Kiss My Wonder Woman

Today we're talking about The Long Earth, a recent science-fiction collaboration between Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. Apparently it also has a sequel, which google just told me, and I will be sure to check that out. Since I just found out about that, though, bear in mind that this review kind of hinges on me not having read the sequel.

So, The Long Earth is a conceptual sci-fi novel based on a pretty cool premise: What if our Earth is just one in an almost-infinite string of Earths, all layered on top of each other like a deck of cards? And what if we could get from one Earth to another with just a single step? How would that change us as people? How would that change the world? And what would we find when we kept on stepping?

Obviously, these are compelling questions, and these are the questions that the novel seeks to answer. Going in every-so-vaguely chronological order, the book shows us Earth, our Earth or maybe not, on and around "Step Day" - the day that everyone on the planet found out about the Long Earth. One day there were plans, available for free online, of how to build your own "Stepper". No one knew what they did, but as soon as the Steppers were turned on, thousands disappeared, only to reappear in empty worlds. Two empty worlds, to be precise: Earth West 1 and Earth East 1. Those are the two directions you can step. East or West. And each time, you can only step to one new world.

Well, sort of. It's complicated. Let's leave it at that.

Our main-ish character is Joshua Valiente, a strange boy raised in a group home by a bunch of really unusual nuns. Joshua stepped on Step Day, like every other kid his age, but unlike all those kids, Joshua didn't get sick or scared, and he didn't freak out. He just calmly noted that he was somewhere new, and then helped everyone else get back. Then, when being questioned, Joshua freaked out and stepped without using his Stepper - which shouldn't be possible. Joshua is weird. Joshua is an enigma to the authorities. And Joshua might just be the key to figuring out what the Long Earth is for.

The book then follows about ten years after Step Day, as the world comes to grips with the idea of limitless Earths. At first everyone ventures a little bit away from home, going to Earth West 1 and 2, or whatever, but as time goes on, they step further and further away. Joshua goes in front, like a modern Daniel Boone, always heading out when he sees signs of people coming closer, but then doubling back to say hi to the nuns again, or get his mail. It's on one of these returns to the Datum (the original, inhabited Earth), that he is picked up by the Black Corporation, in order to have an audience with Lobsang. Lobsang is a computer. Lobsang is also, possibly, the reincarnation of a Tibetan motorcycle repairman.

Lobsang is interested in the Long Earth. And Joshua. And lots of things.

But he's most interested in the Long Earth and Joshua. He's willing to blackmail Joshua into taking him out into the Long Earth, into the "High Meggers" - or Earth's a couple of million Earths away - in order to see if there is an end to the Long Earth, to see what's really out there, to try to understand what has happened. Joshua doesn't really have a choice, but it's an intriguing prospect. And so they're off.

That's not the only storyline, of course. There's also the story of Detective Monica Jansson, who ends up heading the Madison, WI response to Step Day, and goes forward as the only person who really understands what stepping means for public policy. And the narrative dabbles with other results, like families that step out into the wild yonder like old time prospectors or settlers. But most interestingly to me, the story deals, if only vaguely, with those people who cannot step. The "phobics", as they're called. And this is where my critique of the book starts.

I mean, it's only a critique insofar as I wish it were different. I don't actually have the answers to these questions, but I rather wish that Baxter and Pratchett did. Because the problem with the book, that I can see, is that it's far too concerned with the exploration of the ideas of what the Long Earth would mean, and not really enough concerned with making a coherent story.

Like, I agree, this is a fascinating concept, and I love the little ways that it explores what would happen ten years down the line as scarcity is literally removed, as a fifth of Earth's population abandons the planet, and as another fifth of the population is forced to stay at home, forever. I love the little weirdnesses in the book, with alternate evolutions on alternate Earths, with the "trolls" and "elves", which are alternate hominids that aren't quite human but are certainly interesting. And the whole idea of the Silence and Joshua's birth and all that jazz. It's all really interesting, sure, but it's not really enough.

Nothing really happens in this book. And that bothers me.

Joshua and Lobsang make this epic journey to the far reaches of the Long Earth, finding all kinds of insane and bizarre worlds along the way, eventually picking up a hitchhiker, Sally, and going all the way out until they find something a bit scary: a sentient ocean called First Person Singular, that has the potential to destroy all life in all the Long Earths. And you know what happens when, after four hundred pages, they meet this creature? Lobsang joins with it psychically, and Joshua and Sally go home. That's it.

But wait! It's not the end! There's still the situation back on Datum Earth, where the phobics are becoming more and more radicalized, incensed that they are stuck on this world while others can gallivant through the universes. The phobics turn political, and Rod, a kid whose whole family left him behind to become pioneers out in the Long Earth, brings a nuclear bomb to the center of Madison, WI.

Only in a world with stepping, it's easy not to get caught up in a nuclear blast. Everyone just steps away, and helps those who cannot step, and no one is hurt, not even Rod, and it's all happy endings and huh? I mean, I appreciate philosophically the idea of how hard it is to have a war when everyone can just step around it, but still. Narrative wise, that sucks.

And honestly, narrative wise, the whole book sucks. It's a mass of cool ideas and neat concepts, but poor storytelling, and ultimately limited emotional connection. You don't really care about any of them, because they're less characters than they are examples in the thought experiment that is this book.

Like I said, though, it's not that this is a bad book, per se. And I will read the sequel. I just expected a lot more from this. I expected the kind of emotional connection I usually get in Terry Pratchett's works. But it seems that in reaching for a higher concept and trying to explore that concept to its fullest potential, the book has lost out on engaging deeply enough in any one story to create a meaningful narrative. And that's just too bad.

So, fun story, the other day I was in Barnes and Noble, like you do when you're me and totally pathologically addicted to buying books, and I was just browsing in the nerd toy section, when this guy started talking to me. And I'm not exaggerating how random it was. It was literally a case of accidental eye contact, and then the guy started telling me how he was sad because he couldn't friend a girl on facebook because she has a boyfriend and it was a shame because she was such a cute geek.

Friendzoned. What can you do? And apparently my breasts qualified me as a secondary character to whom he should reveal all his relationship troubles. Joy.

Whatever the reason, he proceeded to spill his guts to me as I casually tried to escape by walking towards the door and suddenly into aisles, etc. I guess this girl was really nice and friendly to him, but then he facebook stalked her and found out that she had a boyfriend, and they looked really good together, so he couldn't in good conscience be her friend. Because she has a nice boyfriend.

When I pointed out that this was whack and that he shouldn't use friendship as a currency to get sex, he was like, "Well, yes, but I just hate being friendzoned. And I don't want sex, I just want a relationship."

Friendzoned. I hate that word. I hate that word so, so much. More than you can possibly imagine. Or, if you're a girl, probably exactly as much as you can imagine. Because let's be real, ladies, this word is the bane of our existence. All my dudebros out there are really confused now, so let me back up a couple of steps. (And, in case you're interested, I will finish the story of creepy bookstore guy at the end of the article, so stick around.)

Friendzoning is a term that really came to prominence in the late 90s with a little show called Friends. It was the term they had for Ross and Rachel's relationship, where Ross waited too long to make a move on Rachel, and as a result was put in the "friend zone", where she was incapable of seeing him in a romantic light. He was trapped, and the only way out was to escape the friendzone.

It's a word you hear a lot on the internet today, with boys left and right complaining that their female friends have stuck them in the friendzone, or have friendzoned them. What they mean is that their female friends (girls do this too, but way, way less regularly), are doing them a disservice by choosing to value their friendship instead of seeing them primarily as potential sexual partners. They insist that being friends with a girl is some kind of punishment that the guy gets because he wasn't aggressive enough, or because this particular girl, "Only dates assholes."

So, basically, the friendzone is a made-up place that only exists in the minds of insecure boys who believe that the only reason a girl might have to not date them is that they are "too nice."

Spoiler alert: that's not the reason she doesn't want to date you. And, more than that, friendzoning is a terrible and harmful and generally disgusting way to look at the world. Why?

Because it supports the idea that the only relationship with merit is a sexual or romantic one. Male/female friendships are just the stepping stones to a sexual connection, in this view. If a woman is friends with a man and doesn't want to have sex with him, then she is being a slut, or a tease. If she confides in him emotionally, she is being misleading, and he is within his rights to call her a whore. And if she continues to not date him, and even has the temerity to complain about her romantic relationships to him, because she thinks he is her friend, then she's a bitch who can't see what's right in front of her.

More than that, though, it also absorbs the idea that any relationship with a nonsexual end goal, or with no end goal, like a friendship, is inherently worth less than one that could lead to sex. So, being friends with a girl is only worthwhile if it means that eventually she might want to date you. Being friends with a girl because she is your friend is stupid and pointless. The only relationships that matter in this worldview are sexual or romantic ones.

Sound familiar?

My feelings exactly.

The problem with this, with this whoooole thing is that it completely ignores a pretty important part of this equation. The girl. By which I mean, guys who complain about friendzoning are, by their complaints, implying that they don't think the girl they like has or should have any agency as a person. They don't think she should get to pick her romantic or sexual partners, because obviously she's bad at it. But here's the thing: even if she is bad at it, even if she genuinely dates assholes or idiots, that doesn't mean she's any less entitled to doing so.

It's her life. If she wants to keep dating idiots, then she can keep dating idiots. And if she doesn't want to date you, then she doesn't have to. Kindness and friendship are not tokens that you feed into a meter which eventually rewards you with a girlfriend. They're human things you do for other humans because you are also a human.

Now, what does all of this have to do with Brooklyn 99? Everything.

A while back I wrote a rather protracted rant about the show, complaining that while I love Detective Rosa Diaz (Stephanie Beatriz), I was pissed as hell about her storyline. That storyline involved one of the other detectives, the schlubby Detective Boyle (Joe Lo Truglio). At the start of the season, Boyle has a crush on Rosa. Or, more than that, Boyle is obsessed with Rosa. He has dedicated himself to dating her. He obsesses over her. He buys hundreds of dollars in movie tickets on the off chance that she will go out with him. Boyle wants Rosa, and he is sure he's going to get her.

Rosa wants nothing to do with Boyle. He's not her type (the show has established that Rosa likes her guys tall, dark, hot, and monosyllabic), and she's really up front about that. She doesn't want to date him. She'd be okay with being friends, but Boyle keeps trying to make it weird. And here's the thing. We assume, as we're watching this, that Boyle is going to win. That at some point, Boyle will wear Rosa down and she'll go on a date with him, and she'll suddenly realize that she does love him after all. Because that's how the story works, isn't it?

The show even went so far as to have Boyle take a bullet for Rosa, who then felt guilty about how she still didn't want to date him, and then have Boyle reveal that he wasn't taking a bullet for Rosa especially, but that he was sure, someday, "When you do go out with me, and I know you will..." Boyle is sure that Rosa will one day date him because he's a nice guy. Because movies have always told him that this is how it works. And because Rosa is the girl of his dreams. So obviously the plot is going to bring them together, right?

Well, no, actually. So, when I wrote that article I was pissed as hell. But now? I feel awesome. I feel awesome because Boyle is now in an actual good relationship with a genuinely interesting woman who likes him for him and who is actually his type. She's a foodie, she loves classical cinema and doing nerdy stuff, she's an older, sophisticated lady, and she's totally crazy about Boyle.

But even better than Boyle finally being in a functional relationship, you know what happens in the episodes after? Boyle realizes exactly how creepy he's been to Rosa, and he apologizes for it. I mean there is literally a scene where Boyle apologizes for obsessing over Rosa and blaming her for not going out with him. And she forgives him, because she's a good person. They have fun together. They're friends. Real friends. Because Boyle has given up on his crazy idea of dating her, and is now treating Rosa as a person.

Plus, the show makes it clear that Boyle and Rosa weren't going to work as a couple. You know why? Because they have absolutely nothing in common. The woman that Boyle ends up with isn't a carbon copy of Rosa, she's a completely different person. Someone who actually likes the things that Boyle likes and who enjoys going to fancy restaurants and symphonies and stuff like that. Stuff Rosa hates. In reality, the biggest obstacle to Rosa and Boyle getting together wasn't the friendzone, it was the simple fact that Rosa and Boyle don't have anything in common. They don't like the same things at all. Why would they date?

And that's the part that most guys forget about friendzoning. That in all probability, if the two of you aren't dating, there's probably a good reason. Maybe she has a boyfriend already. Maybe she isn't attracted to you. Maybe you have absolutely no common interests. None of those things make her a bitch for not dating you. It's just life.

So back to bookstore guy, and the other really important side of friendzoning and "Nice Guys". I said I was walking around the bookstore trying to lose him, and while that sounds funny, and it was kind of funny in the moment, it was also kind of not. I mean that I was very literally trying to lose him, because I didn't want him following me out of the store. I did not want this guy to see my car, to remember what it looked like, to find out my name, anything. I do not want this guy to be able to find me.

Why? I'm actually bigger than he is, and I could probably take him in a fight. I doubt he has kickboxing experience, and I really doubt that spends his days lifting fifty pounds of deadweight over his head (hey, who says nannying doesn't build good skills?).

But he still made me nervous. This was a guy who couldn't take a hint. Who didn't get that I didn't want to talk to him. He was following me. And no matter what part of you is rational and knows the odds, as a girl, in a society where you expect to be blamed for whatever happens to you, it's gonna make you nervous.

He wasn't respecting my space, just like he wasn't respecting the choices of that girl he met. He wasn't respecting my right to my own space and my own privacy, and, really, my own body. I was there to give him the informational scene where I commiserate with him about his love life. I was a side character in the novel of his life, and it didn't matter what I actually thought of this encounter. It was all about him.

That is what made me nervous.

At any rate, the encounter ended surprisingly tamely. Finally fed up with his complaining and his terrible reasoning, I told him to stop treating this girl's friendship as some kind of consolation prize, and as he scratched his chin and said, "That's actually...really good advice," I literally ran away.

And now I can't go back to Barnes and Noble. Well, I can, but I don't really want to. I saw him there again a week later and I hid in the travel section until he went away. He was following a female employee around the store, talking at her.

So this, all of this, is why I'd like to thank Brooklyn 99 today. Because it realized that it had a problem, that Boyle's behavior was unacceptable, and that it was promoting rape culture. And then it freaking fixed the problem.

Thank you.

By popular demand, it seems that today, as the last day of Black History Month, and as the last SFC Friday in our series, we're talking about Storm, or Ororo Munroe from the X-Men. Rock on. Last week we talked about Rue (Hunger Games), and before that we discussed Jenny Mills (Sleepy Hollow), and Jessica Pearson (Suits). I feel like we've covered a pretty good swath, insofar as one can cover a swath in four measly articles.

Anyway. Today is all about Storm. First off, we have to talk about how awesome she is, because she is hella awesome. But then we have to talk about something else, something (arguably) equally important: How did a character as ragingly amazing as Storm end up as one of the crappiest superhero adaptations in recent memory? Because let's be real, as good an actress as Halle Berry is in Oscar bait movies, well, that's how bad she is at playing superheroes. I've not even been able to get through Catwoman, and her Storm really isn't much better.

But first, let's talk about what we love about Storm. And, let's be real, there's a lot to love.

