Television Tuesday :: Pretty Much the Queen [a Jessica Hamby fanmix]

1. Old Trains (Merriment)
Well I miss my old house and my old room, the soft, faint whistle of the trains at 3 a.m. and at five in morning too.  How have you been?  Same as always, or is there something you’re not telling me?  So tell me now, what’s taken the corners of your mouth and made you smile so?

2. Lost Kitten (Metric)
Don’t say yes if you can’t say no, victim of the system, say it isn’t so.  Squatted on the doorstep, swollen on the blow, leaving without you, can’t say no.  Halfway starts with happiness for me, halfway house, lost kitten in the street.  Hit me where it hurts, I’m coming home to lose, kitten on the catwalk, high-heeled shoes.

3. Dangerous (This Girl)
So I guess I’m ready for the rush, I don’t wanna live without it.  Gonna make me blush (you’re dangerous), nothing I can do about it.  Now I know why they’re calling it a crush (you’re dangerous), I don’t mind what they say, you be my big mistake and I’ll be yours to take apart waiting for you to break my heart.  Bleeding in your arms, looking for trouble, certain that your love’ll break my heart.

4. Debate Exposes Doubt (Death Cab for Cutie)
Finally there is clarity and there is purpose after all, but every night ends the same as I’m collapsing once more by your side. Finally there is clarity, this tiny life is making sense.  And every drop numbs the both of us, but I alone am staggering.

5. 192 Days (Eisley)
You look so fair in the loving moonlight, I’ll stand beside you, take a photograph, preserve the memory of you and me.  And when it grows dark I won’t be afraid, take my little hand and dance with me instead.

6. Death Proof (Kate Nash)
Burn, burn, burn my heart baby, take a piece ’cause I don’t need all of it.  Don’t have time for your cruel ways and I ain’t wondering ’bout numbered days ’cause… I don’t have time to die.

7. Falling Away With You (Muse)
All of the love we left behind, watching the flash backs intertwine.  Memories I will never find so I’ll love whatever you become.  And forget the reckless things we’ve done, I think our lives have just begun, I think our lives have just begun.

8. Fascination (La Roux)
It’s been seven hours long and your shadow still hangs on, you’ve been two weeks gone so tonight I followed you home.  There are so many different ways of collecting all the strays, the ones that get away.

9. Sacrilege (Yeah Yeah Yeahs)
Fallen for a guy, fell down from the sky, halo round his head, feathers in our bed, in our bed, in our bed.  It’s sacrilege, sacrilege, sacrilege, you say, it’s sacrilege, sacrilege, sacrilege, you say.

10. So Long (Rilo Kiley)
Watch me fly away through the night sky yeah, now that all you touched has finally turned to gray and roads can’t hold us down, winds will move us around with no need to return to this gray town.  Want to bet I can tell you’ve been in bed for too long, so let’s just say so long.

11. Happier (A Fine Frenzy)
It’s not the words that make it final.  You’ve said such things before to rival them, but it’s how you say ‘em now that’s changed, cold but sympathetic all the same.  Lie to convince me that I’ll be better off so, you go on and I’ll be happier, I’ll be happier, you go on, yeah, you go on, you’ll be gone and I’ll be happier.

12. The End (Ellie Goulding)
We’ve only ever kissed lying down, we’ve only ever touched when there’s no one else around.  I can be elusive if you want me to, I’m not being intrusive, I just wish I knew the truth.

13. Jessica (Regina Spektor)
I can’t write a song for you, I’m out of melodies.  I can’t write a song for you, but I am asking please, Jessica, wake up.  Jessica, wake up.

Pretty Much the Queen at 8tracks.

–your fangirl heroine.

Monster Monday :: on makers and progeny (or sires and children, or whichever combination you prefer)

Because I’ve discussed the individual sexual habits and proclivities of individual vampires before, many of whom were makers-sires/progeny-children, and I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned the different kinds of maker-sire/progeny-childe relationships, but I wanted to properly list them out and analyze them.

