know if Debbi consciously planned to have a week focused on women in STEM*, but today we're going to keep it going and talk about Jemma Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge), my favorite character on Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD. Because Jemma Simmons is brilliant, flawed, and the kind of strong female character that I personally would like to see a heck of a lot more.

It's not necessarily surprising that I'm fond of Simmons. At least, not to me. I tend to like smart characters such as Sherlock Homes or Dr. House. Characters that solve the mystery with just the power of their minds. But Simmons is kind of uncommon on television. When we see this trope, the character with the brains saving the world, it's almost always a guy. Or, if it is a girl, she's more of an asskicker than a scientist.

Simmons, however, is a strong female character who could almost be described as the anti-action girl. Her primary contribution to solving the problem of the week is that she is a super genius who is good at science. She wants to go out into the field, but she knows she's not good under pressure and that she isn't really interested in hurting anyone. She's a feminine nerd who wants to save people and who refuses to let the feminine or the nerd get in the way of that.

Obviously, there are female characters on television and in movies that are intelligent and/or good at science but they frequently seem to be either action girls (Brennan on Bones) or created entirely to be attractive to male viewers (Seven of Nine on Star Trek: Voyager). I wish it were a common thing for strong female characters to be good at science in the same way that action girls are common. Tragically, it isn't. Yet.

So, as a little background, Agents of SHIELD is an American TV show that takes place in Marvel’s Cinematic Universe and follows a group of agents as they deal with stuff that doesn’t quite warrant the attention of Captain America and the Avengers. The cast is relatively diverse and there are plenty of weird, interesting characters. Two of the members of SHIELD in the current season have been Avengers in the comics and one of them has actually died before in canon (Clark Gregg’s Phil Coulson). It makes for a pretty interesting show.

SPOILERS

Additionally, each character has a distinct and important role on the team, as well as their own character arc each season. Grant Ward (Brett Dalton), for example, goes from being so perfect a crystallization of what a SHIELD agent is that it wouldn’t be surprising to see him take over as Captain America to being revealed as an undercover HYDRA agent and then going full on Hannibal Lecter in season two. Then Skye (Chloe Bennet) goes from being a hacker with a shady past to an Inhuman SHIELD agent, and possible future Avenger, with a super-villain for a father.

In short, there are several really good candidates for my favorite character.

But Simmons wins by a landslide. She's kind of the opposite of what I would expect in a spy and honestly it's wonderful. She has no killer instinct, no trust issues, not even a healthy level of paranoia. She forgives Skye for betraying the team early in season one. She's merciful to the point of not wanting to kill Centipede/HYDRA agents even when they are very literally trying to kill her. Obviously, not killing people is a good thing but spies and other official types on television tend to be a bit trigger happy. Simmons? She really isn't.

It's not just her compassion and trusting nature that won me over. She's also an incredibly terrible liar and this super happy friendly person who likes doing what is expected of her. These character traits aren’t weaknesses so much as strengths that give her a different toolkit for dealing with problems.

She likes to do what she's told, and she's not good at hiding things. If nothing else, that makes her a character much more commonly used as a punching bag on other shows, rather than a hero with her own epic storyline.**

I love smart characters. I said that before, but it bears repeating. I love smart characters and Simmons is over the top, comic book smart. She had two PhDs by the age of seventeen. Not even Tony Stark can say that. She's described as loving homework more than life itself. She probably was one of those people doing extra credit for fun. Personally, I'm the sort of person who likes school and writing papers plenty, but even I love some things more than homework.

I’m not saying that Simmons is bad for being such a nerd. On the contrary, it is great to see a woman who is consistently the smartest person in the room. Even better, she's not some arrogant jerk like Hugh Laurie’s House, but genuinely respects everyone while brilliantly outsmarting them.

Seriously, she might be the smartest person in the MCU. I'm sure Tony would argue, but he'd be wrong. Over the course of the series she's worked on cures derived from two different alien species, counteracted the effects of Extremis, and performed surgery to remove an eye implant with a kill switch. If she were a real person, and not a fictional character working for a fictional organization that likes to keep ground breaking scientific discoveries a secret, she would have won several Nobel prizes by now. Obviously, it's unrealistic for one person to have done all the stuff she has but not really any more unrealistic than creating a suit of armor out of spare parts.