First off, there's her backstory. Storm has the kind of blissfully crazy and jam-packed backstory that all the best superheroes have. But hers is, well, kind of better than all of theirs. I don't think I can put it better than Nerdy But Flirty did, but I'll try: Ororo Munroe was born in Harlem, to the daughter of a long line of Kenyan priestesses and an African-American photojournalist. Shortly after her birth, her parents moved to Cairo, where they tragically died. Ororo (not Storm yet, that came later), grew up as a pickpocket in the streets of Cairo, before fleeing out in the desert as her nascent powers began to emerge. After nearly dying in the Sahara (but surviving because, you know, weather powers), she found her way to her mother's ancestral village in Kenya, where she learned to harness her powers and came to be worshipped as a goddess.

And then eventually she found her way to the United States and wound up with the X-Men. One fun version of how that happened has her catching Professor Xavier's notice as a chid in Cairo when she stole his wallet. Fun times. At any rate, Ororo, now Storm, joined up with the X-Men and quickly rose to prominence in the team. She became the default team leader when Cyclops was unavailable (dead, on leave, or being beset by relational problems again), and developed a strong maternal bond with some of the younger girls at the school. Kitty Pryde particularly.

Oh, and there's this bit of backstory they added in later where she saved T'Challa, or Black Panther, from racist thugs when they were kids, and then when they meet later in life, they fall in love, and he asks her to marry him and be queen of his country (Wakanda), and she says yes, even though she's turned down kings before. It's all very romantic, until, like always happens in comic books, it turns sour and they have to take a break, and she rebounds by leading a group of all female superheroes under the comic title X-Men, because heck yes Storm is that cool.

Did I mention that Storm had a mohawk at one point? It's not super relevant, it just makes me very, very happy.

So, obviously from my description, Storm is a cool character, with a backstory that sure as hell deserves a movie by now. Seriously. She's by far the most interesting character on the X-Men, and one of the most compelling figures in all of Marvel canon. Get on that, Fox. Stop making movies about Wolverine, and make a couple about our lady of bad weather, Storm. Please.

But the other thing that should be apparent from that description is that none of that was accidental. Storm is a cool character because a lot of writers throughout the years took the time and effort to make her one. She was created to be a strong character, she was intended to be a team leader, and she was. Storm isn't just a nice character who happened to get popular and then the writers took credit for that. No. She was always intended to be a lead. And that? That is awesome.

Because you have to remember that Storm is not a new character. She first came out in the 70s, and she's been a lead in X-Men literally since she showed up. She's the most recognizable black superheroes, and one of the first black female superheroes full stop. I cannot stress enough how important she is as a character, and I cannot stress enough how happy I am that so many writers put so much effort into making sure she stayed important.

Now there's the bad news, though. Because as much as Storm is kick-ass and amazing and occasionally practices nudism because she thinks we're all prudes and is the emotional core of the X-Men and may have dated Wolverine that one time and kind of sort of ruled an African country for a bit and refused to choose between being a queen and being a superhero, she's really one of the worst characters in the X-Men movies.

How the hell did that happen?

Like I said above, I think some of that has to do with bad casting. Halle Berry is a great actress, but she is not a natural at this superhero thing. She's no Chris Evans (Captain America and The Human Torch) or Ben Affleck (Daredevil and Batman). Hmm. Maybe Ben Affleck was a bad example. Anyway. Halle Berry really never seems comfortable as Storm. She never seems like she's having fun or that she's getting into it or even that she's there for anything more than the paycheck. If anything, she looks slightly pained all the time in all of the movies. And that's just no fun.

But that's not the only problem. I would say that the bigger issue we have with Storm is that the writers, the Hollywood script writers, that is, had absolutely no idea what to do with a strong, interesting black woman with no romantic ties to anyone in the story. Like, they just had no clue. They couldn't not put Storm in, because she's one of the best known X-Men, and one of the most popular female superheroes at all, but they also didn't know what to do with her. So they gave her a few quippy (weird) lines, and then mostly stuck her in the background while the white men sorted out the plot.

And then they did that in the second movie. And the third one. Why? Because they had no freaking clue what to do with her.

I get it. I really do. Change is scary and hard. If you write one female character of color as a person who doesn't need a man or a white person in order to relate to the plot, then you might have to write all of them that way! This leads to madness and chaos!

By which I mean that I do not get it, and the failure of the X-Men movies to provide us with an even vaguely recognizable Storm fills me with anger.

However. I have a solution to this. A good solution. You want to hear it?

Give Storm her own freaking movie. Now. Not in five years, now. I promise you that we'll go see it. And you know what? Don't cast Halle Berry in it. I know that black actresses scare you, Hollywood, but hold it together and bear with me for a second. You know who would make an awesome Storm? Bianca Lawson. Aka, the chick who played Kendra on Buffy and Ms. Morrell on Teen Wolf, and fourteen kajillion other interesting, snarky, clever women in between. Bianca Lawson should play Storm. And you should write her a movie that works. A movie with her full backstory, a movie about a woman who refuses to choose between being queen and being a superhero, a movie about a woman who has almost limitless power over the weather, and who decides that she'd like to teach high school for a little while.

Give us a movie about Storm, the real Storm. The woman who loves Kitty Pryde like her own daughter, and who is such a badass she's beating up racist thugs as a pre-teen. Give us Storm who doesn't really remember American social mores some of the time, and really doesn't care. Give us Storm who was worshipped as a goddess and didn't let it go to her head, but definitely doesn't mind a little adulation and fawning here and there. Give us Storm. Give us her in all her awesome glory. And you know what we'll give you in return?

Money. Lots of it. So get on that, Hollywood.

Bianca Lawson. Just saying.

If you grew up in the nineties, or if you had a pulse then, let’s be real, you probably remember when A Knight’s Tale came out. It starred a young Heath Ledger, hot off the also epic and amazing 10 Things I Hate About You, and I don’t know anyone who wasn’t super pumped to see him jousting and speaking with an English accent and being all medieval. And then we saw the movie. It was…not what we expected.

But not in a bad way. I’ve heard a lot of people who fondly reminisce about the first ten minutes of the film, where they were so confused because we were all expecting a warm, fuzzy traditional hero story, and what we got was Queen, sing-a-longs, classic rock, and naked Paul Bettany. It was a little surprising.

And the movie itself got a lot of accolades, not just for being possibly the funnest thing ever (still true), but for being revolutionary and daring. After all, it’s the story of a poor boy who dreams of becoming a knight and decides to make his dreams come true, even though he could die if anyone finds out, and even though he faces extraordinary obstacles and he has to learn how to joust and he’s not actually very good at being a nobleman. William Thatcher (Ledger) wants to joust and “change his stars”, and that’s exactly what he does. Yay!

Only as we all got older, it became increasingly apparent that while A Knight’s Tale is still the most stinking fun you can have in a movie theater (Alan Tudyk for the win), and it had a crazy talented cast (seriously, all of those people went on to do super awesome stuff), the story itself really wasn’t all that revolutionary. At least not when it comes to class.

You see, the story is about William Thatcher, a nice young man who is sold in service to an aging knight to be his squire and make his fortune. Young William grows up on the road with the knight and his other two squires, Watt (Tudyk) and Roland (Mark Addy, also from Game of Thrones). One day the old knight dies right before a tournament, and while Watt and Roland are kind of happy, because it means they can go home, William is angry. He’s hungry, they have no money, and they’re stuck in the middle of nowhere France.

So he hatches a terrible, impossible scheme. He will dress up in the knight’s armor and joust for him, which will win them the tournament, as long as he doesn’t fall off the horse, and then they can use the tournament prize to buy food or go home or anything.

It works, and William is hooked. He convinces Roland and Watt to keep the scam going. He can pretend to be a knight, and he’ll learn how to joust, and they can enter in tournaments and make lots and lots of money. Foolproof, right? Except for the part where William is terrible at being a nobleman, and they don’t have any papers or proof that he’s really who he says he is, and his armor is crap and all that. Some of these problems are more fixable than others.

For example, they happen upon Chaucer (Bettany) in the road, having succumbed to gambling debts, and agree to give him some clothes and a ride on the horse in return for proof of Will’s nobility. Naturally, Chaucer sticks around through the rest of the film. Along the way they also meet Kate (Laura Fraser), a blacksmith who makes the best armor in the land and becomes Will’s personal armorer. And then he meets Jocelyn (Shannyn Sossamon), a noblewoman who entrances and entices Will. He falls for her, and the movie’s pretty self-explanatory from there on out.

Oh, and there’s a bad guy, Lord Adhemar (Rufus Sewell), who also wants Jocelyn and who is a right dick, but the whole thing really follows a pretty standard sports movie script. Sure, it’s kind of weird because it’s set in the middle ages, and, again, it’s a Queen soundtrack, but whatever. It’s awesome.

The thing is, while you want to look at this as some kind of class warfare, or as a victory for the people when Will, in the end, is allowed to joust, it really isn’t. And that kind of stinks.

Will gets found out eventually, because of course he does, and he is sent to the stocks, but his crew stands with him and it’s all very heartwarming, and then Prince Edward Colville (James Purefoy), the Prince of Wales shows up. Will earned his respect earlier in the film when he didn’t refuse to joust against him (everyone else withdrew because you can’t joust at royalty), so the Prince is here to see what’s up. And he decides that since Will is such a nice guy, he’s going to save him.

Only he saves Will by making an announcement: Will’s family is actually one that is long ago descended from the royal line, which makes Will actually a nobleman, and therefore he wasn’t lying and can totally joust in the big tournament. Yay!

Or not. Because let’s think about this for a second. The big reveal, the saving moment, is when there is a deus ex machina that doesn’t destroy the class system in place, but rather enforces it. Yay, Will can joust, but only because Colville was willing to lie and say that he’s of royal blood. If he weren’t, he wouldn’t be able to joust. So the common man still can’t participate. They still have fewer rights. So, it’s actually not revolutionary at all.

Well, it’s not revolutionary at all with regards to class. It is pretty surprising with regards to something else: gender. That’s right. This movie? Secretly kind of awesomely feminist.

Let’s roll it back. Remember Jocelyn, Will’s lady friend? Well, one of the more defining things about her character, insofar as her character has defining traits (she’s a pretty standard movie girlfriend), is that she loves fashion and dances and parties and girly stuff. And that’s cool. Her costumes are pretty awesome, and the scene where they dance to David Bowie is super rad.

But there’s a scene right after Will’s won another tournament that really makes you realize that Jocelyn, bland character that she is, is kind of stinking awesome. So, Will’s just won the tournament, but he only won because Adhemar withdrew (because he wouldn’t joust against the aforementioned Colville), and Will is pissed. He really wants to beat Adhemar. So he’s storming around, throwing what can only generously be referred to as a tantrum.

Jocelyn comes up, all excited about the ball, and Will lays into her. Insults her. He takes out all of his rage and frustration on her, complaining that she’s so obsessed with dresses and balls and stupid stuff, while he’s over here, thinking about what really matters. It’s disgusting and annoying, but it’s pretty standard movie stuff, let’s be real.

What Jocelyn does next, however, is not standard movie stuff. Instead of apologizing or crying or even screaming at him, Jocelyn just looks at Will very calmly and says, “Better a silly girl with a flower than a silly boy with a horse and a stick.”

I want you to think about that for a moment, because while on the one hand it is a pretty sick burn, it’s also a freaking shocking statement to come out of a movie that is otherwise a perfectly comfortable masculine sports movie with traditional gender roles. This one line, this line where we as the audience are meant to be appalled at Will’s behavior and rooting for Jocelyn, subverts the entire idea of the movie itself: namely, that it is somehow important that Will win these tournaments.

In one moment, Jocelyn reminds him (and us) that no, it’s really not.

More than that, though, Jocelyn challenges and shuts down the idea that his pursuits are more worthwhile than hers. She speaks out against the idea that because Will is doing something traditionally masculine, that his efforts are more important than her love of dresses and social events. Jocelyn is challenging the idea that masculinity is inherently worth more than femininity.

Because, when you think about it, it’s totally true. Yeah, Will loves jousting and by jousting he’s supporting his friends and making a living and getting to do something he’s good at and enjoys.

Well, Jocelyn loves parties and dresses and social stuff. She’s good at it. Hell, she’s used her party magic to save Will’s ass before, thus keeping him from being a laughingstock of the jousting circuit and keeping him from being a target of investigations into his heritage or people who just plain don’t like him. If you look at the movie, Jocelyn is actually a more effective figure than Will.

She’s the one who saves him from public humiliation (and possible imprisonment). She’s the one who goes to rescue his father and bring him to Will’s tournament. Jocelyn is, in fact, the more powerful of the two. She’s the one with political know-how, and she’s the one who has the connections to get Will freed. Oh, and there's this tiny little thing where she knows her own worth. Like, really well.

The concept of the plot, in general isn't super feminist, but it takes a surprising turn. Jocelyn has come back to the tournaments because she's mostly forgiven Will, but not totally. They meet, and he stumbles all over himself trying to convince her that he will win the tournament for her. She (rightly) points out that literally every man has promised to win for her. What she wants is someone who will lose for her.

Think about it for a second. She's asking him to damage his life and livelihood by proving his love to her. On the surface, that sounds kind of sadistic and like a terrible girlfriend. But what it really says is that she knows exactly what she is worth.

For Will to promise that he will win for her does nothing for Jocelyn. Will wants to win anyways, so saying he's going to do it for her doesn't mean crap. It's nice and all, but it shows zero commitment. For Will to lose, however, goes against all of his previously held values. If he loses, and loses in her name, then he's actually putting her needs ahead of his own, and therefore is a worthy mate. Because remember, up to this point, it's pretty much all been on Jocelyn's side. Oh yeah, Will's been pursuing her, but Jocelyn is the only one with something on the line in this relationship: her future. If she's tied to Will and he turns out to be a dud, she's screwed (thanks, patriarchy). Jocelyn pretty understandably wants to make sure Will is all he says he is.

That scene, paired with the other one, gives us a pretty cool view of Jocelyn as a character. She's interesting. She's complex. And she knows a whole lot more about what's going on her than it seems at a first glance.

Also, it is nice to see a female love interest in a period piece who isn't white as the driven snow? Sossamon, who plays Jocelyn, is of mixed ancestry, but some of it is distinctly non-white, and the fact that it's in the film, but never really mentioned or made a thing of is cool. She's still the most beautiful girl, and all the men want to have her, even though she doesn't actually fit the usual ideal of medieval beauty. (And, as a sidenote, Berenice Bejo plays her handmaid, who is rad, and also Latina. Just saying.)

The plotline about the jousting and Will losing to prove his love is great, even if it does rather immediately get jossed so we can get back to the main story. (Jocelyn comes back as Will is losing and demands that now he win for her!). The point, however, stands. Jocelyn is an awesome character, but she's one that we've been trained to disdain, because she's unabashedly feminine. Because Jocelyn actually enjoys parties and dressing up, we’re normally allowed to think of her as silly or useless, as opposed to Kate, who is a blacksmith, a traditionally masculine job, and something “useful”.

In fact, they’re both useful, and they’re both important. Jocelyn isn’t worth less than Kate or Will because the things she likes are girly, and Kate isn’t worth less than either of them because her work is manual labor. When Jocelyn lays the smackdown on Will, and then follows it up by ignoring the ever-loving crap out of him for a few months, as a feminist I feel happy. She’s saying the thing. She’s pointing out what we’re all too blinded by the movie to realize: that Will’s dream is just as stupid as hers.

For me, this little moment redeems a lot in the movie. It saves the fact that this is a film that doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test, that cut one of the only female characters completely out of the film (Olivia Williams as Chaucer’s hilarious wife), and that Jocelyn, for all her moments of feminist awesomeness, is a pretty bland character.

