Kiss My Wonder Woman

So, here's a question that needs answering: does a character count as a "strong female character" even when she is deeply underserved by her story? Can a character still be a strong female character even if there's really not much she's given to do and the narrative never rests on her for more than a moment but you just look in her eyes and see so much damn potential?

I mean, I guess that by choosing Agent Astrid Farnsworth (Jasika Nicole*) for this week's Strong Female Character Friday I'm answering that question for myself, but I still want to talk about this idea. Because in a lot of ways, Astrid really isn't a strong female character on Fringe. And that's not her fault or the fault of her actress. It's just that the story never does anything with her, never explores her as a character, never even gives her much screentime. I love Astrid, but I don't feel like I ever really got to know her, and that's a damn shame.

If I had to explain this week's offering, I guess it's an ode to a character who might have been, who almost was. A character we saw glimpses of and who I fervently hope gets her own dang show in some other parallel universe. Somewhere Astrid Farnsworth takes center stage as she rightly deserves, and somewhere Jasika Nicole has won a handful of Emmys for her role as this complex and intriguing woman. A girl can dream.

Here in reality, though, this is the situation: Astrid Farnsworth is/was a perpetual background character on the show Fringe. The show, which we've talked about before on here, is a science fiction show that ran from 2008 to 2013. Created and run by JJ Abrams and Kurtzman and Orci, the show is in a lot of ways an example of the best of their work. Following FBI Agent Olivia Dunham, the show explores "fringe science", or the idea that once we reach the singularity, science spins out of control and everything goes wonky.

The first few seasons are heavily episodic, with each new week bringing a new mystery and weird science happening to the team to solve. The later seasons, though, become strongly serialized, with the "plot of the week" utterly abandoned in favor of deep themes and long arcs on issues of global domination and the fight against our own exploitative future.

In all of this we had our leads - Olivia, Peter, and Walter - and we had our secondary characters. Those secondary characters were Broyles and Nina and William Bell and Olivia's sister and Lincoln Lee and a couple of other people throughout the years. But in between both groups, we've got Astrid. Neither one of the cool kids nor exactly a secondary character, Astrid goes through the entire series in limbo. And it's hard to actually say why that is.

Astrid comes into the series early in season one, brought along to act as an assistant to Olivia as she sets up her own secret branch of the FBI. She's supposed to be a sort of secretary, but Astrid quickly becomes more of a babysitter, taking care of Walter and helping around the lab and just doing general fetching stuff.

Sure, it makes sense why a junior agent with her skills - Astrid is fluent in several languages, a skilled computer programmer, and solves complex puzzles and encryptions for fun - would be useful on this team, but none of those things are what she spends her time doing.

Instead, Astrid spends the bulk majority of her time on the show, and I really do mean the vast overwhelming majority, rolling her eyes at something Walter said. Reacting to him. Making him strawberry milkshakes and taffy and helping him dissect bodies. Astrid doesn't get the chance to be her own person unless the plot demands her skills. The rest of the time she just plays the straight man to Walter's wackiness, freeing up Peter and Olivia to have complex character development and interesting scenes.

I find this immensely frustrating.

Now, admittedly, Nicole is a really talented actress and found a way to shine through this. Even in the first few seasons where her role is almost entirely relegated to background drudgery, Nicole still makes you care about Astrid and like her. In seasons three and four, which are absolutely the best seasons for Astrid fans, we get to see both our Astrid growing and maturing in her position as well as meeting her "alternate". By which I mean that we get to meet Astrid in another universe, an experiment which sheds a lot of light on the Astrid from our world.

Sure, this is never a real highlight of the show - except for the one episode where Astrid takes center stage for a while, and that episode is glorious - but by giving us two different iterations of the same woman, we are shown a slightly more complex version of who she is. And it's freaking fascinating.

Cinnamon roll.

See, our Astrid, the one from the show's main universe, is funny and sweet and charming and extremely intelligent but also very caring and nurturing. It's unclear how much of this is her inherent personality and how much is the fact that we only know her in the context of her work with the team and Walter, but that doesn't matter. Our Astrid is, for lack of a better term, normal. Or, at the very least, seemingly neurotypical.

Other Astrid, however, (or alternate!Astrid as she's more commonly known) is not neurotypical. It's never stated explicitly, but the show heavily implies that Other Astrid is probably autistic, and not particularly high functioning. Her developmental delay was apparently such that her father signed her up for an experimental program when she was young. She now works for the Alternate Fringe division as an analyst, and, well, the other agents treat her mostly as a robot. She gives them statistics and does calculations and never talks about personal things or exists outside of work.

Only, that's not really all there is about her at all. Other Astrid is different in some really compelling ways. Like she has these streaks of pink in her hair which are never mentioned or addressed but seem to bely her "all rules all the time" behavior. She never makes eye contact or speaks directly to another agent - preferring to address her remarks about six inches to their lefts - but Other Astrid clearly cares about her coworkers.

She is devastated by the realization that someone on her team might not be who they say they are. She's deeply worried about them when they're in dangerous situations. She's a little different than we expect, but she's still the Astrid we know. And that's really interesting.

It suggests, for one thing, that Our Astrid might not be entirely neurotypical herself. Yeah, she has a lot of high level social skills, but those could be learned. And social functioning really doesn't mean she isn't neurodivergent. Her skill set even seems to suggest she might be. In other words, Our Astrid very well might be on the autistic spectrum and just high functioning enough to hide it. Unfortunately, this is never addressed by the narrative, so we never find out.

And then there's the hints we get about Astrid's relationship with her family. In one episode in season four, "Making Angels", Other Astrid comes to visit Our Astrid because her father has died. She wants to know if Our Astrid's father has died too, but more than that, she wants to know if Our Astrid has the same strained and complicated relationship with her father that Other Astrid does.

They spend an entire day circling each other on the issue, but eventually Our Astrid tells Other Astrid that she does. Other Astrid is immensely comforted by this, by the idea that her father didn't not love her because she was "broken", but because he never would have no matter what.

The thing is, at the end of the episode, Our Astrid goes to see her father and, well, they don't have a bad relationship. Not at all. Instead, they are close and warm and loving. It's not hard to see why Our Astrid lied, but it raises so many questions. Like, does Our Astrid now wonder if her father might only love her because she's normal? Does Our Astrid sometimes feel guilty for lying and for never introducing Other Astrid to the warm loving father she never knew?

I don't know. I wish I knew how Astrid felt about all this, but I don't because the show never bothered to explore anything related to Astrid at all.

If I'm sounding a little peeved right now, it's because I am. Seriously, the further you get into the show, the more frustrating it gets. All we ever get are breadcrumbs. A comment about Astrid going on a yearly trip with her father. A vague mention that she used to solve encryptions for fun. She collects butterflies. But for the most part, we don't ever get to know Astrid as a person. We certainly don't get to know her outside of her work with the team.

And this seems (is) really truly unfair. Not only is Astrid treated like a second class citizen by the narrative, she's treated like one by the actual characters in the show. There's a running joke about how Walter can never get her name right, or never bothers to get her name right, that's honestly pretty insulting. When Walter imagines a world of pure fantasy, he puts Astrid in it as a secretary who just wants a job. She's always fetching things and doing favors and never falters. Always smiles.

The other character seem to take it as a given that Astrid's life revolves around them. This becomes really really apparent in the fifth season when the four of them - Olivia, Peter, Walter, and Astrid - are transported to the future. While Olivia and Peter and Walter all ruminate on the tragedy of the time they've lost, contemplate how their lives have been impacted by this jump, Astrid just...does the dirty work. Seriously. She never gets a single line to talk about how she feels about being twenty one years in the future.

Her father is almost certainly dead, but didn't she have any other friends or family she wants to look up? The show suggests that Astrid's entire life, her existence, is subsumed in being a background character for Olivia and the people who matter in the story.

This is compounded and made even more appalling when you factor in race. See, Astrid is African-American. If we count the main cast as being those characters who appeared in almost every episode, then she is the only person of color. If we count Broyles, then she's still the only woman of color. And not just in the main cast. Pretty much in the entire show.

So, to make sure you're following me, the only woman of color in the whole show is a glorified babysitter for a doddering old white man who can't even bother to call her by the right name despite having been with her over forty hours a week for five years. Does that about sum it up?

The worst bit is that all of these problems, these grievances, wouldn't seem so bad if the show just freaking acknowledged them. If they stopped and said, hey, here's what Astrid is thinking in all of this. If they gave her a voice. But that never happens. Even in "Making Angels", the episode that is supposed to be all about Astrid, she's actually not in that much of it. A huge amount of the episode follows Other Astrid bonding with Walter while Our Astrid has work to do.

I mean, come on.

It doesn't just border on insulting, it is insulting. That the writers of this show went through a hundred episodes and it never occurred to them to give Astrid her own storyline or voice baffles and enrages me. How could they do that? I mean, she doesn't even get a side romance or anything. Not one in one hundred episodes. How.

It makes me angry because it's a waste. It's a waste of a character who is everything I actually want a female character to be. She's complex and kind and loving but keenly analytical and sometimes she has a short temper and she gets frustrated but she's so brilliant. She's a woman I have deeply wanted to see on my screen, and so it drives me nuts that she's never given anything to do. Literally in season five we have whole episodes where OliviaPeterWalter are off having adventures and Astrid is unquestioningly left behind in the lab to keep doing drudge work.

To be completely honest, I find the treatment of Astrid to be racist. Intentionality is not my place to judge, but the effect is clear. Fringe wanted to be progressive and feature a woman of color in a genre not known for embracing diversity (ironically), but they failed. By refusing to ever give Astrid her own voice, they didn't make a character, they made a plot device.

And in so doing they perpetuated racist stereotypes that black women, or any women of color, cannot be the leads in their own stories. That women of color exist only to prop others up. That women of color are the background players of life, only suitable for boring work no one else wants to bother with. And that women of color will do all of this without a single complaint because they're not really human anyway.

Like I said at the beginning, I firmly believe that in another universe there's a version of Fringe where Astrid Farnsworth gets her due. But it sure as hell isn't this one.

*Jasika Nicole is an amazing fantastic actress who has actually been featured in a SFC Friday before. Previously we discussed her voice work on Welcome to Night Vale as Dana Carmichael. Check it out!

Today's topic is, in a lot of ways, a very obvious pick for our series on masculinity. I mean, Billy Elliot is, if nothing else, a story that is all about the presentation of masculinity and how compulsory masculinity can be enforced just like compulsory femininity. But we're not going into this by looking at the film version of the story, amazing though that movie is. Instead, I'd like to talk more about the musical adaptation of that film, also named Billy Elliot, because I think that in a small way, the musical manages to capture more fully the tensions at play in the issues of gender performance and class warfare.

I mean, for all that Billy Elliot seems a very straightforward story of "boy wants to do slightly feminine-coded thing, boy's father recoils in horror, father comes to accept son and feminine-coded thing at end", Billy Elliot actually has a whole hell of a lot going on. So let's dive in.

For those of you unfamiliar, the film version of Billy Elliot came out in 2000 and really is amazing. Starring Jamie Bell as the titular character, it follows a young boy named Billy who discovers one day that there is something in this world called ballet and that he wants, more than anything in the world, to be a dancer.

This doesn't go over particularly well with his father, a gruff single-dad trying to raise his two sons during the coal mine strikes of the early 1980s in Britain. His father is out there fighting for their survival, while Billy keeps sneaking off to go play dressup and dance with girls. Nothing could seem more trivial to his dad.

Eventually, though, Billy's father comes around and the town rallies around him, seeing Billy as their one great chance at hope, since (as we know from history) the strike does not end well. At the end, the strike is over and the miners have lost, but Billy gets into a fancy ballet academy and becomes a professional dancer, proving that he can achieve his dreams and living up to the hopes of the people in his town. Awww.

Well, sort of. I should point out that the film is much less sentimental than I just made it sound. In fact, a big part of why I've never covered it before is because the film is actually quite hard for me to watch. It's incredible, make no mistake, but it's so unrelentingly grim that I had trouble making it through the first time, let alone the repeat viewings needed for an analysis like this.

Lucky for me, the musical (which I have seen a few times, actually) is a lot less grim but has the same basic plot. The difference, of course, is that the songs provide a nice break from the sadness and allow you to see Billy in all his dancing glory. So I highly recommend it.

But, like I said above, there really is much more to this story than an obvious analysis of a nice white boy discovering that it's okay to like feminine things. Way, way more.

For starters, the musical and film both make it clear that a big part of compulsory masculinity has to do not just with identity, but with class pride. See, Billy and his family are working class. They're miners, from a mining town, and have been miners since time immemorial. Billy's grandfather, his father, and even his older brother Tony, are or were all miners. It's expected that one day Billy too will take his place in the mine. Not because he's not good for anything else, but because that's just the way it is.

Then you've got the timing of the story. This is taking place right during the mining strikes of the 1980s, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (called, mockingly, "Maggie" throughout the story) was shutting down the socialized mining system Britain had put into place after WWII. I'm not going to get too much into the economics of it, but suffice to say that the socialized system of mine governance in place was one that was good for the workers - not great, but definitely good - and Thatcher's replacement largely involved shutting down the mines. It's a huge part of why she is still so hated in much of Britain, and why there were people swearing they'd dance on her grave. She literally put a quarter of a million people out of work.

But that was later. This was the beginning of that, when the miner's union thought that they could defeat Thatcher's plan by going on strike. Billy's father and brother are front and center of the strike in their town. Everyone is excited, figuring that the strike will be over by Christmas and that everything will go back to normal because the people, united, will never be defeated.*

In all of this, the Elliots' pride about being working class is a huge part of the story. They don't have any ambition to "rise above their station" - there's even a lyric in the musical that goes "solidary, solidarity / solidarity forever / we're proud to be working class / solidarity forever". The message is pretty clear. This protest is partially about mining rights and the structure of the socialized mining system, but more about the rights of the working class. The rights of "unskilled laborers" (even though we all know that unskilled is more a way of saying that something is messy and physically demanding than actually easy) to determine their own economic futures without the interests of corporations dictating terms.

So, basically, this strike isn't just about the mine, it's about the working class fighting for their place and for respect. When Billy switches from doing boxing to doing ballet, to his family and the town, it's like he's siding with the people they're fighting against. Boxing is a sport for the working classes. Boxing is a good tough "manly" sport, while ballet is something the rich do in their spare time. Right?

The thing is, in a lot of ways this is an accurate assessment. Ballet is something the rich do, because you basically have to be rich to get anywhere with ballet. The lessons are expensive (or at least good lessons are), the clothes aren't cheap either, and you have to travel to performances, take time off of work, go to competitions, take the kid to see other people perform, and more. It's a huge commitment if you want to do it at all well, like any sport, but with the addition of everything being about four times more expensive than you're expecting.

Seriously. I did ballet for four years when I was little, before it became abundantly clear that enthusiasm is no actual substitute for any modicum of talent, and I remember even as a child knowing that it was putting a financial burden on my family. It's just a reality of the art, and one that ought to change.

Billy picking ballet of all things to fall in love with must have felt like the greatest betrayal. Not only is he wanting to be a dancer of all things, he wants to be a dancer in the kind of dance that Maggie Thatcher might attend. It's an outrage, and everyone reacts accordingly.

This is what I mean about the analysis being slightly deeper than you might immediately suspect. Because there is definitely a strong thread of just plain sexism at work here, but there's also classism, and the two are so intertwined as to be inextricable. That's important to remember, because what Billy Elliot is reflecting here is true. Class and gender expression very frequently go together, and to go against one is to go against another. But more on that another time.

Let's move on to the bulk of the story, which is about how compulsory masculinity is harmful to both women and men. Now, obviously the plot here is about how sweet young Billy wants to do something that is "for girls" and his whole family is horrified. But, here too, there are layers to pick apart.

First, there's the fact that his lower class family is a single-parent household. Billy's mother died several years ago, and he is raised by his father and older brother. His grandmother is still around and lives with them, but she has a mild case of dementia and he spends more time caring for her than vice versa. Billy's father clearly loves his son, but he also clearly doesn't think much about him at the beginning of the story. Jackie - that's his father's name - is more concerned with the strike and keeping his sons in line than with worrying about their hopes and desires. His father is just plain busy, so a lot of the problem comes from a form of benign neglect that is all too common in working class single-parent households.

Interestingly, though, the story does take time to establish that the men in Billy's family have a history of being good dancers. At one point Billy's grandmother tells him a story about his grandfather. It's not a particularly flattering story, to be sure, but it is interesting. See, apparently Billy's grandfather was a drunken, abusive bastard, but he was also a divine dancer. His grandmother's fondest memories of them were when they would go out drinking and dancing. And by fondest memories, I mean only fond memories.

What's really interesting here is that his grandmother openly states that if she had the chance to do it all over again, she wouldn't. She would do literally anything else. She'd go dancing on her own, get drunk, do what she wanted, whatever, she just wouldn't get married to that drunken lout. It's a fascinating (and honest) thing for her to say, but it underscores the idea that men being told they are naturally rough and violent and "hard" is bad for both men and women. And the idea that under all of that Billy's grandfather was a great dancer raises the question of why, exactly, he was so miserable in all other areas of his life.

Anyway, that's more of a sidenote than anything else. I just find it really fascinating to see a story like this where the effects of compulsory masculinity are explored so deeply.

They're also not just examined in terms of Billy, but also in terms of his best friend, Michael. Michael is a lot of people's favorite character in the film, and it's not hard to see why. He's funny and charming and a complete drama queen. He dresses up in his sister's clothes in his spare time, but calls Billy a weirdo for liking ballet. Eventually we find out that Michael is (probably) gay - but at no point does the narrative say that all this makes Michael less manly. Because it doesn't.

Adding in Michael's simultaneous exploration of gender performance makes Billy's feel more normal. Billy's not doing ballet because he's rebelling or he's gay or because he doesn't have a mother. He's just doing it because he likes it and he doesn't need a better reason. And as far as his sexuality goes, while everyone in Billy's life seems to think it's a big deal and he needs to be concerned with whether he's gay or not, Billy himself doesn't seem to care at all. Which makes sense. He's twelve, and he's already pretty busy.

It all works together so well. That's what I'm getting at. The class struggles and the gender performance and the issues with Billy's family - they all work together to create a complex understanding of how compulsory masculinity works and how we can dismantle it. Because just like there's nothing wrong with a boy liking something more traditionally for girls, there's nothing wrong with a boy liking something traditionally for boys. That's definitely not a problem.

And there are issues related to class conflict that we need to be aware of when looking at gender expression. The key, this story seems to suggest, is that rejection of compulsory masculinity does not mean rejection of your culture and your history. Rejecting being a miner doesn't mean rejecting everyone who chose to be a miner or the history of your family or your love for your town. You can have both. You can have ballet and you can also be up front about being from a working class family in a coal mining town.

That's the key, I think. Finding a way to decouple the ideas of cultural history from gender expression. But it's still a conversation that needs to be had.

One final closing note: I mentioned at the very beginning that I think Billy Elliot the musical is ever so slightly more interesting an examination of this topic than Billy Elliot the film, and here's why: it's to do with the actors. In a film, it's easy to forget that the characters you're watching aren't real, and these aren't actual coal miners, they're paid actors playing pretend. It is virtually impossible in watching a stage production, which is very interesting.

When you're watching Jackie and Tony sing about being worried about Billy getting involved with stage people, or talk about how they don't believe in the arts, or rail that no one who loves dancing can be a real man, you're forced to confront that they're doing this while singing and dancing. There's just this added level of cognitive dissonance that makes it really really complex and cool.

Billy Elliot has a whole hell of a lot to say about compulsory gendering and gender expression - and it doesn't hurt that the music is pretty damn good too.

*Which is probably my favorite protest chant ever, even if it is rather provably untrue.

It feels awfully appropriate, now that October is well underway and Halloween approacheth, that I finally sat down and watched all of Over the Garden Wall. OTGW, if you haven't heard of it, is an animated miniseries that came out in 2014 and actually won an Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program. Very much in the vein of Adventure Time and Steven Universe and the going renaissance of children's animated television, OTGW is weird and kind of frightening and very very good.

It's also absolutely completely baffling and I don't get it at all. Yay!

Before we get really into this, I do want to give a couple of works about Over the Garden Wall's format. Available on DVD and some streaming services, the show comprises ten episodes that are each only eleven minutes long. So it's not just convenient, it's freaking easy to watch the whole show in a single sitting. That's less than two hours worth of material.

And, if you are considering watching it, I suggest treating it like a complete whole. Watching the first episode really won't give you much of an idea of what it's really about - you have to watch the whole thing for it to work. It's more a serialized movie than a show, to be honest. You know, like a miniseries. Which is what it is.