It should be noted though that she's not really on her own for most of this. For all of the first season and a bit in the second Jemma Simmons works closely with Leo Fitz (Iain de Castecker). In fact, they work so closely together that they are referred to as FitzSimmons, a single entity. So most of the scientific discoveries Simmons makes over the course of the series are done while working with other people.

But, again, this isn’t a bad thing. Simmons is kind of a female power fantasy in science. Actual scientists work together and it is good to see this reflected in a genre (superhero stories) that tends to feature lone scientists making incredible discoveries.

Thus far Simmons’ character arc hasn’t featured shocking revelations of the sort that have come out about other characters, but it's still pretty interesting. During season one, when the team visits a SHIELD base known as the Hub, Simmons is established as being an awful liar. She tries and fails to convincingly lie to Jasper Sitwell (Maximiliano Hernandez) while trying to find information to use in rescuing her teammates. This establishes that Simmons has flaws (always good), but it also sets a benchmark for season two, when we see that Simmons has actually learned to lie and learned to do it convincingly. Even if her arc isn't as dramatic as other characters', it still matters. She grows and changes, just like a real person. An incredible, awesome, brilliant person.

At the start of the series, Simmons isn't the most assertive of characters either, but she learns that too. One of her biggest accomplishments was using GH.325 to heal Skye. The events of the show make it clear that the drug is dangerous, but Simmons defies orders from Agent Coulson in her investigation of the drug because she realizes GH.325 could be used to save lives. She stands up for what she believes in. Granted, it goes pretty far awry, but she sticks to her guns.

The time she spends under cover, though is in my mind what really cements her as a strong female character. Specifically, when she goes undercover in season two. She's chosen for the mission - infiltrating HYDRA's science division - because her academic background gives her reason to have access to files that other agents, such as Bobbi Morse (Adrianne Palicki) would not.

While Simmons does do some dishonest things in her time undercover, she succeeds in rising through the ranks of HYDRA mainly due to her friendly, pleasant, personality and her intelligence. How unusual is that? A spy whose superpower is being really really nice and it works? Just saying, it's refreshing.

Ultimately, the more traditional action girl, and possible strong female character in the making, Bobbi Morse, has to extract Simmons from her cover, but not because Simmons herself screwed up. She didn't. In fact, without her actions and her aggressive friendliness in infiltrating HYDRA, the team would have been lost. They need her. She adds value not just through her vast intelligence but also with her compassion.

One of the things that makes Agents of SHIELD so much fun to watch is that it has a diverse cast of characters. Not just racially or in gender, but in the outlook and actual design of the characters themselves. There are scientists and action heroes and bureaucrats and tech wizards all working together to save the world. And that's a good thing. A very good thing. Because while it's obviously important to have a variety of strong female characters on television so that women and girls can have role models to look up to, it's also important for white dudes like me to see these women and know that their real life counterparts exist.

One of the questions I see asked when men do a terrible job of writing women is “Do they know any real life women?” People ask that because the female characters don't behave like people, they act like cardboard cutouts where human beings should be. But when written well, having women like Simmons on television gives the boys and young men who are watching an idea of what real women are like. It helps us to humanize the women we see every day, and it suggests that despite what we've been told, the problems men and women face and the way they overcome them aren't so different after all.

It feels like it shouldn't need to be said, but it does. Seeing poorly written women hurts both women and men. But when women are written well, men can see a new perspective on the world. Hopefully, this translates into male viewers having better friendships with the women in their lives, but at the very least, studies have shown that exposure to diverse media makes people, especially young men, more compassionate over all. And if the young men watching happen to want to be writers, then maybe their friendships with women will translate into better written female characters.

But most of all, I like the variety, both as a viewer and as a person deeply invested in the future of education in America.

It's been talked about a lot here and in other places, but representation in the media really does have an impact on what people choose to study. When CSI became popular there was a spike in applications for students to study forensic science. Why can't the same be true for women and the science fields? I want more character like Jemma Simmons because I want more women doing science. I want more minds innovating and creating and moving the world forward. Don't you?

Having different kinds of strong female characters isn't just good on a personal and social level, it also makes for good media. If Simmons were any less flawed or brilliant or interesting, Agents of SHIELD would be diminished. She adds value, just by being there. She is a vital part of the team. And, as far as I'm concerned, the best reason to tune in.

Trey Stewart has his PhD in Educational Research from the University of Alabama and currently works for a think tank examining educational policies in Alabama. He likes comics (just a little) and has strong feelings about gender representation in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as he should.