This single moment makes the movie what it always claimed to be: revolutionary.

If you don't like this movie, I'm not sure we can be friends. Sorry.

So before we go into this, I want you all to know that I secretly (not very secretly at all) adore Veggie Tales. I was a little bit older than the target demographic when they started coming out, but that has in now way stopped me from loving those little Bible-verse spewing vegetables with my whole childish heart. I have at various points in my life own plushies of Bob, Larry, and Junior Asparagus, and I totally was super pumped the year Mom gave me the Veggie Tales Christmas Album in my stocking.

I saw this not to establish that I am a dork (have you met me?) but to explain that when I criticize this show, as I am about to do, I do it out of a place of love. As Veggie Tales themselves should know, when you love someone or something, you demand that it be its best, because you can see the good there, and you are saddened that it is being covered up.

Covered up, in this case, by hair.

I get what you're thinking - namely, "Huh?" - and I will endeavor to explain. Veggie Tales is a series of short to feature length computer animated films that center around a bunch of vegetables reenacting stories from the Bible, or just going through basic religious analogies. They were created to give kids a fun and unique way to learn about the Bible, and from that perspective, they're dang cute. They're not super preachy, the songs are hella catchy (I still have that album), and the characters are fun. Overall, they're an easy, quick way for religious parents to give their kids some Biblical education without boring the pants off them or trying to ram it down their throats. And speaking as someone who remembers BibleMan (shudder), I am all for this.

The problem with Veggie Tales isn't so much in the content as in the way that the content is brought to life: the characters. Our main characters are all male: Larry the Cucumber, Bob the Tomato, Junior Asparagus, Archibald Asparagus, Pa Grape, and so on. I mean, literally, I can keep going off, just naming male characters who had some level of important role in the stories, recurring characters who just so happened to be male.

That in and of itself isn't weird. I mean, it's a little weird that we're giving vegetables defined genders, but then it's also weird that a bunch of vegetables built a pirate ship in the sink and somehow got ahold of vegetable sized laz-e-boys, so what do I know?

No, the issue is when it comes to the female characters. By which I mean that there are hardly any. At all. And the ones there are...suck.

Just going off the top of my head here, these are the female characters I can name from the Veggie Tales movies: that weird carrot thing, Junior's mom, Madame Blueberry (who only appeared in her film), and Esther (also only appeared in her film). Oh, and there's another really bizarre thing pulling them all together: only the female vegetables have hair.

Like, again, I don't want to belabor the realism here, because these are vegetables telling Bible stories, but isn't that kind of weird? It seems like they should pick one: either none of the vegetables should have hair (except the peach, and that's really just a one-off joke), or they all do. Making it so that only the female vegetables have hair says something rather uncomfortable about the people who make Veggie Tales. It says that they don't think women are women if they don't have hair.

Stay with me here.

It has to do with gender differentiation when you're dealing in a medium where there is no natural gender distinction. This is a kids' program, so they're not about to give a vegetable breasts, right? And besides breasts, when you get down to it, there really aren't any other super distinctive secondary sexual characteristics that differentiate men from women. There certainly aren't any when you come to vegetables.

What we're left with, then, are cultural characteristics to connote gender differentiation. And since, again, these are vegetables (and occasionally fruit), it's hard to make distinctions. So I guess the animators looked at all of that and though, "Hair. We'll give them hair. And dresses. Oh, and bows! Girls like bows!' And then they were done.

The problem here is that it creates a weird subconscious space in the heads of the little kids they're trying to reach. Boys can be whatever: they can be gourds or grapes or cucumbers or tomatoes or anything in the world. They can be silly or angry or stuffy or bored or anything in the whole wide world. But girls, girls can be pretty. Only pretty.

I mean, look at the female-centric stories that Veggie Tales has chosen to tell: Esther (the story of a girl so pretty she saved the Jews), and Madame Blueberry (an allegory about consumerism and materialism). There are a couple more since I stopped watching, but those, Sweetpea Beauty: A Girl After God's Own Heart and Princess and the Pop Star don't sound particularly promising.

And I want you to remember something really important here. These movies are not old. Veggie Tales started in the nineties. So in the past twenty years, they've managed to have four distinguishably female titles, and only a tiny handful of female characters, none of whom are nearly as prominent as their male characters, and all of whom are bogged down by needless gender signifiers.

For crying out loud, Larry the Cucumber doesn't even wear clothes, let alone "gender appropriate" ones!

All of this bothers me. Partly because it's really kind of distressing that the message they're sending girls is that they should be pretty and stay out of the way, because they have no part in the larger story (which is just wrong, especially Biblically), and partly because if it weren't for this, I would be ready to celebrate this series for their gender coolness!

Because the characters are vegetables (and fruit), the animators seem to have been more comfortable giving the male characters feminine traits. Like, Larry the Cucumber likes soap operas and doesn't feel bad about it, and he cries sometimes, and he's very sweet, and all that. But since there are no female characters to speak of, this doesn't come off as gender equality and open-mindedness, it comes off as just Larry being silly. Not important.

And there are so many opportunities for them to have cool female characters. Even just in the crowd scenes! In Josh and the Big Wall, arguably my favorite, there are literally no female characters. None. Zero. Nada. They have crowd scenes where all the Israelites are gathered, and you know what? All the Israelites are dudes. All the people of Jericho? Dudes. Even the one major female character from that story, who is incredibly instrumental and actually so important that she is listed by name in the lineage of Christ (which is a big deal, for all you non-religious types out there), is totally written out of the story.

Hmmph.

What this all does is send the message that girls are nice and pretty, but ultimately they don't matter to the larger story. And that's just crap.

So, Veggie Tales, please fix this. I want to be able to show you to my kids someday, but I don't want to show them something that could give them the wrong impression of God and his love for everyone, of both genders. Be better than this.

"Oui, oui, Jean Claude!"

You know that scene in Jaws where the chick is swimming in the water and the shark is coming and she doesn't know - you know, the only scene everyone remembers from Jaws? Well, that's how I am with deadlines. I totally forgot that I have a pretty big one coming up this weekend, and that I actually care if I hit it on time, so for the next couple of days, I'm taking a mini-break from blogging to get my stuff done.

I should be back on Friday, but if not, I'll totally be back on Monday. And in the mean time, watch yourself some Netflix. Maybe catch up on Leverage or splurge with all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Treat yourself. You've earned it.

I'll just be over here. Regretting my life choices.

Hooray, I finished in time! And, also hooray, Hannibal is back for season two! Okay, so technically it was back last week, but now that the second season has officially started, and we've gotten a feel for it (trust me, it's just as good as the last one, yay), I think it's time to take a minute to remember the women of that show.

Bow our heads for a second and remember the awesome ladies taken from us too soon, and then raise our eyes to give thanks for the great characters we still have. Characters like Beverly Katz and Dr. DuMaurier and Alana Bloom. Specifically, today, Dr. Bloom. Why? Because I said so, that's why.

Well, and because Alana is in a unique situation as the season begins. She is the only character truly sympathetic to Will's plea of innocence, and she's also the only one he stands a good chance of really convincing. But more than that, Alana has integrity. A lot of it. And she's strong. Strong enough to stand up for what she believes in, even when the FBI itself is demanding she back down. Alana Bloom will tear down the heavens themselves if she thinks an injustice has occurred. And she'll do it with a soft hand and a smile.

Because that's the thing that's so interesting about Alana. Not that she's a strong woman with an ingrained sense of justice, or even that she's the one most sympathetic to Will, but that she's kind. I mean, genuinely truly kind. Her first instinct when her best friend and possible love interest turns out to be a psychopath (maybe) isn't blame or recrimination or even self-pity. It's kindness.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I know there are at least a few of you out there who are totally confused by now. "Who is this Alana?" you seem to say, as I imagine you. I always imagine you hypothetical readers wearing Hawaiian shirts, just so you know. Not sure why. "Who is this Dr. Bloom, and why does it matter that she is kind?" you say, sipping your banana daquiri. "What's Hannibal even about, anyway? And can I get a refill?"

Hannibal is NBC's interpretation of the Hannibal books by Thomas Harris. The books were, as I'm sure you know, previously adapted as the movie Silence of the Lambs, as well as several other less good movies that we're not going to mention here. Anyway. Hannibal follows FBI Special Agent Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), as he consults for the FBI. Will is uniquely gifted with empathy, an ability to see the killers behind their crimes and get deep inside their heads. Unfortunately for Will, this is a gift that comes with a price. While it does make him amazing at solving cases, it also makes him deeply unstable.

His boss, Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne), refuses to let Will out into the field unless he's talking to a psychiatrist. Now, he could to talk to Dr. Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas), but she's more of his friend than his shrink, and that's vaguely unethical. Instead, Alana refers Will over to another psychiatrist she knows: Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen). And here's where things get really interesting.

Hannibal likes Will, and eagerly agrees to take him on as a patient, but not out of any altruism or sense of charity. Hannibal thinks Will's brain is fascinating, and he would like nothing more than to muck around in there. A lot. And he is Will's psychiatrist, after all, so he can. A lot.

Will's already a bit unstable, and now he's being manipulated by Dr. Lecter, as well as being exposed constantly to a dangerous psychopath (Dr. Lecter, again - I don't think I need to mention that Hannibal is crazy and eats people, I feel like you know that). Will is not doing so well. It only gets worse when we realize that Will isn't just crazy, he's actually legitimately ill. He has encephalitis, a swelling of the brain. He's hallucinating, he's losing time, he's lost in a dreamworld, and he's convinced it's all mental. Hannibal knows it isn't. Hannibal also knows that he's just found the perfect patsy.

So, SPOILERS but not really, Hannibal decides to frame Will for his own crimes. He decides to plant evidence that shows that Will Graham is a cannibalistic serial killer, all because of his unstable very special brain. Also, he frames Will for the murder of Abigail Hobbs (Kacey Rohl), a girl for whom Will felt genuine fatherly affection (partially because he killed her father, who was a serial killer, and got inside his head and this is a very dark show).

At the start of season two, then, Will is in prison, or rather, a very high security psychiatric institution, awaiting trial. He now knows the truth, that Hannibal is the cannibalistic serial killer they've been hunting, but no one will believe him. All evidence has come back that Will is the one who committed the murders. That Will is guilty. And everyone believes it, even Alana.

But here's the thing. Alana, for all that she is devastated by Will's collapse, and frustrated by his mental instability, for all that she tells him, "I feel wounded," Alana is the only person who still treats will like a, well, person. Alana visits him, and asks how he's doing. She helps him rally his defense for the trial. He doesn't agree with her, of course, because she wants him to plead guilty, but she keeps trying to help.

Alana even goes so far as to adopt Will's seven dogs, and care for them. Oh, and did I mention that she gives him regression therapy to see if he can recover any memories that might prove his innocence? Because she does.

Alana Bloom isn't just a nice person, she's the nice person. She's unfailingly giving and kind and loving, even when she's been hurt.

Now, in another situation, these traits might actually kind of bother me. I mean, Alana is the stereotypical movie girlfriend. She's selfless and supportive to the point of almost not having a personhood of her own. She's so good and so nice. But it doesn't bother me here, and I think I know why.

Part of it is because this show is so unremittingly bleak and dark (dark enough that Hannibal's constant cannibalism jokes are actually highlights), that Alana's kindness shines out in full color. But another part is because Alana isn't weak. Alana might be a freaking Disney princess on the kindness scale, but she's not weak. Not by any means.

Her second action, when Will is taken away (after she adopts all of his dogs because she is a freaking saint), is to file a report on the way that Jack Crawford mishandled Will and his abilities. Alana had been petitioning for months to get Will out of the field and away from dangerous mental influences, but no one would listen. Now that Will has seemingly snapped, Alana is perfectly comfortable in calling out the people that she hold responsible. She's kind, sure, but she's not a wallflower.

And, when the FBI demands that she recant her statement of misconduct, Alana straight up refuses. To Jack Crawford's face. And she does it nicely. She apologizes, but she makes it perfectly clear that she will not reconsider her position. Yes, Will is damaged. No, she does not think he's evil. And she will stick by that.

It's not just Will, either. When Alana is faced with a female charge (Abigail Hobbs), who might very well be guilty of heinous crimes, she doesn't freak out or react with disdain. Alana just very calmly asks Abigail if she's guilty, and then goes on treating her with dignity and respect. Even when she knows, in her heart, that Abigail really is guilty. It doesn't change the fact that Abigail is still a person.

You see, it's so easy to write female characters, or any characters really, who aren't very complicated. Maybe they're nice, but they're kind of weak, right? Or maybe they're really strong emotionally - but they have very little compassion. Alana isn't like that. She's beautiful inside and out. She's strong, because she believes in her cause. She's kind because she truly does see good in everyone. She's not one thing, and that's great.

Also? I love that she's perfectly happy being beautiful. That she doesn't feel a need to dress down, to not wear beautiful things. She's girly, and she likes it, and it doesn't make her less of a BAMF to wear a flowered frock.

But mostly, I love that Alana Bloom is good. She's a genuinely good person, on a show where pretty much everyone else is a pile of crap. Or at best, a shade of grey. Alana is good. And we need that sometimes.

At the start of the show, it really looked like Alana was going to be Will's love interest. And I would have been okay with that, I think. But I like this better. Alana is Will's friend. She loves him and she will protect him. On a show where most episodes you just wish someone would give Will Graham a hug already, Alana does. She hugs Will. And she helps him. And she does it all with a smile, and an iron backbone.

I want to be like her when I grow up.

On the advice of my sister, who is a very wise and lovely person (and who also doesn't read this blog, so technically I could say whatever I want, but she is actually wise and lovely), I'm going to tell you guys about my weekend: It sucked. Well, not exactly. The weekend itself was fine, but a fair number of sucky and/or stressful things happened. An amazing woman in my church passed away. Another person close to me went in for major surgery. A good friend of mine lost her baby.

It's been a rough weekend. God is good, but it's been a tough couple of days.

And to top all of that off, the stuff I've been reading and watching has been pretty universally intense and depressing. I'm watching 24 so that I can write a really smart and cool academic paper on it. But the coolness and smartness of the paper don't negate the fact that 24 is a freaking intense show. I read a really good comic series about people dying. I read The Maze Runner. Not exactly full of warm fuzzies.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm feeling kind of down. Worn out. Run through the ringer. I know that God has good in all of these things, and I know that none of it is more than I can handle, not even my taxes (which I hate) and all the other stuff I have to do this month to be a responsible adult, but dang do I want to curl up in bed and Redwall books for the next couple years.

So I'm putting this out there: what do you watch and/or read when you feel like poop? I'm seriously asking. I'm even more seriously asking for recs that are up on Netflix instant or apt to be at my library. I want to engage with media that is fun. Positive. Hopeful, and life-affirming. And if you send me something new that we've never covered on here before, chances are good you'll get to see a review of it!

Just, please. Help. I'm sure in a few weeks I'll be back to wanting to talk about the deep darks of depressingness again, but for now it's all a little too raw, and I think I want some fluff to make me feel better.

With that in mind, let's talk about Pitch Perfect.

Look, I'm not exactly known to be a big proponent of romantic comedies. They're just not my thing, and a lot of the time I think that our cultural obsession with happily ever after and perfect romance (between two inordinately attractive, young, affluent, white people, especially happily ever afters that end just as the wedding starts) is total bunk. But that doesn't mean I have a stone where my heart should be, and every once in a while one of these rom-coms breaks through and makes me smile.