Anyway. The show follows two brothers, Wirt (Elijah Wood) and Greg (Collin Dean), as two brothers trapped in a magical and frightening forest. The forest, which is known as "Unknown" exists mostly out of time and is home to a bunch of weird and terrifying people and places. Wirt and Greg aren't from there, but somehow they got lost while trying to get home. That's really all we know about them, actually. Wirt is older and more neurotic, constantly worrying and second guessing himself, while Greg is a little kid with an unbreakably good attitude. Together they manage to...get hopelessly lost. Even with the help of Beatrice the Bluebird (Melanie Lynskey)

As they wander through the woods, Wirt and Greg come upon a variety of creatures and people who live there or are also passing through, all of whom seem to be living in some slightly different version of this same place. As in, no one appears to be quite in everyone else's reality, and as they travel through, they discover places that even the people who live there have never heard of.

But there is a larger plot going on here. Obviously there is the larger plot about Wirt and Greg trying to get home, but there's also a battle between good and evil (sort of) going on in the background. And that's what I want to talk about today, because that battle is what makes it seem like Over the Garden Wall is actually a story about death, the afterlife, and making the most of the life you've got. Plus it's just really interesting from a storytelling standpoint.

So in the very first episode, Wirt and Greg are already lost in the woods but not quite as clear how far they are from everything they know when they stumble on a woodsman. The woodsman is super creepy and Wirt doesn't want to trust him, but Greg happily follows the guy back to his mill where he explains that he grinds up Edelwood trees to make an oil which he uses to light his lantern. He must keep the lantern lit no matter what.

The reason for that is simple: there is a beast who stalks these woods and who might eat the boys alive if he finds them outside. The lantern is the only thing that can keep him at bay, or so the Woodsman (Christopher Lloyd) tells them.

That night, Wirt and Greg have an encounter with the beast, or what they think might be the beast, and it seems like they get the best of it. Only, as the story goes on, it becomes utterly clear that this was not the beast after all. Or maybe just a little piece of the beast. The story is confusing. Point is, there's still more beast around and it's still trying to get the boys.

In fact, the whole story is much less about Wirt and Greg's adventures - though that forms the majority of the screentime - as it is about the Woodsman and the beast competing for the boys' souls. Like, very literally competing. The Woodsman keeps entreating the boys to keep their spirits up, because if they lose hope then the beast can get them. But then they run into a town that insists that the Woodsman actually is the beast, because his lantern is the sign by which they recognize the beast. And the beast himself keeps throwing obstacles in their way to discourage and dishearten them.

In other words, the real battle here is a mental, emotional, and spiritual one. As long as Wirt and Greg keep hope, then there's a chance they can go home. As soon as they give in, they are trapped forever in Unknown. But, at no point is there a guarantee that they will get out. It's all up in the air, it's all a matter of faith.

That, I hope you can tell, is what makes this story interesting. Each little unfolding of the story adds more weight to what's going on and makes it every so slightly more bizarre and intriguing. Like, SPOILERS, when we find out that Wirt and Greg are not from the vaguely middle ages time their clothes suggest. Actually they're from the present* and are just wearing their Halloween costumes. That means that they somehow fell into this fantasy world from a time very different from it.

And then there's the moment when we see a gravestone in the modern cemetery that has the name of a person they've met on it. Or how at the end (SUPER SPOILERS), they wake up in the hospital. Some people have speculated that Unknown is actually purgatory or the space between life and death or something like that. All of these are pretty valid and interesting theories, all based on the little clues dripped into the episodes - I mean, there's even the question of if the lantern is actually the beast's soul, a question that we never actually get answered.

I guess what I'm getting at is this: I have no idea what is going on in Over the Garden Wall. Seriously. None. But I really like it. Normally an abundance of tone and a dearth of plot drives me absolutely nuts, but I think this is one place where it really works. Because the story here is so metaphysical, but still a very present and important part of the series, the vagueness of what exactly is happening doesn't feel wishy-washy, but rather like a necessary part of the show. You aren't supposed to know what's going on, not exactly. That's the point.

Right? This is a show about death, sort of, and also family and relationships and standing up for yourself, but it's above all else about being lost and afraid and not sure what to do. The ambiguity isn't an accident. It's not like the writers and directors and animators all just sort of forgot to answer any important questions. This isn't Lost. Over the Garden Wall's ambiguity is intentional, a story choice that underlies the entire story.

I think that while this show is pretty unambiguously about death, it's also in a lot of ways about life.

I mean, life is a thing where you are, for the most part, wandering around with no clear idea where you're going and where you should be going. You don't have a map, the people you meet along the way might be there to help you, but they also might not be. And if you lose hope, you're going to stay lost forever. The only way to keep going through is to hold your hope close to your chest and take things as they come.

So the show is about death and also about life - it's mysterious on purpose, and as far as it goes for children's television, the mystery is something I really appreciate. I mean, so much in your life is an unknown, but it seems that when we make stories for kids we insist that they have clear morals and resolutions and that they always make sense. Why? Life doesn't typically make a whole lot of sense. It doesn't follow narrative structure. It tends to only make sense when we look back and trace the path we've made.

The value of shows like Over the Garden Wall is that they create an understanding of ambiguity. They tell kids that everything might be scary and confusing, and that's okay. That's normal. Scary and confusing are things that happen. If you're naturally buoyant, like Greg, then you can pretty much waltz your way through. But, if like Wirt, you need some time to prepare for the weirdness the world can throw at you, then I like that this show operates as a sort of warning. Things are not always as they appear. The monster might be hiding in a sweet young girl, but then again, maybe you can help her anyway.

The beast has a weakness and the light might actually need to go out. Your life probably won't make a whole heck of a lot of sense to you as you're going through it, but chances are you'll get through just fine. That's all stuff that kids really do need to hear. It's worth saying and showing and creating an entire miniseries just to get across.

I get why shows like Over the Garden Wall are good and necessary, and I love that we live in a golden age of children's animation where such complex issues are really being addressed. I mean, this show goes into so much that's usually called too deep or frightening for children: despair, sacrifice, overpowering guilt. It does it all because these are issues that children too face, and I love that. But I don't "get"Over the Garden Wall. I really don't. Which is, I think, as it should be.

*Roughly. I'd actually estimate it as the 1980s or so, based on the mix tape and the cars and the general clothes.

So today's article was going to be yet another wonderful Outlander recap, but due to technical difficulties, that's been pushed to next week. Instead, today we're going to talk about an idea I've touched on before: the "new canon" of lady centric television. Aww yeah.

Before we can really discuss this topic, though, we have to talk about the idea of there being a "canon" when it comes to TV in the first place. For all that television is widely becoming respected as the most interesting and engaging American creative tradition right now, for the past fifty years up to this point, television was mostly viewed as a dumping ground for projects no one else cared about. It was also, and this is really important to note, a place where stories for and about women could thrive, because it wasn't viewed as an important storytelling medium. It wasn't the movies, which were high art or big budgets, and it didn't have the literary cache of novels. It was, well, schlock. And while it didn't get a lot of respect, it did get a lot of ladies.

When we look back at the history of television, it feels almost surprising now to realize that a lot of stuff we take for granted was originally pioneered and invented for women. I mean, we all get that I Love Lucy was a groundbreaking and important show, but we sort of gloss over how much impact it actually had on how we make television.

I mean, I Love Lucy basically invented the multi-cam sitcom setup. They were the first to shoot on a soundstage with a live audience, with the sets placed back to back and with multiple cameras rolling at the same time. You know, the way they would later shoot Seinfeld and Friends and How I Met Your Mother. That.

Lucille Ball, in fact, accrued enough power through her work on the show that she and her husband eventually set up their own very television studio, Desilu, and after her divorce, she bought out his shares and ran the studio on her own, producing such groundbreaking works as Star Trek and Mission: Impossible and The Untouchables. And there's this minor thing where Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz convinced CBS to let them own the rights to I Love Lucy, a massive financial investment that CBS later deeply regretted and had to buy back from them.

In other words, a huge amount of how sitcoms were made was pioneered by a little show starring a woman and a man of color. And many of the shows that have massively influenced pop culture over the past fifty years were greenlit by a woman who owned her own ridiculously successful production company. We all like talking about how funny I Love Lucy is and was, but for some reason when we talk about film history, we tend to leave out the really good stuff.

For a long time, television was a place where you could see interesting and surprising achievements by women and people of color precisely because no one took it seriously. As long as no one thinks what you're doing has any value, then they don't care who's most successful doing it. But as soon as has some cultural cache, or there's money attached, then suddenly it matters a whole heck of a lot.

And that's what we've seen in the past fifteen years.

Think it through with me. Television in the past fifteen years has actually gotten worse about representing women. Seriously. At best, it's stagnated, with no noticeable advancements in representation of diversity in the past fifteen years. Check out this excerpt from a New York Times article on this exact issue:

“We’re living in a golden age of women in comedy,” my friend gushed.

I nodded and asked whether she thought female creators would ever make up half of the comedy series nominations. Her smile froze.

“Well, I don’t know about that …”

I do. Because it happened a quarter of a century ago. In 1990, Susan Harris’s “The Golden Girls,” Linda Bloodworth-Thomason’s “Designing Women” and Diane English’s “Murphy Brown” squared off for Outstanding Comedy Series. “Cheers” and “The Wonder Years” rounded out the field, and when the envelope was opened, I was sitting in the audience cheering as they announced “Murphy Brown.”

The writer of that piece (which you should totally read in full because it's great and not very long) is Nell Scovell, a longtime television writer and the creator of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, so I have a hunch she knows what she's talking about. In terms of Emmy representation, things have actually gotten worse for women since the late 1980s and early 1990s. Why?

Well, a lot of reasons, definitely, but I think one of them really is that all of a sudden television matters. It's no coincidence that the "Golden Age of Television" has been all about middle aged white dudes. With the exception of The Wire almost all of the shows people point to as the turning points for television as a respectable medium have been narratives about white men going through some kind of midlife crisis. Breaking Bad. Mad Men. Deadwood. Game of Thrones. Sons of Anarchy. Rescue Me. The Sopranos. Oz. Dexter. Should I keep going? I can keep going.

The shows about women, meanwhile, have been considered anomalies at best and schlock at worst. Even the female lead shows that really closely mimic the things everyone seems to love in these "gamechangers" I listed above, like Homeland or The Honorable Woman or Strange Empire or Orange is the New Black are considered quaint anomalies at best and completely ignored at worst.

Television is run by dudes right now. We already knew that. But what frustrates me isn't the sheer dudeness - as we know that we can and will overcome that with time - but the way that history has been rewritten so that really amazing female oriented television shows are getting the shaft. The way we're really ignoring female lead shows that inspired imitation and created whole genres.

I'm talking about how Ally McBeal reinvigorated the workplace dramedy. Or how Sex and the City, whether you like it or not, changed how we could and did talk about sex on television. How about recognizing the vast impact Xena has had on genre television? Or the way that Buffy the Vampire Slayer mushed genres and created the teen supernatural category. How about recognizing Roseanne for giving life back to sitcoms and talking more about what Golden Girls did for the representation of older women?

Instead of writing off Shonda Rhimes and her collection of ridiculously successful and interesting dramas as being some anomaly off in "Shondaland", why don't we recognize that people are hungry for representations of powerful women? Let's sit down and really talk about Weeds and Veep and Parks and freaking Recreation.

It is clear that television has a problem with women, but it's also important to remember that if television has erased the narratives of successful shows about white women, it's really really erased anything about successful shows by and for nonwhite communities - All-American Girl is a footnote at best, and In Living Color gets hardly a mention after Saturday Night Live. We need to admit that television has never been good at telling stories by and about people of color, and if we want this to really be the Golden Age of Television, we need to own up to that and seek to rectify it.

I'm proposing a new canon. One where we recognize the achievements of women and people of color as instrumental in the creation of television. One where TV didn't just spring out of nowhere when The Sopranos came on the air, but where we all understand that it came from a long history of people who couldn't get a foot in anywhere else making the best damn art they could. Because maybe if we better understand the history of television, we'll be able to go forward without getting caught in this idea that the only classics worth mentioning are the ones about white guys fighting the irrepressible onslaught of time. Hell no.

We need a new canon that shows the width and breadth of television and how it's definitely gotten better in recent years, but that doesn't mean everything that came before was worthless. So. Who's with me?

Today's Masculinity Monday comes to us courtesy of Trey Stewart, who is more qualified to talk about masculinity than I am, by virtue of actually being a man. Also he's written for us before, and you can read that article here!

The idea for this post came from a Skype conversation with Debbi. As such, she deserves some of the credit for my coming up with the idea. As I read through the recent posts on toxic masculinity, I began to ask myself what nontoxic masculinity might look like. The thing is, when we look at toxic and nontoxic masculinity in the media, we have to remember that we're always seeing it portrayed through tropes and narrative conventions. Some of these tropes are good, some bad. The toxic part happens when there is only one way to be a “real” man, and only one set of tropes we use to define a "real" man in fiction.

Star Trek, then, is attractive to me as a lens though which to think about nontoxic masculinity, first because I am a HUGE Star Trek fan, but also because Kirk, Spock, and McCoy embody three distinct, but not always toxic, ways to be a man. By giving us three very different views of masculinity, Star Trek avoids the pitfall of defining it too narrowly, and instead posits that there are a lot of different ways to be a good man. Which is, well, good.

First, let's talk about Captain Kirk.

“All right. [War is] instinctive. But the instinct can be fought. We're human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands, but we can stop it. We can admit that we're killers, but we're not going to kill today. That's all it takes! Knowing that we're not going to kill... today!"- Kirk to Anan 7 (TOS: "A Taste of Armageddon")

Of the three main Star Trek characters, James Tiberius Kirk (William Shatner in Star Trek: The Original Series) most closely embodies the traditional "doesn’t take no for an answer" action hero. He is famous, among other things, for reprogramming the no-win Kobayashi Maru scenario to make it possible to win. Captain Kirk, in TOS, provides an interesting example of nontoxic masculinity couched in the tropes we've come to associate most with toxic masculinity.

While Kirk was the first Starfleet captain in about 100 years to fight Romulans, defeated Khan (Ricardo Montalban), and outsmarted more than one cosmic entity, he does it all without becoming a character who revels in violence or views his personhood as an amalgamation of his victories, as we see in other more toxic representations of classic masculinity. Kirk’s masculinity is nontoxic precisely because he is more than just a warrior with a girlfriend on every planet. He is much more than that.

For example, Kirk's original plan for dealing with Khan - not in Wrath of Khan, but in the episode that set up that film called "Space Seed" - was to settle him on a planet of his own. The plan would have worked if the planet hadn’t shifted in its orbit to become close to a blackhole and therefore really not suitable for human habitation.

But Kirk has no way of knowing this in advance. His plan is actually very kind to Khan, and it's worth noting that he doesn't make these decisions unilaterally. In "Space Seed" after finally subduing Khan and stopping him from stealing the Enterprise, Kirk holds a trial publicly to determine his fate. In other words, Kirk does exactly what we wouldn't expect of a traditionally masculine hero in this situation, and yet Kirk still abides by the usual tropes of the masculine hero. Hell, Kirk basically invented half those tropes.

This is what makes it so interesting that the Captain Kirk who appears in JJ Abrams' rebooted Star Trek films is so representative of genuinely toxic masculinity. While the reboot Kirk (played here by Chris Pine) can be faulted for his violent confrontations with everyone from bar patrons to Khan (Benedict Cumberbatch) to the Klingons, the biggest shift is in his sexual behavior. The Kirk of the original series is always falling in love with another woman, sure, but the show makes it clear that Kirk genuinely has feelings for every woman he sleeps with. He might be out there seducing half the galaxy, but he's doing it because he falls in love very easily.

Not so in the rebooted series. For example, in the first movie, Kirk takes advantage of Orion cadet Gaila (Rachel Nichols) in order to get the codes necessary to reprogram the Kobayashi Maru scenario. Orion women are famous for their sexual openness.

Nonetheless, I suspect, and her reaction to the that allegations Kirk cheated on the test confirms, that Gaila wouldn’t have been sexually interested in Kirk had she known what he was up to. He used her. Kirk’s actions show that he doesn’t respect Gaila and more broadly play into the idea that if a woman is sexually promiscuous she is “asking for it” and doesn’t deserve respect.

Moreover, Kirk displays his lack of respect for Gaila’s friends in that he appears not to ask if Gaila’s roommate minds if she brings guys over. If you’ve seen the movie you know that Gaila’s roommate is Uhura (Zoe Saldana), who Kirk had expressed attraction to earlier in the movie. I understand that being caught in Uhura’s room is embarrassing, and that Uhura is an attractive woman, but that doesn’t justify hiding under the bed while Uhura undresses. That's not okay in any situation.

Basic decency would seem to dictate apologizing for being in Uhura’s room once she entered and doing so before clothing is removed. Also, I would hope that Starfleet Academy has a policy against spying on cadets. In case you hadn’t figured it out, as a man, this scene makes me angry with Kirk and JJ Abrams for, apparently, assuming such a scene would be titillating.

Even though the original series' Kirk has sex with numerous women throughout the show and movie sequels, he seems to genuinely respect them. For example, he stays out of Carol Marcus’ (Bibi Besch) life even though they have a child together (Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan) because she asks him to. While the decision itself is questionable, Kirk makes the choice out of respect for Carol.

Additionally, he inspired the Mirror Universe’s Marlena Moreau (Barbara Luna) to hope for a better world when she noticed he was different from her “evil” Kirk (TOS: “Mirror, Mirror”). Finally, given when Star Trek first aired, Kirk surrounded himself with a surprising number of competent women like Nyota Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), Janice Rand (Grace Lee Whitney), and Christine Chapel (Majel Barrett).

So here we can see that the original Captain James Kirk was a character whose representation of masculinity was actually quite healthy. He was capable of violence, but preferred peaceful solutions. He enjoyed sex and had a hell of a reputation, but he respected his partners and made sure their emotional needs came first. This is a large tonal shift from the way Kirk is now portrayed. Those same traits are stripped of their complexity, leaving the new Captain Kirk who doesn't seem to care who gets hurt around him and uses women like sex objects.

But enough about Kirk. Let's talk about Spock.

Spock (Leonard Nimoy in the original series) embodies a rational, intellectual, form of masculinity. I should also note that Spock has had something of an outsized impact on how I perform masculinity. Just a personal disclaimer.

In Star Trek, as you may be aware, there are three main versions of Spock: the original series, the Mirror Universe, and the reboot. I want to go through these really quickly. First, we don’t get to see much of the Mirror Universe Spock but he seems to represent a cold, ruthlessly logical, form of masculinity. Importantly, though, he seems to be aware of the problems with his version of masculinity. His self-awareness is his most important trait. In fact, most versions of the Mirror Universe Spock assume that he was responsible for turning the Empire toward peace.

Honestly, I’m not sure what to make of reboot Spock (Zachary Quinto). I like that he seems to be more emotional and to have a more obvious sense of humor, but he expresses his emotions in ways that make very little sense. For example, he begins his romantic relationship with Uhura when she is a student and he is her teacher.

In the 21st century that is the kind of thing that can get a person fired. I cannot imagine it being different in the 23rd century. Also, as someone who has been a teacher of a class where most of the students were women, I can say that it isn’t that hard to avoid having a relationship with a student. To the extent that reboot Spock is toxic, it is more because of his unhealthy emotional reactions and lack of proper boundaries than anything else.

Spock, as played by Leonard Nimoy, however, presents an interesting example of someone who, over about 160 years of life, develops from toxic to nontoxic masculinity. In his second episode, Spock gives the impression that he doesn’t even have emotions. Throughout the original series Spock embodies the stoic, dualistic ideas that logic and emotion are completely separate and that logic is clearly better.

This Vulcan ideal is toxic because it doesn’t work as a practical life philosophy. We know that Vulcans have emotions because every Vulcan ever seems to care about whether or not they get up in the morning. Given that emotions are a thing everyone has, the logical, but not Vulcan, thing to do would be to face them and integrate them into who one is as a person.

Spock illustrates the Vulcans’ toxic approach to emotions when he undergoes pon farr. In pon farr, a Vulcan’s biology strips away every vestige of emotional control and compels the person to have sex or die. While pon farr is technically a part of a Vulcan’s biology, and not a consequence of Vulcan philosophy, the experience would be far less traumatic if Vulcans just accepted their emotions. It's only because they repress so heavily that the mating season becomes a fight to the death.

Prior to Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Spock tries to purge himself of all emotion. The surprising aspect is less that it fails and more that some Vulcans seem to think they succeed. But what's even more interesting here is why Spock abandons his attempts to become truly and purely logical. Basically, Kirk needs him and so Spock abandons his attempt to purge himself of emotion.