Shockingly, this list is not going to be canon-sorted.  Since it’s about different kinds of things, I’m sorting it that way.  So.

Sexual relations from the start

• These are the makers (okay, from here out I’m just going with makers and progeny, since quantitatively there are going to be more on this list who are thusly called in canon) who are banging their progeny, period.  They sire (but see here I’ll use that term as a verb, because I like it) a vampire because they like them and want to be with them intimately.
• Sometimes these maker-progeny relationships end; this is often due to choices made by the progeny.  They want to live a different kind of life, so they ask to be released and basically dumped, or they do something to cause the maker to feel they have no choice but to set such a scenario into motion.
• Both pairs of consistently coupled makers and progeny who constitute Buffy and Angel‘s Whirlwind, Darla/Angelus and Drusilla/Spike, could be made to fall under this category.  (Angelus/Drusilla is a more complicated issue.)  Darla (Julie Benz) seduces Angelus (David Boreanaz) and turns him, they go on their merry and have all the sex the whole time (though not exclusively, of course), their relationship is then terminated by Angelus and his acquisition of a soul.  Drusilla (Juliet Landau) is enchanted by Spike, who is then William (James Marsters), then she charms him and turns him, they go on their merry and have all the sex the whole time (though not exclusively, of course).  Their relationship is terminated technically by Dru, but because she observes a change in Spike’s behavior.
• The best example I can pinpoint from True Blood is Lorena/Bill.  (While certain other couples, i.e. Russell/Talbot, technically fall into this category, many of the details are ones that are not given much airtime, so I’m just going to mention it and move on.)  Many of the details of Lorena’s (Mariana Klaveno) past are similarly fuzzy (though according to the True Blood wiki, there are several things in common with the Drusilla situation) but the details of her relationship with Bill (Stephen Moyer) are fairly straightforward.  He shows up at her cabin on his way home from the war, she appreciated his “strong moral character” (quoting from the wiki there, because I think it’s funny), she turns him, they go on their merry and have all the sex the whole time.  In 1935, then, Bill asked to be released, being fed up with Lorena’s being, well, a prototypical murdering seducing vampire.
• Oh, and I guess there’s plenty of this in Twilight, because sex is okay as long as you’re in a committed relationship and maker-progeny situations seem to sometimes lead to committed relationships in Twilight.  Or committed relationships lead to maker-progeny situations.

The fuzzy gray area that involves sexual relations, but

• There are three types of these.
• Angelus/Drusilla, wherein it is a fuzzy gray area because, well, there are sexual relations, there are a lot of sexual relations, but they are technically in relationships with their own other halves.  The Whirlwind is this big polyamorous mess of vampire sexin’, but it’s mostly that they like to share.  Also, Angelus/Drusilla is never a proper relationship, because the proper relationships that come from the sex in these other cases involve(d) some degree of officialness.  Angelus was with Darla, Drusilla was with Spike, and there was never really any time when the four of them were together and that wasn’t true.  And here the father and daughter thing is very intentionally creepy.
• Eric/Pam, wherein it is a fuzzy gray area because yes, they partake of the sexual relations when Eric (Alexander Skarsgard) turns Pam (Kristin Bauer van Straten).  They also partake of the sexual relations before she is turned.  But while they eventually stop having these relations, they don’t ever actually have a “break up” like the above couples.  They stop banging, but they stay together, and their relationship gradually shifts into one that the True Blood wiki says is “comparable to that of a father and a daughter,” though never entirely.  They stop banging, but they stay really, really close.
• Pam/Tara, wherein it is a fuzzy gray area because the circumstances of their turning involve no sex whatsoever, but their attraction grows naturally.  Pam turns Tara (Rutina Wesley), but Tara makes the first direct move sexually.  There is an aspect of mother and daughter to their relationship, though it’s really only as much as you would see with a little girl “mothering” a doll, dressing her up and scolding her for purported misbehaviors.  Mostly they are just two women with a definite power dynamic that eventually enter into a relationship.