Not that I'm exactly saying that Pitch Perfect is a rom-com. It shares story elements, but overall it's a female-lead ensemble comedy. And that's okay. I love female-lead ensemble comedies. Like, a lot.

The point, which I seem to be losing rapidly, is this: I don't hate romantic comedies, but I do hate the way they try to propagate an incredibly narrow view of gender dynamics. You know the drill. Guy and girl meet and hate each other almost on sight. After a few slightly contrived coincidences, they realize that it's not hate, it's passion, and they fall madly in love. But then there's some kind of lie or misunderstanding, and they split apart, only to be brought back together at the end when the guy makes a grand romantic gesture that reminds the girl why she loves him, and tells the audience that he has matured enough as a person to be worthy of her love.

But here's the thing: it's always the guy making the big gesture. Even when it's the woman who screwed up the relationship. And even when the main character of the film is purportedly the woman, she's still the one waiting and hoping that he'll come to his senses and sweep her off her feet. Even when she's the one in the wrong.

The perfect example of this for me is Never Been Kissed. In that movie, Drew Barrymore plays an improbable reporter who goes undercover at a high school, macks on a teacher for a while, and then gets exposed as a reporter. Said teacher (who totally hit on a student thinking she was a student) is then kind of pissed (he should be relieved that she can't really press charges), and also a little bit reviled by the city. Because he hit on a student.

So Drew makes it up to him with a grand romantic gesture. She'll stand and wait on the pitcher's mound of the baseball diamond until the game starts, and if he loves her and forgives her, he'll come and give her a big old kiss in front of everyone.

Now this may sound like Drew is the one making the grand gesture. It may sound like it, but it's not. Remember, the guy is the one whose life was ruined. He's the one who could be up on charges. And he's the one who has to come racing across the city in order to kiss some girl by some arbitrary deadline or else...what? Or else what? But he does it, and it's cute, and everyone cheers, because that's what's supposed to happen. Our hero is supposed to in some way make a gesture, and usually humiliate himself, in order to get the girl.

Let's take another example. 10 Things I Hate About You. A seriously awesome movie, and one that hits almost all of my qualifications for things to be good. It's just such a fun flick. Wildly inappropriate for any actual teenagers, and I can't believe I saw it when I was twelve, oh my gosh, but really fun. Anyway, the end of the movie has Julia Stiles reading out her English assignment, which turns out to be an incredibly personal poem about Heath Ledger and how she hates that she doesn't hate him, not even after everything that's happened. And then she rushes out of the room crying.

Again, it seems like this is a case where the girl is the one making the grand romantic gesture, but, again, not really. You see, Heath Ledger chases after her. He runs down the halls and out into the parking lot where she's about to get into her car, and bam! We see that he's already used the money he was paid to date her to buy her a brand new electric guitar. And then they kiss.

I'm not sure entirely why it was so freaking time sensitive that she find the guitar that instant, or that he chase her down to her car, or why any of it was so urgent, but then, I never understand why the ends of romantic comedies are so weirdly rushed.

At any rate, it's just another case of reaffirming the gender paradigm. No matter who is at fault, it is the man's responsibility to humble himself and seek forgiveness from the woman in order for there to be a happily ever after and a kiss.

Only. That's not what happens in Pitch Perfect. Which is strange. And unusual. And awesome.

So, the main story in Pitch Perfect is about a bunch of girls who want to win a national a capella competition, blah blah blah, let's be real, you've probably already seen this movie. Let's cut to the chase: the romantic subplot between Beca (Anna Kendrick) and Jesse (Skylar Astin). Jesse and Beca have a pretty normal meet-cute (see each other on the quad during orientation, he makes a fool out of himself), and Jesse very doggedly spends most of the movie pursuing Beca. He likes her. He thinks she's pretty and awesome.

But Beca, being deeply emotionally constipated and not super into the idea of college in general, is a hard person to date, and after a while, and some misunderstandings and stuff, Jesse gives up. He is pretty (rightly) pissed at Beca, and so he puts his efforts into his friendships and doing well at a capella.

Beca finally realizes that she does actually like Jesse, and also that feelings are not just for the weak, but what can she do? Jesse won't talk to her. He's still very hurt, and even when she tries to tell him that she finally watched The Breakfast Club and now she understands it, he's not impressed. He's pretty sure she's just the same old Beca: snarky, kind of a bitch, and liable to eat his heart right out of her chest.

What to do? Grand romantic gesture of course!

Only this time, it's Beca making the gesture. Not even Beca going halfway and Jesse grabbing the other half. No, this is 100% Beca. She is the one who comes up with her team's a capella final performance, and she includes in it the song from the end of Breakfast Club, you know, "Don't You Forget About Me". And then she sings it, straight at Jesse, in the middle of their performance, and keeps going until he gets it. She watched the movie. She is putting effort in. She wants you bad, dude.

Here's the part that really gets me here, though. It's partly that this is one of the only, if not the only, romantic gesture from the end of a movie like this that I can think of, that is 100% all the girl, but it's also partly something else. It's partly that this? Isn't humiliating. Beca is not acting like an idiot. She's not throwing away her team's chance of winning in order to get some guy to notice her. She's not making a scene.

Instead, she's allowing Jesse to see that his love for her made her a better person. It made her a better human being, but it also made her a better singer, a better musician, a more well rounded member of her team. When Beca sings that song, yeah, she's saying that she wants Jesse back, but she's also saying that she needs him. That she needs him to show her movies and challenge her to engage emotionally, and that she wants all of that. That she's ready to try.

You see, in most romantic gestures, especially the grand ones, it's about the man showing that he's humble enough to really love the woman now. He's humiliating himself to prove that he is willing to risk it all for love. That this woman is enough for him. He doesn't need anything else. That's not what Beca is doing here.

Beca is saying that she appreciates Jesse because he makes the rest of her life, and her relationships, and her music, better. Not that he's the only thing that matters, but that he makes the other things matter more.

That's a hell of a lot healthier, and, really, a hell of a lot more romantic. Romance should be about that. Romance should be about two people making each other happier, yes, but also two people who make each other more. Challenge each other. Make each other more compassionate, intelligent, interesting people. The person you love should, by loving you, make you more yourself. They shouldn't insist that you debase yourself or give things up in order to love them better. They should encourage you. Add to you. Real love is about finding the person who will make you a better you.

I don't want someone who will chase me through an airport, or kiss me on a baseball diamond, or even sing and dance his way across a stadium then buy me an electric guitar. I want someone who will make me want to be a better human being. That's all. It's a lot.

Awwww, yeah. Kiss like you just smashed the patriarchy, girl.

Thank you all for your support these past few days. Life is better. Partially, that's probably just because it's sunny out, which automatically makes it all seem more manageable, but also because it honestly is better. Things get better with time. And sleep. Sleep helps.

Now, admittedly, this series, Locke and Key, is precisely the kind of depressing, intense, death-filled story that I was complaining about on Monday. I read it last week, and it certainly didn't help with the funk. But then I finished the story, got to the end, and I have to say, I do actually feel a lot better. Why? Because in Locke and Key, as with most things, it's the ending that makes the story.

So, Locke and Key, by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez, is one of those comics series that if you're vaguely in the comics community you've probably heard of, and been told you should read, but then you didn't because who has time for that? Or maybe that's just me. Either way, it's fantastic. The story follows the Locke family, who, in the wake of a brutal attack at their summer house, uproot from California and move back into the ancestral home in Lovecraft, Massachusetts. And in case you can't tell from the name of the freaking town, yeah, this is a horror story.

The attack, which left the family patriarch, Rendell, dead, and his wife, Nina, traumatized, is most felt through the stories of their kids, who are struggling to adapt and survive in their new life and new school. There's Tyler, a pretty average high schooler forced to grow up really fast when he realizes that it was an offhand comment from him that led their attackers, both of whom went to Tyler's school, to target his father. There's Kinsey, who has no idea how to relate or cope or even deal with the tragedy that threatens to overwhelm her family. She wants to be strong, but ultimately she's not sure she likes the person she is when she is that strong.

And then there's Bode, who is probably seven or so (I am terrible at gauging child ages), still a kid, who doesn't understand the reality of what's going on around him, but who is by and far the most capable of coping with tragedy and weirdness and the horrors that life can bring.

Because trust me, there is horror.

So after their family is attacked, and they move way the hell across the country, the Locke family is still plagued by death and disaster. First their attacker manages to track them all the way to Massachusetts and try again to wipe out the Locke family. Then their uncle's partner nearly dies, hit by a car outside his house. Oh and there are all these "accidents" and "freak tragedies" that just well up in the town. A local teacher commits "suicide". The track coach goes insane and then mysteriously recovers. You know, comforting stuff like that.

Of course, the real story is one that goes a little deeper than freak tragedy and "accidents". It turns out that all of this, from the attack on, is the work of Dodge, a malevolent spirit trapped in the wellhouse at Keyhouse (the Locke's home). Dodge is magic, and evil, and deeply crazy, and also determined to open The Black Door, which can only assume is a really bad idea. Dodge is the one who sends an attacker to take out the Locke family. Dodge is the one who kills the teacher, who drives another insane, who escapes the wellhouse and brings chaos and blood wherever he/she goes. And it's up to the kids to fight.

Did I mention that there are keys? I think I forgot to mention that. Dodge's goal is to open the Black Door, sure, but to do that, they need the key to the Black Door, which is hidden. And to get the key, they need a lot of other keys. These keys can do anything, it seems. Open your head so that you can rummage around (that's how Kinsey conquers her fears: she removes them). Allow you to turn into an animal (Bode particularly likes being a bird). Even let you open any door to any other door (which is how Dodge manages so much mischief). The keys are the secret of Keyhouse, a secret known only to kids, who forget when they grow old. And that, as it turns out, is the key to this whole thing.

Get it? Key? Heh. Anyway, SPOILERS for the main plot now.

It turns out that Dodge isn't some random malevolent spirit, nor is what's happening, the endless death and destruction, unprecedented. It is, in fact, utterly dependent on the past, and particularly on the actions of Rendell Locke, the kids father, and the man who dies in the first five pages of the story.

Back when Rendell was a teenager, he and his friends were the keepers of the keys. They were sweet and relatively innocent, except in the normal teenagerish ways, and they were, most importantly, happy. Until they reached too far. Until they tried to keep the power of the keys for themselves, after it was time for them to give it up.

Remember how the keys belong to children, and how adults really can't use them easily, or remember them? Nina and Duncan (the kids' uncle) both become aware of the keys at various points in the story, but they have trouble remembering, like the whole concept is slippery. The kids, however, have no issues there. What Rendell was trying to do was prolong their access to the power that the keys give. He was trying to remove the limitations. And to do that, he needed to make another key. A special key. One that would unlock their ability to remember the magic.

Which meant he had to open the Black Door. That's how this whole mess started in the first place. He opened the Black Door and something crept inside one of his friends, a little touch of evil, that took root in Dodge's soul and made him into the spirit of vengeance and destruction that tried to end the Locke family.

All of that is important, sure, but what's more important is what happened later. With the kids, the ones who were asked to pay the price for Rendell's hubris. They were given the same choices: did they want the power to go on? Did they want to be known for this? Did they want to live in a world fashioned by the keys?

And the answer is the most important part: no. They didn't.

When Kinsey, Tyler, and Bode, are finally offered the opportunity to open the Black Door, or even to use the keys for themselves, while they do indulge to some extent, what they do more than that is use the keys to save their friends. To save everyone they know. When given the choice, you know what they decide? To fight.

When Tyler is given the same opportunity that felled his father, the chance to make any key he wants out of the whispering iron, he doesn't make one that will give him more power, or one that will make any girl fall in love with him, or any of that crap. He makes a key that will unlock demons from souls. Rendell took a chance that destroyed his friend. Tyler made the key that saved him.

The title up there is a quote from Harry Potter, but Harry Potter is actually quoting from CS Lewis (a fact that I find very funny). Lewis, in Mere Christianity (because I read theology books in my downtime, don't you?), says that each choice we make is what changes us into either a heavenly creature or a hellish one. That no matter what foundation we start out with, a good one that inclines us towards good actions, or a bad one that inclines us toward bad actions, it is the choices we make from that point on that define who we are. You are the choices you have made. Not your background, but what you did with it.

So Rendell and Tyler, for all that they are father and son, for all that they had relatively similar starting points, are actually completely different people simply based on their choices, and the reasons for their choices. Rendell's story is one of falling to pride and doubt. Tyler's story is one of overcoming past actions and growing into the man he is supposed to be.

At the end of the book, when all is over, and Tyler is just about to age out of even remembering about the keys, he takes the time to spread mercy. One last important thing. He finds Dodge's spirit, and he sets it free. He finds the memories of a woman left insane, and gives them to her. And he takes the time to listen to the birds.

It's not about power, in the end. It's about what you do with it. It's about how you define yourself when you choose to act either rightly or wrongly. And, let's be real, we all know the difference when make those choices. We can lie to ourselves as much as we want (I am particularly good at that), but in the end, we totally know.

Tyler is the hero in this story because he sacrificed his pride, and he decided to be a better man. He decided that mercy and justice were more important than revenge or pride, and then he chose to live in accordance with that choice. He may have chosen poorly in the beginning, but I don't think any of us can say that by the end he was not transforming into one of Lewis'"heavenly creatures". And, ultimately, that's why I love this story. It's not the art, which is good, or the action, which is impressive, or even the really cool concept, which is really cool.

It's the message. It's the meaning. And it's the choices.

So after I posted my passionate plea for more nice stuff to watch/read, stuff that wasn't going to totally bum me out, I got an amazing response from all of you. I'm definitely going to have things to add to my list now.

But I also got a really funny response from my mother, who knows me pretty well, as you might guess, and came up with some spot on suggestions to get me out of my funk. She told me I should try to reread some of the Redwall books (because I was legitimately obsessed as a middle-schooler), reminded me that I love Felicity from Arrow, and then gently suggested that I write about Ever After.

Which made me realize something very important: in the two and a half years I've been doing this blog, this is the first time it's even occurred to me to write about Ever After. That is weird. That is deeply deeply weird. Why? Because I love that movie so, so much. I love everything about it. I even love the things about it that I shouldn't love. It's just so...girl power. And as much as I love radical feminism, some days, you just need a little bit of feel-good girly power. You know?

To give a little background, Ever After, which came out in 1998, was a star vehicle for Drew Barrymore, hitting right at the apex of her romantic comedy career. It was probably supposed to signal her arrival as a "serious actress", and I guess it does an okay job at that. From an objective standpoint, she's really weirdly cast, but from a completely subjective view, I love the movie and I really love her in it, so whatever.

The movie, officially titled, Ever After: A Cinderella Story, is exactly what it sounds like, a Cinderella story set in the late middle-ages, without any magic, but with plenty of anachronisms and silliness and pretty dresses. Barrymore plays Danielle, a noblewoman whose father passed away when she was a child, only shortly after he married his second wife, Rodmilla (Anjelica Huston, being amazing). Like the story usually goes, Rodmilla reacts badly to her husband's death, and eventually Danielle finds herself as a servant in her own home, while her step-mother and step-sisters (Megan Dodds and Melanie Lynsky) squander the family fortune and try to attract the notice of eligible suitors for the girls to marry.