As Spock gets older, and after he dies, he mellows a bit. For example, when Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) accuses Spock of cowboy diplomacy in making an unauthorized move to the Romulan homeworld Spock reminds the captain that he has been engaging in such tactics since long before Picard was born. Also, Spock seems amused by reboot Kirk’s concern over damage to the timeline that might result from reboot Spock meeting original Spock. Clearly he's loosened up.

But, more relevantly, it's clear that Spock has changed. He's come to see that an embrace of pure reason is not the best way to live and not the best way to be a man. Instead, he shows that the integration of logic and emotion is necessary to be a well-rounded and complete person.

Finally, let's talk about Dr. McCoy, aka Bones.

What's interesting about Dr. McCoy is that, of the three main original series characters, Dr. Leonard H. McCoy (DeForest Kelley), is, in a sense, the most traditionally feminine. While he is portrayed as a brilliant medical researcher, McCoy’s basic function on the ship is to care for others, but this is never insinuated to mean that he is less of a man. His masculinity is nontoxic because it is a healthy way of living, but it benefits greatly from being seen in contrast to several other healthy forms of masculinity, like those outline above. Because McCoy's version of masculinity is just shown to be one of many ways to be a man, we see that it's not about masculinity or femininity at all, but about different roles.

One of the defining moments of McCoy’s life was the death of his father. McCoy’s father was suffering from an incurable disease. In order to save his father pain, and after much soul searching, McCoy decided to take his father off life support. Shortly thereafter, a cure for his father’s illness was discovered. For decades, McCoy felt guilty about taking his father off life support.

The incident is relevant to masculinity in that it is possible to care too much or to go awry even when motivated by concern for others. We don’t know enough about the details of McCoy’s father’s illness to figure out whether or not he made the right decision. However, properly caring for someone requires both the ability to logically weigh relevant factors and the ability to assertively seek their best interests. Both of these are qualities that McCoy displays in his time on the Enterprise.

As you would expect the Mirror Universe Dr. McCoy is, by all accounts, a terrible person whose masculinity is utterly toxic. The reboot Dr. McCoy, however, seems to be pretty similar to his original series counterpart, if a bit more exaggerated. For example, this McCoy hates space, not just transporters. At this point, I don’t have a clear sense of reboot McCoy as a man. Hopefully, future movies will shed some light on this. (Incidentally, I am somewhat fond of Dr. McCoy because he is a fellow southerner. He was born in Georgia and I was born in Alabama.)

What I find most interesting, though, about analyzing the men of Star Trek is seeing how their individual traits might line up with representations of toxic masculinity - or they might not - but how when taken as a whole, these three men work together to give a more complex picture of masculinity as a whole. Granted, it's a masculinity only of white men, but it's still worth noting that each of them presents his masculinity in a different way, and each of them is recognized as a fully masculine character.

It's also worth noting, as I have in this article, how those representations of masculinity have changed and become overall more toxic in the show's translation into the current reboots. It's most notable in what they've done with Captain Kirk, but there are signs of it in the other characters as well. They've been stripped down, robbed of their complexity, and made to fit more narrow archetypes that create a toxic and unhelpful image of what masculinity is, instead of being allowed to explore what it can be.

Just say no to toxic!Kirk.

Trey Stewart has his PhD in Educational Psychology from the University of Alabama. After losing his job at the think tank, he started his own education research consulting/tutoring business. He loves Star Trek and has strong feelings about gender representation in science fiction.

So, disclaimer way the hell up front, before I even saw How to Train Your Dragon 2, I read this article by Tasha Robinson: "We're Losing All Our Strong Female Characters to Trinity Syndrome". In this article (which is awesome and you should totally read in its entirety), Robinson makes the argument that in a lot of our movies we have a problem with our strong female characters. Using Trinity from The Matrix as her chief example, but pulling other ladies in from different franchises, including Valka from HTTYD2, Robinson goes on to explain that Trinity Syndrome is when a female character is introduced from the beginning of a film as an abiding badass, a super strong, super cool, super awesome fighter and hero. And then the movie just...gives her absolutely nothing to do.

I read this article when it came around a little over a year ago, and I was blown away by how accurate it is. And now having actually seen HTTYD2, it's striking me all over again how much this film really dropped the ball when it comes to their female characters. But more on that in a minute. First, let's do a brief synopsis.

Taking place five years after the events of How to Train Your Dragon, How to Train Your Dragon 2 gives us in the first few minutes a view of Berk that is very different from how we left it. Berk is now totally infested with dragons, but in a good way. Nearly everyone in Berk has a special dragon friend/pet, and some people even have several. They've gone so far as to invent new sports for dragonriders and it's no surprise at all to see that Astrid (America Ferrera) is ace at it.

But Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) isn't there. At least, he's not in the village and he's not playing dragonball (or whatever they call it). Hiccup is actually off with Toothless somewhere, testing some new gear he made for himself and exploring the archipelago that was previously out of their reach (because, you know, it was full of dragons). He's also brooding because that morning his father, Stoick (Gerard Butler), told Hiccup that the time has come for Stoick to step down as chief and for Hiccup to take his place. The thing is, Hiccup doesn't want to be the chief. He's only twenty. He wants to fly around and explore and he doesn't know who he is well enough to know if he'll be a good leader yet. Which are all pretty reasonable arguments, actually.

Astrid thinks so too, and we're given a sweet scene of the two of them interacting as a couple clearly comfortable with each other and secure in their relationship. This scene is helpful because immediately afterwards everything goes to crap.

In their explorations, Hiccup and Astrid come across a fort that appears to have been blown up with ice or something. It's weird and cool, but also apparently full of incredible hostile pirates. Or, as they prefer to be known, dragon trappers. The trappers, led by Eret (Kit Harington), are furious because all the dragons they'd trapped were set free last night and some kind of wild dragon blew up their fort. Unacceptable! They assume that Hiccup and Astrid are to blame, which naturally escalates into badness.

Eret, it seems, is collecting dragons for some guy named "Drago" to add to his dragon army. It's never a good sign when someone named Drago is collecting dragons. I mean, that's supervillain level naming conventions. Anyway. Eret and his men try to capture Toothless and Astrid's dragons because they need something to show for their time, but our heroes escape in the knick of time and race back to Berk to tell Stoick what's up.

Stoick, who ran into Drago once before and has a healthy fear of the guy, insists immediately on closing the gates and holing all the people and the dragons up in the heavily fortified Berk. No one goes in or out and we wait for Drago to get distracted by something else and stop possibly trying to murder all of us. But Hiccup isn't okay with this plan. He's sure that if he just meets Drago he can change his mind. After all, people can change! That's what happened with his father and the whole village of Berk in the first movie. They changed their minds. So if he reasons with Drago, then he can change his mind too.

Hiccup flies off, Astrid right behind him, and enacts his slightly stupid plan of getting himself captured so that Eret will have to take him to Drago. Unfortunately, the plan is snarled when Stoick and all our lovable outcasts from the first movie turn up and set them free. Not in the plan, guys. So eventually Hiccup flies off on his own and everyone ends up chasing after him, both good guys and bad.

Before Hiccup can get too far, though, he runs into a mysterious dragon rider - clearly the person who stole those dragons and blew up the fort. Said dragon rider is really really really cool and powerful and manages to capture both Hiccup and Toothless by outflying them and then bring them back to a magical ice cave in the ocean. It's only once we're in the cave that the big reveal happens and our story starts in earnest. See, the mysterious dragon rider is none other than Valka (Cate Blanchett), Hiccup's mother who he thought was dead for twenty years.

Cue the awkward and weird family reunion.

I'm not going to keep taking you step by step through the movie, because I want to skip forward to the end, but understand here that Valka is amazing. She's complicated and full of regrets but also really loving and kind. She was flown away by a dragon during one of the Berk raids when Hiccup was just a baby, but she had always believed that dragons weren't naturally beasts. She ended up living among the dragons, accepted as one of their own, for two freaking decades. Seriously, Valka is basically a viking Jane Goodall only she studies dragons. How cool is that?!

And Hiccup responds exactly that way. Since he was a baby when she went away, he didn't really miss her growing up. He even mostly understands her reasons for staying away all this time. So the second act of the film sees Hiccup and Valka bonding over their dragons and studying them and building a super rad relationship built on trust and respect.

This is what makes act three so difficult and frustrating for me. By act three we've come to a collision of all of our characters and plotlines, with Drago and his dragon army coming after Valka's dragon sanctuary. Hiccup and Toothless fight to protect the dragons, as do all our other heroes, but in a weird and shocking twist, Valka is basically useless in this fight.

Despite being the kind of badass who can live among dragons for twenty years, who outflew Hiccup and Toothless while standing on her dragon, and who has done literally nothing else for two decades than learn about dragons, Valka spends this whole battle cowering while Stoick, recently reunited with his wife, protects her.

Um, what?

I mean, I'm totally in favor of the married couple overcoming their differences and coming together and reuniting and true love and all that, but it literally makes no sense in the narrative - and is straight up insulting - that from the point of their reunion on, Valka loses all of her power and becomes a female figure only there to dispense encouragement and pep talks and cower when the villain comes near her.

By the end of the movie all of Valka's power has been stripped away, and she's now there basically just as Hiccup's mother. She has no other real role. She doesn't do anything or contribute to the story. Her character's role was to be interesting in act two and then just disappear, I guess. It makes no sense, and it's not good writing.

Even worse, this happens across the board with the female characters. How to Train Your Dragon 2 is interesting in that it has three different and very distinct female characters who each have their own plot through the movie, until the third act when they just stop contributing. What the hell?

Astrid, for example, is set up as a supreme athlete and dragon rider, a woman secure in her relationship and very happy, who even goes so far as to basically mentor Eret throughout the film. But in act three, Astrid has nothing to do besides be a supportive girlfriend for Hiccup and smile encouragingly. That's it. This is super frustrating because I really thought the film was setting up a different storyline, one where Hiccup does not have a change of heart and become chief, but Astrid does.

Walk with me here. Astrid and Hiccup make a great couple, but if we're breaking down their relationship dynamic, they're a lot like Stoick and Valka. Hiccup is always off in the clouds and thinking about exploring and pushing boundaries and taking new and different roads with people, just like his mother, while Astrid is very practical and grounded and enjoys the day to day realities of their life, just like Stoick.

Astrid would make a freaking great chief, which is what I thought we were building up to. She's well-loved, a strong leader, understands the people, and is great at making tough decisions. She and Hiccup would do very well leading together. Unfortunately, that's not what happens.

Instead, Astrid is relegated to a "girl role" of support and encouragement while the third act sees Hiccup take on all of the responsibility and storylines himself. I mean, the climax of this film is literally a battle between two alpha dragons - and between their two male riders, Hiccup and Drago (Djimon Hounsou). Astrid, and Valka, have nothing to contribute here. There is no subversion of gender tropes, just solid reinforcement. Grrr.

The worse problem is that at no point do we see Hiccup really change and decide he wants to be the chief. He never gains those qualities that would make him a good leader, he just has Astrid and his mom tell him he'll do a good job and decides to go for it. Astrid's actual leadership skills are never acknowledged, and that bothers me.

Hell, even Ruffnut's story goes south in the third act. Ruffnut (Kristen Wiig) is mostly a comic relief character, but her story in this film is actually pretty cool. Now a dragonrider and attractive woman - apparently - Ruffnut has two different dragonriders vying for her love and attention. Only she's not even remotely interested in either of them. Ruffnut is into Eret, who barely gives her the time of day and seems mostly creeped out by her affections. It should also be noted that Ruffnut is primarily attracted to Eret sexually, and seems to have no qualms about this.

But in the third act, the movie basically shames her for the way she's been treating her two suitors. When she falls off her dragon, they catch her together, and she is astounded by how attractive they look. Then at the end, the two men run towards her, only to run right past her and hug their dragons. We're treated to Ruffnut looking sad for a moment, as if the film wants to tell her, "serves you right for not picking one of them when you had the chance, you heartless harpy!"

Which is not okay at all. Ruffnut shouldn't be shamed for knowing exactly what she's looking for in a romantic or sexual partner. And she doesn't toy with the guys at all. She's not into them and she tells them that. Repeatedly. Her brother also tells them that. So when the movie makes it clear that she should have been grateful for their attentions, it's saying that Ruffnut is responsible for friendzoning these guys. She's a bitch who didn't want a "nice guy" when she had the chance, and now she's all alone. Haha!

Yeah. No. Worlds and worlds of no.

I guess what I'm getting at here is that I'm disappointed. How to Train Your Dragon 2 is, in a lot of ways, a more frustrating movie than even the Minions film managed to be, because it has strong and interesting female characters, it just chooses to do nothing with them. Instead of taking these rad ladies and giving them storylines that play to their strengths and say something important about the world, the movie goes out of its way to disempower them and punish them for choosing to act outside the coded roles for men and women.

It's hard to think of a less helpful message to send little kids. Because, as I hope you have not forgotten, this is a children's movie, and while Hiccup is a great character and Toothless is adorable, what does it say that literally every female character in the movie is portrayed as helpless or useless when the chips are actually down? What can little kids glean from that?

Nothing good, obviously. And it's all the worse for coming from a franchise that has such potential to be good and that otherwise does a pretty decent job with its storytelling. I mean, it's made even more annoying because HTTYD2 is a reasonably fun and entertaining film. It's not bad or hard to watch, which makes the messages all the more insidious.

I don't think that Dreamworks is trying actively to send bad messages to the children of America or anything, but I do think that this is a perfect example of how lazy writing can turn into harmful writing. Lazy writing which doesn't think through a character's motivation and strengths but relies on cheap stereotypes and cliches will only end up reinforcing our cultural status quo.

Valka should be badass. Astrid should be the chief. And Ruffnut should get to like whoever she damn well pleases. Those are the messages we want to actually send children. Dreamworks, get it the hell together.

Every once in a while someone says something to you that you just can't forget. It gets in your head and cements itself. When you drift and daydream you find yourself coming back to it, turning it over and over in your mind, or you take it out on special occasions and look at it. Remind yourself of it.

As if you were likely to forget.

A few months ago I was chatting with a good friend of mine when we got onto the topic of politics. Not in any particular bad way - this friend and I happen to agree on a great deal politically, so it was cool - but just chatting about the current state of politics in America. I forget why, but I made a passing joke about how unAmerican and unpatriotic I am. I was surprised, then, by the vehemence of his reply.

"No," he said. "Don't let them take that away from you. You are patriotic. You love your country. Don't let them tell you that you aren't just because you go about it in a different way."

And that? That stuck with me. I think about that a lot. Because, as I'm sure some of you who are from the United States can attest, there is this weird correlation we see now between conservativism and patriotism. Somewhere in the early post-9/11 years, when jingoism was all the rage and we were being asked to love our country with no recognition of fault, patriotism became synonymous with pickup trucks and American flags and owning a gun.

Not that there's anything inherently wrong with any of those things, but it became a kind of shorthand for conservative values. And it wasn't until my friend called me on it that I realized I'd bought into that lie.

It is a lie, for the record. Patriotism is nothing more than just loving your country. I do love my country. I actually love my country a lot. It's just that I love my country with my eyes wide open. I think a necessary part of loving my country is criticizing my country. A necessary part is demanding that my country do better. Real love isn't a meek and hollow acceptance of the status quo, it's a fierce and powerful recognition of potential belief that we can make it happen. I love my country because I love what it could be and I want to help make it that way.

Obviously this isn't a political blog, so you might wonder why I'm sharing this at all. By and large I try to keep from talking about my political views, though some definitely slip through. I bring this up today not so much to talk about my personal relationship with patriotism, but more to talk about how we view the relative patriotism of different works of fiction, and how we view ourselves in light of that.

Take, for example, Captain America.* I'm talking Steve Rogers from the comics and MCU (as played by Chris Evans) Captain America. What I find really fascinating about him is how he interacts with his own patriotism. I mean, on the surface, it's pretty easy to see how Captain America could be a patriotic symbol. Even leaving aside his name which is pretty obvious on its own, there's a lot of surface level patriotism wrapped up here. His costume is red, white, and blue, clearly meant to evoke an American flag. He has a white star at the center of his shield, also a patriotic symbol. His freaking birthday is the fourth of July. So American and patriotic it hurts. He fights for what's right and is a nice white boy with big muscles who everyone can agree is, yes, very patriotic.

But that's surface level stuff. The things I actually love about Captain America, what I view as his real patriotic values, are the ones just below that. Like how Steve Rogers is a good old American white boy, but he's also the son of Irish immigrants. In fact, at the time he was growing up in New York, he was considered to be from one of the "less desirable races". Looking back on it we figure that blond, blue-eyed Captain America was always everyone's image of patriotism, but you have to remember that for this character growing up, he would have been ridiculed, told he was a "filthy Mick", and probably told to go back to Ireland. Steve Rogers lived the immigrant experience.

All that stuff about his costume and his shield and even his birthday is all just wrapping paper. What's underneath is what makes Steve Rogers a patriotic character, and that is defined solely by the fact that Steve believes in America even when America doesn't believe in him.

Even when he was small and weak, he believed that America could and should be the kind of place where you are judged on your strength of character rather than your muscle mass. Hell, he believed that after he had the muscles too, which goes to show the sincerity of that belief. The real patriotism of Captain America is shown not in what his costume looks like or the fact that he fought Nazis in World War II, but in what his squad looks like and why he fought Nazis in World War II.

Stars and spangles are all well and good, but the real proof is in how Steve intentionally recruited a diverse group of men to work with him in WWII - his Howling Commandoes, fictional or not, were one of the first integrated fighting groups in the US military - and even in the present day is committed to making sure that anyone who has the will to make a difference is given a chance. Yeah, whatever, the comics made a scene where he punches Hitler, but the good moment is when Erskine asks Steve why he wants to fight and he says, "Because I hate bullies." The fighting isn't the important bit; what matters is why you fight.

Do you see?

Patriotism isn't surface level. Not real, good patriotism anyway. And it's been interesting to mull this over because I've been really thinking about why we are so eager to push it out of our minds. Why it's become a bad thing in some circles to admit that you openly and unabashedly love your country. Or why, in other circles, it's bad to admit that you see some huge flaws in your country and demand that they change and be rectified.

I know it feels a little frivolous to think of this in terms of fictional characters, but it's really not. Fictional characters are a huge part of how we process the world and our feelings about it. Captain America is an avatar for our beliefs about what it means to be a patriot and a good man. So it matters that we understand the real strengths of Cap's patriotism and don't get distracted by the surface crap. It matters because we are judged by the fictional characters we pick to represent us, and because they impact us more than we're usually willing to admit.

Steve Rogers loves his country enough to volunteer for a terrifying medical experiment, but he also loves it enough to fight back when he's given bad orders. He loves America not because America's been good to him - it really hasn't, actually - but because he still believes in that old immigrant dream of making it the place where everyone has a chance at a good life.

Or how about another example. Without even leaving that franchise, we have an amazing example of patriotism in Sam Wilson too. Both in the comics and the films, Sam is shown to be an incredibly patriotic man, but he's also shown to be a man who is well aware of all the crap American can throw at him. In the comics he's a straight up civil rights activist, and even in the movies he's a counselor at the VA Hospital. Sam Wilson is a person who cares about people, because it seems to me that he's a man who loves his country because he loves the people in it.

You have to stop for a second and think about who Sam is as a person. Because, no, he doesn't ever run through the streets wielding an American flag and shouting about how much he loves his country, but I don't think that's really the point of his character. I mean, this is a guy who chooses to run around the Washington Mall for his daily exercise. This is a man who joined the military and then volunteered for an incredibly dangerous job as a pararescue guy. He took one of the most intense positions in the US military, and it's one that is about helping people. Rescuing civilians. Medical aid.

Sam Wilson is a black man in a country and a city that does not value the lives of African-Americans. Sam Wilson reaches out his hand to Steve Rogers even when he doesn't know if Steve is going to be, well, racist or not. Sam follows Captain America not because he has to or because he's starstruck, but because he believes in Cap's mission. He believes that Steve's mission is good, even if it involves going up against the actual United States government.

In other words, Sam Wilson loves his country enough to fight it and fight for it. What more do you need?

And, for the record, both Steve and Sam show that loving your country is not the same as thinking everyone else's is crap. There's a level of insecurity required for that, one that neither of those men has. They are confident both in themselves and in their belief that America can be better, so they don't need to crap on anyone else's idealism. That matters too.

Leslie Knope. Jane Villanueva. Every single character on The West Wing. The musical Hamilton. Kamala Khan. There are so many different ways to be patriotic, to love your country, and it just really bothers me that we only seem to acknowledge the outer trappings of that love.

I don't wear flag pins. When I was in school I was the kid who steadfastly refused to say that pledge of allegiance and skipped pep rallies. But that doesn't mean I don't love my country. I do. I really do. I just also admit that it has a lot of problems.