*Ed. I didn't. That was a coincidence. Go me!
**Ed. See also Amy Santiago on Brooklyn 99. Love her.

I am going deaf. Not particularly quickly, mind you. I probably have decades of hearing left until I succumb and have to depend on technological assistance to hear. But I am going deaf. I've known it for about five or six years now, since I first noticed that I couldn't hear myself singing like I used to. Then I found that loud noises made all the sound in my right ear turn to loud static and sharp shooting pain. A little after that I started to experience fadeouts. And in the past year my left ear has started doing the static thing to.

I'm not telling you this so that you can pity me, I'm saying it because I want you to understand where I'm at with it all. I'm not particularly fussed about it, honestly. Back when I first realized I was going deaf I was pretty upset - I put a lot of stock in my musical ability and I thought I might someday want to be a singer. I can't do that now. And, really, that's okay. I've found other things to love, other lives to live, and when the time comes and I fully lose my hearing - probably when I'm in my forties or fifties - it won't be the end of the world.

But I will say that it was hard to get to this point of acceptance and comfort with my hearing loss. The first couple hundred times you have to ask someone to speak up because you very literally cannot hear them are embarrassing. Especially when you're telling a scared teenage girl that she needs to speak her fears much louder because you can't help her if you can't hear her.

It was hard not just because adjusting to any new life change is hard, but also because out of all the stories you see in pop culture, representation of characters with substantial hearing loss is pretty much nonexistent.

If you don't believe me, I'd like to do a little thought experiment: I want you to close your eyes and name a movie or TV show about a character who is blind. Got one? Okay. Personally, I always think of Scent of a Woman first, despite the fact that I've never actually seen that movie, nor am I particularly inclined to do so. Now, next I want you to think of a movie or TV show that features a main character who is noticeably physically disabled. Got it? Is it X-Men or My Left Foot or something like that? Right on.

Now I want you to close your eyes and think of a movie or TV show where the main character is deaf.

Go ahead. I'll wait.

Now, I'm not saying that there are no movies or TV shows with deaf characters. There are, and some of them are pretty good. But I am saying that compared to the way that our culture talks about other forms of disability, deafness is weirdly invisible. And that's dumb. Not just because it's a relatively common form of disability, but also because there is literally no reason for this. And yet when I think of movies or TV shows that deal explicitly with deafness, I can think of a couple of guest stars on episodes of Law and Order, Mr. Holland's son in Mr. Holland's Opus, and Marlee Matlin. Also this German movie I saw once.

So when I, as a woman in her early twenties, realized that I was slowly and inexorably losing my hearing, I looked to pop culture for an example of what that would be like. What was it going to be like to be deaf? What is deaf culture like? Who am I? And instead of finding something helpful, I found the Very Special Glee episode where the kids meet a glee club from an all deaf school and proceed to sing a touching duet with them where the hearing kids' voices are pitched to cover over the "embarrassing" and "awkward" sounds of the deaf choir.

I'm still pretty pissed about that.

All of this, however, is just a long intro to bring up a fact that I discovered in my panicked research. Because, as it turns out, there is one character in pop culture that can show me what it means to be deaf in a hearing world, and even what it means to be deaf and still very very capable. That character is Hawkeye.

Heck yes, Avengers Hawkeye! Clint Barton from the Marvel comics is canonically deaf, and it's kind of my favorite thing ever. Now, granted, we don't yet know whether or not the film version of Clint Barton, as played by Jeremy Renner, is deaf, but we do know for a fact that current comics Clint is.

It's been mentioned multiple times on Matt Fraction's Hawkeye, in Hawkeye vs. Deadpool, and I think (but I'm not sure on this one) that it's come up in Secret Avengers. Point is, Clint Barton in the current Marvel comics canon is nearly completely deaf.

The origin of his deafness varies a little bit - sometimes it's because he stood too close to an explosion while working for SHIELD, othertimes it's something that happened in childhood, but the point of the matter is simple: Clint Barton has near complete hearing loss, and yet this in no way prevents him from being an awesome superhero.

This is a big deal. It's established that while Clint can hear pretty well if he puts his hearing aids in, they're not infallible, and sometimes they break or need new batteries or he forgets to put them in or whatever. The point is, it's not hand-waved away. Clint is deaf and it impacts his life. It does not, however, make him any less of a badass, and one has to assume that this is an intentional narrative choice.