The final straw comes when Rodmilla sells one of the servants, Maurice, who has been like an uncle to Danielle. The servants are devastated when they realize they have no way to get him back. That is, until Danielle stops a man trying to steal her father's horse (she pegs him with an apple), and when it's revealed that the man is actually Prince Henry (Dougray Scott), he gives her a pouch of gold to keep quiet. It's this gold she can use to free Maurice, but that has to done in person. Aaaaand, it has to be done by a noblewoman, not a servant.

So Danielle dresses up in her mother's clothes, goes down to the palace, and uses her commanding knowledge of Thomas More's Utopia to bargain for Maurice's freedom. Which is cool, until she runs back into the Prince, who is smitten and confused and positive he's seen her before somewhere. Romance ensues. Awkward romance where Danielle is constantly trying to hide who she is, and Prince Henry is kind of a jerk sometimes. Oh, and Leonardo da Vinci (Patrick Godfrey) is the fairy godmother. Good times.

As you can probably tell, the story itself isn't super surprising. It's easy to see where it's heading, and there really aren't many shocks or bumps along the way. Henry and Danielle fall in love, all while she tries to hide the reality of her situation, and Rodmilla and Marguerite (the evil stepsister) conspire to steal Henry's heart. Or at least his wallet. Eventually Henry finds out about Danielle and he reacts with all fo the dignity and love that one would expect from a man who's been raised with near unimaginable wealth and privilege.

So, not much.

Rodmilla reacts badly too and decides that Danielle should be punished: she sells her off to this super sketchy noble who wants Danielle for...unsavory purposes. And Danielle is sad and unhappy. Henry realizes he's made a terrible mistake and goes off to save her. Until, that is, he gets there and finds that she has already rescued herself.

Which is kind of the point of the movie and why I love it. Danielle, for all that she is a traditional romantic heroine who swoons and stutters and loves looking beautiful and marries a prince, is also a really radical person, at least for this kind of movie. She's a woman who likes dressing up, but also happens to have enough of an arm to be able to knock a guy off a charging horse with an apple. She gets all dressed up for a picnic, and then saves her date from bandits by picking him up and carrying him away. She gets sold in servitude, and then slashes at her master with a sword for a while until she just can walk out of the castle scot free.

What makes this story really unique in terms of Cinderella fables, is that it's all about choices. Each of the characters has to choose what they're going to do. Danielle has to choose to continue seeing the prince. She has to choose whether she's going to end up with him in the end. The Prince has to choose who he's going to marry, what his fate will be. Even the step-sisters have to choose how they're going to react to the situations in their lives.

That's rare. There's really no "fate" in this movie. There's no love at first sight. It's hard. It's real. And the fact that they choose makes it all mean a lot more.

Oh, and she's a brilliant woman with a love for justice, freedom, and Thomas More's Utopia. She's a pretty, resilient, hard-working, smart, rabble-rouser who marries a prince. No, she doesn't really have any flaws and she doesn't really change throughout the story. But really that's fine. She's awesome. She's everything I wanted to be when I was twelve.

Actually, she's everything I want to be now.

The biggest and easiest criticism of this movie is that it's wildly anachronistic. Danielle is a revolutionary thinker, a proponent of free speech and democracy hundreds of years before those ideas became popular. And some people find that irritating, people who really want their movies to adhere to a specific timeline, I guess.

Personally, that's why I actually like it. Sure, most noblewomen probably didn't know about radical ideas of personal liberty, but who cares? Don't you prefer the version where they did? And, more than that, who exactly is saying that there's no way Danielle would have known about this stuff? When it comes down to it, why wouldn't she? Historical women did a lot more stuff than we give them credit for. They ran revolutions, were pirates, invented science, started universities: women did much more than is recorded in most history books.

Ultimately, it comes down to a choice. Are you going to suspend your disbelief and your cynicism, your ideas that Danielle is really just a modern woman in an old-fashioned dress and go with it, or are you going to complain?

The good answer, for the record, is that you aren't going to complain. Complaining is bad.

If this scene doesn't make you cry, I don't understand you.

Ah, Friday. Spring is in the air, Purim starts tomorrow night, there are a ton of awesome movies coming out (Grand Budapest Hotel, Veronica Mars, Divergent, need I go on?), and I managed to find pre-made tahini sauce at a supermarket for under ten dollars. Today is a good day.

One of the other things making this beginning of spring pretty awesome is the return of some of our favorite shows to the screen. Hannibal returned a few weeks ago, Game of Thrones is back the beginning of April, and Orphan Black shall grace us with its presence very, very soon. I'm excited about all of these, but today I am especially excited about Orphan Black. Why? Because I love it. I love everything about it. I love how it's shot, I love the mystery, I love Tatiana Maslany, I love the science stuff, I love how the plot is so confusing but so good, I love seeing clones playing other clones, and I love love love Allison Hendrix.

Okay, that last one might be a little confusing for all of you. For the people who don't watch the show, I just spouted off a random name, and for the people who do, I just declared my undying affection for one of the most objectively boring and/or annoying clones in the cloneclub. What gives?

For those of you who don't watch this show, first of all, do, and second of all, Orphan Black is a science-fiction thriller about illegal human cloning. Which sounds kind of dull maybe I guess, but it so isn't. Tatiana Maslany plays Sarah Manning (and every single other clone, which we'll get to), a down on her luck low level con artist and criminal who's just come back into town to get her daughter. Before she can even leave the train station, though, she sees a woman commit suicide. A woman with her exact same face. Shaken, Sarah grabs the woman's bag and runs.

Upon looking into the bag, Sarah discovers that the woman, Beth Childs, could be her twin. Except she doesn't have a twin. Using her incredibly limited moral faculty, Sarah decides to steal Beth's identity for a little while, just long enough to withdraw all her money from her bank accounts, and skip town with her daughter, Kira.

But things get more complex as "Beth" discovers she's a cop, and oh by the way, she keeps getting weird phone calls, and then she's supposed to pick up a "German", who also looks exactly like her and then the German gets shot, and what is happening oh my gosh.

It turns out that Sarah, Beth, the German (Katje), and a whole host of other women, most notably Allison and Cosima, are clones. They don't know who made them, or why, but they do know that they are the result of someone's genetic experimentation a quarter of a century ago, and now they're being picked off one by one.

So, you know, normal day at the office.

The real highlight of the show is watching Maslany play all these incredibly different characters, and it's super cool how each one is incredibly distinct, not just in look, but even down to the most minute of facial ticks. They don't even hold themselves or walk the same way. It's amazing.

Now, most of the clones are in some way memorable or adorable. Cosima is a beautiful science angel with awesome hair and adorable style that I generally try to copy because it is so wonderful. Sarah is the stone cold badass who doesn't take any crap from anyone and who can probably save the world on her own. Helena is crazy on a terrifying level, but she's also sweetly childish and cute and likes pudding. Beth is dead, and Rachel is a little scary, but generally, we like the clones, the clones are cool.

But then there's Allison. Allison is the normalest of the clones. She's a freaking soccer mom. She's an uptight, annoyed, constantly neurotic, white wine swilling suburbanite. She's only really concerned with the clone thing insofar as it could affect her normal, nice, cushy life. She likes being normal. She is good at being normal. She has absolutely no desire to be otherwise. Being a clone has completely and utterly messed up her worldview.

And that's what I like about her. Because as much as I love Cosima and want to be as cool as Sarah, let's be real, I'd totally react like Allison. Scared. Angry. Protective of my family and the little life I've built for myself. Concerned with my own comfort. In those first few episodes, I recognize Allison, and I like her, even if it's kind of a begrudging, "Yeah, I guess you're okay," like.

As the season went on, though, I grew to like Allison more and more. Far from being a hindrance, her love of normalcy and her determination to have a normal, safe life for her kids and her husband becomes a major plot point that drives the show forward. Allison is willing to go to pretty much any lengths to make sure that she and her family are okay, and while it's pretty genuinely terrifying, it's also pretty cool.

More than that, though, Allison is honestly quite comforting in her humanity. She's the one who breaks down and freaks out and gets drunk and makes mistakes. She gets totally smashed and sobs out her problems to her clone's foster mother. She drives around screaming the lyrics to "Bitch", and she chases people down in the street in order to make sure they aren't going to come after her kids.

Allison is human. Delightfully, infuriatingly human. And it's this humanity that makes her dangerous.

Sure, Sarah is cool headed and the main character, and totally the kind of person you want with you in a crisis, and yes, Cosima is a beautiful science angel, but Allison is real. She's the sort of woman you already know. You probably don't even really like her. Not gonna lie, Allison reminds me really strongly of some parents I've run into, and ones that I've actually argued with. That's okay. I don't have to love the Allisons of the world in person in order to love her in fiction. Because in fiction? She's perfect.

Or rather she's so ridiculously riddled with flaws as to be a perfect way of telling the story. When the clones are offered the opportunity to sign an agreement that will give them their lives back if only they stop looking into this whole mystery of their origins, Sarah nobly refuses, while Cosima considers it for the science aspect, but Allison pretty much snatches the pen up and signs before anyone can blink. And we need that character. It's not a real story without that character.

Allison is proud and wrathful and obsessed with petty, stupid things. She's selfish and conceited, and really only cares about her own life. What matters is that she changes. Not a lot, she's still Allison, but her world, and the things she considers "her life" grow to include Cosima and Sarah and even Kira. Allison never really grows up or becomes a demonstrably better person. But she does try. And when that fails, she goes back to what she knows.

I'm okay with that. I hold out hope for her, and for the amazing progress she's going to make as a person this season. But more than that, I love Allison because watching her freak out at wine tasting parties, watching her try to meet covertly with clones while supervising her children's soccer team, and seeing her drown her sorrows in cheap white wine is freaking hysterical. And needed. There's so much weird in Orphan Black. Allison brings it back down. Reminds us that these are people, people whose lives are being impacted. She's funny and mean and selfish, but she's also the one who best understands the consequences of finding out where they came from.

Allison is the stakes. You need the stakes in order to have the story. And it certainly helps when the stakes are as fun as she is.

As some of you may or may not know, on Sundays I participate in a fun webcast with Elizabeth Kobayashi, Dan Ingram, and Patrick Bohan - all fantastic nerd people. We talk about pop culture, the news, comic book movies, and pretty much anything that strikes our interest.

This week, though we were missing Elizabeth, we talked about sexism in superhero costumes and the difference between power fantasies and sexual fantasies, as well as the male gaze versus the female gaze.

And then we got distracted and nerded out about Teen Wolf.

It was a bit of a shock this weekend when I realized that in the two and a half years I have been running this blog, and in all the years prior to that when I was writing for school newspapers or running my sad little livejournal blog that I hope has been deleted, I have never talked in depth about Legally Blonde. How? No, seriously. How?

Legally Blonde is one of those movies to which I give a lot of credit. I first saw it in middle school, at exactly the right age to get swept away by its girl power and feminism, and I fell madly in love. I also thought I wanted to be a lawyer, a thought that persisted well into grad school, but that's another thing. I love this movie. There isn't even really that much I object to about it. In fact, I will now raise my one objection to the film: It's very white.

There. Done. That's it, that's my problem with the movie. Tada!

Now let's talk about all the things I do like in this movie. Which are varied and plentiful. First, it's about a woman whose reaction to being dumped is to prove that she is smarter than him. Yes. Second, it's about a woman whose reaction to being dumped is to prove that she's smarter than him who goes on to not only prove that, but also solve a law case involving another woman and prove that girliness is not only not a bad thing in a professional setting, but can in fact save lives.

Third, it's about a woman who does all of this while being friends with women, learning from women, supporting and being supported by women, and whose only real antagonist is a man who doesn't believe in how awesome she is.

Fourth, the cast in this movie is awesome.

Fifth, she becomes best friends with her romantic rival and they both decide that the guy isn't worth it, dump him, and go skipping off to frolic in a field full of legal briefs and torts. Also she is genuinely a nice person.

So, to recap, Legally Blonde is about a young woman, Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon), who, when dumped by her WASPy boyfriend Warner (Matthew Davis) because she's not "serious enough", decides to prove him wrong by getting into Harvard Law School - where Warner and his new girlfriend Vivian (Selma Blair) are not at all coincidentally set to go - and showing him that she can be a serious lawyer lady too.

Elle, with the complete and total support of her sorority, studies really hard, aces the LSATs, gets herself into Harvard, and discovers that Harvard is, well, hard. And full of really mean, judgmental people.

What does she do? Double down. She gets herself a manicure, she buys a laptop, and she decides something very important: she is valuable. She is important. And she is damn well going to show them that she can be a lawyer.

And then she does.

Elle gets the most coveted law internship in the school (with creepo Professor Callahan - Victor Garber), aces her classes, and even befriends most of the campus, including but not limited to: her classmates, her professors, the nice manicurist down the road, Paulette (Jennifer Coolidge), and Vivian, Warner's new girlfriend. Because Elle is a nice freaking person.

Oh, and once she's at her law internship, working on the murder trial as the defending council for Brooke Windham (Ali Larter), Elle continues to be a nice person. She doesn't give herself airs, or act stuck up, or even respond rudely to the rudeness people hit her with. She continues to be a class act. A class act who is convinced her client is innocent, and decides to prove it. She also gets sexually harassed by her professor/boss, runs away, and eventually ends up as lead council. Because she is nice and kind and a damn good lawyer.

And then she wins her case by knowing about proper hair maintenance.

Along the way, sure, there's a little bit of romance, where Elle eventually winds up dating Emmett (Luke Wilson), a third year law student and all around good guy, but that's not the point of the story. The point of the story is that Elle Woods, this beautiful blonde woman that everyone underestimates because she is, well, beautiful and blonde, turns out to be kind of amazing. Really kind of amazing.

This movie is one of the most feminist things I've ever seen in my life, and I am so okay with that. It's feminist because it's about a woman who realizes she doesn't need a man to be fulfilled, and because it's a love story where the woman is falling in love with the law and legal practice instead of a person. And it's feminist because she surrounds herself with wonderful, compelling women who support her and appreciate her support. But most of all, to me, it is feminist because it's about judgment based on appearances, and the idea that the way you look doesn't matter. What you do, does.

When Elle gets dumped in the first place, she's living a nice life at a state school in California. She's from a wealthy background, gets good grades, and seems to be on track to become yet another heiress fashion designer kind of person. I mean, as we later learn, if Elle Woods is going to be a fashion designer, then she's going to be the next Valentino in like a year, but still. She seems happy, but not particularly fulfilled. She's excited to be dating Warner, who is old Yankee blue blood, and she thinks he's going to propose. He doesn't. Instead, he dumps her because he has political aspirations, and he can't have a wife who looks like a bimbo.

Elle's response to this is understandably enraged, and at the same time, understanding. Warner needs a girlfriend who's serious? Okay, she can do serious.

So she goes off to law school, and the first couple of days there, it seems almost like she's LARPing "serious law student". She even has fake glasses. But that's not Elle. Not really. So when she decides to go hard, to really push and strive, she drops the fake geek stuff, and sticks with what she loves: pink, dresses, girliness, and that's fine. Good, even. Elle is being her authentic self.

All throughout this, though, Elle is being judged based on her appearance. Her classmates think that she's a fluke, only there because of a clerical error. Her professors, particularly Professor Callahan, think she slept her way into the school. And even her parents think that law school isn't for "pretty girls".

Elle, of course, proves them all wrong, but it's important to note how much of the movie is devoted to this. Is devoted to other people telling Elle that she can't do what she wants to do, because she's too pretty. Ugly people are smart. Pretty people are dumb. That's just the way the world works. Except for the part where it doesn't.