So here's the thing. Part of the reason why I adore Captain America so much, and those other characters and stories above, is because he gets at the heart of what it means to love your country. It's not a flag pin and saying the pledge of allegiance. It's believing that your country can and should be better than it is, and then choosing to work to make it so.

I don't believe in a love that just accepts the status quo. That's probably why I'm single.** I believe that love immediately appreciates you for who you are, but also sees who you can be and loves you for that too. Love doesn't accept indifference or apathy, it demands passion and effort. I don't like my country most of the time, but damn do I love it.

There's no larger point today, honestly. I mean, I do think that Captain America and Hamilton and The West Wing and Parks and Recreation and Jane the Virgin and Ms. Marvel are all fantastic works of art and if you feel strongly about appreciating America as it is and also demanding that it be better, you should check them out, but mostly I'm just thinking aloud.

I'm not in the habit of thinking of myself as a patriot. I'm still trying to unlearn the belief that patriotism is something reserved for people who like country music and live on farms. But it matters that I do figure this out because now is not a time to be complacent. I love my country, so I should do something about that. I love my country, so that makes me a patriot. And no one can take that away.

I don't know. I don't know what to do with all of this. But I hope it helps.

*If you're keeping score at home, yes, Captain America is basically my example for everything because I love Captain America because, as it turns out, I am patriotic as hell.

**I'm kidding, that's not probably why I'm single. That's actually literally and exactly why I'm single. One of my exes cited this as a reason why I am a terrible girlfriend.

How do you reconcile Western cultural expectations with the desire to see non-Western cultures depicted without white-washing or condescending changes made to local customs? How do you deal with a story and a character who makes total sense in her context but feels weird and kind of unsettling in yours? In other words, what do you do when you have a strong female character who feels just a teensy bit...repressed?

These are the questions I've been dealing with since I finally finished reading the first six volumes of A Bride's Story, which is an exhaustively researched and really very fun manga about life and culture in Central Asia a couple of hundred years ago - roughly the 1800s, I think. The manga, which is both written and illustrated by Kaoru Mori, follows the lives of a couple of different families in a region of Central Asia near the Caspian Sea. It's a historical romance and drama, but contrary to a lot of stories like that, this one is focussed squarely on the lives of the women of the area. It's especially focussed on marriage and wedding traditions, which is cool and frankly a little refreshing. Mostly, that is.

Our heroine in the story is Amir, the titular bride. The story starts when Amir, who is twenty, arrives in the village to meet her husband - it's an arranged marriage, as is traditional for the time and place - only to discover that her groom, Karluk, is eight years younger than her. Yup. This story is about a twenty year old woman who has to marry a twelve year old and then defer to him because they have a traditional society which puts him as the man of the household. It's awkward for everyone involved.

Amir handles this revelation with grace and dignity, but it's clear that this is a strange situation to be in. Most marriages of that time feature brides that are slightly younger than the grooms, because it takes the groom time to establish himself in the family and be monetarily settled. Amir and Karluk's marriage has come about for a couple of reasons then. First, because this is a culture of ultimogeniture, which means that the youngest son inherits, Karluk is the "most important" son. And second because the Halgal family, Amir's family, wants to make an alliance with the wealthy Eihon family. At least, at first they do.

If this all sounds kind of complex and dry to you, trust me that it actually works really well in the story. Like I said, this is a manga about women and women's culture of the time, and, well, that mostly revolves around marriages and homekeeping. We're generally socialized to think of that as a dull story, but it's not. It's rich and well-researched and very interesting. To me, anyway.

And this is not to say that there's no external plot to follow. As we get deeper into the story, a couple of plotlines start forming. There's the development of Amir and Karluk's marriage, obviously, where Amir is more of a big sister to Karluk but Karluk feels a need to assert himself because he is the head of the household technically. Then there's Amir's family, the Halgal clan, which is greedy and pretty ruthless and decides very quickly that they regret sending Amir off to marry Karluk and want to annul the marriage so she can be sent off to marry into some other rich family.

This plot is the most intense one, actually, because it features long insights into the fate of Amir's family and how the changing political structure of Turkic Central Asia at the time, as well as incursions by a colonizing Russian force, is clamping down on nomadic herding tribes. Also there are gigantic bloody battles and Amir is torn between her loyalty to her brother and her love for her husband and new family. So that's always interesting.

Some of the plots also take us to different parts of Central Asia, courtesy of our eyes into the story, an English anthropologist named Henry Smith. At the start of the story he's living with the Eihon family as a treasured guest (and sort of a local curiosity), but he eventually sets out on his own, stumbling into a bunch of different cultures along the way. What's cool here is that the writer chooses not to make Henry Smith the focal point of any of these stories, but instead uses him as a tool to examine how women live in each of these situations. Like, how does a widow without any other family survive in such a patriarchal system? How do sisters deal with the prospect of being married off to different people and then having to go live with their husbands and never see each other again?

These are real and interesting questions that the narrative goes into, and I appreciate that. But I want to talk a bit more about Amir because she kind of fascinates me and frustrates me in equal measure.

I find her fascinating because Amir is actually really kickass. Because she comes from a nomadic tribe, she has a lot of practical skills that the Eihon family finds exotic. Like, she's an accomplished horsewoman and can even stand up while riding, which is super cool. She's a great archer and hunter, even managed to kill her own food when she and Karluk are out camping.

She's a scout and a tracker, she can butcher her own meat, and all kinds of super interesting skills. She's very matter of fact about life but not particularly cynical or beaten down by the world. She's friendly and kind, but also a little bit oblivious, which makes her more compelling. She's terrified of illness, which makes sense given the time period, and she's not great at sewing or at baking bread.

Amir is interesting. She's a view into a culture that we typically think of as homogenous and monolithic, but her interactions with the Eihon family show us that in all actuality, the culture has more diversity than our own. So all of that is super cool and interesting. What's the catch?

The catch is that Amir never quite crosses over into feeling like a person. At least, she doesn't to me. Other female characters, like Seleke or Pariya (who I love) or the twins do feel like comprehensive portraits of real women, but Amir doesn't. She feels just a little bit sanitized, a little bit airbrushed. And I think a lot of that has to do with her general attitude towards the plot point that was the biggest hurdle for me getting into this story: her marriage.

See, obviously for me there's a little bit of an ick factor involved in a woman marrying a boy. It's weird and it makes me uncomfortable. That is, I feel, entirely reasonable. But at the same time, I do understand that this is a historical thing that did happen. I get that, and it feels stupid to not want to consume a story just because it includes historical details that make me squirm. The problem I have, then, is really with how Amir deals with the situation: she's totally cool with it.

I mean, maybe not totally cool with it, but from all we can tell, Amir is perfectly happy in her life. She likes Karluk well enough, she likes the Eihon family, and by the second volume or so, she's so emotionally invested in them and her marriage that she refuses to go back to her family. And none of it is technically bad, but it feels disingenuous that Amir, who is a beautiful adult woman, is absolutely totally okay with being married to a kid who hasn't gone through puberty yet. And being told she has to listen to him as her chief authority in life. It's weird.

It's confusing for me because I can't imagine her not resenting Karluk. Maybe that's just me projecting onto this character (it almost certainly is), but it's a strange situation to imagine that Amir takes so easily to this bizarre power dynamic and relationship. Especially once Karluk starts puberty. But through it all, Amir is totally fine with everything that's happening (obviously up to this point in the books they haven't had sex, thank goodness, but it's still weird). Karluk occasionally feels strange about the difference, but Amir never does.

It all just feels too easy. That's the problem I have with it. It presents this view of women's culture in a male-dominated society, but it offers no commentary on how the women feel about their position. I'm not saying that the next volume ought to have Amir protesting in the streets of the village or being horrible to Karluk or anything, but I do think it would be more realistic if there were some tension. Some tension anywhere. Because that can't be an easy thing to live with. And I can't imagine that every woman is comfortable with how this society is run. There are always malcontents. Show me some of them.

Perhaps it's not so much that Amir is complacent and content in her life, but more that no one ever suggests to her that she is allowed not to be. That Amir, who is strong and courageous and incredibly competent, is allowed to think that she might be happier if she were allowed by her culture to ride freely on horseback and hunt and explore rather than sit at home and do embroidery.

Embroidery and baking bread aren't bad things, by the way. I don't mean to imply that. I personally sometimes laugh over how well I would fit in a traditional culture considering that my chief hobbies are needlework and cooking and how I used to make a living taking care of children. There's nothing wrong with enjoying domestic work and A Bride's Story does do an excellent job at showing the intricacies and value in such labors. The problem is that it is never even suggested that Amir could desire something else, something more.

As you can clearly tell, I have mixed feelings about Amir and A Bride's Story, but on the whole I think I like it. I think. I don't know... I want to support a story that goes into the realities of the lives of women in Central Asia, because I find that women's history and culture are largely overlooked and because Central Asia doesn't get nearly the attention it deserves. There's a lot of rich and fascinating culture there and I would love to learn more about it. So in that sense, I'm indebted to these books for teaching me so much about the people and events of this time and place I've always wondered about.

On the other hand, I find it troubling that Amir is so unevenly characterized. She never comes together as a character in the story because she's never really given a voice. She just seems to blithely accept the things that happen to her, and that makes for a difficult hero to love.

I guess, like some of my other articles for Strong Female Character Friday, this article is more of an expression of what I wish were the case than a celebration of a story that really does female characters well. I want Amir to be a strong female character, but I'm not sure if she is. For what it's worth, though, she could be, if only she were allowed a voice.

Considering that I went to a wedding this weekend (which was lovely), it shouldn't surprise anyone that today's Masculinity Monday is all about love. Well, love and the representation of Asian-American masculinity in mainstream Hollywood, but mostly love.

See, in talking about masculinity, there are a couple of things that it's easy to overlook. First, like I've complained several times, it's easy to ignore how masculinity is frequently associated with whiteness in our culture. Many of our examples of "what it means to be a real man" in film and television are constricted to explicitly white characters, while characters of color are left off the consideration and not seen as "relatable" enough to a larger audience. Which is of course crap.

Most specifically, though, Hollywood has a bit of a hangup when it comes to the representation of Asian men. Black and Latino men are bogged down in racist stereotypes, it's true, but those stereotypes tend to be about masculinity, with the implicit idea that in some weird way black and Latino men are more masculine than white men, to their detriment. And this of course weird and confusing, which we'll get to more another week. But Asian men are often seen as non-masculine, which is also very strange. They are seen as weak and feminine and "not real men".

This is reflected in the alarmingly low numbers of Asian-American leading men in Hollywood. Seriously, when you sit down and think about it, it's downright shocking how few films and television shows feature an Asian-American man as the hero. Why is this? Because Hollywood is convinced, and therefore our culture is convinced, that Asian men are not masculine enough to be the leading man. Let that sink in for a minute.

The second part we're talking about today is the fact that when we talk about masculinity we rarely use that as a jumping board to talk about how men behave in romance as well. While femininity is often constructed in light of how those women behave in romantic situations, masculinity is seen as separate from love. When a man is in love he is "getting in touch with his feminine side", which begs the question, how is it not masculine to want romance?

The underlying assumption here, which is also crap, is that men are only after sex. Any man who is pursuing romance, then, is behaving femininely, while any woman who pursues sex is behaving masculinely.

What happens when you combine these two facets of narrowly constructed masculinity? What happens when we get an Asian-American man playing a romantic hero, a character who is really not interested in sex but instead interested in love and romance?

Well, you get Selfie. And then Selfie gets cancelled.

Not to be a downer, but, yeah, that's exactly what happened. While there are a couple of other examples of Asian-American men being given leading roles in romantic stories, this is the most recent and most easily brought to mind, and it was canceled about seven episodes in, with the rest of the episodes being dumped unceremoniously on Hulu by the end of the year. So let's talk about this. Let's talk about Selfie and about Henry Higgs (John Cho), its star, and how masculinity doesn't have to be white and hyper-sexual in order to be real.

So, for those of you who missed it last year - which, given the viewing numbers was apparently most of you - here's the deal. Selfie was a half-hour sitcom based on the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. You know the story even if you don't know the name, as this play was later adapted into the musical My Fair Lady. It's a timeless tale of man reinventing woman, so timeless that the Shaw play was actually based on a Greek myth about a sculptor who sculpted a woman so beautiful he fell in love with her and she came to life.

Now, on its surface, Pygmalion is not a very empowering story for women. It's about a man who sees a woman on the street and decides that he can turn this horrible street wench into a fine and lovely lady fit for society. So he does. And in the process he falls in love with her, but he really just falls in love with his own ego and how good he is at "improving her". Yuck. The sitcom then works because it subverts this idea and substitutes a much better one: instead of Selfie being about a man fixing a woman, it's about a man and a woman helping each other. Much more evenly split, and therefore much easier to root for. So far so good.

Selfie, then, follows modern day colleagues Henry Higgs (Cho) and Eliza Dooley (Karen Gillan). They work at a pharmaceutical company together, him in marketing and her in sales, but they don't know each other well until one day Eliza's worst nightmares come true. See, Eliza is "insta-famous", by which I mean that she's something of an internet celebrity. But when an awful case of food-poisoning brings her low, she discovers that all of the internet fame in the world is no substitute for having actual friends. She's forced to admit that no one in real life really likes her.

And that brings us to Henry. Eliza knows that Henry is a marketing genius, so she comes to him (she takes the initiative and has agency in her life) to ask him to market her better. Make her more appealing to other people so that she can make friends. She's basically never had friends because she went from social outcast to internet famous with no in between period, and she has no idea how to go about it.

That's the basic premise of the show, that Henry, who is persuaded into the idea because Eliza flatters the hell out of his ego, will teach Eliza how to be a better person. What actually ends up happening is more complex.

Yes, Henry does teach Eliza how to be a better person. That does happen. Or, more accurately I think, Henry helps Eliza to be confident enough in herself to show the better person who was hiding inside her all along. But this story isn't a one-way street. Henry helps Eliza, and Eliza helps Henry learn to stop hiding from his feelings and his own desire for a more adventurous life. She teaches him that it's okay to take risks and want big things and that you're allowed to have no idea what you're doing.

Henry teaches Eliza how to grow up, and Eliza teaches Henry how to chill out. And the show deftly manages to avoid falling into manic pixie dream girl tropes by making sure that we're always aware it's a two-way street. Eliza is irresponsible and ridiculous, but she's also savvy and clever and incredibly good at her job. Henry is uptight and controlled, but he's also an emotional mess and very funny and prone to terrible life decisions.

They help each other to become better, well-rounded people. Isn't that what love is supposed to be?

Eliza is a fascinating character and we're totally going to talk more about her at some point (as well as the amazing Charmonique who had one of the most compassionate and interesting storylines about slut shaming I've ever seen), but today is all about Henry. Henry who doesn't get why anyone would actually want to have casual sex. Henry who flounders his way through romantic relationships but clearly wants that level of connection with someone. Henry who is very comfortable telling Eliza what to do but balks when she starts trying to change his life. Henry Henry Henry.

It's funny to me that people claim that characters like Henry aren't relatable to the average man because they aren't white, while characters like Indiana Jones are supposedly universal. Come on. We live in 21st century America (or at least I do), and you're claiming that an archaeologist whose idea of going on a dig is fighting Nazis over precious Jewish artifacts and can use a whip to take down an airplane is more relatable than a slightly neurotic modern man who works in marketing?

Um, no.

Henry Higgs is valuable as a character precisely because he is so relatable. I mea, come on! He's a hopeless romantic with no idea how to relate to women. He thinks he's always right. He can't use facebook without looking like a crazy stalker. He gets uncomfortable as soon as someone tries to talk to him about something other than work. Henry Higgs is incredibly relatable, and the value there is that because he is so relatable, the lessons we can learn from his representation of masculinity require much less interpretation to bring into our own lives.

What are those lessons? Well, for starters, they are that wanting romance is not the same as pursuing romance. Henry wants romance. He likes romantic relationships and he wants to be in love with someone. He wants romance. But he's not actually very good at, or even particularly inclined to, pursuing it. He doesn't do anything about these desires until Eliza and Charmonique push him. And even then, Henry chooses the simplest possible option, dating a woman who is exactly like him.*

So he wants love but he doesn't translate that into pursuing love. I think that's pretty common. The big shift in the show comes when Henry finally realizes that he is in love with Eliza and decides to do something about it. Not something obvious or showy, but simply makes a choice to pursue this love and pursue Eliza's heart when they are both in a good place to do so.

Along in there, the show is trying to tell us that Henry isn't wrong or bad for being out of touch with his feelings, but he is unhappy. And this is an important distinction. It doesn't say he's a bad man for being bad at feelings, but it doesn't say he's a good man for it either. He's not more masculine because feelings are hard, and he's not more feminine at the end because he's finally self-aware. Self-awareness and emotion are not gendered.

Arguably one of the more powerful ways the show gets at this is by pointing out that both Henry and Eliza are bad at feelings and repressing everything all the time. Neither of them is inherently better at their emotional maturity because men and women are both endowed with an equal ability to understand ourselves.

And it think all of this is made more interesting and complex in the story precisely because Henry is played by John Cho. Henry being Asian-American makes for a better story because it gets at those other stereotypes sideways. While we're examining what it means to be a man and a romantic lead, we're also examining how all those old stereotypes about Asian-American men being weak and feminine can be disassembled. By combining these two tropes, the feminine romantic lead and the feminine Asian man, we can break them both.

Which is, ultimately, what I think the show does. Henry pushes aside stereotypes about Asian men not because he directly confronts them, but because he is so fully characterized that he never becomes a stereotype himself. Yes, he fits the ideas about Asian men being naturally hard-working and studious and "nerds", but he also loves Blues Traveler and isn't good at technology and really likes Gwen Stefani. In other words, he's complex and that takes pressure off of his race.

Similarly, because Henry is a complicated and interesting character, his slowly burgeoning feelings for Eliza never come off as the writers getting desperate or the degradation of his character. He is allowed to be masculine and nerdy and Asian and in love without any of it conflicting because he's a person. And that's all that is actually required.

I've been rambling, so let me sum it up: don't write stereotypes, write people. Asian men are not inherently less masculine than anyone else, but the solution to that isn't necessarily to make a show where every Asian male character is constantly bench-pressing weights or hitting on women loudly or being gruff or driving a pickup truck. The solution isn't to fix the problem by buying into other stereotypes about what masculinity is or is not. The solution isn't to make it so that we don't have Asian-American men as romantic leads because it will make them look weak.

The solution is to write fully developed and realized characters and a lot of them. The solution is a deluge of complex and interesting Asian men on screen, men who are masculine simply because they are men. Good role models. Bad role models. Men who scream at spiders and men who kill without remorse. We need more data points for this chart. We need to see more Asian men on screen so that we can understand masculinity as more than just a white people thing.

And we need someone to bring Selfie back. Just saying, this show was gold.

*Don't take this as a dig on Julia, by the way. I love Julia and it's not her fault that Henry is bad at feelings.

Today's article is all about on of my favorite stories from childhood, but contrary to what I thought I was going to write, it's not going to be about how this is a great story and clearly child-me had amazing taste in books. See, I just reread the book in question, A Walk in Wolf Wood by Mary Stewart, and now I am pressed with a difficult question: what the hell did I see in this when I was a kid?

Make no mistake here, A Walk in Wolf Wood was one of my hands down favorite books when I was younger. The copy I have is beaten all to hell but still has the sentimental inscription in the back to remind me that this was a present from my third grade teacher at the end of the year. I've hoarded this book and kept it with me since I was eight because I just meant so gosh-darned much to me. And now that I've reread it for the first time in what must be a decade at least, I am forced to admit that I have no idea why.

Seriously. None.

I can speculate as to why I specifically as a child might have been drawn to the story - it's about wolves, magic, time travel, and medieval life - but I don't see why I loved it so much. The plot is almost laughably simplistic: John and Margaret are two nice young English kids on vacation with their parents in Germany's Black Forest when they fall into a magic spell.

Playing in the woods after a picnic, the kids get separated from their parents and end up wandering around looking for a man they saw crying. And then they run into a wolf. Before you can say "contrived plot device" the children have run back to where their parents ought to be only to find that everything they knew is gone and they're lost in the woods and possible the past. Oh no!

The story goes on and we find that the man and the wolf are actually the same person. His name is Mardian and he's the sort of really really ridiculously nice fictional man who thinks nothing of helping out strange children who walked into his own house and threw things at him because they thought he was trying to eat them. Mardian tells his whole story to them, again because apparently that's just what you do when some weird time-traveling kids show up on your doorstep.

His story is that Mardian used to be an advisor to the Duke, best friends since they were kids, but they had a falling out when the Duke got depressed, and a mean bad rude enchanter in the castle took advantage of this fight. He cast a spell on Mardian to make him a werewolf, then made himself look like Mardian and stole his place. Not sure why he picked such a contrived plot, but okay. He could have just killed Mardian and saved himself the trouble, but no. Instead, the sorcerer, whose actual name is Almeric, took Mardian's life and now is poisoning the Duke himself. John and Mary must help the real Mardian get his life back and save the Duke!