I mean, how easy would it be for the writers to give Clint a cochlear implant? Or have Tony Stark build him hearing aids that never stop working and are surgically attached to his ears? He works for SHIELD. SHIELD could easily be persuaded to make sure their asset is never compromised in the field. But the writers haven't done that. They haven't let us forget or not care that Clint is deaf, but neither have they made it an insurmountable obstacle. Instead, they've chosen to go the best possible route: reality.

Because here's the thing: there are only certain circumstances in which my hearing loss actually affects my daily life. By and large, I can get by. And even for people with complete hearing loss, the kind that even hearing aids can't help, it's not like life is impossible. Heck no! It's just life, with a couple of extra hurdles in the way.

It's not like the comic goes deep on this, but there are little moments. In Hawkeye vs. Deadpool, Clint forgets to put in his hearing aids at the beginning of the night. He's then forced to work with Deadpool, whose mask covers his face entirely, and Clint can't hear him or read his lips. The solution? He literally just tells Deadpool this, and Deadpool rolls his mask up so Clint can see his mouth. That's it. Problem solved.

This also comes up when he's working with Spiderman too, and again the solution is the same. See, being hearing impaired doesn't make Clint unable to be a superhero, it just means he has a couple of workarounds to use.

It's worth noting too that Clint's disability really doesn't have any impact on his superpower. Or rather, his lack of a superpower. He's a great shot not because he's deaf but because he's a great shot and also happens to be deaf. He's not Matt Murdoch in Daredevil whose disability very literally is his superpower. He's just a guy who is deaf and also very good at a thing. And I know it sounds weird, but that's really comforting.

What I got from looking at Clint was an assurance that while going deaf will affect my life (and already has), that doesn't mean my life is going to be worse or that I won't be able to do any of the things I love to do that I know I'm good at. I'm not going to fall into some netherworld of the deaf community that exists without contact with the world upstairs and never be seen or heard from again.

I know that sounds a bit dumb, but what else was I supposed to think? There are barely any deaf characters in pop culture, and even fewer who are doing the thing that they love to do happily and well. I mean, I can think of that one guy from The Replacements, but that's about it.

And this is just dumb. Seriously. Super dumb. It's not like deafness is all that hard to portray in movies or television. Sign language is gorgeous to watch and surprisingly intuitive to understand. And for the audience members who don't know ASL? Subtitles. Seriously. It's that easy.

It's interesting that of all the media in the world, the one that's best at showing deaf characters (or at least the one that has deaf!Clint Barton) is comics. Comics are uniquely suited to portraying deaf characters, because they're an even playing field. Deaf and hearing readers get the same experience. But it's also cool because comics are visual. They can literally show the sign language and still convey plot. I'm just saying, it's pretty neat.

But this doesn't let TV and movies off the hook. The problem with the complete lack of representation of deaf characters is that as a person freaking out, I had no image to show me what I could expect. The lack of representation suggested to me that in becoming deaf I was going to become completely alienated from pop culture and society as a whole. And it's completely stupid because I patently know that's not true, but it haunted me anyway.

Now, I wouldn't go so far as to say that my experience stands in for the experience of everyone fearing the loss of their hearing, or even that I have a particularly enlightened or informed understanding of hearing loss. But I do know that Clint Barton brought me comfort when I desperately needed it, and for that I'm pretty stinking grateful. In the end, that's really all you need to know.

Usually on Tuesdays I tackle media that is made for children, but today I thought we'd switch gears and talk about media about children and specifically a show that deals explicitly with parenthood. Because why not.

There are basically two narratives we get about single fathers in the media. Either they are horrible abusive, inconsiderate louts who cannot without the presence of another adult in the home keep control of their children, or they are sensitive, kind, overworked men who desperately need a woman to come in and care for them and the children.

Basically, it's weirdly hard to find examples in our media of single fathers who are neither awful nor needy. It's like we've all internalized the idea that a single father absolutely must have a love interest or else he's pretty much the worst. A man can't take care of kids on his own, no way, no how.

And this bothers me for I think obvious reasons. In reality there are a lot of single fathers who manage to be neither horrifically abusive nor insecure and daffy. Lots of men who really aren't looking for a partner to help them co-parent, because they've got this. There are plenty of men who are good dads, and pretty decent people too.

Which is why, upon rewatching a few episodes of Better Off Ted this weekend with my sister, I realized that Ted Crisp is an anomaly in the world of fiction. He's a single father whose primary defining feature is his competence and good nature. He's raising his eight year old daughter, Rose, by himself, but that doesn't make him a bad dad.