And here's the thing: Elle didn't ask to look like the ideal of hyper-feminine beauty. I mean, if you think about it, that's just the way she looks. It's completely incidental to her personality and to her aspirations as a person.

It would be very easy to compare this story to one where a girl who doesn't fit the societal ideal of beauty tries to become a model, or something, but I think that would be a false equivalence. Elle isn't trying to change the standard of beauty, or conform to it, or really have anything to do with it at all. Rather, she's living her life, as herself, and constantly running up against value judgments and obstacles, because pretty people don't go to law school. And that sucks.

But the best part of this storyline, which is admittedly rather depressing, is that it doesn't suggest that Elle herself should change in order to shield herself from this criticism. It would be so easy to think, "Well, if she just put her hair in a ponytail, got a sweater and some jeans, and wasn't so ostentatious about it all the time, she wouldn't have this problem." So? So she should completely change herself and her appearance in order to fit a pre-prescribed idea of what law students look like, in order to avoid harassment? Um, hell no.

Thankfully, the movie doesn't do that. Instead, it shows us Elle doubling down both on her schoolwork and on herself. She doesn't become less Elle Woods, girly girl extraordinaire, she becomes more so. And that's great. Because Elle doesn't need to change. It's everyone else who has the problem.

Feminism as a movement has kind of a bad rap for wanting everyone to express their feminism in the same way. You know, the mental picture you get when you imagine a feminist - that's what some people assume all feminists are like, and that's what some feminists believe all feminists should be like. But that isn't true. Feminism isn't just for upper-middle class white women, but it's also not just for people who dislike shaving their legs and enjoy a hot pink dress every once in a while.

Feminism is a movement dedicated to the economic, political, and societal equality of men and women. Nothing more, nothing less. Elle Woods is a feminist, and so is Vivian. And so is Paulette, and so is Enid (Meredith Scott Lynn). Feminism is for everyone, no matter what they look like.

Once again, we find ourselves at Think of the Children! Tuesday discussing a book that is not actually intended for children. Or about children. But it is a coming of age story, and I did read it in middle-school, so in my head it is inextricably bound up in childhood. Besides, a lot of the key plot points in the story happened when the characters were children. And also...it's my blog and I can do what I want. So there.

Anyway, today we're talking about The Only Alien on the Planet by Kristen D. Randle, one of my all time favorite books, and one that I almost never read. I found this book in my school library when I was in seventh grade. I picked it up because of the title, and because the front cover made me think it was a cool sci-fi thriller. I somehow neglected to read the back until I was about halfway through, baffled by the utter lack of extraterrestrial activity so far. Upon reading the back I learned that there wasn't actually going to be an encounter of the any kind, but I kept reading. I was halfway through. I'd committed.

And, as much as I had trouble admitting it to myself, I was invested in the story. Even though it totally wasn't my kind of deal, and even though it was actually the kind of pulpy, emotional, soap operatic story I generally hated, I didn't want to stop. I really, really wanted to know the story of Smitty Tibbs. So I kept reading. And I loved it.

Then, for some reason, I returned the book to the library, and kind of forgot about it. I mean, I remembered that there was a book out there called The Only Alien on the Planet, and that I loved this book, whatever it was supposed to be about, but I remembered no specifics. It wasn't until college when a friend rightly pointed out that I could just buy the silly thing on Amazon for less than five dollars that I remedied this turn of events. Now I own a copy that has traveled with me to no less than three continents, lived in every house I've stayed in since sophomore year of college, and is looking mighty worn at this point.

All of this is to say that I love this book so, so much. But also that I'm kind of confused by it. I'm confused because I've never actually met anyone in real life who's read this book (that I know of, or that they've admitted to me), and because it's not actually a great book. It's a good book, but it's not a great one. And my love for it is pretty disproportional to how good it is. This isn't to say that it's a bad book. It's not. It's really not. Just that it's...I don't know, in some way not great.

I don't know if I can explain it.

So for the uninitiated, which until proven otherwise, I am assuming is freaking everyone, The Only Alien on the Planet is not, as it turns out, about aliens at all, but rather a charming and kind of weepy coming of age novel. It's sort of like The Fault in Our Stars, only without the cancer, because it's got serious mental issues and traumatic childhoods instead. Also (SPOILER), no one dies in this one.

The book follows Ginny Christianson, a relatably whiny seventeen year old, whose life is uprooted when her older brother/best friend starts college (how dare he?!), and her family moves across the country on a whim, to "have an adventure". Prior to this, Ginny has grown up in the same small town and knew everyone and liked knowing everyone. Sure, her best friends are her brothers, but she still enjoyed having friends around. Now she's in a new town where it actually get cold in the winter, perish the thought, and she has to go about being the new kid for the first time ever.

Also, her parents are going to be busy for the foreseeable future setting up their design firm, so Ginny and her brothers are largely on their own. She hates it. She's miserable. It's all very teenaged and unsurprising.

Her neighbors, on the other hand, are surprising. On one side lives Caulder and his two sisters, who happen to be just the right ages for Ginny and her brothers to hang out with. Caulder and Ginny become best friends almost immediately, in the sort of proximity and vaguely shared interest kind of friendship you have when you're a teenager. But on the other side of Ginny's house is the Tibbs family, whose second son, also in Caulder and Ginny's classes, is kind of deeply...crazy.

Like, there's no other word for it. Smitty Tibbs, though he is absolutely gorgeous, is completely nuts. He never talks to anyone or at all. He never looks at anyone or touches anyone or allows himself to be touched. He hasn't made eye contact since he was two. He's reportedly quite brilliant, since his grades place him at the top of the class, but he's also deeply weird. And not diagnosably crazy, either. He's not autistic, probably, and he doesn't seem to be brain damaged, he's just...in another world. All the time. Forever.

Naturally, Ginny is hooked.

Fortunately for her, Caulder is hooked too and the two of them embark on an attempt to solve the mystery of Smitty Tibbs. In their own bumbling teenage way. And I love the fact that the book really doesn't try to portray them as saviors or crusaders rushing in to save the day. No, they're nosy teenagers who end up doing as much harm as good, and nearly give the poor guy a heart attack. Which is, I think, probably quite accurate.

I'm not going to say what happens in the end, or what's really going on with Smitty, because I deeply want at least one of you to read this book so that I can discuss it with someone, but I will say this: the truth of the story is good, and real, and hurts. As it should. And in the end, the book says so many important things about personhood and autonomy and the danger of projecting our own ideas of other people onto them that I just want to pick this book up and crush it to my chest in the world's biggest hug.

I won't do that, because that would probably damage it, but know that I want to.

This book becomes the rare coming of age story that isn't so much about the transformation of our hero or heroine into a "better person" or into an "adult" or even into the idealized version of themselves they always knew they could be. Nor is it the kind of book where the person coming of age realizes that it's all actually crap and nothing matters and they've been lied to their whole lives. Neither of those things happen. What happens instead is this: Ginny screws up, Ginny apologizes, and Ginny learns to stop putting people in boxes based on what she thinks of them, and instead allows them to speak for themselves.

That's it, but really, it's a lot. You see, this book teaches a lesson that is so rare that it pains me, and it's a lesson that is so stinking good and well put and everything that my only solution is to just post a picture of the words from the actual book, and let you read them for yourself, because I can't do it better.

photo credit [x]

I really hope you took the time to read that, because it is stinking excellent. But if you didn't, here's the gist: if you start to anthropomorphize someone, start to assign them qualities because you don't understand them or don't know them or whatever, then what you end up caring about is your idea of that person, and not the person who is really there. You end up caring about your ideas, not reality, and it will cause you pain. A lot of pain.

I needed to know that in middle school. Hell, I need to know that now. It is so easy to rest on your own assumptions, to see people the way you want to see them, and to ignore any evidence that seems to contradict that, but it's wrong. It's genuinely and horribly wrong to do that to anyone, especially someone you love.

And part of growing up is coming to see the people around you as just that: people. Not the extras in the movie of your life, or the supporting figures in a novel, or even as the NPCs that help you achieve whatever it is you're going to achieve. The people around you are people too, and they are just as complicated and twisted and weird and wonderful as you are. It matters what you think of them, because it matters what they think of you. It matters that you stop seeing yourself as the center of the world, because if you don't, you'll never be happy or fulfilled, or even a decent freaking human being.

Ginny Christianson is kind of a brat, a bit whiny, and a lot melodramatic, and that's really why I love her. She's such a mess most of the time, but she knows it. She knows she's a mess and she decides to do something about it. She sees that she's being selfish, and she tries to change.

Yes, she does a lot of harm, but she also does a lot of good. And in the process, she learns how to stop thinking of herself as the center of the world, or as the "only alien on the planet" and start seeing everyone else. Really seeing them.

That's a good book.

P.S. Also, Caulder and Ginny are never romantically involved with each other, they're just friends and both of them have dates with other people without it getting weird, which is so genuinely refreshing you have no idea.

There are a lot of things I could say about Blacksad, the phenomenal French noir comic by Juan Díaz Canales (writer) and Juanjo Guarnido (artist), where animals take the place of humans, and our hero is a black cat in a trenchcoat solving crimes. Honestly, I really enjoyed reading this, and I powered through two whole hardcover volumes in an afternoon, with the only breaks being ones that I really couldn't avoid, because I do have a job, you know.

There are a lot of things I could say here, about how beautiful the comic is, how interesting I find the storytelling, how neat the concept of film noir with animals is, and all that, but there's only one thing I am going to say, and that's this: What the hell is going on with the female characters in these books? No, seriously. What the hell? They don't even look like they're the same species as the male characters. And in the cases where they aren't an identifiable species, a lot of the time they don't look like animals at all. Just pinup girls that are vaguely furry and have ears.

It's kind of messed up.

This is me, so obviously this was actually the first thing I noticed in the book. Well, the first first thing I noticed was that the murder in the story was, of course, a beautiful woman, and, of course, she was a femme fatale ex-girlfriend of the lead detective. Because of course she was. But immediately after noticing that, I noticed something else: namely that she really didn't look like an animal. I quickly flipped through the book to see if I was just nuts, or if she was a weird exception. She wasn't.

Throughout the whole book, while some female characters looked more similar to the species they were probably supposed to represent, those were the characters that clearly were there for their integrity for the plot. Or, to put it more broadly, those were the characters who weren't supposed to be attractive. So the elderly deer schoolteacher? Looks like a deer. Mouse housekeeper in like four panels? Looks like a mouse.

The femme fatale who's been murdered and appears only in flashbacks? I have no idea what animal she is supposed to be, merely that it's a mammal and she doesn't look like it. The single mother in the second story who works as a waitress at the drive-in? No clue. I mean, there's even this thing where there's a polar bear married to what I think is supposed to be another polar bear, except she doesn't look anything like a polar bear, and maybe she isn't, but then what the hell is she supposed to be?

The problem is partially that every time I see one of these female characters I get confused and totally taken out of the story while I try to figure out why they look so out of place, and partially the reason why none of the female characters look even a little bit like the male characters: so they can look sexy. This whole world-breaking thing is so that the female characters in this story can look attractive to a human audience. Because if they didn't look significantly more humanoid than their male counterparts, then it would be weird for us to sexually objectify them.

I want you to think about that long and hard for a minute, because it is freaking gross. I really like this comic. But it's still gross.

You see, if the women looked like animals in this story, then it would be weird to constantly see the female characters all half naked and being sexy and stuff. Or rather, it wouldn't be attractive, would it? It would be a cat in a bra, which is more funny than sexy, and if you do think it's sexy, well then there's something very wrong with you.

But the basis of this book is that the female characters have to be sexy. If they're not sexy, then the story doesn't work. If the characters aren't sexy, then we don't understand why Blacksad is doing so many ridiculous things to solve their cases. If they aren't sexy, visibly sexy to us, then why would we care?

What it means that we apparently need characters more identified by their sex appeal than species in a book like this, is that the writers have so little confidence in the merits of their story outside of a narrow, gendered framework, that they're willing to bend the rules of this world in order to keep that gendered framework in place. If the victim isn't sexy, if there isn't a down-on-her-luck beautiful dame behind this, if there isn't an ice queen, if the story doesn't include a sexy beatnik, then apparently it all falls apart.

Honestly, I find it a little terrifying that the artists here decided that if they had nothing else, they needed to have identifiable breasts in their comic about animals.

Why do the animals have boobs? Why? And why do only the "sexy" animals, usually mammals, have breasts? If you're going to give any female animal breasts, you should give all of them breasts, right?

But they didn't. And it bothers me.

So while I did enjoy reading Blacksad, and I'll probably read more of it as it gets translated into English, I can't say that I enjoyed it unreservedly. I'm always looking around at how women are shown in our media, and this popped out at me. A lot. And it scared me, and made me uncomfortable, and just hammered home how incredibly women are sexualized by the media. So much so that they become literally unrecognizable.

One last thing before I go: I had rather mixed feelings about a second representation issue in this comic. The comic shows the animals discussing race, and being incredibly incensed about racial issues, and even goes so far as to have an entire story arc about white supremacists kidnapping a little black girl. What's weird about it isn't that there's racism - the world in these stories is pretty well-rounded, so it fit - but rather that the story arc about racism is about fur color and not, oh, what kind of animal you are.

Like, the Black Claws gang is made up of crows and panthers and horses and vultures, and pretty much any white animal. And the white supremacists consist of a tern, a walrus (I think), a polar bear, an arctic fox, etc. I just don't really get why the animals are discriminating by color, especially when, in the first story, it seems like they're segregating along different lines (cold blooded versus warm blooded). And that seems a better distinction to me.

All that having been said, however, I did actually like the idea that the race question was made all the more silly by its frivolousness. Like, okay, all the white animals are chilling together, even though they are really, really different. But they hate the black animals. Hey, it's like real racism, where we make distinctions that don't mean anything in real life! Clever!

Or not. Like I said, I had mixed feelings, and I'm still not sure where I wound up. I am still confused about what and how these animals eat (are there other, less sentient animals farmed for food, or what?), and I don't really get why they all walk on two legs even though four would be more efficient, but whatever. It's fantasy, so I guess I can let it go.

The sexiness thing, though? Not letting that go. Not a chance.

Makes no sense.

Source [x]

So, for those of you who were waiting with baited breath to find out what happened with my computer (and for the rest of you who are now wondering what I'm talking about), the crisis has been solved and it was minimal: I needed a new power cord, which was expensive, but ultimately cheaper than buying a new computer, so it's all turned out well. I will have to get a new computer probably in the next year, because this one is four and a half years old, which is very old in computer years, but I knew that was coming eventually. I was just hoping it happened, you know, not for a while.

Pretty sure I've got another year left, though, so that's nice.

Anyway, that's why today's article is late. And it's a real shame, too, because the topic for today is actually something I've been looking forward to covering, and not something I was dreading or procrastinating over, or any of the usual. Which I totally don't ever do. I was kidding about that. Haha.

Like a lot of you, probably, I have a reasonable commute everyday, to and from work. And while sometimes I like to fill that half-hour with pop music or NPR or classic CCR because CCR, these past few days I've been using it to catch up on episodes of Welcome to Night Vale, the deliciously insane fake community news program available for free online. You should listen to it because it is amazing.

While I've been listening, a few things have popped out. First, I love this show and everything about it, and second, the women on this show are pretty universally rad, and in ways that make them stand out from the usual background characters on shows like this. Insofar as there are other shows like this. Which there aren't really. But there are analogs.