So the real Mardian, who they call Wolf, helps the children into some conveniently placed medieval children's clothing and sneaks them into the castle. He gives John an amulet that he and the Duke had made when they were boys to convince the Duke that it's all true, and then they have to navigate their way through life in a medieval castle to save Wolf. It works out okay.

Actually, it works out improbably well. After less than twenty-four hours in the castle, John has managed to get the amulet into the Duke's hands and told him the story, while Margaret has gotten herself recognized by one person (who saw her out on the road the day before) and captured by the evil Almeric. She contributes very little to this story, honestly.

The whole thing is very anti-climactic, with the end coming as everyone watches Wolf turn back into the real Mardian and Almeric dissolve in a pile of slime at daybreak. That's it, and then the kids walk back to their parents.

Why the hell did I love this so much when I was eight?

I mean, on a purely surface level, it's not a very good story. Everything happens way too easily. John and Margaret happen to find Mardian's little house in the woods with no problem. When they decide to help him, which they do instinctively because they're just good people, he happens to have clothing in their size in his house which is not at all creepy or suspicious. Come on, it even "just so happens" that John is able to get in an audience with the Duke on his first night in the castle. No one works for anything in this book. It's like being told you're steering the train. It's on rails and nothing you do has any effect on the direction it goes.

So just from a storytelling standpoint I'm kind of giving me-from-the-past a sideeye here. But what about everything else? What about the emotional core of the book? Is that good at least?

Simply put, it's not awful, but I'm not sure I would go so far as to say it's good. Parts of it certainly have merit. There's a bit early on when the children ask what they should do if the Duke won't believe them, and Mardian replies, "Then hope is done. If trust dies, and vows come to count for nothing, then I must stay a forest wolf till they hunt me down to death. There will me no more reason for me to stay a man..." And that's some intense good crap!

I find that bit rather profound, stating that without love and trust and hope, there is nothing human about us all. These are the things that make life worth living. So that bit is really compelling. It is also, however, pretty much the only time things get so emotionally involved. The rest of the time it's just meh.

And the thing is, because there are no hurdles in the story, no struggles to overcome, no obstacles, nothing in the way of this very simple plot and the happy ending, it comes off as cheap. It ends up being frustrating because you don't feel like the ending was earned. It's the participation trophy of book endings. You get it just for showing up, but no work or skill actually went into it.

Hell, from a gender standpoint this book is downright regressive. It gives good lip service to Margaret being a clever and brave little girl, even stating that she's so shocked by how little there is for these medieval women to do and how she hates it there, but in the end she contributes absolutely nothing to the plot. She gets recognized within the first two hours, then she hides all day, then she spies on the bad guy but gets caught and turned into a hostage, and then she's just kind of there for the rest of the book. How is that a good message for little kids?

It bothers me because the bones of this book aren't half bad. The whole thing with Mardian and the curse - which, like I said above, is classic movie villain logic - is compelling and weird and interesting. The part with the children fitting into the castle life could have been really neat if it had gotten more of a handwave than "and no one recognized them and they were able to completely fake being almost a thousand years in the past without anyone noticing because magic". The emotional story of Mardian's humiliation at being forced to be a wild animal and his relationship with the Duke are both stories that needed more development but had real potential.

Unfortunately, all of that is really wasted here and all that we're left with is a plot that reads like an outline someone wrote before bothering to go back and edit. So, I say again, what on earth did I see in this?

I guess this is the part where I get all philosophical and point out that, a lot of the time, it's honestly hard to say why kids like the things they do. Why, when every adult who can speak is begging them to stop, do children so love Thomas the Tank Engine? Honestly, what is the appeal of Cars 2? There are dozens if not hundreds of children's franchises and stories that I as an adult cannot fathom. I suppose I thought I was above all of that, and this experience is teaching me that I'm not.

I don't know why I liked this book so much. I can remember the feelings I associated with it. I remember being completely wrapped up in the story, biting my nails as we neared the really obvious ending. I distinctly remember being enraptured by the part where John and Margaret put on their medieval clothes for the first time. And I remember wishing so much that I had a wolf I could play with and hug and save from an evil sorcerer.

But I can't tell you why this book meant so much to me. And I feel like, in its own way, that's a very important message.

See, I talk a lot on this blog about children's media, and I always come at it from the perspective of an adult. This is what's helpful about this story, that's what's harmful, monitor what your kids consume as media, blah blah blah. I don't spend nearly as much time thinking through the logic of why kids like what they like. Probably because, as it is here, so much of that is completely ineffable.

So this is a reminder for me that for all that I can rail and rage about making sure your kids are exposed to good stories and good messages and media that helps them grow into good human beings (which I still think is important), there's another factor at work here too. Your kids are people with opinions and taste and particular preferences. I can't predict them and I can't explain them. I can no more guess if your child will fall head over heels for Bob the Builder than I can tell you what it is that so enraptured me in A Walk in Wolf Wood.

All I know is that personal preference seems to be one of our most human characteristics. Which is probably very good and deep and meaningful. But it's also weird and unpredictable and confusing. So take everything I say with a grain of salt, my chickadees. It's clear to me now that I don't even know my own mind as well as I'd like, let alone yours.

What is the point of horror?

I don't mean this question facetiously, I'm really asking. As the genre goes, I've never really gotten into horror. Or, well, I've never much gotten into modern horror. I like me some gothic literature, I really enjoy eldritch horror (Lovecraft, et al), and I think horror-comedy is a brilliant and fantastic invention. But I've never really managed to develop a taste for mainstream horror films.

Now part of this could be because my chief exposure to horror movies came when I was in high school and my then-boyfriend and I would trade movies back and forth. I'd go see Butterfly Effect, he'd sit through Nicholas Nickleby. I watched The Hills Have Eyes, he'd watch Little Women. And so on. I never really watched one of those movies because I actually wanted to, and as time went on I upped the stakes of the game to reach for more obscure and girly films just to counteract the aftertaste of all the gore and jump scares he kept making me sit through.

Also, the first time I saw The Ring was in Austria and it was dubbed into German, of which I only spoke a little at the time, and the whole thing is so much more terrifying when you have no idea what's actually going on.

So I think it's probably not surprising that I never managed to "get" horror films. The majority of the time I was watching a film where the audience was being asked to cheer for the lead characters' deaths. The movies where a lone girl might survive, the "final girl", but only if she was good and sweet and innocent enough to not be killed in a retribution against her promiscuous ways. I wanted movies where the female characters were in charge of their lives and, doomed or not, their fate were because of their own choices.

Which is why I am so happy to tell you all that I've now seen Crimson Peak and it is exactly what I wanted from a horror movie. Full stop. It's also pretty much what I want out of a period piece, though that is ancillary to today's argument. Crimson Peak is great. It's a fantastically filmed and directed bit of gothic horror that manages to completely express how a woman can be both in charge of her own destiny and also caught up in a horror plot.

It's so good. (And this review is full of SPOILERS.)

The film has the sort of pedigree that can make for either an amazing dark horse superstar or a dramatic flop. Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, the movie stars Mia Wasikowska as Edith Cushing, a sweet bookish young woman in late 1800s upstate New York. Edith is a nerd, simply put, and she wants to be a writer. Her book of choice? Ghost stories. Or, rather, a "story with a ghost in it." Unfortunately, Edith's ambitions are stymied by the sexist publishing industry of her time, so she finds herself looking for more and more complex ways to get a book into an editor's hands.

Her father, Carter Cushing (Jim Beaver), is perfectly happy that his only child would rather read and write than attend balls and flirt. He thinks she's great and they have the kind of relationship you rarely get to see: a healthy and respectful close relationship between father and daughter. Right on!

This is not to say that Carter is the kind of dad who wants his daughter to die alone, however. He does want her to marry, he just thinks she ought to end up with Dr. Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam), an old friend of the family. Alan has had a crush on Edith since time immemorial, something which Edith appears to know, but has never pressed her or really done anything about it. He's just waiting to see if she's interested.

Into all of this cuteness steps Thomas Sharpe, Baronet (Tom Hiddleston). Thomas Sharpe is an inventor from England who wants Carter Cushing to invest in his new mining apparatus. But while he tries to secure funding, he also appears to fall deeply in love with Edith. He's so handsome and dramatic and romantic and tragic - he's everything your average gothic heroine could want in a man!

It's too bad that his sister, Lady Lucille Sharpe (Jessica Chastain), seems to disapprove. But Edith is smitten and not even her father's disapproval can turn her away. Granted, there seems to be a hitch when Carter sets a private detective on the Sharpes and then pays them to go away, but the next day Carter is found dead in a pool of his own blood, so clearly this isn't a real obstacle. Edith and Thomas get married and go away to Allerdale Hall, his ancestral home, and the real story begins.

See, there's another story in here too, one that is easily forgotten in the bustle of the romance and the murder: Edith Cushing can see ghosts. While she never really brings this up with Thomas, she has a long conversation with Alan about it, and even tells us in voiceover that when she was a little girl, her mother's ghost visited her and warned her, "Beware Crimson Peak!" It's just that those words meant nothing at all to her until it was too late.

So our heroine ends up at this ramshackle old manor in the English countryside, only to find that it is nicknamed "Crimson Peak" for how the red mud bleeds through the snow in winter to make the whole hillside look like it's made of blood. Charming.

Obviously Thomas and Lucille have lured Edith here for some nefarious reason, but exactly what that reason is requires more investigation. The bulk of the second act of the film follows Edith as she acclimates to life at Crimson Peak and then her growing horror as she discovers that something is not right and she is in grave danger. It doesn't help that she keeps seeing horrible ghosts everywhere. These grotesque decayed bodies of ghosts - always bright red - that follow her around and reach out their arms to her.

The big turn comes when Edith realizes that the ghosts aren't trying to hurt her, they're trying to warn her. Warn her of what? That she's about to be next.

Now, I won't spoil exactly what the danger is, but I will say that in a weird way, I was impressed by how simple and prosaic it actually ends up being. I was anticipating that there was some kind of deal where the basement of the house led straight to hell or there were condemned souls trapped in the bricks of the manor or everyone who lived there had been dead for centuries or something. But no. And in a weird way that actually makes the story better. Not to give too much away, but just like Edith insisted at the beginning, this isn't a ghost story, it's a story with a ghost in it.

It's also, and this is why I think I like this film so much, a movie where the horror is real and terrifying, but all the characters act in ways that actually make sense. Edith walks blithely towards her own doom because it never occurs to her that something out of a story might be real. Alan pursues her and investigates the mystery because, well, she's his childhood friend and he's worried about her. Thomas and Lucille have sinister motives, but those sinister motives are actually pretty normal and understandable.

In other words, it's the rare horror movie that manages to let all of its characters keep their brains and characterizations, but still is genuinely quite frightening. I appreciate that.

I appreciate that when Alan shows up to save Edith, he does not actually succeed. Not because she doesn't need saving, but because he can't actually save her, she has to save herself. In the end (MASSIVE SPOILERS) she saves them both, not vice versa. It's a movie where the ultimate battle ends up being between two women, with the men both sidelined and considered too emotional for the fight.

It's just so satisfying watching Edith come into her own, but it's also satisfying because she was never really a damsel. She was a woman who made a mistake and then did something about it.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I appreciate Crimson Peak for not underestimating the audience. It would be easy for a film like that to assume that we all think Edith is stupid for going off with Thomas and Lucille in the first place, but that's not the case. Edith is allowed to be smart and sensitive and very clever and also to make mistakes. She doesn't have to be perfect for us to like her. We like her just fine as she is.

And the movie also doesn't try to tell us that Edith "deserves what she gets" for choosing Thomas over Alan. Alan pretty much steps back and lets Edith make her own choices. He doesn't tell her not to marry him or even say anything rude. He gets a little rough with Thomas only when Edith asks him to, and even at the end of the film he's still unfailingly polite. Alan is a nice guy, not a Nice Guy. He doesn't think Edith owes him crap, and he's happy to let her live out her married life in peace if Thomas Sharpe really is on the up and up.

Furthermore, the movie gets at the complex motivations people can have for doing terrible things. It doesn't let any of its leads become caricatures of themselves. They are all fascinating people with rich inner lives and also a lot of penchants for murder. When the movie has been out a bit longer I'll write a whole article on Lucille Sharpe because DAMN is she amazing, but you get my point.

The real thing here, though, is that this movie more than a lot of contemporary horror films seems to get at the point of a scary movie. Horror movies are about examining our deep fears in a safe setting. They're about exploring and exploiting the things that make us feel unsafe. There's a really interesting article in here somewhere (maybe I'll write it later) about how the things we fear in horror movies make compelling analogues to what we fear in real life, but that's not the point.

Crimson Peak is about how we can never really know another person. Even when bound by marriage or love, how can we actually know another sentient being? The horror here is the unknown of another person's heart, and that's a horror that we all can fear. Crimson Peak works not because the ghosts are scary or the setting is gorgeous or the tone is really great, but because the fear is so human and so real.

Who hasn't worried that a boyfriend or girlfriend was just faking their affection for some unknown reason? Who hasn't wondered about someone else's past? Who hasn't been terrified that they made the wrong choice and will now be punished for it?

Crimson Peak isn't a ghost story because it has ghosts in it, it's a ghost story because it's all about the ghosts of insecurities that haunt our relationships. The past loves and past lives that can bring us down because we're afraid to share them. I just really like that. I really like that Edith is clever but flawed, that she's a brilliant woman who can be brought down by a pretty face, and that she is perfectly capable of picking herself back up again.

I love that Alan is a good friend and a good man but Edith is never shamed for not loving him. I love that Thomas and Lucille are so dang complex. And I love love love that Edith is the driving force behind all of this. Without Edith there is no story.

Edith is the one who decides to marry Thomas - yes he's manipulating her, but she still chooses. Edith is the one who starts to investigate when things start going strange. Edith is the one who uncovers all the horrible secrets. Edith is the one who saves the day. Edith is the hero of this story and no one else can lay claim to that title. It's wonderful.

I'm not sure if Crimson Peak is a feminist reclamation of gothic horror or if gothic horror was already pretty damn feminist - I'll let the real academics sort that one out - but I do know that it is sublime gothic horror and also fantastically feminist at the same time. Those two values don't contradict.

So good on Guillermo del Toro for making yet another movie that I adore and that goes in a completely different direction from all the other films in that genre*. Given how mainstream critics are responding to the film, however, I have a sneaking suspicion that this movie might be making its way onto The Undies this year. Oh well. If they can't appreciate some subversive horror goodness, that's their problem. I, for one, am celebrating the joys of a movie that refuses to sexualize its female lead, that features complex performances from every character, and that refuses to dehumanize even its villains. More please!

*I mean, Hellboy is completely different from every other superhero movie, Pacific Rim is lightyears away from your average Godzilla ripoff, Pan's Labyrinth has very little in common with either period pieces or children's media, and The Strain is just totally outside of other vampire fiction. Dude likes subverting genres is all I can say.

We’re going surprisingly highbrow today, chickadees, because today we are talking about that classic Margaret Atwood novel The Robber Bride.* Why? Well, because it’s almost Halloween, and in a very weird and roundabout way, this novel is, to me, basically the most Halloween-y thing I can think of to cover.

No, it’s not about ghosts or goblins or ghouls, no there’s no overt horror, and no, it’s not set in the fall or anytime around Halloween. It’s not even very scary. But this novel is Halloween-y to me because it’s about witches. It’s about women in our culture who fill the same role that witches played for hundreds of years. Women who are forced to “do it for themselves”, women who come together in groups to band against the evil forces of their lives, women who live on the outskirts of what we consider polite society and who are not confined by the restraints the rest of us live by.

I mean, in its most basic form, this book is about three women vanquishing a ghost. It's just that the ghost isn't so much a reality as it is a manifestation of their own hopes and dreams that they must confront in order to move on. And that's pretty interesting.

The Robber Bride is about three women who are all connected by a fourth. The three women - Tony, Charis, and Roz - are all middle-aged when the book starts and have known each other for years and years. They went to college together, though that's not quite where they know each other from. They know each other because over the years each of them has had a catastrophic run-in with Zenia, another woman they went to college with. Going through the decades, the book documents each of their battles with and against Zenia, and shows how this women brought them together by ruining their lives.

I find that absolutely fascinating. It's clear from the get-go that Zenia is bad news and that the women are better off without her in their lives, but it's really interesting to me how the book shows us that each women had her heart broken by Zenia but ended up with a much better life. Like, Zenia screwed them all over, destroyed the lives they had, but because of that they ended up with lives that are sweeter and more whole.

The book starts with the women in middle-age, like I said, meeting as they do once a month in a local restaurant. The three women have very little in common on the surface. Tony is a tiny "bird-like" academic who hides behind her glasses and prefers to intellectualize everything, while Charis is an overgrown hippie, a sweet and loving flower-child who the others worry lacks emotional strength. And Roz is a "ball-buster", a middle-aged woman who runs her own magazine and is very externally successful. They wouldn't ordinarily be friends, but their run-ins with Zenia over the years have bonded them so closely they feel a bit like family.

It's at one of these meetings that the women get the shock of their lives. Zenia, who has been presumed dead for years, is in the restaurant. The women freak the crap out. First off, they thought she was dead. They were at the funeral. Second, what must she want now? What could she be doing back in their lives? What is there left for her to ruin?

Then the story takes us back through each woman's interactions with Zenia in a rough chronological order. Not to go too far into detail, but they go like this:

Tony met Zenia in college and fell quickly in friend-love. Zenia and her then-boyfriend West were cool and charming and the most interesting people she'd ever met. She and Zenia were thick as thieves, and Tony told Zenia all her deepest secrets, about her parents dying and the money she didn't want to spend and all that. Zenia then turned around and manipulated Tony into giving her a massive check, then skipped town, leaving Tony betrayed and West heartbroken.

Now Tony and Wes are together and Tony is pretty happy in her life. But she's terrified that Zenia has come back to steal West away from her. She's so worried that West will go along happily because he never really loved her, he just needed someone to lean on when Zenia went away. Tony is most afraid of abandonment and she's so scared that it'll happen again.

Meanwhile, Charis met Zenia years later when they were in their late twenties or so. Charis was living with a cute draft-dodger from America when Zenia appeared on her doorstep all beat up and needing care. Zenia had cancer, or so she told Charis, so Charis cared for her, kept her safe, and slowly worked her way in between Charis and her draft-dodger boyfriend.

Like with Tony, Zenia got Charis to tell her all her deepest secrets, like that Charis used to be called Karen and was horrifically sexually abused as a child and that Charis' now boyfriend is a draft-dodger who is wanted by the US government.

Then the other shoe drops and Zenia and the draft-dodger are gone, leaving Charis pregnant and alone. She has no idea what happened, if Zenia was ever really sick or if she was turning the draft-dodger over to the government or if they ran away together... She never gets answers, but she does get help. Looking for information on Zenia, Charis ends up calling Tony, who enlists Roz to help take care of the pregnant and poor Charis. Charis gives birth to a daughter and suddenly has two best friends to help her through her troubles.

Finally, Roz's story is the most interesting because Roz was so well-warned about Zenia. She knew all of them in college and was aware of exactly what Zenia did to both Tony and Charis. But somehow she can't resist Zenia's allure. Zenia shows up as a writer for her magazine, and Roz hires her because she's so perfect for the role. Zenia's great at it and readership goes up, until one day she defrauds the magazine and runs off with Roz's husband.

Roz is furious, of course, but also sad. It gets worse when Zenia leaves her husband too and he goes a little nuts looking for her. He ends up disappearing from a sailboat on Lake Michigan (if memory serves), and that's the last that's seen of him. But Roz still has her kids and she has Tony and Charis to help bear the weight.

Obviously none of them are thrilled to see Zenia again.

Tony is worried that Zenia is back to steal West; Charis is worried that Zenia is here to destroy her soul; and Roz is terrified that Zenia is here to consume her beloved son like she did her husband. As it turns out, all of them are wrong.

Zenia is here because Zenia is here. It really doesn't end up more explained than that. Each woman goes in to confront Zenia, and possibly kill her, and yet each of them comes out with the realization that not only is Zenia not worth it, she's also not nearly as clever as they'd given her credit for. She was never out to be the malevolent force of their lives, they were all just convenient means to ends.

Maybe one of the things I like most in the book is that Zenia is never explained. The reader only knows what Tony, Charis, and Roz know, and what they know is very little, most of it conflicting. So Zenia exists not really as a character, but as a collection of identities that these other women have projected onto her. She became what each of them fear most and wreaked havoc with their lives. It's just that in so doing, she also gave them lives which were much better.