Pretty much familial

• I feel weird saying that the Master (Mark Metcalf) was properly fatherly toward Darla, but there’s really no other place to put them, because I’m pretty sure they never banged?  “Darla,” a nickname given her by him, means “dear one,” but that could just as likely be a dearness born of some sort of platonic familial affection.  She was his protégé, and that was pretty much that, I think?
• Also, Bill and Jessica (Deborah Ann Woll).  This is the most overtly daddy-daughter relationship that really is between a maker and progeny, and honestly, the only times I’ve ever felt fond toward Bill was when he was playing good dad.  I’m positive I’ve mentioned that before.  I imagine that Bill’s reasons for not sexually relating to Jessica were several: for one, he remembered how unhappy he was in a romantic relationship with his maker.  For another, he was in a relationship with Sookie (Anna Paquin) at the time.  For another, Jessica was a teenage kid, after all, and Bill used to have scruples and whatnot.  But while he was a pretty awkward dad at first, and he obviously turned into a huge jerk in regards to the whole Lilith mess, there was a period in the middle where he was just an affectionate father, and she was happy to call him her dad, since in that in-between he was way less of a douche than her human father.
• I’m pretty sure this is mostly true of Godric/Eric and Godric/Nora?  In their conversations about Godric (Allan Hyde), Eric and Nora (Lucy Griffiths) tend to refer to him as “father,” and they do seem to (have) compete(d) for his affections like siblings do.  I don’t know if we’ll ever know how much maker-progeny sexin’ was going on in that situation (personally, I suspect there was some, but that it eventually faded out over time a la Eric/Pam, and while Eric/Pam’s eventual form was something almost father-daughter but also decidedly not, the vibe of Godric’s relationship to his progeny was much more strictly familial at the end).
• Oh, and I guess there’s some of this with Twilight and Carlisle the wonder vampire doctor dad.

Surrogates

• Angelus was somewhat of an extra maker for Spike; this is mentioned sometimes.
• Eric and Pam both stood as substitute makers for Jessica for that little while (and I understand why it wasn’t part of the show, but I kind of wish we’d have seen those shenanigans at least a little, just because I love the ridiculous cool older cousin/enthusiastic little cousin vibe that Pam and Jess have).
• Salome (Valentina Cervi) was basically an extra maker for Nora.  Because Godric may have taught her how to vampire, but Salome taught her how to do many other things, I’m sure.
• Oh, and this is true of Twilight and Carlisle the wonder vampire doctor dad too.

–your fangirl heroine.

Television Tuesday :: baby vamp [a sartorial analysis of Jessica Hamby]

Because I am the kind of person I am, I was having a conversation with one of my friends (she who was the unnamed fangbanger in the True Blood party pictures) about clothesmeta today.  I mentioned how much fun coming up with clothesmeta regarding Pam was, and she in turn mentioned that a lot of the characters on True Blood really are dressed with intent.  “Except Jessica,” she then commented.  “I feel like they just sort of put Jessica in clothes.”  Without them being meaningful, that is to say.  And I thought about this.  And then I replied, “I think that’s at least somewhat to do with the fact that she’s still figuring out who she is.”  We then discussed this for a little while longer, but also because I am the kind of person I am, I have to go through and prove this theory.  Because clothesmeta is fun, and because I do adore Jessica (Deborah Ann Woll).

The more I think about it, the more I realize it’s true.  Pam (Kristin Bauer van Straten), as I before discussed, presents constantly.  Sophie-Anne (Evan Rachel Wood), back in the day, was definitely tied to a very specific presentation.  Salome (Valentina Cervi) and Nora (Lucy Griffiths)?  Presenting on the regular.  Also in very deliberate ways.  And despite being technically vampire-younger, Tara (Rutina Wesley) doesn’t have the same aesthetic ambivalence that Jess does, both because Tara has always known more or less who she is and because at least so far in her unlife Tara has basically been Pam’s life-size doll to play dress-up with.  Jessica, on the other hand, has been trying this whole time just to figure out who the hell she is and what the hell that means.