So, Welcome to Night Vale is a fake community news broadcast, like I said, purporting to be the local news from a little town in New Mexico: Night Vale. Night Vale is the kind of creepy that would make Lovecraft uncomfortable, and not just because of all the not-white people in the town (H.P. Lovecraft was racist, that's why that joke is funny). There are mysterious hooded figures in the dog park, a Glow Cloud on the PTA board, and a man in a tan jacket with a deerskin briefcase full of flies. Because, you know, flies.

Source [x]

The town thinks of itself as a perfectly normal town, which it most assuredly isn't, and the news bulletins are hilarious for their nonchalance. Stuff like, "Oh, it's Poetry Week again, watch out for the bulldozers," etc. The entire premise is based around the idea that these people have lived in this horrifying, horrifying place for so long, that it has become normal. And it makes for a good show.

All of this is related to us by our host, Cecil Palmer (voiced by Cecil Baldwin, just to make things confusing). Cecil is a native of Night Vale, and as such takes everything in stride. And he's not the only one. The show is rich with recurring characters, inside jokes, and awesome plot development. But like I said above, what really stands out here is the diversity: there are female characters here, and they aren't shoved in the usual female character pigeonholes. They're people, and of course there are a lot of them, because there are a lot of women in Night Vale.

That's right: this is a show with a representative, diverse population of female characters, and they do things. What.

I don't have enough time to run through all the female characters, because there are actually that many of them, but I want to pull out a few to examine, because I feel that it's important to show how much these aren't your usual stereotypes. For example, probably the most popular female character on the show is Tamika Flynn, a twelve year old girl who first shows up in the "Summer Reading Program" episode. Tamika Flynn is one of the children who cautiously walked into the dreaded Night Vale Library, and came out victorious from her battle with the Librarians, covered in gore, with a reading list far in advance of her grade level, and clutching the severed head of a vanquished Librarian.

I should probably mention that Librarians are considered the most fearsome beasts in all of Night Vale, and that this was a big deal.

Tamika then disappeared for a few months, only to reappear while training an army of children for advanced combat, holding a guerilla war on the Strex Corporation, rallying crowds to her support, and literally disappearing into nothingness again. Ah, Tamika Flynn. She's freaking terrifying, and we love her.

But the thing is, Tamika Flynn is, 1, a really weird character in general, and 2, not the kind of character you would normally make the stylistic choice to have as a "stocky", young African-American girl. I mean, I feel like most writers would have pictured more of a young Edward Furlong kind of deal here. Instead, we got Tamika Flynn, and oh are we grateful for her.

Source [x]

Or how about a character who is slightly older and maybe a little less militant? Well then you've got Old Woman Josie, a kindly lady who likes bowling and cookies, and just so happens to have a whole host of angels living at her house, changing her light bulbs, watching her television, and protecting her from the darkness of the void. You know, like you do.

And then there's The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your House, who is a faceless old woman secretly living in your house. She writes passive aggressive letters to be read on air sometimes, and she's also running for mayor. Because why not?

The current mayor is Pamela Winchell, who sometimes acts like a normal mayor, and sometimes acts like an elder beast constrained to human form. It's kind of hard to tell what's up with her, but she is awesome whatever it is.

Or maybe you relate best to stories about childhood disillusionment, and overcoming bullying? Then you'll love Megan, a young girl struggling to connect in school, because she is literally just a severed adult male hand. That's it. And while that seems like it should be a one off joke, it's actually an entire episode, where, by the end, you really and truly feel for Megan. She's not just played for laughs, she's actually a person. Albeit a person whose entire body is a detached hand.

There are so many more female characters I could mention - I didn't even get into the Interns (Intern Dana is actually coming up on a SFC Friday post) - but that's the point. This is just a small sample of the characters in Welcome to Night Vale, and none of them are trivialized or defined by their sex appeal, or even left as caricatures. They're all people. Diverse, weird, sometimes deeply terrifying people.

In fact, not a single character in all of Welcome to Night Vale is defined by their relationship. Everyone is always their own character - even Cecil's boyfriend, Carlos. Carlos is most immediately defined by his job, as the only scientist in Night Vale, instead of by his relationship, even when Cecil is doing the referring. Because this is a show about who people are, rather than what they are or what role they fulfill in society.

What this does is create a world in Night Vale that is deep and interesting and, well, real. You feel like this world is real, because the people who inhabit it are so realistic. The people here have feelings and faults and mess up and make mistakes and are multi-faceted weirdos, and it's great. It really is.

I'll take existentially terrifying over badly written any day.

Source [x]

I would just like to say this before I begin: yes, today's Strong Female Character Friday is literally just an excuse for me to watch Sister Act again and call it "work". I am completely comfortable with that, and you should be too. Besides, she really is a strong female character, isn't she? I would actually argue that along with Elle Woods, Danielle, and Wednesday Addams, Sister Mary Clarence (or Deloris Van Cartier, but I never think of her by that name) is one of the defining female role models of my childhood.

Best childhood.

Anyway, as I was recently rewatching the film, it occurred to me that some of the things I have taken totally for granted about this movie, largely because it came out when I was five, are actually kind of really surprising. And more than that, I honestly do not believe that this movie could come out today. But more on that later. To start, what is Sister Act (I pray you all know, but just in case), and why is Sister Mary Clarence a strong female character?

Sister Act is a bitchingly awesome musical that came out in 1992, and stars Whoopi Goldberg as Deloris Van Cartier, a lounge singer from Reno who accidentally witnesses her mob boss boyfriend (Harvey Keitel) kill someone, and has to go into witness protection. And because her WitSec officer has a sense of humor, he decides to hide Deloris where her boyfriend will never find her: a convent.

It's the kind of really classic one sentence comedy that flourished in the 1980s and 1990s, and personally I think it's one of the best. Obviously Deloris isn't going to fit in with the nuns at the convent, and we've got a real fish out of water story on our hands, haven't we! Deloris immediately butts heads with the uptight Mother Superior (Maggie freaking Smith), and befriends some of the misfit nuns (most notably Kathy Najimy and Wendy Makkena). And, because she has musical experience, Mother Superior assigns her to the choir, to maybe help the ladies harmonize a bit better, and to give her something to do.

Deloris, frustrated by how boring life is at the choir, and annoyed by all these old white women eating bran and praying all the time decides to shake it up a little. She teaches the choir to sing and harmonize, but she also teaches them how to, well, put some funk in it.

And that's where the story really starts. It's not a story about Sister Mary Clarence (as she is now called) being changed and turned away from the awfulness of her life outside by the convent, nor is it a story about one woman fixing a horrible broken place. It's a movie where the two sides help each other, influence each other, and heal each other. Sister Mary Clarence teaches the nuns how to get back on the streets and really help people. She helps them relate to the new generations, and she uses the choir to draw people to the church who haven't been in years.

The nuns, on the other hand, show her that she doesn't have to be hard to be strong. That there is room for faith, even in a secular life. And that loving people well, and truly believing that everything we do matters is important. At the end of the movie, everyone leaves changed. And it's a good thing.

I feel it's important here to emphasize how unusual this storyline is. I mean, seriously, how many other movies can you think of that are explicitly about faith and love and the Church, but which never really force their opinion on you? I mean, the nuns in this movie are clearly in love with Jesus, totally sure that they have done the right thing in choosing this life. But Sister Mary Clarence, or Deloris, isn't a nun, and we don't actually know what she believes. She never says. And, the other characters never really press her. I mean, we can assume from the beginning of the movie that religion probably wasn't a big part of her life, but it's never really brought up again.

And that's what I respect about this movie. Or, one of the things. Not that it never told us the faith of its main character, but that it left it open. The nuns love Jesus, and Deloris may or may not have any faith at all, but that doesn't mean they can't love each other and learn from each other.

In reality, that's actually a much better application of the Gospel than most "religious" movies you see these days. By the end of the movie the nuns know Deloris is really a lounge singer, and they don't actually care. She's still their friend, and they still love her. That's what matters. The real life application of "Love thy neighbor," as manifested by a bunch of women loving their lounge singer friend.

Okay, but why is Sister Mary Clarence, aka Deloris Van Cartier a strong female character? Well, as you can tell from the outline above, she's certainly an interesting one. But she's also really resilient. I mean, she goes from witnessing a murder and having her whole world torn out to living in a convent with a bunch of old white ladies, and while she complains a fair amount, she still lands on her feet. But more than that, she doesn't hold her prior experiences with nuns, which we see from the beginning were largely negative, against them. She lets these women be her friends, and they help change each other. That's being strong.

I also think that the ending, where Deloris is revealed, and she goes back to being a lounge singer, is actually a very courageous ending. It would have been a lot easier for the movie to keep her a nun. I mean, it's kind of safe there, right? She wouldn't have to worry about all the moral issues or frustrations of her previous life, and she would be settled in a community that loves and adores her, full of people she loves and adores, doing a ministry that is established, respected, and by the end of the film, pretty freaking popular. She could have stuck around and run the convent choir, a now internationally renowned institution, and lived happily for the rest of her life. She didn't.

And that takes guts. It takes a lot to see that your time somewhere is over and to transfer somewhere else. To decide to pick up and move when the time is right. Deloris is moving into a world of unknowns now. She doesn't have a job anymore, nor does she really have a place to live, and while she is now more sure of herself and fulfilled, fulfillment doesn't really put a roof over your head. Still, she decides to try. And I like that about her.

That's why the movie is good, and why Deloris/Mary Clarence is a strong female character. But what about the other bit? Why couldn't this movie come out today?

Well, this ties in to a few factors. First, there's been a growing trend in Hollywood of the past twenty years to steer away from mid-budget action and comedy films, movies that aren't too expensive, but aren't exactly cheap either, which will bring a modest box office but definitely turn a profit, in favor of out and out blockbusters that cost billions and make even more (hopefully). Sister Act as a movie probably just wouldn't get picked up. Or it would be an indie. Or a movie made and marketed exclusively for the "black audience". Because that's a thing that happens and is super annoying.

I think this ties in with who is in this movie, and what it's about. Sister Act is a comedy with a 99% female cast about nuns and lounge singers, where the main character is black, where race is an addressed issue, and where no one has a happy romantic ending. Oh, and all the female characters spend most of the movie in incredibly unflattering nun habits.

I think I just gave a movie executive hives.

Seriously, though, think about it. Think about Whoopi Goldberg's whole career. Can you imagine her having that career, having that long stretch of playing leading ladies, dramatic roles, side roles, complex figures, even the freaking Queen in Cinderella, today? Most people are lucky if they can name two commercially viable black actresses. And usually one of them is Whoopi. Or, maybe you can name more than two. Yay! Now, of those actresses, how many of them have been artificially shoe-horned into the "black movie" market?

And that's sad. I hate that. I really do. I wish the industry weren't like that, but I still want to celebrate that it was once. Not that Ms. Goldberg was making her films in the height of cultural sensitivity (um, no), but that when Hollywood was less obsessed with abnormally large box office receipts, it was somehow easier to take a risk on a non-conventionally attractive, non-white actress.

Lower budgets mean more risks. That's why indies are either terrible or great, and why blockbusters are usually so bland. Risks are good, they make life interesting. And you can see how the fear of failure has crippled our entertainment industry.

But that's a lot of big talk. What's the takeaway here?

Well, for starters, if you don't love Sister Act, I'm not sure we can be friends, or you're lying (in which case we definitely can't be friends), but also, it's important to remember that movies like Sister Act have been made and that they could be made again. It's not impossible. And, actually, it's pretty freaking important that they are made again. Soon. We need movies like this, so that little girls like, oh, say, Lupita N'yongo can look up at the screen and see an actress who looks like them, an actress who is funny and cool and at the top of her game, and realize that they can be a star. Or an astronaut. Or a superhero. Or whatever.

Representation matters. It matters more than blockbusters, and it matters more than the safety of a sure bet. Representation can change the world, and it will. For better or worse.

As some of you may or may not know, on Sundays I participate in a fun webcast with Elizabeth Kobayashi, Dan Ingram, and Patrick Bohan - all fantastic nerd people. We talk about pop culture, the news, comic book movies, and pretty much anything that strikes our interest.

This week we talked about Almost Human. As well as the ethics of personhood and robotics, Bender from Futurama, and how Patrick is Dad and I'm Mom, and Dan and Elizabeth just want us to stop fighting. Which will probably never happen.

Also there is an extended reading from Les Miserables used to make a point.

So. The time is finally upon us. The great Divergent movie has been released, made a ton of money, and suggested the possibility that a world of young adult adaptations that don't suck might just be upon us. What are we to do with this information?

Uh, be happy, I guess? And also, analyze the crap out of it!

For those of you who studiously avoid things like this until I tell you about them, which is statistically at least one of you, Divergent is another young adult dystopian franchise, the successor to The Hunger Games' crown, and one of the more imaginative iterations of the whole "teenage girl in oppressive society must rebel against government's desire to squash her bodily autonomy" subgenre. Which is weirdly getting big enough to be its own genre.*

The movie and book (written by Veronica Roth) follow Tris Prior (Shailene Woodley), a young girl who has grown up in a very weird world. She lives in a city that we know is Chicago, but that she has never thought to know the name of. She knows that there was some kind of war, and that the founders of her city took great pains to create a society that would discourage the ill effects of human nature.

To do this, they created the faction system: five groups based around five important values to a free society. There is Erudite (intelligence), Amity (kindness), Candor (honesty), Dauntless (courage), and Abnegation (selflessness).** When children of this society come of age at sixteen, they are forced to choose which faction they will join. They can stick with the one of their birth, which most do, or they can defect to another faction, but in so doing, they will lose all rights to their family, and their new faction will become their family. It's a weird system.

Fortunately for the undecided, they don't have to make the decision blind. Nope! They get told what to do. Isn't that comforting? Each student takes an aptitude test, or simulation, that basically sees what they really do in a variety of situations, and uses that information to determine which faction they belong in.

Tris is Abnegation and while she loves and adores her family, she's never really felt comfortable in selflessness. It doesn't come naturally to her. I would argue that it doesn't come naturally to anyone, but it's hard for a sixteen year old to get that. Anyway, as much as she loves her parents (played by Ashley Judd and Tony Goldwyn), Tris is pretty sure she's not going to get Abnegation when she takes her test. And she's right. Sort of.

Because she does get Abnegation, but she also gets Erudite and Dauntless, and that's a very, very bad thing. Tris is someone they call "divergent", which pretty much just means that her brain is a little bit different, and the serums and tests the government uses to control its citizens don't work on her. Which is a very bad dangerous thing. And while this is explained in a kind of confusing, herky jerky way in the books (and the movie), it does end up being very important. Tris is divergent, and it's probably going to get her killed.

So Tris decides to follow her heart, and joins Dauntless. She loves being brave and doing silly, adrenaline junkie things (I would not be in Dauntless, not even a little bit), but more than that, Tris likes protecting people, and Dauntless makes up the city's security forces, its police, its law and order. Tris wants to keep people safe, so she learns to be dangerous.

In Dauntless, though, things are more dangerous than they seem. While Tris gets on very well with her gruff (and dreamy) instructor, Four (Theo James), she also makes quick enemies with Four's supervisor, Eric (Jai Courtney). And it's refreshing to see that while she has guts to spare, and a determination to do well, Tris isn't actually very physically strong, and it takes a good long while for her to measure up in the initiate rankings. Fortunately, she has a solid motivation. If she doesn't do well, she'll get booted out, and become Factionless, which is a fate worse than death, apparently.