She is the reason that Tony ended up with West, the love of her life. She's also the reason why Tony became confident enough to assert herself as an academic. She might have taken away Charis' boyfriend, but said boyfriend was a deadbeat who never treated her well anyway and was deeply ambivalent about the baby they were having. And Roz's husband? Was a jerk to her and needed very little incentive to cheat. So while it's too much of a stretch to say that Zenia was doing all of them a favor by coming through their lives like a demolition crew, she didn't destroy anything that was too vital to their survival.

But going back to the point above, I guess I think of Zenia as a witch. Not because she's mean or magic or anything like that, but because she's unpredictable and seems to be playing a game that only she knows the rules of and only she can see the cards. Zenia is a mystery made up of other people's conceptions of who she is, and that's so witchy to me.

I mean, insofar as we all agree that witch is really less a thing about medieval ladies who could do magic and more about uppity women who were burned to death because they didn't fit inside the social order.

Don't get me wrong, Zenia is a horrible person. She's an aggressively awful human being and the things she does to people in this story seem to be just the tip of the iceberg. At one point it's insinuated that she's smuggling cocaine and heroin for a Russian cartel. Like, the woman is terrifying. When the news comes back that she died in an explosion in Lebanon, no one is particularly surprised. And then when she turns up out of the blue five years later miraculously not dead, it's surprising and yet somehow not.

I guess I mean that Zenia feels magical in a weird subversive way. Not a good kind of magical that makes people feel nice, but this perverse magic that helps good things happen by bad means. There's something so fascinating in how Zenia makes their lives better by ruining them. Some weird sort of magic that has to destroy in order to create. And Zenia is never explained, which means you can read into her whatever you want. I prefer to think of her as an elemental force, neither good nor bad, but always bringing balance in her wake.

Or maybe I'm over philosophizing this. Maybe it just comes down to a simple answer: I like The Robber Bride and Zenia makes me think of witches. Happy Halloween.

Yeah, that seems about right.

*We are not going to be discussing the 2007 movie adaptation because I have not seen it and probably won't - just saying, when I picture Zenia, I imagine more of an Eva Green than a Mary Louise Parker type...

Happy almost Halloween, my chickadees! In honor of this most ridiculous holiday, I thought we'd look at a character from a show that feels right at home this time of year. Let's talk about Anya Jenkins, aka the demon Anyanka, Patron Saint of Scorned Women, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer because Anya is super amazing, and because her character arc over five seasons of the show is one of the most compelling in the series. Through Anya we see a meditation on what it means to be human, on what it means to learn humanity and morality and forgiveness, and on what it really means to sacrifice.

I love Anya.

If you don't love her, though, or if you have no idea who I'm talking about, allow me to persuade you. Anya Jenkins (Emma Caulfield) is a character who shows up in season three of Buffy, then again in season four a few times, and becomes a series regular in season five, sticking around until the very last episode. She's one of those characters who goes from villain of the week to beloved member of the ensemble cast, and it's frankly impressive how much characterization they managed to get into her storyline.

When we first meet Anya she's pretending to be a high school student, but actually she's a vengeance demon - as in, she's literally an immortal demon named Anyanka who has devoted herself to casting vengeance down upon unfaithful men. She comes to Sunnydale when Cordelia, understandably angry that she caught her boyfriend cheating on her, wishes that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale.

Anya grants the wish, plunging them all into a hellish alternate timeline where Buffy never came, Xander and Willow are vampires, and Cordelia dies immediately upon arrival. But it's in this alternate universe that Anyanka is defeated: alternate Giles smashes the necklace that is the source of her power, saving the world and forcing Anyanka to live in it as a human high school student.

Obviously this is kind of a funny punishment for a demon. I mean, she's an eleven-hundred years old and now she has to pass her math class. She doesn't really take to it well, and we see her sort of flit through the background of the next season or so being baffled by her attempts to fit in with humans or get her power back.

But then something funny happens. Anya starts to get the hang of being human. I mean, she never really stops being weird, but she also stops entirely resisting the experience. She helps Buffy and her friends out a few times. She goes to prom with Xander. She and Xander start dating. She even saves him from an evil haunted house one time. Little by little, Anya stops trying to become a demon again and acclimates to being human. Which is where things get really interesting.

See, Anya wasn't always a demon. She actually used to be a nice Scandinavian woman named Aud who was distrusted in her village because she spoke strangely and didn't make sense to anyone - which brings up the fan theory that Anya is on the autistic spectrum, something never officially confirmed but seems very likely. Aud fell in love with Olaf the troll hunter, but when he cheated on her she turned him into a troll in vengeance. It was this act of vengeance that brought her to the attention of the head vengeance demon, D'Hoffryn, and got her a job as the "Patron Saint of Scorned Women".

Now that Anya is human again and trapped in the modern day, we get to see how a millennium of being a demon and ignoring any human impulses has done to her. Because here's the thing: as far as we can tell, being a demon didn't actually change anything about Anya's morality. It just gave her the power and immortality to not have to care about laws or rules or right and wrong. Now that she's human, she's not suddenly a more moral person, she just suddenly has to care about these things again. And that's fascinating.

It's fascinating because of how clearly it doesn't come easily to her. Some things come easily, sure. She gets the hang of capitalism right away and becomes a financial wizard very quickly. Anya ends up helping run and eventually owning a local magic shop. Sex is something else that Anya clearly didn't need help remembering. She shows up out of the blue one day in season four and decides she wants to have sex with Xander, which leads to the two of them eventually falling in love.

But love itself is a struggle for Anya. Sex is fine, but love is hard. It's hard because her instinct is to punish and be vengeful. She's out of practice with the little grievances and frustrations that come along with being with someone for a long time. She's having trouble getting back in the swing of assuming the best of people instead of the worst.

And there are other problems too. Like how Anya is terrified of dying now that she's mortal after so long. Or how her first instinct is always to run away from the danger even though she's supposed to be helping fight the danger off. Or how she has no idea how to give moral support to someone without offering to curse their enemies. Little things like that.

Anya grows over the seasons. She never gets less weird or blunt or funny, thank goodness, but she does grow up. She comes to really embrace getting a second chance at being human... At least until she gets her heart broken again. When Anya and Xander's relationship reaches critical mass, it basically explodes under the pressure of Xander's neuroses and fears about the future. Which is funny, because up until that point anyone would have assumed that Anya would be the one calling their wedding off.

No, in the end it's Xander who can't handle the concept of marriage (for surprisingly understandable reasons - he's afraid he'll turn out like his abusive father), leaving Anya heartbroken and alone at the altar. This is when Anya turns back to the only thing that's ever made her feel better: vengeance.

So she goes back to being a demon, but it's clear that this time mass bloodshed and horrible curses just aren't doing the trick. She's too human now, with too much pent up morality. Killing people makes her feel bad because she's lost the hang of being a demon. So what's a monster girl to do when being human hurts but being a demon isn't any better?

Keep going anyway.

That's seriously the lesson we learn from Anya. She comes incredibly close to giving in and giving up in season six, devastated with her broken heart and unsure if she really wants to bother trying any more. But then she does try. She keeps trying. She and Xander eventually reconcile, but that's not the point. The point is that Anya decides, man or no man, she'll keep being human and making the hard choice and choosing to sacrifice.

Which is what brings us to the very end of her story and why I think she's a perfect example of what it means to "learn humanity". At the very end of season seven, when everything is coming down to a terrifying end, Anya doesn't run away like she did the first time. Instead, she stays and fights even though she doesn't have to. As she explains it to Andrew,

"Well, I guess I was kinda new to being around humans before. And now I've seen a lot more, gotten to know people, seen what they're capable of and I guess I just realize how amazingly... screwed up they all are. I mean, really, really screwed up in a monumental fashion...

And they have no purpose that unites them, so they just drift around, blundering through life until they die. Which they-they know is coming, yet every single one of them is surprised when it happens to them. They're incapable of thinking about what they want beyond the moment. They kill each other, which is clearly insane, and yet, here's the thing. When it's something that really matters, they fight. I mean, they're lame morons for fighting. But they do. They never... They never quit. And so I guess I will keep fighting, too."

This is the moment when Anya chooses humanity. For all that it was thrust on her without her choosing it before, for all that she still doesn't really "get it", for all that she's made a lot of questionable choices and done a lot of really horrible things, Anya in the end chooses to be human. She chooses to stand and fight because it's the right thing to do.

And that gets down to something really important: humanity is a choice. It's a lot easier to let go of humanity than it is to grab it and hold on. Because holding on to our humanity means embracing and acknowledging the things that are hard and unpleasant in our lives. It means refusing to run away from our problems and admitting that we have no idea what we're doing.

Anya is all of that wrapped up in a hilarious and cranky ball.

It's worth noting too that Anya is unique for being a female character doing all of this. We're relatively used to stories about male characters with horrible pasts being redeemed and becoming human, but not so much about female characters. Anya was a vengeance demon for over a thousand years. She has a past. She's scary. She's strong. And yet she chooses to be human in a way that never compromises her strength and past, but instead adds to it.

I love Anya. I love that she never really gets the hang of social interactions but she does come to understand love and family and hope. I love that the surface stuff doesn't matter in the end. What matters is that Anya gives up her own life to save the world. She knows it might not help, she knows that the odds are stacked so far against her. But she chooses humanity anyway.

As Xander says, "That's my girl. Always doing the stupid thing."

Well, I was really hoping it wouldn't come to this, but you know what, chickadees? Between helping out at home, racing in between doctor's appointments, doing the work I actually get paid for, seeing my friends once a week, and doing this blog, my grad school applications have kind of sort of not been getting done. Which is not okay, as they are due in a month and a half and I really really want to go to grad school.

So, as much as it pains me to do this, I'm putting us all on hiatus until they're done. Trust me, this hurts me more than it hurts you.

Hopefully, though, this shouldn't take more than a week or two (it's not that I have a huge amount to do, it's more that I have very little time to do anything), and I'll be back before you know it. In the mean time, allow me to leave you with some gifs that will nurture you through this trying time (and accurately sum up my rollercoaster of emotions about the process).

See you in a few weeks!

Chickadees, to help us close out Arab-American Heritage Month, we're actually going to throw it to our guest contributor, Trey Stewart. You can read his previous articles on Jemma Simmons from Agents of SHIELDand the nontoxic masculinities of Star Trek elsewhere on the site. But for now, let's all settle in so he can walk us through some of the most interesting and challenging representations of Arab-American women currently on television: the ladies of Quantico.

I must confess I haven’t seen Prince of Egypt, Kingsman, or Mr. Robot. Also, I haven’t read Bodies. I can say that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is my favorite of the Star Trek series, so I’m pretty familiar with Dr. Bashir. And I have read a few things with Simon Baz as Green Lantern. What I'm getting at is that I’m pretty into sci-fi/comic book/nerd media and I suspect it says something that I have only seen a third of the series discussed this month. And it's not saying that I was busy watching other shows or reading other comics with their own awesome representations of Arab-Americans. It's really not saying that at all.

Instead, what this points to is the sheer under-representation that Arab-Americans face in the media. The few positive representations they do get are frequently in obscure or more independent forms of media and it's easy for your average pop culture consumer to walk right past. In other words, it's easy to not even notice this lack of representation, so it's well worth talking about the representations we do get.

Today for Strong Female Character Friday, we’re going to talk about two characters from Quantico who represent somewhat opposing versions of Arab-American womanhood: Nimah and Raina Amin (Yasmine Al Massri). I’m not quite prepared to say that their characters are awesome but I can definitely say that they are interesting.

Quantico is a mystery/thriller about a terrorist that infiltrates the FBI Academy at Quantico (hence the show title) and months later blows up Grand Central Station. The mystery comes from the fact that we, as the audience, aren’t quite sure who the terrorist(s) is/are.

The show is set pretty much square in the middle of the issues of terrorism, religion, and racism that have become part of post-9/11 America. What I mean is that the show can’t avoid addressing these issues in some form or fashion due to its subject matter. The events in the series alternate between the trainees at Quantico and their time as agents during and following the above mentioned terrorist attack - Nimah and Raina are two of these trainees.

And just so you know, SPOILERS.

So we as the audience are introduced to Raina and Nimah while they are still at Quantico. What's interesting from the very beginning, though, is that Nimah and Raina are actually posing as a single trainee: Raina. Obviously, part of understanding their characters initially is figuring out why they are pretending to be one person. And given that anyone on the show is a potential terrorist, this initial deception makes you wonder if they might be the ones responsible for the attack.

Then again, having the Muslim women be terrorists seems a bit obvious and heavy-handed. So it shouldn't come as a huge surprise that there is another big reason for Nimah and Raina to be deceiving their fellow students: the women are part of a plan to use twins to infiltrate terror cells. The idea is to have them take “shifts” posing as an individual member of a terror cell, relieving the intense stress and danger of undercover work. Which is super cool.

But you still don't know for sure whether or not one or both of these women is guilty. Over course of the season, I have become convinced that Raina and Nimah probably aren’t terrorists. All of this, however, is ancillary to the real reason these two characters are interesting. Yes, twins pretending to be one person is a fascinating idea (thanks, movie about magicians that I kind of don't want to spoil by saying the name of), but there's more to Nimah and Raina's representation of Arab-American womanhood than just this. The really interesting stuff is how they differ.

The biggest and most obvious difference is simple: Raina is a devout Muslim, wears a hijab, and is idealistic. Nimah is secular, does not wear a hijab, and is more pragmatic. Just by setting up this dichotomy, two women with the exact same family background and exact same career choice who diverge so much in their expressions of personhood and identity, Quantico has already made a big leap forward for the representation of Arab-American women. They're showing that there are at least two very different ways to be an Arab-American woman and that those two ways aren't necessarily better or worse, they're just different.

More than that, though, there's something really worth noting in how both Raina and Nimah are training to become FBI agents. It's a pushback against the idea of Arab-Americans as "others". I mean, what's more American than trying to become an FBI agent? The characters wouldn’t be trying to join the FBI if they didn’t “love” America. And that's an important aspect of them as characters. They love their country and they want to protect it.

One of the questions that comes up as you watch Quantico early in the season is why Nimah is as secular as she is. For us white Americans, it's easy to conflate Arab-American heritage and cultural Islam with devout Islamic faith. Nimah's characterization, then, is a reminder that it is entirely possible to be Arab-American and culturally Muslim without being particularly observant or even interested.

It's an expression of her personhood and agency that she alone gets to choose her level of interest in her own faith. Again, by showing that these two characters can both exist in the same community and even in the same family, Quantico is expanding our understanding of what it means to be an Arab woman in America in 2016. And it's telling a pretty good story while it does it.

Conversely, it's important to see a character like Raina too, a woman who is devout in her faith and even arguably sympathetic to the socio-economic and political reasons that might lead someone to engage in terrorism. This doesn't mean that Raina is a terrorist or condones terrorism, but it's a complex and frankly realistic view to point out that someone like her, who has studied a great deal about terrorism and what leads a person into that path, might understand and sympathize with the people on it.

This kind of characterization pushes at our desire to dehumanize terrorists or "freedom fighters" or enemy combatants. And the revelation that Raina is sympathetic but not condoning forces us as the audience to expand our understanding to meet hers.

Raina is phenomenal precisely because she is as devout as she is and expresses her faith with compassion and understanding of others. I personally always prefer characters who take their beliefs seriously and live them out. Raina's ability to express and live out her genuine faith makes her a compelling character. It also makes her a complicated one. I mean, can you think of another time you've seen a young Arab-American Muslim woman on television working in law enforcement and yet also feeling compassion for the plight of terrorists? Yeah. No.

And it's hard to stress enough how radical it is to see a major television show where one of the main characters wears a hijab. It is hard to overstate the significance of that, even if sometimes the show handles Raina's hijab rather clumsily - it's still a really big deal.

But getting back to the main point, it's important to remember that while Raina and Nimah express different versions of Arab-American womanhood, they're not opposing versions. More recent episodes have moved on from the portrayal of Raina and Nimah as opposites, and that allows us to see both of them in a more holistic light. For most of the show, Nimah is basically pretending to be Raina - the atheist pretending to be devout in order to work on her cover. But it sometimes goes the other way as well.

There are a couple of instances where Raina gets to pretend to be Nimah, and we are allowed to see the emotional weight and responsibility that this carries. It's not just seeing a devout Muslim woman take off her hijab - though that is part of it - but it's also seeing Raina choose to be where Nimah's at. In other words, it's a version of the story we very rarely see in Arab-American women, a willingness to experience both sides and decide which one is preferable.

And it certainly doesn't hurt their training goals. Currently, during their time at Quantico, Raina and Nimah are trying to build a cover identity that is somewhere between perfect Muslim and perfect atheist, in Nimah’s words someone that is a “sinner” and that might believably be attracted to a terrorist cell. Even in their undercover work, the women are expanding on preconceived notions of what an Arab-American woman is "supposed" to look like.

Look. Raina and Nimah Amin are not perfect characters and Quantico is not a perfect show. It's a good show, though, and it's trying. It tries very hard to take a subject we all assume we understand - terrorism and FBI training and law enforcement - and subvert our expectations.

By giving us two Arab-American women as major characters and allowing them to be very different from each other, Quantico validates an understanding of the diversity of Arab-American life. But because so much of the show is wrapped up in mystery and tension and drama, it's hard to really feel like these women are being shown to their fullest potential.

Ultimately, one show isn't going to fix the major problems we have with Arab-American representation in the media. It can't. What can fix it is a lot of shows over time. And books and movies and comics and games and songs and silly youtube videos. Quantico isn't perfect, but it's a pretty good place to start.

Trey Stewart has his PhD in Educational Psychology from the University of Alabama. He recently started his own education research consulting/tutoring business. He's been enjoying Quantico so far. So far.

This might come as something of a surprise to some of you, but when I was in high school and college I really really loved stoner comedies.

Like, I saw Pineapple Express so many times my roommate wanted to murder me. We would watch Dude Where's My Car and mouth the lines along with the characters. And of course I saw Harold and Kumar 2: Escape from Guantanamo Bay* in theaters, even staying for the cut scene after the credits where Neil Patrick Harris comes back from the dead to lech another day. What I'm saying is that, despite all expectations, there was a period in my life where, for whatever reason, movies about mid-20s men getting stoned and going on weird adventures really spoke to me. I try not to read too much into it.

But I think it's a good way to go into our topic today because, in a lot of ways, the reasons that I enjoyed stoner comedies in my late teens and early twenties are the same reasons why those characters enjoyed getting stoned in their late teens and early twenties. Particularly in the case of Harold and Kumar, I felt like out of all the characters, I most understood those two guys. I liked them. I felt for them. I got them.

Now, in retrospect, most of the movies that one could call "stoner comedies" are pretty awful when you watch them as an adult. Even the Harold and Kumar films, much as I remember loving them, have regressive and insulting depictions of women, deeply offensive moments, and a general tone that I no longer enjoy. But for all of this, for all that I really don't like these movies as much any more, I have to give them credit for one specific thing: their complete and utter decimation of Asian-American stereotypes.

So that's what we're going to focus on today.

As you may well know, May is Asian-American and Pacific Islanders Heritage Month**, so, as we did for Black History Month and Arab-American Heritage Month, we're going to take this month to more deeply examine the stereotypes and tropes and issues involved in the way that Asian-American characters and stories are represented in our pop culture. And I want to start that off by talking about two guys who looked at all the stereotypes about what it means to be Asian in a Hollywood movie and then just pissed all over them. In the best possible way. So let's talk about Harold and Kumar.

If you're not familiar, here's the basic gist of the franchise's first movie, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle - the sequels are fun but their plots are generally labyrinthine in their complexity, so we're not getting into it. The first film, which came out in 2004, stars John Cho as Harold Lee and Kal Penn as Kumar Patel, two young, potentially high-achieving Asian-American men who have responded to the stress in their lives and the pressure to perform by just getting super stoned all the time.

And if you want to be really technical, that's pretty much the story of the movie. I mean, the actual plot follows Harold and Kumar as they go on an epic road trip throughout New Jersey, desperately seeking a White Castle where they can get burgers and satisfy their munchies. Along they way they fall in and out of ridiculous situations, like crashing the car and getting picked up by terrifying hillbillies or picking up a hitchhiking Neil Patrick Harris (as a straight, psychotic version of himself) or riding a leopard. The movie is largely a string tying these wacky hijinks together and the real core of the film isn't so much their getting to White Castle, it's their relationships to each other and to themselves.

Those relationships are actually super interesting even if your taste doesn't run towards jokes about double penetration. See, Harold and Kumar both fulfill and then subvert our stereotypes about high-achieving Asian-American men. And in so doing, they reflect back at us the inherent unfairness of these stereotypes.

Harold works in an office, and to be totally honest it's not super clear what he does. What is clear is that Harold is the low man on the totem pole. We're introduced to him just as he's getting ready to leave for the weekend, but already one of his coworkers is stopping by to drop off more work.