When we first meet Jessica in 1×10, “I Don’t Wanna Know” (and then continuing into the above, 1×11, “To Love is to Bury”), she’s dressed as a “good girl.”  She’s a teenager, seventeen to be exact (which seems to be synonymous with capital-letters REBELLION in fiction), who comes from a very repressed background: hyperreligious (her little sister, we learn later, is named Eden), strict, control-freaky, and abusive parents.  (Also learned later is that these tendencies seem to run in her family.)  She’s a good girl whose first major bad act, sneaking out, led to being captured and turned into a vampire by Bill (Stephen Moyer).  She has her sweet little floral blue dress, not at all revealing, not at all tight, not at all distinctive.  (And thinking that this was what she wore for a night of sneaking out, it’s probably the least “not at all” dress she owned.)  And then Bill, someone who several times over has at least somewhat reflected her biological parents’ behavior, turns her over to Pam and Eric (Alexander Skarsgard) for a little while.  When she returns in 1×12, “You’ll Be the Death of Me” (and then continuing into the above, 2×01, “Nothing But the Blood”), Jessica is dressed as her approximation of a “bad girl”: black low-cut tank top, black stockings, black bracelets, plaid mini-skirt, studded belts and choker.  It’s at least the same color/texture scheme of Goth Punk Barbie, it’s everything she wasn’t allowed to be before and probably saw on the cool rebel girls her age.  Our first introduction to Jessica is Good Christian Jessica, which isn’t entirely who she is; she then goes completely the opposite direction, with Bad Punk Vampire Jessica, which isn’t entirely who she is either.

So for a tiny while, Jess is in stasis.  She doesn’t know what she wants to present, she doesn’t know what Bill wants her to present (he’s pretty specific about not liking the Goth Punk Barbie look), so she’s basically sitting around his mansion in her Dollstate jammies.  The yellow dress of 2×02, “Keep This Party Going,” and 2×03, “Scratches,” as seen above, is one of the Cotton Candy Jessica outfits, the first of them.  It’s a compromise of sorts: not the lifeless, repressed nonfashion of what her parents insisted on, but still probably part of the wardrobe that Bill selected and approved of for her.  It’s still “sweet girl” without being too, too “good girl,” it’s youthful without being infantilizing.  She curls her hair to go out, she combs and pins it back, but despite the fact that Bill picked these clothes out for her, she’s at least making decisions about how to style herself.  Also noteworthy is that, while she still sometimes opts for loose curls in later seasons, the tight ringlets there are pretty strictly season 2, evidence of something she tries and then apparently grows out of emotionally.

2×04, “Shake and Fingerpop,” and 2×05, “Never Let Me Go.”  More of the curly hair and cute colors Cotton Candy Jessica.  Given Jessica’s upbringing, it’s reasonable to assume that gender roles were a normal thing assigned to her, but given what little we see her wearing from that life, it’s not necessarily cute-feminine.  These light colors and ruffles and whatnot represent an overt embracing (not the only way to embrace, mind you, but a way to embrace) something that was probably deemed negative: taking too much pride in one’s appearance, taking too much effort with one’s appearance, even the feminine itself, which likely had Biblically negative connotations in Jessica’s father’s eyes.  Goth Punk Barbie was a costume for Jessica, but this is something that, while different, she seems a bit more natural at.  And given that she is often (due largely to lack of vampire experience) the naive one in the room, it’s reasonable that she’s for now in relatively innocent colors.

By season 3, Jessica’s default has mellowed even more.  She’s still colorful, still doing things with her (absolutely gorgeous) hair, but as seen here with 3×01, “Bad Blood,” and 3×03, “It Hurts Me Too,” she’s grown up a bit.  Season 2 Jess is still getting the hang of just having a new life; season 3 Jess is at least more comfortable with that.  Comfort is the thing here, and it continues to be so for the rest of the season.  She may not know who she is yet, exactly, but she’s gotten a decent hang of where she is.  Incidentally, another reason it can seem like Jessica’s clothes aren’t necessarily as meaningful as the other particularly vampire women of the show’s clothes is that, well, Jessica is sort of the “normal” one.  While she’s still figuring out what she wants to present overall and still does use her clothes to her advantage in that way, her default is very Forever 21, BP at Nordstrom, occasionally Anthropologie.  For her, “normal” is still a rebellion of sorts from her human life.