And then in the end, (SPOILERS), Tris and her divergence, her ability to be unaffected by the serums and simulations, both save her life and create a big problem: while she and Four are able to stop the evil Jeanine Matthews (Kate Winslet, who reportedly took the role because she wanted to "play the baddie for once") from killing off Abnegation, they must then go on the run while society crumbles around them.

I skipped a few steps in there, I know, but don't worry. I'll make it up to you.

What makes this story somewhat unique in a sea of dystopian fiction is that it is so highly philosophical about the whole thing. And it's the rare dystopia where, aside from that thing where Erudite is trying to murder Abnegation, it's not actually that dystopian. It's weird, and strict, and kind of intense about things that don't immediately seem to matter, but the faction system itself isn't actually awful. It's actually kind of nice. Or, well, it should be.

I say this not because the idea of segregating people into cliques based on common personality types seems like an inherently good idea (it's not), but because the basic idea behind the most basic idea here is actually freaking great. It's not the factions that are awesome, it's the Choosing Ceremony. Allow me to explain by way of another, better known, book series: Harry Potter.

You all know what happens in Harry Potter, especially in the first book. We're going to skip right to the part in the Great Hall, where Harry meets the Sorting Hat and determines his fate. Now, there are fourteen kajillion tests online that will tell you what house you belong in, and the houses are based around basic character traits and values, just like the factions. Harry gets the Sorting Hat put on his head, and he expects it to tell him exactly what house he ought to be in. Only it doesn't.

Instead, the Sorting Hat asks Harry what house he would like to be in. It's not that the Sorting Hat doesn't have an opinion. It does. But it maintains that this is Harry's choice. Harry has the qualities to be in pretty much any of the houses, though he's best suited for Gryffindor and Slytherin, but the Hat is actually letting Harry decide where he'll go. And that is absolutely crucial.

Harry decides he wants to be Sorted into Gryffindor, because that seems like the best house to him. What this means is actually really important: it's not that Harry examined himself and determined that he had the most aptitude for Gryffindor, or that he looked at their classes and determined them to be the easiest, or anything like that. Harry chose Gryffindor because he agreed with them the most. That bravery is important, and, for him, the most important thing.

How is this like Divergent? Well...

The Choosing Ceremony, like the Sorting Hat, is less to do with your natural aptitudes than it is about your values. You choose your faction based on natural ability, sure, but you also choose it based on the thing you find most important. Because your faction will determine the rest of your life, you choose based on the values that you will be most comfortable upholding for the duration of your (hopefully long) existence.

And this matters. A lot. It matters because it forces you to, at least once in your life, publicly declare what you believe to be good.

Whenever I take online tests about this, because I am a nerd and I love taking tests, it tells me that my Hogwarts house would be Ravenclaw, and my Divergent faction would be Erudite. And those are both pat, neat answers. I am a nerd, and I do love learning more than I love almost everything else, so those seem like totally easy solves, right? Well, no, because that's not what I would pick.

I don't actually want to spend my life surrounded by a bunch of people who think intelligence is the highest value, because I don't think intelligence is the highest value. I like intelligence. I am quite fond of my own, and I get rather a lot of mileage out of it. But it's not my core belief. I don't cherish my brain. If tomorrow I woke up, and I had lost my ability to remember everything, to analyze, to think circles around my teachers, I would be sad, yeah, but I wouldn't be devastated. In short, I would make a great Ravenclaw or Erudite. But I would be totally miserable.

When I sort myself, I pick Hufflepuff, and when I choose, I choose Abnegation. Not because loyalty and selflessness are values I inherently have. They aren't, trust me. But because they are values I deeply, deeply want. I want so much to be loyal and kind and selfless. I want to be that person, and I try so hard to make my choices reflect that. If I chose in the ceremony, I would probably pick Abnegation, even though I have every bet that my aptitude test wouldn't show that.

Which brings us back around again to why this is such an interesting story. In the world of this book/movie, the faction system is supposed to be about choice. It's supposed to be about the values you hold most dear. If you think of it like that, the faction system is actually great. The problem comes, like with most societies gone wrong, from the implementation: the aptitude test. (Also that whole thing with the death and the killing. That wasn't great.)

The aptitude test is like those online quizzes: it shows you what you are, but it doesn't say anything about who you ought to be. It doesn't give any indication of who you want to become, and it doesn't take your values into account. This is important.

It's important because it creates an artificially narrow view of what it means to be brave or smart or selfless. It matters because people change. Tris changes. And also, Tris stays the same.

I really wonder sometimes what would have happened in this story if Tris had understood the Choosing Ceremony to be not about what you're good at, but what you value. Because Tris actually does value selflessness. She values it so much that she never gives it up. In true divergent fashion, Tris manages to show the selflessness of courage and the courage of selflessness. Dauntless and Abnegation have quite a lot in common, but then, so do all the other factions.

Tris isn't less selfless just because she wants to learn to fight. She wants to learn to fight in order to be able to stand up to bullies. How is that not selfless? But because society has defined selflessness narrowly, she is shunted into another corner. Because society has decided to base the system on what you're good at, and not what you value, everything gets all messed up.

It's a terrible system, when they do it this way. Because when we decide to define our lives by our aptitudes, we only look at who we are now. When we define our lives by our values, then we can see a glimpse of who we will be.

Okay, this is all really philosophical. What's the bottom line?

The bottom line is that you should probably go see Divergent. Not just because it's a good movie, or because I want you to watch the hell out of most movies with a realistically drawn, compelling female protagonist (good reason, though it is), but because this is a movie that will make you think. And, if you're willing to let it, this is a story that will make you choose. What do you actually hold most dear? What do you value?

And how are you going to define your life?

*The Hunger Games, Divergent, Matched, Uglies, The Selection, and even The Maze Runner which is about a dude, but has the same basic plot as all the others. There are more, I just got sick of listing them. But isn't that weirdly specific? Well, I think it's weird. And I wrote a paper about it! For more on this, be on the lookout for The Age of Dystopia, a new book about dystopian fiction, with a chapter on this very topic, written by moi, on your bookshelves sometime in 2015 (hopefully).

**Also be on the lookout for another article by moi on the courage of selflessness in Abnegation, and the perils of a society that seeks to enforce it, in Divergent and Philosophy, which will be on your shelves in...2015? Maybe? It's really hard to tell with these things. But probably sometime around Christmas, if we're lucky.

In case you guys haven't picked up a trend so far, young adult dystopian fiction is kind of my jam. Whether it's The Hunger Games, Divergent, Matched, The Selection, Uglies, or pretty much anything else I forgot to mention but love uncontrollably, yeah, I like it a little bit.

Which is why I was so excited to finally get my hands on The Maze Runner and its two sequels. I love me a good yarn about oppressive governments and coming of age, and this one is widely considered to be one of the best. I settled down into my comfy ikea chair to read about a dude for once, and remembered fondly that the main character in this one, Thomas, is actually going to be played by Dylan O'Brien in the movie that comes out this fall, and all is right with the world. Except for the part where it's not. Because it wasn't too far into the book when I realized that crap, these books are actually incredibly deeply sexist.

Whoops.

So while some people read books like this and get swept up in the plot or the story, I actually read this entire trilogy with a single mantra in my mind: "Please be all in my head. Please don't actually be sexist. Please let Teresa turn out to be awesome."

Spoiler alert: it didn't get better. It actually got worse. A lot worse.

And now, to back it up for those of you who have no idea what I just said. The Maze Runner and its sequels (The Scorch Trials and The Death Cure) are all books written by James Dashner, and they focus on a group of teenage boys who have been abandoned, seemingly without purpose, inside a giant maze full of monsters and other things that could kill them. The boys are given food, shelter, equipment, and even the tools to farm and raise their own animals. But they aren't given any way out.

More than that, more boys keep arriving. Once a month, on the same day each time, the Box comes up, and in it comes another boy, roughly teenaged, with absolutely no memory of who he is or how he got there. All that boy will know is his name. And the other boys will haze him a little, before enfolding him into life in The Glade, as they call it. Some boys raise cattle, some boys farm the land, some cook the food, some clean the latrines, and some boys, just a few, run the maze every day before the doors close, looking for a way out.

Into all of this carefully constructed something comes Thomas, the new boy in the Box. Thomas has no idea who he is or what he's doing there, only that the Maze and the Glade seem somehow familiar, and that more than anything, he wants to be a Runner. But mostly he's just terrified and wants to go home, wherever home is.

It's with Thomas' arrival, though, that things seem to kick into high gear. Whoever put the boys in the maze to begin with is ready to take things to the next level, and the day after Thomas appears, something completely different happens: a girl comes up in the Box. She's a month too early to be their new Glader, and she's the first girl ever to arrive. Also she's in a coma and carries a piece of paper that says she's the last one, ever.

So totally not ominous.

She also appears to know Thomas because, moments before slipping into a coma, she said his name. This does not help with the Gladers, who are already suspicious because girl, and then suspicious because she has "WICKED is good" written on her arm, and also everything else is super not kosher. Thomas is just freaked out that she appears to be speaking to him inside his brain. And that she looks very familiar.

For the majority of book one, Teresa is in a coma. Then she wakes up, and, her memories now completely gone, she and Thomas try to solve the maze before the Grievers (horrifying monsters that roam the maze at night) kill them all. Or, well, Thomas tries to solve the maze. Teresa gets locked up for a while, then sits around in the map room making puzzles, while Thomas heroically sacrifices himself and runs around and is generally heroic.

Eventually (not really SPOILERS, but whatever), they manage to escape the maze, only to find that they have been held as part of an experiment held by the group WICKED, which is a really dumb acronym, and that the whole point of the maze was to test them against various Variables. Because the world has succumbed to a pseudo-zombie apocalypse, and clearly trapping a bunch of teenagers in a giant maze for two years was the most efficient way to deal with the problem. Totally.

In the second book, The Scorch Trials, the Gladers think that they've finally escaped, only to discover that, no, they haven't, and WICKED is still testing them. Thomas and company are "rescued" and taken to another location, only for Teresa to be kidnapped, because of course she is, and for the boys to find themselves abandoned in the wasteland that is The Scorch (a part of North America completely fried by sun flares), and beset by "Cranks" - people with the Flare virus who are at varying levels of zombification.

They have to walk through the Scorch in order to reach safe haven, and they have a deadline, because, again, of course they do. Also, Teresa is still missing, and probably in danger, and it seems that there is a second group of Gladers out there, this one a group of all girls and one guy (the guy is now with our heroes because we needed another dude). And also these girls want to kill Thomas. Because plot, I guess.

Thomas meets a pretty girl: Brenda. Brenda wants to kiss Thomas, but Thomas wants to kiss Teresa. Brenda is mad. Teresa comes back, only to be kind of mildly psychotic. Teresa kidnaps Thomas, tells him to trust her, and then declares loudly her intent to murder him.

Teresa tries to murder Thomas, with the help of some other people (mostly girls). Thomas is very unhappy for some reason with being stuck in a gas chamber in the middle of the desert. He and Teresa are not really friends anymore. Teresa claims that she was trying to save his life. By trying to kill him. They all make it to the safe haven, and find out that this was just another test, and also that WICKED is still monitoring them and studying their brains. Thomas is then taken away and put in a little white cell for a while, because plot, I think.

Book three: The Death Cure. Thomas gets out of his cell, and discovers that WICKED has decided to play with all of their lives because they are trying to make a cure for the Flare. But, because WICKED is super horrible, not all the boys are immune to the virus. Thomas is immune, but his best friend Newt isn't. Also, Teresa is totally sure that WICKED is great, even though Thomas is sure it isn't. Oh, and Brenda is actually working for WICKED but not working for them and still wants to kiss Thomas.

Blah blah blah, Thomas and some friends escape from WICKED and go on a rollicking adventure through a post-apocalyptic Denver, only to eventually end up back at WICKED, trying to save the immune people from being blown up. The series ends with Teresa dead (she died trying to save Thomas, because of course she did), and the rest of the immune characters escaping to a magical land where they can be safe from Cranks and repopulate the earth in peace. The end.

In case you couldn't tell by my tone in there, the books kind of lost me after the first one. Not only are these books where the entire cast is made up of guys, and the only female character spends all of her time either being useless or being an antagonist motivated by wanting to bone the hero, they're also just kind of badly written.

It's sad, but true.

The problem comes from the setup of the story. I'm all for the idea of a story where it turns out that the characters are actually labrats in a giant experiment (I've actually got a great comic script like that kicking around), but the problem with this is how much it blames on that conceit, and how little sense it actually makes.

Thomas is stuck in the maze because of the experiment. Then he escapes, then he is rescued, then he escapes again, then he wanders in the desert, then he kisses some girl, then he escapes another freaking time, and all of these things - all of them - are supposed to happen. They're part of the experiment. What it does is degrade the stakes of the story. It makes it all feel meaningless.

And I suppose that some part of that is intentional. Thomas and the others feel like labrats. They feel like their lives are being controlled, and that they have no power. Every move they make has been anticipated, and is actually playing into their captors' hands. Unfortunately, while that is conceptually interesting, it really blows in a book series.

When I am absolutely sure that my hero cannot win this battle, and that in fact it is wildly rigged against him, and then the story goes on to show me that literally every fight he is in is rigged against him, at some point I stop being outraged on his behalf, and I just start getting bored. I stop caring. It's too much effort, and I know he's going to lose. Whatever.

Plus, most of the "Variables" that WICKED puts Thomas through feel a bit more like plotlines that the writer wasn't comfortable fully committing to. Like when Thomas is trapped in the insane asylum. The second book ends with him locked away "for his own good", and then the third book starts with him being let out a few weeks later, everything fine, no worries, carry on. And it is never explained or really referred to again.

This happens, for the record, all the freaking time. All these Variables are actually just random excuses stuck in there every once in a while to say, "Oh right, yeah, there's an explanation for that! A good one! But you don't need to know what it is."

I find this rather frustrating.

And, like I said before, the sexism in these books is really remarkable. For starters, the only female character in the first book at all is Teresa, who spends most of the story comatose. Then there's the thing where there are only three notable female characters (Teresa, Brenda, and Chancellor Paige), and two of them are love interests for Thomas. The other one, Chancellor Paige, of course, is the secret mastermind behind everything and never appears in the story. At all. I think we glimpse her hand once.

All of this is annoying. The lack of girls in the maze, and the existence of "Group B", the girl group, are explained away as the Variables, but the reason for those particular variables is never given. Nor do we ever really learn anything about Group B, other than that they were slightly better at the maze than the boys.

The problem is that Dashner focuses the story on the guys, and never questions it. He gives us one female character, who sucks, and who the hero literally cannot even mentally refer to without calling her pretty, but he ignores the entire massive group of female characters at his disposal, because of "the Variables."

It really seems more like he just didn't feel like writing any women. Like it felt easier to just write about a bunch of guys, but he needed to throw in the idea of a female version of this happening too, just so people like me didn't get upset. Too late, Dashner. A little too late.

For all of this, though, it's not a bad story, per se. There's a movie coming out this November adapted from this material, and I will probably go see it. In theaters, even. It's an entertaining concept, and while I was grossly let down by the execution, I'm willing to give it another chance.

It better not screw it up.

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For Once, The Girl Makes the Grand Gesture (Pitch Perfect)

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Strong Female Character Friday: Allison (Orphan Black)

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Your Values, Not Your Aptitude, Will Determine Your Life (Divergent)

Hang On, Were You Trying to Be Sexist? (The Maze Runner)