Work that means that Harold will have to work pretty continuously through the weekend to finish in time for Monday. Why has this guy dumped it all on Harold? Explicitly because he's Asian and therefore must not have much of a life or any interests outside of work. No wonder all he wants is to leave and go get stoned with his best friend.

Kumar, on the other hand, is the kind of brilliant slacker we're super used to seeing white guys play. We meet him as he's in an interview for medical school, bedraggled and looking like he just got pulled through a hedge, openly telling the interviewer that he doesn't care about this and he doesn't want to be a doctor.

The interviewer is shocked - why wouldn't he want to go to medical school when he has near-perfect MCAT scores and is all set to go off into a prestigious career? Even more, his whole family is full of doctors and they're pressuring him to take this step and "start his future". But Kumar doesn't want that - he isn't interested in the stress and intensity of med school.*** So he blows it off and goes to get high with Harold.

On the surface, it feels like Harold is a more inherently sympathetic character than Kumar. I mean, he's put-upon at work but he's trying so hard. Kumar, though, isn't trying at all. He's in fact aggressively pushing away the great advantages he has and trying to avoid following the path that's been set out for him. But what works so well here is that both Harold and Kumar subvert our ideas of who Asian-Americans are supposed to be and what they're supposed to want. And Kumar's rejection of med school is just as sympathetic in a lot of ways as Harold's frustrations at work. Let's break it down.

I feel like I shouldn't have to tell you that there's a certain way Asian-Americans, particularly men, are portrayed in the media. Especially in comedies. They're invariably the butt of the joke, right? Like in that awful awful sitcom Dads, where Asian men and their "tiny dicks" were the punchline of the pilot episode. Aside from the tragically rare complex portrayals we get in shows like Fresh Off the Boat, Asian-American men are generally represented as being hardworking, socially incompetent, asexual/sexually unappealing, and weak. In other words, most of media portrays Asian-American men as "not real men". Asian-American masculinity is said like it's a joke.

Harold and Kumar faces that down by giving us two characters who have to live in this toxic landscape and somehow get through. Clearly they've taken very different life paths, but it's sort of ended up the same. They're both pissed off, which, again, isn't something we're used to from Asian-American characters.

The film goes after a number of these stereotypes, but the ones it hits the hardest are the ideas that Asian-American men are inherently hardworking and that they're uninterested in sex or sexually uninteresting. The movie then focuses its plot on demolishing these stereotypes and helping us to see Harold and Kumar as complex, fully-developed people (if occasionally not very nice people) rather than racist stereotypes.

As far as "hardworking" goes, obviously the film subverts that by giving us Kumar, a gifted slacker who has no interest in hard work and even scoffs at the idea of buckling down and using his big brain for anything useful. Like I said above, we've seen this character as a white guy, but it's hard to think of many other examples where he's Asian.

Additionally, the movie examines ideas about familial pressure and the immigrant experience. Kumar expresses his frustration with his parents for pushing him so hard towards medicine. There's this idea that as the child of immigrants, Kumar "owes it" to them and to himself to achieve as much as he can as fast as he can. Kumar, though, rejects this for the most part. He wants the chance to be just like any other guy in America, stoned if he wants to be and a failure if he so chooses.

When, at the end of the film, he decides to give med school a chance, it's not because he's giving in to the stereotypes and pressure, it's because he has been pushing it away for the wrong reasons. He's been pushing back because he doesn't want to be defined as yet another Indian guy going to med school, but the truth is that he really likes medicine and would enjoy it as a career.

The complexity of Kumar's issues with school and fears about his future bely the usual narrative about a high-achieving Asian-American student who just mindlessly goes off into the sciences or medicine like a "job-stealing" robot. Kumar is a person with hopes and fears, and by showing us the turmoil and hilarity of his decision process, the film humanizes him and people like him.

Harold, on the other hand, already seems like a perfect example of the usual pop culture depiction of an Asian-American man. Pushed around, "hardworking" whether he wants to be or not, and passive at work, Harold has a lot to get through. But his story is about pushing those stereotypes away from his own understanding of himself.

It's about Harold letting himself be more assertive, even if no one is ready for him to be. And because the movie makes it clear that Harold isn't so much naturally hardworking as he is shoved around by a culture that ignores his unique personhood, we the audience are forced to reckon with his humanity. He's not a stereotype of some Asian-American worker drone, he's a real guy who's annoyed that he has to work through the weekend.

And because he's pushed into the East Asian "submissive" box, seeing him verbally take down his coworker at the end of the film is really satisfying. It's not that Harold was always a pushover, it's that he was uncomfortably asserting himself in a work situation - again, showing the complexity of the issues at play forces us to think about his humanity and reconsider the people we see around us.

As far as the issues about Asian-American male sexuality go, there's this lingering racist belief that Asian men aren't good at sex or interested in it or, well, horny. And Harold and Kumar definitely puts that one to rest. While I don't love the aggressive sexuality of the film and the constant sexualization of female characters (who are generally little more than boobs and butts for the guys to lust after), I can understand the importance of reminding an audience that these two characters, these two Asian men, are sexual beings. They like sex. They think about it. They are actively pushing back against the idea of the sexless Asian man, and I can appreciate that.

There's more to look at in Harold and Kumar, but I'll leave it for another time. For now, let's take this as an entry into Asian-American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month - a reminder that Asian-American men and Asian-American masculinity is much more complex than the media has led us to believe. There is value in ascertaining our understanding of the stereotypes in play, because once we know what they are we can destroy them. And even though Harold and Kumar really is just a not-very-deep stoner comedy, by centering this story on two Asian-American men, it reminds us that they're human too.

Human, frustrated, and frequently stoned.

*There is definitely material worth considering in this movie - like, so much. So much. I think we're going to have to do a whole other article on the issues raised in Escape from Guantanamo Bay, from Kumar being mistaken for a terrorist to the whole idea of their position as men of color meaning they are vulnerable to government overreach... More on this later.

**So, there's a lack of consensus on whether or not the indigenous peoples of Oceania, a group that overlaps with Pacific Islanders, are counted as Asian-Americans or Native Americans. And since I am not at all the most qualified person to figure this out, I'm going to defer to smarter people than me on this one - we'll be talking about Native Hawaiians and the indigenous people of Oceania (like in Lilo and Stitch) in November for Native American Heritage Month. Heads up!

***This is of course kind of funny as Kal Penn later found some mainstream recognition playing a doctor on House MD. Also John Cho went on to play another office drone, albeit one with a much better career trajectory, on Selfie. These secondary roles are more stereotypical representations of Asian-American men than their work in Harold and Kumar, which is a bit of a bummer. But good characters in and of themselves.

Somewhere in the grey area between stereotype and awesome character lives a nice Korean girl named Lane Kim. She's a fantastically feminist and complex figure on a show filled with awesome ladies and yet simultaneously a stereotype about the Asian best friend with her restrictive parents, weird food, and life that never overshadows the main character even for a day. Depending on how you look at her, Lane Kim is either very bad or very good for representations of Asian-American women. Or, if you're willing to stomach the complexity, she's both at the very same time.

Like most girls of a certain age in the early 2000s, I feel like I grew up in Stars Hollow with the girls of Gilmore Girls. I had a crush on Luke (didn't everybody?), envied Rory's revolving door of attractive boyfriends, and desperately wished I could pull off even half of Lorelai's wardrobe choices. But while I always wanted to be Paris, one of the characters I hands down related to best on the show was always Lane Kim, Rory's hometown best friend and number one fan.

At this point it feels almost insulting to assume that you don't know the basic gist of Gilmore Girls, but you might not remember all of the main points of who Lane is as a character. So here's a quick rundown:

Introduced in the pilot episode, Lane Kim (Keiko Agena) is one of the major characters of the show, even if her role did get cut down in later seasons. Rory's childhood best friend, Lane grew up in a restrictive religious household. Somehow she still managed to fall in love with rock music and dreamed of being a musician. Eventually she was able to sneak her way into learning to play the drums and became a drummer in a rock band, much to her mother's stone-faced disapproval.

While Rory was off at Yale making bad boy-decisions and living it up, Lane stayed in Stars Hollow, working at Luke's Diner and a couple of other lowkey jobs, playing with her band, and slowly falling in love with one of her bandmates. They got married, had twins, and by the end of the show seemed settled into a quirky but loving family unit.

Like I said above, there's a lot to love about Lane but there's also some stuff that bothers. This division becomes even more noticeable when we analyze Lane in terms of her position as one of the only Asian-American women represented on primetime television in the early 2000s, let alone one of the only Asian-American teenagers.

Perhaps the first note we should make, then, is that Lane is the best friend and the supporting character, but she's not the lead. Gilmore Girls, for all its merits, is not a very racially diverse show, and it seems there was never any inclination for the leads to be non-white. So Lane from the beginning fits into a pervasive and frustrating stereotype, that of the Asian best friend - the character who's there to make the story feel more diverse, but not to take any attention away from the white lead.

This racialized power imbalance is exacerbated by the show itself. Lane is always secondary to Rory, even in their actual relationship. Lane's problems nearly always get second fiddle to Rory's problems. Lane's life is wrapped up in Rory's life. And when Lane, missing her best friend who has moved on and somewhat left her behind, finds her own life and interests in Stars Hollow, Rory is hurt and upset and refuses to understand.

In other words, while Lane gets a story here and there that's all hers, the majority of her plotlines are centered on Rory or used as filler when Rory's not around. Lane as a character rarely gets to take center stage on her own merits, and when she does it's almost always for a very stereotypically feminine event. Like a boy problem or a wedding or a baby. That kind of thing.

Yet despite all of this, Lane is actually one of the better representations of an Asian-American woman that we get to see on television.

Because of how we're centered on her life in Stars Hollow, we see very specifically how Lane feels about her culture and background and how it influences her going forward. Lane isn't generically "Asian", she's from a specific nation and wave of immigrants. Her parents are Korean Christians, particularly Seventh Day Adventists, and very devout. Lane's culture isn't handwaved away or generalized into some kind of vague East Asian blur, it's clear and present and a major factor in her life. And a lot of Lane's story is about her struggle to integrate her background with her life in modern America and her love of modern American culture.

So in that sense Lane is awesome. She's a clearly defined Korean-American girl trying to compromise between parents she loves but doesn't understand and a culture that says that a girl, let alone a Korean girl, can't be a rock musician. She loves a culture that doesn't love her back and we frequently get the feeling from her that she doesn't feel like she fits in anywhere. Not really. It's not until she's able to carve out her own little place in the world, playing in her band and making her own community, that Lane seems to really find herself at peace and settled into herself.

This is the part of Lane that I find most compelling, honestly. The idea of being a person who wants to rebel, but who's too scared and loves her parents too much to rebel openly. Lane hides CDs in Rory's room because she loves this heathen music, but not so much that she wants to destroy her relationship with her mother to listen to it. She fluctuates between wanting to pretend that everything is fine and railing against her parents' expectations of her. Lane isn't particularly religious, but she understands how important religion is to her family. It's the painful balancing act of anyone who finds themself fluctuating between parents who they love and a future their parents can't understand.

Lane's insecurity and bravery and freakouts are what make her a character I love. I love that she is bold enough to decide that she wants to dye her hair bright purple, and I feel for her when she backs and realizes she can't live with it and dyes her hair back immediately. I love that Lane manages to learn the drums and join a band and create this fantastic musical life for herself all on her own, but I feel for her so much when she finally has to face down her mother's hurt and sadness.

While Rory is off falling in love with beautiful boys who have the world at their feet, Lane's romances with her bandmates are somehow realer to me and a little bit sweeter for it. She has this wonderful puppy-love with Dave that transitions into a grownup relationship with Zach. She might live a smaller life than Rory, might fall into Rory's shadow a lot of the time and get pushed to the back of the narrative, but Lane Kim is amazing. She's smart and funny and insecure and bold and awkward and the kind of real person you feel like you know almost instantly.

I actually think it's a shame that Lane didn't get her own show. I feel like she would've been awesome as a lead.

This is all not to say that I don't love Rory and Gilmore Girls as it is, but rather to express that I wish it could have been more, you know? I love Lane, and I would have loved even more to see her really allowed to come into her own, instead of getting ten minutes every three episodes or so. Instead, what we get is a complex and fun and cool Asian-American teenage girl who spends almost all of her time thinking about her white best friend and her white best friend's problems.

There's a reason why I picked Lane Kim for the first Strong Female Character Friday article of Asian-American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and that reason is the duality of her representation. The frustrating push and pull of "awesome complex character" and "best friend sidekick" that hampers Lane's development. In a lot of ways, I think Lane stands in for the larger issues of Asian-American female representation has gone on television and in film. There's a tension there, a tension that is only now starting to come to the forefront.

While African-American characters are saddled with centuries of racist stereotypes and Arab-American figures are pushed relentlessly into roles that paint them as terrorist villains, Asian-American characters have had a very different issue: Invisibility.

Lane isn't invisible, and for that we can be thankful, but she's also not a lead or even as popular and given as much screentime as the white secondary characters. I mean, Jess almost got his own spinoff for crying out loud, but Lane barely got an episode a season where her problems trumped Rory's. Even in cases of good representation, like Lane, there seems to be a block in our culture preventing us from viewing Asian-American stories as ones that deserve our attention. Lane Kim is awesome, yes, but she's also kind of invisible, and that blows.

Especially since she's the kind of complicated, accessible, kind, loving, and hilarious character we could all do with more of in our lives. Seriously. Lane Kim for the win.

*She's angry, driven, intense, and refuses to feel bad about not fitting into the stereotypes people push at her. But underneath all of it she's actually really kind and compassionate, just in a super no-nonsense kind of way. I'm not saying that I am Paris Gellar, I'm just saying that I'd like to be.

In my line of work (the complaining about pop culture on the internet line of work), you tend to take whatever diversity in media you can get. It means spending hours developing backstory theories to explain Scott McCall's Mexican heritage because Tyler Posey has Mexican heritage. It means a lot of deep thoughts about Rashida Jones' character on Parks and Recreation. It means constantly walking an internal balancing line where you wonder, "Am I reading too much into this?" It means being hyper-aware of any smidgeon of representation for women and people of color and other marginalized groups and spending so much time obsessing over these details that you can kind of start to lose perspective.

And it means eventually having to sit yourself down and admit that you honestly don't know if Bellamy Blake on The 100 is supposed to be Asian or not.

So here's the basic problem: as a lifelong proponent of letting the casting inform the character, I have been operating under the assumption that Bellamy Blake, like Bob Morley the actor who plays him, is half-European and half-Filipino. Recently, however, it has occurred to me that we don't actually know for sure if Bellamy Blake was intended to be an Asian-American character. We really don't know that for sure.

While we do meet his mother, Aurora Blake (Monique Ganderton*) in a flashback episode, we know nothing about his father, not even his name. And both Bellamy's mother and his sister, Octavia (Marie Avgeropoulos), are played by white actresses. So while it's technically still totally possible that Bellamy is supposed to be mixed race like his actor, it's also not confirmed by the show itself, and I'm starting to think that this really does matter.

This is Asian-American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month here in the USA, and already we've looked at the damaging effect of stereotypes that paint Asian-Americans as inherently "hardworking" and "submissive" by examining their subversion in Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle. This week, though, we're taking a different tack - I want to use Bellamy as a lens by which to talk about "invisible Asians" or "stealth Asians", as in situations where the actors are Asian-American but their characters are not. Fun, right?

Also, before any of you get worried here, we will be avoiding spoilers for the most recent season of The 100 - I don't even want to get into that mess more than we have to, so for now we're going to ignore it and look at the larger systemic problems. For now.

We here in America have a very screwed up and frankly baffling way of looking at race. We think of whiteness as the default and everything else as a deviation from that, right? So if someone is mixed race, with one white parent and one African-American parent, then we would think of the child as being African-American not white. Alternately, though, the Native American community has to contend with actual blood quantum laws that regulate the amount of Native heritage you must have in order to qualify as Native. And somewhere in between those two ends of the spectrum is the Asian-American community.

Look, I hope we all understand now that while race really isn't a thing biologically speaking, racism is absolutely definitely a thing in our society and world. So while genetically and physically there really is almost no difference between saying that Bellamy Blake is Asian and saying that Bellamy Blake is white, there remains a profound cultural difference between those two statements. The impact of a show where Bellamy Blake is Asian is very different from the impact of a show where Bellamy Blake is white.

For starters, Bellamy Blake as an openly Asian-American leading man would be a big pushback against the stereotypes that Asian-Americans frequently face in the media. He's the kind of manly, gruff badass that Asian men are so often told they can't be. Bellamy is a born military leader and strategist, but he's also politically powerful, seems to have been born to give epic speeches, and sexy as hell.

His moments of fear and doubt come not when he worries that he's not strong enough or that everyone will laugh at him but when he realizes that he has made the wrong choice or that he has been too hard and cold and violent.

In a culture that tells Asian-American men to be worker drones and to kiss goodbye any concept of being the sexually appealing and active leading man, Bellamy Blake would and could be a breath of fresh air. He's physically strong and imposing, the kind of guy that all the girls on the show swoon after (with good reason), and a fantastically complex figure who has to grapple with great moral questions and issues of life and death. While I don't always appreciate the way that his character is handled, I can confidently say that even with the bad mixed in an openly Asian-American Bellamy Blake would be a huge deal.

For starters, there aren't many mainstream shows right now with an Asian-American lead, let alone a relatively uneducated Asian-American young man in the center role as a military strategist. I mean, Bellamy's not exactly a doctor or restauranteur here, is he?

Then factor in that all of his relationships so far have been interracial ones, that his character has never been subject to racist comments about the size of his penis or his "virility" - sadly topics that still come up on television today because we're kind of awful sometimes - and you have the ingredients for some fantastic representation. So why am I not shouting from the rooftops about the value and importance of Bellamy Blake for Asian-American representation on TV?

Because I am genuinely and deeply worried that he's not.

Like I said above, American culture has a tendency to view race as an either/or proposition. So while we view any person with any amount of African-American heritage as being "black by association", we don't tend to view Asian-Americans the same way. A lot of Asian-American actors, particularly actors from mixed race backgrounds, find themselves slipping under the radar, forced to play characters who are one or the other.

I call these characters "stealth Asians" partly to be funny but also partly to remind myself that they exist. Characters like Blaine Anderson on Glee are nominally white but played by white-passing mixed race actors (in this case Darren Criss, who is part-Filipino), meaning that their characters exist in a liminal space that both is and is not representation of Asian-Americans.

Chloe Bennet of Agents of SHIELD has stated in interviews that she gained more success in the industry after changing her name from Chloe Wang to the more neutral Bennet. “Oh, the first audition I went on after I changed my name, I got booked. So that’s a pretty clear little snippet of how Hollywood works.” Granted, Bennet now represents a case of it working in her favor - her character, Skye/Daisy Johnson, was written to reflect Bennet's racial background and has one Chinese parent and one white American parent. But other cases don't work out as well.

Take, for instance, Keanu Reeves, an actor who most don't even realize is relatively proud of his Chinese and Native Hawaiian heritage. Reeves has spent most of his career, for better or worse, playing white roles and only occasionally allowed to represent his Asian side on screen. As an actor, he falls clearly into our conceptions of whiteness and is forced to live in that bubble.

The result of this is an emptiness or lack where we could have more complex representations of Asian-Americans, particularly Asian-Americans of mixed race. But because of our cultural obsession with race as an either/or proposition, those representations disappear. Chloe Wang becomes Chloe Bennet, Keanu Reeves plays white, Blaine Anderson's heritage is never addressed, and Bellamy Blake is white. Probably.

It's a form of marginalization and, frankly, one of the more insidious kinds. Rather than pushing back at stereotypes and years and years of bad representation, this invisibility problem sweeps it all away and whitewashes the whole situation. So while it's still entirely possible that Bellamy Blake is and was always intended to be a man of color with a Filipino father, that's not how it comes across.

Instead of Bellamy Blake the revolutionary representative of non-stereotypical Asian-American masculinity, we get a character whose race is never mentioned or addressed, whose only references to history or culture are white**, and who represents nothing more than himself.

And since we all know now The 100 has such a problematic time with representations of women and people of color, the lack of explicit representation here makes me nervous. It makes me suspicious. The only other prominent Asian-American characters on this show have been a woman who was killed off too soon and a teenage boy who remains the only one of the main characters to never have a romantic subplot. I'm saying it doesn't look good.

I think of this as cheating at diversity, frankly. It's like the show and showrunners are trying to get the social justice points for having a non-white male lead while also avoiding actually having to have a non-white male lead. And please understand that none of this blame falls on Bob Morley as far as I can tell - it's about the how The 100 and its writers and producers and marketing and directors have fallen into a trap of systemic invisibility. Bellamy Blake might be Asian-American, but until someone actually says that, I can't be sure.