This is my ode to Jessica’s hairstyles while she’s at work.  3×05, “Trouble,” and 4×06, “I Wish I Was the Moon”: what I love about this is that sure, she’s going to work, she needs to keep her hair relatively out of her face and presentable, but when she’s not doing something with braids and ponytails or headbands, she tends toward these cute retro-looking styles.  And that’s cute, and because these start when she’s basically independent, I’m going to say that this wasn’t anyone’s idea but her own.

And then 4×02, “You Smell Like Dinner,” rolls around.  Jessica has basically been “playing house” with Hoyt (Jim Parrack), her first love.  They’re trying to make it work out, and she’s definitely presenting for him, inadvertently or deliberately or maybe a bit of both.  Never before have we seen Suburban Farmgirl Jessica, with the flannel and the hair back in a messy bun, and there are only two instances of Jess opting for something like a messy bun, and the other is in season 5 after she’s, you know, been kidnapped and silvered and threatened with death all night.  It would seem to be her way of saying “oh, screw it.”  It’s not an act of giving up or giving in, exactly, it’s just potentially an act of being tired, and a year of playing house with Hoyt has left her tired.  As Pam observes in 4×01, “She’s Not There,” when Jessica and Hoyt drop in on Fangtasia one night, “He seems sweet and all, but if you’re making him bring you here, I have a hunch that it’s not enough.”  (Because really, Pam is the Cool Older Cousin Who’s Basically A Sister But Don’t Let Her Hear You Saying That in this situation.  And most situations involving Jessica.)  Upon returning to Fangtasia soon after that without Hoyt, in the same night of the flannel and the messy bun, Jess quickly strips down to a much brighter and snazzier tank top, she literally lets her hair down.  This is getting closer to the colorful default tank top Jessica of season 3, though with an extra edge of Sexy because that’s what she perceives Fangtasia as requiring.

Then, after more episodes of flannel and the Merlotte’s work t-shirt and default tank tops (because when Jessica isn’t consciously presenting, she does default, and that’s comfort both physical and personal more than anything), we have the first two efforts at and instances of Big Girl Vampire Jessica.  I’ve said before and I will say again, every self-respecting vampire owns a leather jacket, but this, 4×10, “Burning Down the House,” and continued as above in 4×11, “Soul of Fire,” is Jessica’s first leather jacket.  One sported, as I noted in my analysis of Pam, while no other vampires present are actually doing leather.  She’s getting definitely more comfortable with her vampire badassery and definitely more comfortable with using her vampire powers for good and not having them ultimately create a semi-dependent state that is rejected, as with Hoyt.  She’s finally beginning to come into her own, vampire-wise.  And then 4×12, “And When I Die,” we have another first for Jessica, one key (thought not as compulsory) for lady vampires: first corset.  Yes, hers is for Halloween, because if you wear something red under a red cloak, you can basically be Sexy Little Red Riding Hood no matter what, but this makes sense.  Jessica’s life is different from Pam’s and Tara’s: she’s not consciously presenting a human’s idea of Sexy Vampire every night.  She doesn’t live a corset life, really.  But she’s found her reason for one, and it’s for her own purposes: while she’s wearing it to go see Jason (Ryan Kwanten) and make with the sexy, it’s a costume chosen by her, presumably because she likes the way it makes her feel.