And while there are a couple of love interests who pop into his life in the criminally short two seasons that this show was on, none of them are particularly serious and none of them are evaluated in terms of who would be the best mother for Rose. Rose is cool. She doesn't need another mom.

For the record, Better Off Ted isn't really about Ted as a father. It's actually a workplace comedy - a spectacularly weird and funny one that was cancelled far too soon - about a group of people working in research and development at the world's most alarming corporation. Veridian Dynamics, the company, is a sort of passive-aggressive multi-national conglomerate that has its hands in everything. Literally, because it probably has a lot of hands. It's into weird science like that.

The company is sort of a combination of Aperture Science from Portal and StrexCorp from Welcome to Night Vale, and the plots of the episode usually revolve around the company asking one of its employees to do something illegal/unethical or imposing a new insane policy or just trying to cryogenically freeze one of its employees to see if it's possible.

Ted (Jay Harrington) is our hero, a moderately good man who really loves his job as head of R&D. Far from being disaffected or a complainer about work, Ted is chipper, kind, and reasonably ethical. Reasonably. He supervises the work of Veridian's best scientists, Lem (Malcolm Barrett) and Phil (Jonathan Slavin), and coordinates with the head of product testing, Linda (Andrea Anders). Then he brings it all to his boss, the delightfully cutthroat and insane Veronica (Portia de Rossi). At night he closes up shop and goes home to make dinner with his adorable daughter, Rose (Isabella Acres). That's it, that's the show.

Ted's parenting isn't the focus by any means, but his conversations with Rose frequently serve as a ballast to the insanity he gets at work, and Ted likes to use his daughter as a sounding board for ideas. Plus, Rose serves as a the moral center of the show, without falling into too many "sainted child" tropes. So that's all good.

As a whole, I have to say that Better Off Ted's management of single parenthood might just be my favorite next to Gilmore Girls. Because it doesn't say that everything is easy and Ted is the perfect dad, but neither does it make it out to be a hellish nightmare. Most of the time, Rose is an easy child to love. She's smart, interested in school, an upright citizen of the world, and pretty emotionally stable. Ted is open and aware of Rose's emotional state, and even admits that the loss of her mother has been hard for Rose - the mom isn't dead, she's just not in the picture - while never trying to "fix it". Ted's a good dad.

And, yes, there are episodes where Rose and by that fact Ted's fatherhood, figure more heavily than others. There's an episode where Rose's nanny is sick, so Rose has to come into Veridian Dynamics and chill at the daycare after school. This makes Ted nervous, because the daycare is notoriously dear to the company, and he shudders to see Rose used as child labor or an experiment subject or product tester. His solution ends up being to have Veronica watch Rose, which gives us a hilarious half hour of comedy, as well as some good insights into both Rose and Veronica as people.

Or there's the episode where Veronica and Ted realize that Rose, because she knows the other children, can be useful in digging up dirt on the other employees at Veridian. Or they decide to use her ability to play with other kids to get in good with the executives. In other words, Rose isn't a non-entity in the show, but for the most part, she exists as a foil to the wacky machinations at Veridian Dynamics and as a reminder of what the real world is. And that's fine.

The point that I want to get to with all of this is that I really like how Better Off Ted handles Ted and Rose's relationship. It's clear that they're close and that they have a very healthy relationship. It's obvious that Rose is going to grow up and be a very good, functional, probably kind adult. And it's nice to see that Ted isn't punished by the narrative for raising his daughter and working full time. It is both possible and perfectly fine for him to do so.

Yay!

But I'd also like to point out that the show doesn't give Ted "extra cookies" for this. He's not shown to be better or more capable or more honorable and saintly just because he has a daughter that he is doing a good job raising. He doesn't get extra props for wanting to care for Rose when she's sick. Why would he? She's his daughter and he wants to take care of her. That's natural and normal, and while it's nice that he wants to care for her, he shouldn't be lionized for doing exactly what parents normally do.

There's very frequently a double standard in cases like this. Single mothers are just expected to do all of this, to manage their children and their careers, to effortlessly juggle full time work and full time parenting without any support. But single fathers, no matter their failings, are given much more leeway. "At least he's trying.""Bless you for doing this!" And so on. We as a culture are so unaccustomed to the idea that men can be functional parents that we shower them with praise for doing the most mundane, normal parenting things.