Look. Clearly this issue is a lot bigger than my current beef with The 100 and the question of whether or not we're ever going to find out who Bellamy's dad is. Really what I'm getting at is this: stealth representation is not representation. Casting actors of color or mixed race actors and asking them to "play white" isn't diversity. It's cheating. It's not representation.

Yes, there's a lot of value to be had in casting non-white actors in colorblind roles, but there is also a crucial importance to casting non-white actors in roles meant for non-white characters. Even on a show as "post-racial" as The 100, there is still value and importance in representing cultures and racial backgrounds on screen without erasing them and hand-waving them away. That's all.

Now deep breaths while we take in that jawline.

*In my research preparation for this article (believe it or not, a lot of research goes into these), I discovered that Monique Ganderton is a fantastically prolific and talented stuntwoman. While she's appeared in some film and television roles as an actress, she is predominantly known for her stunt work in stuff like the Resident Evil franchise and The Hunger Games and Guardians of the Galaxy. You know those epic fight scenes between Nebula and Gamora? Well when you look at Nebula, you're really seeing Monique Ganderton. Swoon with me.

**As in, that adorable scene where a small, hopelessly nerdy Bellamy names his little sister after a Roman emperor's sister because that's totally a normal thing for a child to do.

What is it about human nature that demands that we pit people, things, franchises, companies, characters, what have you against each other? Why are we so insistent on only looking at antagonistic narratives where two foes battle it out for supremacy? What does this say about us?

I don't mean this as a criticism of Captain America: Civil War, by the way. I have no problem with watching Steve Rogers and Tony Stark try to punch the crap out of each other over ideological differences. No, my problem here is with the media for turning a movie about really complex issues of regulation and security and humanity into another blow in the manufactured battle between Marvel and its nearest competitor, DC Comics.

Sigh.

On the surface, this comparison has a lot of merit. Batman v Superman and Captain America: Civil War came out within a month and a half of each other and cover a lot of the same themes. Both films center on a conflict between two of the franchises' most respected and beloved heroes. The ideological differences between these heroes forms the spine of a story that threatens to pull everyone apart if they can't find some common ground. And both films fit into a larger framework of big budget blockbusters meant to dominate the box office.

I mean, hell, they're even similar characters. Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark, the wealthy industrialist representatives of the free market, beating down on Clark Kent and Steve Rogers, the idealistic boy scouts from low income backgrounds who distrust capitalism and its governmental support systems. In a lot of ways, sure, these two movies are ripe for comparison. But, then again, they're really not.

While Batman v Superman was only the second film in a franchise just getting its legs under it, Captain America: Civil War is the umpteenth movie for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a culmination of a conflict between characters that started way back in The Avengers. This beef has been a long time coming and is clearly and cohesively worked in the world of the story. Batman v Superman, unfortunately, can't benefit from this long history of films and character development, and so it has to go its own way. Which means that while it's satisfying and pretty true to say that Civil War is the movie that Batman v Superman was trying to make, it's also not even close to the whole story.

This is the whole story.

Captain America: Civil War is in a lot of ways a continuation both of Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Avengers: Age of Ultron. While these are two very different movies with very different agendas, Civil War does an admirable job of spinning them together and showing us the resultant kaleidoscope of characters and themes.

From Winter Soldier we get, well, the Winter Soldier, but we also get a taste of Steve Rogers unwillingness to submit to unlawful government overreach and his belief that it's better to be called a criminal than to allow injustice to go unchecked. From Age of Ultron we get Vision and Wanda Maximoff and a memory of Tony Stark's pervasive fear of what he could be capable of if no one stops him. Put that together, and you get a movie. This movie.

It's a good combination. For all of its flaws - this film really does suffer from an overabundance of superheroes, making each character's time on screen feel a little rushed - Captain America: Civil War is a very good movie about a very complicated issue. It balances the ideological views on both sides of the aisle without making the audience feel like one side is inherently worse than the other and it still tells a pretty damn good story even through a haze of bureaucratic legalese. That takes skill.

But more than just managing to tell a pretty decent story about differences in public policy, where Civil War really succeeds is in breaking your heart. I mean that nicely, by the way. Even with the limited screentime and constraints of a big Hollywood movie, the film does a fantastic job of getting you emotionally invested in their characters and their conflicts, meaning that when they fight you don't get bored partway through - you're on the edge of your seat because everyone in this fight is a little bit important to you and this kind of hurts inside.

Even the characters who are just introduced in this film, like the newest Spiderman (Tom Holland) and our hero of perpetual epicness Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), are written to be emotionally sympathetic and engaging without feeling like they're crammed down our throats. Hell, this movie managed to make me slightly emotionally invested in Tony Stark, and I didn't think that was possible.*

But the real core of the story is the functional love triangle between Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, and Bucky Barnes. Not in a romantic sense, but in the sense that intentionally or not both Tony Stark and Bucky Barnes are competing for Steve's heart.

Tony, representative of the twenty-first century and the new life that Steve has in the here and now with the Avengers and his new friends, is competing with Bucky, the life that Steve knew and misses and desperately wants back, the life before he was Captain America when he was just some kid from Brooklyn. The film, more than anything else, is a conflict between these two forces, Steve's past and his present, to determine his future.

And I loved every minute of it.

I feel comfortable assuming here that most of you have either seen Civil War or are going to soon, so we'll skip the plot summary here and just get right into some analysis. What worked, what didn't work, and how much I want to wrap Bucky Barnes up in a blanket and cuddle him forever. Good? Good. [SPOILERS from here on out.]

Running up to this movie, I was skeptical of how the film would manage to believably pull off the emotional weight of Tony and Steve's conflict. Not because I didn't think that these two characters were capable of disagreeing strongly - the opposite. In the trailer they showed a little piece of a scene where Steve, defending Bucky, tells Tony, "He's my friend." And Tony, betrayed, says back, "So was I." And this should be heartbreaking and wrenching and all that, but all I thought on seeing the trailer was, "Really? Since when?"

Because, let's face it, Steve Rogers and Tony Stark haven't exactly been buddying it up in the Marvel movies so far. In contrast to their epic bromance of the comics, Steve and Tony are not each other's closest friends on the Avengers. They're barely even friends. Steve's best friends in this modern day are clearly Natasha and Sam, and Tony's are Rhodey and Bruce. If we were looking at Steve's speed dial, Tony Stark would probably rank around #7. I mean, he's on there, but not very high.

With all this in mind, I was pleasantly surprised with how the film managed to explore the dissolution of their relationship without trying to make it more than it was. Instead of this movie following the death of intimacy between them, it more follows the death of possibility between them. As in, it shows how even though they're not very close they do really respect each other, and that's what the movie shows being destroyed. So that's well done.

For someone who doesn't particularly care for Tony Stark, I was happily surprised by how much I empathized with him in this film. The Russos did a fantastic job really bringing us into Tony's mindset and emotional state, even bringing us back around to show us how he's trying to deal with his earliest issues, like the death of his parents. By allowing Tony this complexity as the antagonist and showing how his reaction to the regulations is based in his own fear of himself, we aren't allowed to dismiss him. We have to take him seriously.

On the flip side, this movie really is all about Steve and it's so wonderful to see how they managed to tell a story where Steve Rogers is not uncomplicatedly good without turning him into an anti-hero. Instead, the movie examines where Steve Rogers stops and Captain America begins. It's really more about his legacy as Captain America, his identity as himself and how Steve Rogers has been subsumed by his costume until there is little of the actual man left. Civil War completes the arc of these three Captain America films, bringing us full circle in Steve's identity.

In other words, the Captain America movies have always been about the tension between being Steve Rogers and being Captain America. The first film is about a Steve Rogers who desperately wants to be more and better but learns quickly the awful cost of that choice - he loses Bucky and he loses himself. Winter Soldier, then, shows us a world where Steve Rogers is basically gone. All anyone knows or talks about is Captain America - but it's in this film where we see Steve starting to come back to himself. It's where Sam pulls him out and starts to remind him how to live as a person and not a symbol. And it's where Steve gets his glimpses of the only people left in the world who remember him as Steve and not as the Captain: Peggy and Bucky.

So according to this analysis, Civil War is where Steve decides to grab at his past and take back his identity as Steve Rogers. He's tried to be both, but he can't. He can't be Captain America and Steve Rogers at the same time. Civil War is his last attempt, and, tellingly, it's the movie where Peggy Carter dies and Steve almost loses Bucky too. When push comes to shove, Steve decides that he'd rather be one than the other. That's how we get a scene where Steve walks away from it all, from Tony, leaving behind a painted shield and following Bucky Barnes.

When I say that Civil War is a love triangle between Tony and Steve and Bucky, what I also mean is that it's a competition between Captain America and Steve Rogers. Tony represents Captain America - he's standing in for the duty to others and the civic responsibility that led Steve to put on the costume in the first place. There's even a jolt of a scene where Steve has to fight Peter Parker, a standup kid from Queens who wears red, white, and blue and believes in fighting to defend the little guy. Steve instantly likes him, but there's also a sorrow there. Steve is almost done fighting. He's tired. He wants to be himself again, and so he's going to follow Bucky.

Bucky, of course, represents the life of Steve Rogers, the last tie that Captain America has to the person he used to be. Sure, Bucky's memory is swiss cheese and shot all to hell, but with Peggy gone, he's also literally the only person left in the world who remembers who Steve used to be. He's the only person left who knew about Steve Rogers first and Captain America second. So when Steve chooses him, he's making a pretty big statement. Not that we ever thought that Steve might not choose Bucky. Let's be real. That was never happening.

This movie is a love story - there's no getting around that. In fact, the movie seems almost uncomfortably aware of how much they're telling a love story that spans decades and continents and brain-altering technology. I have no explanation for the horrendously awkward Steve/Sharon kiss besides the filmmakers' desperate attempt to make the movie slightly less gay. It didn't work. And, unfortunately, it pushes a generally badass female character into the zone of uncomfortably incestuous love interest, one of the only flat notes this movie hits.

In general though, aside from a discomfort with showing Bucky and Steve - two friends reuniting after seventy years of horror - actually hugging, Civil War does a good job with their relationship. We believe that Steve loves Bucky and vice versa, even when it's painful and Steve has to admit his best friend might be a terrorist or Bucky is asking to be put down before he can kill again. It's heart-wrenching and a little awful and exactly what I was hoping for.

Actually, this brings me to a sidenote: Stucky fandom, pat yourselves on the back. While watching this movie I was genuinely shocked by how accurately a lot of the fics had predicted Bucky's mental state and physical condition after escaping from Hydra. Seriously, you all nailed it, from his tiny apartment where he sleeps in a sleeping bag on the floor to his hoarding of pictures of Steve and his backpack of treasures to his fragile emotional state. I'm very impressed. Carry on.

Anyway, there's a lot that bears mentioning about this film, but if I try to cover it all in this one article we're going to be here until the next Marvel movie comes out. Just trust that we'll talk more about T'Challa and his fantastic character arc in another article, that we'll get to discussing Wanda Maximoff, that we'll take the time to really dig into the movie's representations of mental illness, and hell, we might even spend a few words on Zemo and how he's a brilliant villain. We'll talk about all of it, don't worry. But for now, all I really want to think about are the feels.

And by the feels, what I means it the emotional weight of a movie that allows itself to hang on the skills of its actors. Civil War could have been a pretty standard superhero plot, but it's not because the character development in this film is insane. Even characters who have to step aside here to make way for the larger plot still get moments that remind us of why we relate to them. Sam Wilson, for example, isn't nearly as large a figure in this film as he was in Winter Soldier, but he's not really diminished either. His relationship with Steve remains rock solid, giving him a continuity of character that's really interesting to watch. Especially his interactions with Bucky, which were flat out hilarious highlights of the movie.

Natasha as well gets less screentime than she had in Winter Soldier, or Age of Ultron for that matter, but she still stands as an imposing figure. Her relationship with Steve, inarguably the most developed of the original Avengers, is a throughline for the film that puts the conflict into a much smaller and more human frame. While Tony disagreeing with Steve can be placed as just ideological differences, Natasha disagreeing with Steve hits hard. They're really close, and it's painful to see them on opposing sides even as Natasha flies across the world to give Steve a hug. Literally.

Hell, I hope Marvel is paying attention here because their arguments on why Natasha shouldn't get her own film are getting flimsier by the second. She really steals the show here.

Okay. I could keep going all day, but I really shouldn't. The real upshot here is that Captain America: Civil War is really a better movie than it has any right to be, even if it's still not a perfect one. It has emotional heft, great action, and a core conflict that genuinely does leave you thinking long after you leave the theater. I mean, I'm totally Team Cap, but I appreciate the value of a good moral dilemma with the best of them.***

Reducing this movie down to a pissing contest between Marvel and DC and comparing it endlessly to Batman v Superman is to do both films a great disservice. This movie is its own thing. It's a story about Captain America and the fight for the future of Steve Rogers and it's a love story between two men who would do literally anything for each other. You don't have to say it's anything else to get people's attention, that's more than enough.

Even if I'm still a little sad that Marvel hasn't made Jewish Bucky Barnes canon yet.

#leavebuckyalone

*I get that a lot of people like him, but I just...don't. He's a great antagonist in this, though, and I did definitely feel some real sympathy here.

**I like to think that the writers chose to have Bucky hiding out in Romania so that Sebastian Stan, who is Romanian originally, got to actually speak his first language in a movie. Not sure if that's true, but I'm choosing to believe it because it's adorable.

***Probably more than most people actually. I was a philosophy major, after all.

You know what? It says depressing and awful things about us as a culture and society that when I try to think of friendships between men and women that start as friendship and stay as friendship and never veer into something that isn't friendship, I am struck dumb with the difficulty.

I mean, when you factor out stories where one or the other of the characters isn't human and stories where one or the other of the characters is absolutely definitely gay (and not Chasing Amy gay) and stories where the characters are separated by a significant age gap and stories where the characters are related, stories about heterosexual men and women being friends and just friends are in alarmingly short supply.

Maybe it's because we've all been brainwashed by When Harry Met Sally, but it does seem pretty clear that our culture has bought wholeheartedly into the idea that men and women can't be friends without sex getting in the way. Which is, frankly, stupid.

Furthermore, it feels like we as a culture really don't give friendship its due in general. I mean, we've got movie after movie about the bonds of family and our entire media structure is based on the importance of romantic love, but there is very little out there that's just about friendship. I mean, we've got My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and the occasional buddy cop movie and that's pretty much it. And most of those examples are same-sex friendships. Not to say that same-sex friendships aren't worth celebrating, but it divides the world into "people I can be friends with" and "people I can be romantic with".

Which is, again, stupid. Friendship is one of the best parts of life in large part because it's entirely altruistic. It's deciding to care about someone and let them into your life even though you don't have to and you're not getting sex out of it. Friendship is entirely voluntary - there's no marriage vows or custody agreements for friendship, as much as we sometimes joke about it. Friendship just is, and it's great.

So since I'm all for stories that push back against these sorts of societal blind spots, let's take a quick look at that rarest of birds, a male-female friendship where no one is in love with anyone else, they're not related, and they're really just two people who like each other enough to weather all of the crap that goes along with a relationship between two human beings. They fight, they make up, they share a dog and a superhero codename, and most of all they share life. Because that's how friends work. I'm talking, of course, about Clint Barton and Kate Bishop from the Marvel Comics Universe.

Yes, while it generally gets left out when people discuss the epic gold that is the standalone Hawkeye comic, the friendship between our two Hawkeyes (or Hawkguys if you ask the residents of Clint's building) is both epic and genuine. It's epic because they express their friendship by taking down Russian mobsters together and go to fancy parties together and count on each other to help out even when they're fighting.

It's genuine because, well, they fight. They have flaws. Kate frequently thinks that Clint's life is a mess, that he makes bad life choices, that he needs to stop feeling sorry for himself and get off his ass. And Clint thinks that Kate is spoiled, obnoxious, and too privileged to understand where he's coming from. Neither of them is wrong, and sometimes they're so pissed at each other that they end up on opposite sides of the country resolutely not speaking. But you know what?

That only makes it a more realistic friendship.

The thing about friendship is that it doesn't have an end goal. Despite what Buzzfeed listicles might tell you, there's no one point where you can stop and say, "Yes. We have reached apex friendship. We are Friends." That's not how it works. There's no wedding, there's no ceremony, there's no single defining point that says that you are as friends as you can possibly friend. Friendship doesn't have an end goal, it's a goal unto itself.

This is what I feel like Clint and Kate demonstrate really well. By all accounts they are two people who have just enough in common to feel like they ought to be friends, but they're different enough that probably no one would blame them if they decided to just stick to a mentor-mentee relationship or even a vague acquaintance. They don't have to be friends because that's not how friendship works. And when they decide that they are friends, we don't really see that as a set point with a clear and defined goal. It's just that at some point we the readers understand what they the characters understand. They are friends and they will probably keep being friends. Probably.

The fact that friendship is entirely voluntary makes it all the more heartbreaking when Kate, utterly fed up with Clint's bullshit (and understandably so) steals his dog and goes to the West coast. It's painful to see her do this and to see Clint left at odds without her, but it's also understandable. They're just friends - she doesn't have to stay.

And when she comes back? That means even more too because she doesn't have to. She has every reason in the world to walk away, to not help Clint, to just cut her losses and keep running, but she comes back anyway, because he's her friend.

Factor in the complete and utter lack of any romance between the two of them, and you've got yourself that rarest of birds in American pop culture: a completely platonic, very close friendship between a man and a woman. Rejoice.

I feel the need to point out as well that while it feels easy to say, "Yeah, well, the reason it's platonic is because Kate's too young for Clint," that's a cop out. Comics are totally okay with having women in their early twenties date men in their late thirties. That's not a big age difference for comics at all. Which is alarming when you think about it, but does make the lack of romantic or sexual tension between these two all the more comforting. The comic doesn't go there! Yay!

Instead, the comic focuses on how these two broken people from radically different backgrounds can make each other better people without having to worry about bumping uglies. Clint was raised in abject poverty, was abused, ran away to join the circus, and spent years dealing with a physical disability. Kate grew up in the lap of luxury, emotionally neglected but provided for, and went into the hero business because she kind of didn't have anything better to do. Yet despite this gulf in their experiences, Clint and Kate can love and support each other.

I mean, while other heroes squabble and fight over codenames and proper credit and have rivalries and piss all over each other, Clint and Kate literally share a superhero name with almost no argument.* This doesn't mean that they never get mad at each other or have fights - they patently do fight - but rather that their relationship, despite their differences, is based in a mutual respect that is incredibly hard to shake. Their friendship is solid, even when they're not super enthused about each other. That's pretty great.

As for their friendship being solid, I think the fact that the Matt Fraction and David Aja Hawkeye run is so compelling is because it realistically portrays what happens when a very solid friendship is tested. So for most of this run Clint and Kate really aren't getting along, and that still doesn't change how much we can tell that they care about each other. They care about each other enough to call for improvement.

Kate loves Clint enough to demand that he stop running away and avoiding his responsibilities, and Clint loves Kate enough to demand that she grow up and stand on her own two feet. And yeah, they kind of hate each other sometimes. But that's the great thing about friendship: you can be pissed the hell off and still consider someone one of your closest friends. Friendship is a voluntary system, and good ones can definitely handle the growing pains of a relationship built on genuine intimacy and trust.

It doesn't hurt, of course, that they really do have things in common. Both Kate and Clint are the kind of people who realize they don't have superpowers, shrug, and then go fight crime anyway. They're both masterful archers, both obsessed with the color purple, and both keep feeding their dog pizza even though that is definitely not a good food for dogs.

Friendships, particularly a friendship like Clint and Kate's, should be built on a solid foundation of shared interests and mutual goals, but it's a sign of health and strength when they build past that. When the friendship extends to helping each other out in awkward family situations and supporting each other at funerals. When they've got each others' backs even when they kind of want to punch each other too.

Friendship is great, is what I'm getting at here.

In our society, we prioritize bonds that have clear delineations and defining markers of success. We think about familial love and we obsess over romance. But we give way too little credit to the importance and value of pure platonic friendship - particularly a friendship as close and challenging as what Kate and Clint have. Friendship doesn't have a point, it's a good in itself. There's no markers or guideposts or signs that you're doing it right or wrong. It's just you and another person figuring it out, no ulterior motives or goals to hit.

It's the only kind of relationship where it is by its nature completely voluntary. If you don't think that's the raddest thing, I'm not sure we can be friends.

*What happened was that Clint was Hawkeye, then gave the name up to go undercover and said that Kate could use it. Then he came back and she told him she wasn't going to stop being Hawkeye. So now they're both Hawkeye and the solution seems to work well for them.

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