I'm not saying that men deserve no praise for being good parents, merely that if men deserve praise for how they care for their children, then so do women. And that above all we need to remember that parenting is parenting, and the important thing is to do a good job overall.

Better Off Ted presents Ted as an average, decent but not spectacular father. He's very open and honest with Rose, but that means that sometimes she schools him on ethics violations. He's emotionally aware and receptive to her needs, but that doesn't mean he's above sometimes using her to spy on other executives. And while Rose is a big part of Ted's life, he's not shown to be a better man just because he's raising her on his own. It's no big deal, just another part of who Ted is as a person.

And there's something very satisfying about the fact that the show never tells us Ted needs to get married so that Rose can have a mommy. As much as Ted has a variety of love interests in the course of the show, their stories are always about their relationships with Ted, and not their ability to raise his daughter. Even his longer term love interests, like Linda and Veronica, are evaluated in terms of how compatible they are with Ted, and not on how good they'd be at raising Rose.

That having been said, I do have to admit that I prefer Ted's relationship with Veronica to his flirtation with Linda. Not because I think Veronica is a better mother figure - she's patently not - or because I think the two of them share true love or anything. Rather, I like that Veronica and Ted bring out different things in each other. Veronica makes Ted more competitive and excited about his job, and Ted makes Veronica feel her feelings.

Plus, Veronica's relationship with Rose is one of my favorite parts of the show. While Veronica is basically a shark in a lady-suit, she cares a great deal for Rose in her own way. She thinks Rose would make an excellent apprentice and tries to impart to her the wisdom that Veronica herself has gathered: the importance of The Art of War, why she should destroy her enemies before they can get her, and how a good hairstyle can signify power to all who see it. Veronica doesn't treat Rose as a little kid, she treats her like she treats everyone else: as a person who is, albeit, inferior to Veronica but in need of her gracious guidance.

And I like that. Sue me. I think it's absolutely hilarious.

But I've gotten off track. The point here is that I really really like how the show deals with parenthood and children and the issues of being a single father in today's workplace. It's not always easy and it's not necessarily fun, but there's never any question that Ted loves Rose and we always know that he is proud of his role in her life. He doesn't need a woman to fix him or save him, and Rose is going to turn out just fine. Even with Veronica's meddling.

I certainly hope there aren't kids watching this show, since it's wildly inappropriate for children, but I do think that there's value here for the audience too. Ted's quiet competence in raising his daughter and the way the narrative treats him for it send a message that being a single father is just as normal as any other kind of family.

And that's a message worth sending. It's one more step towards our culture understanding that a family is a family is a family, and hopefully it gives some comfort to the other single parents out there. Not because Ted is perfect, but because he isn't and it all works out anyway.

Still my favorite relationship.

Today was supposed to be the day that I gave all of you my review of The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies. I was going to watch it yesterday afternoon while enjoying my uncharacteristic Wednesday off, and then review it for you today. But, in case you couldn't tell from the fact that all of this is in past tense, I did not do that. I couldn't. For a number of reasons.

I mean, I physically could have, probably. I was right next door to the movie theater. I even stood in front of the ticket counter for a few minutes before walking away. It probably would have been more logical for me to see it than not see it, but I just couldn't. Or I didn't want to. Or the idea of watching this movie was so unbearable to me that I had to leave. Either way I finished up my Christmas shopping and then went home and laid on the couch watching Rehab Addict until dinner.*

So instead of actually giving you a review of the movie today, I thought I'd explain why I have no desire to see it. This is not to say that I won't see it. I probably will at some point, and it might even be in the next couple of weeks. But this is why, even though I was right there and had nothing better to do, I could not bring myself to watch the final Hobbit movie yesterday afternoon.

It's the end of an era.

You probably don't all know this, because it's a fact that massively predates this blog, but I was grandfathered into the Lord of the Rings fandom. I really had very little choice in the matter, not that I'm complaining. My parents both love the books and read them to us when we were little. The first time I heard the whole trilogy I was two. Then again when I was six, and I read them for the first time on my own when I was eight. We had a painting of Goldberry hanging on the wall in our living room. We currently have a painted tree from a set for a play production of The Hobbit hanging in our dining room. Basically my whole family are giant Lord of the Rings nerds, and I grew up with all of the stories.

We even had that terrible animated version of The Hobbit - the one where the elves were green and had German accents for some reason - and I watched it over and over as a child. These books were full of magic and mystery and epic stories and admittedly very very few female characters, but still. They were perfect fuel for an obsessive little nerd like me, and from the ages of eight to about fourteen they were my life.

I was thirteen when the first movie (Fellowship of the Ring, that is) came out, and I went to see it in theaters seven times. This is impressive not just because that's a lot of times to see a three hour movie in theaters, but also because the nearest theater showing it was half an hour's drive away, and I was thirteen. I could not drive. Let that sink in for a minute and now I hope you understand why I like my parents so much.

Our whole family was obsessed. We bought the DVDs as soon as they came out, then waited again and bought the extended editions when they came out. We sat down as a family and watched literally every single commentary and special feature on both DVD sets. I used to be able to name which stunt-people played which orcs, and so on, because I cared so much.

And this isn't even getting into how I tried to learn Elvish (Quenya, specifically), how many of my Halloween costumes were remarkably themed, and how I wore a cloak to class for two years in college because I could. I still own a veritable library of appendices, bestiaries, language guides, maps, and other tangentially related Middle-Earth miscellany. I was given a first edition of The Silmarillion for my birthday one year, and I cherish it.

Okay, so all of that is to establish that I am a huge nerd and always have been. But it's also to explain that I have had my obsessive moment with the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies, and in a very real way, I have also burned myself the hell out on them.

Like I said, I saw The Fellowship of the Ring seven times in theaters, but I only saw The Two Towers twice. And Return of the King, while great, only got me into the theaters three times. One of those times I pretty much dozed through all of the Sam and Frodo scenes on Mount Doom. By the time I graduated high school, for all that I still loved the story and had participated in Hobbit Days** and marathons in theaters and even acted out scenes in drama class, I was kind of over it. I was tired of Lord of the Rings, and ready to move on to something else.

So I did. I spent college becoming more and more interested in pop culture in general, from Buffy to Doctor Who and Heroes to Supernatural and finally I ended up going to grad school for screenwriting because I loved it all so much. And Lord of the Rings played a very big part in all of that, but it was a part that was over. It wasn't until my early twenties that I could actually enjoy watching the movies again at all, because I'd so thoroughly worn myself out.

And then I found out that they were going to make The Hobbit into not just one, not just two, but three more movies, and I'll be honest. The reaction I had was not glee or joy or squee, it was exhaustion.

It's not that they're bad movies exactly, because they aren't. It's that something in me has changed. Maybe. I'm not the same person I was when the first Lord of the Rings movies came out, but that's not a bad thing. It just mostly means that while I can appreciate these movies for what they are, they don't hold the same emotional, gut-wrenching tug for me as the first ones.

Also, and I know that some people might not want to hear this, I'm pretty sure they're just not as good.

That's the second reason why I couldn't bring myself to watch the movie yesterday. Because, based on the previous two movies in The Hobbit series, I have a sneaking suspicion that I might not like it very much. It's not my style. It's all glam and special effects and greenscreen and CGI and not so much with the dirty, gritty feeling of the previous movies. It feels like a fairy tale, and I've never been much for fairy tales.

I know this is unecessarily poetic language, but The Hobbit never made my soul sing with joy. It's a cute story, definitely, but it's not epic like Lord of the Rings is. It's not about the battle between good and evil and the movements of kings and armies and a righteous war, it's about a bunch of greedy people arguing over some gold. And it's a perfectly fine story, but it's not nine hours worth of story, no matter how you slice it. I'm definitely not the first person to say this, but the Hobbit movies feel bloated and laggy. There is too much movie and not enough story and I just don't enjoy watching them anymore.

Now, I fully admit that all of this is coming from a person who has not finished the trilogy. That's the literal point of this article. So maybe I'll go see the movie next week with my family and I will be amazed at how wonderful it is, how moving, and I will deeply regret all of the mean things I said here. That could happen. It probably won't, though.

And yet, for all of this, the last and final reason why I didn't watch the movie yesterday is because there's still a part of me that doesn't want it to end. I mean, it's a weird part of me, because the rest is all raring to go and wants to move on with my life, but there's that happy little thirteen year old in me that will be really sad when this is over. When I watch The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies, that's going to be the end. There will be no more Lord of the Rings movies to see after that.

I'm just not ready for that to happen, for all that I have been ready for a very long time.

*I really love that show. She makes the houses look so pretty!
**Where you dress up like a hobbit and watch all three extended editions back to back while eating hobbit-like food constantly. It's pretty disgusting. And very fun.

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