Then for the first episodes of season 5, 5×01, “Turn, Turn, Turn” and 5×02, “Authority Always Wins,” we have a different kind of quasi-bad girl Jessica.  She’s made pseudo-friends with some college kids while her vampire dad King Bill is off doing… whatever.  As she told Steve Newlin (Michael McMillan), “that basically makes me the queen.”  She isn’t abusing her potential power, per se, but she’s definitely enjoying it: coming out of a long relationship and taking a break from being attacked by and then attacking an evil possessed witch, she needs the relative R&R that comes from not having to worry about anything.  And she’s not worrying.  She’s hanging out, playing Rock Band and holding their beer kegs for them, having a good time like “normal” kids do.  Party Girl Jessica takes on an almost 1980s style; the pink dress is 2007 Betsey Johnson, but even recent Betsey Johnson can and often does feel somewhat 1980s.  Party Girl Jessica is just barely dipping her toe in the “bad girl” pool while still staying cute, young, and not Goth Punk Barbie.

But… then here comes Goth Punk Barbie once more, in 5×05, “Let’s Boot and Rally,” and 5×08, “Somebody That I Used To Know.”  Both of these instances, unlike when she was a baby baby vamp and dressing like that around the house, are specifically for Fangtasia: she’s assumedly realized from observing Pam or from observing other vampires that dressing in an edgy, “vampiric” way around the vampire bar helps to pick up fangbangers, which is a goal of her being at Fangtasia.  At this point, she’s somewhat rudderless: she’s unmoored from that relationship with Hoyt, from whatever she had or didn’t have with Jason (even though she wants it back), from even her college buddies.  Fangtasia, though something she has to present for, and not necessarily a place of warm fuzzies for her, is familiar, and she seeks it out, hoping perhaps to figure out who she ought to be by being more typically vampire.

Then 5×10, “Gone, Gone, Gone,” rolls around.  Both of the times seen above that she’s Goth Punk Barbie-ing for the Fangtasia crowd, she deals with her ex Hoyt in some way and deals with her vampire nature in relation thereto some way.  She’s not ashamed of it by any means, but she’s starting, perhaps, to realize what she’s more comfortable with.  She’s not a Goth Punk Barbie girl, at least not every day, and that’s all right.  In order to bring the Hoyt situation to an end once and for all, she has to be herself-herself to do it, or at least what herself-herself means right now: cute jewelry (I haven’t had it confirmed or been able to confirm it myself, but I’m fairly sure her earrings here and probably other times are Betsey Johnson as well), bright colors, feminine but not childish prints.  And then by the time she’s summoned to go see Daddy Bill at the Authority, she needs to be herself-herself as well: she’s comfortable, but there’s a little more individuality to it by now.  She needs both things in order to deal with the hellstorm that is Bill’s new outlook.

And to finish off season 5, which definitely shows the most variation in Jessica’s style, we have two fairly apparent juxtapositions of the badass and the feminine/personal-to-her.  Another instance of a leather jacket in 5×11, “Sunset,” (this outfit first appears in the episode preceding, and because Jess didn’t have any time to pack before she was hauled off to the Authority, this leads me to believe that either Bill did some more shopping for her because he knew she was being dragged there or they just have a surplus of leather jackets and things sitting around the Authority, which is actually more believable to me considering how many leather jackets are found down there on others) because she’s doing the badass thing of going against Bill’s wishes supposedly secretively and trying to help out Jason and Sookie; this is paired, however, with a pink top, a tank top, because that’s her comfort zone, and her cute retro hair, because that’s what she likes.  Then later in that episode and carrying into 5×12, “Save Yourself,” we see her reoutfitted in black jeans, boots, and this pink semi-punky-semi-girly t-shirt.  She’s never had a t-shirt like this before, and presumably she’s wearing it because it’s what Pam and Tara had laying around at Fangtasia to lend, but I do know that Lucky 13 designed the shirt specially for her, so it’s got at least some aspect of her personality infused in it somewhat.  She’s trying at least to combine comfort zones with the badassery she needs in the situations she’s in.

–your fangirl heroine.

Spectacular Summaries Sunday :: top 10 gifts 2012 gave me

It’s not showing any signs of stopping yet.  And there will be much linking.

10. The Space Mountain Ghost Galaxy
No, really.  Hear me out on this one.  I will admit, this is sort of my wild card in-joke gift of the year, but for some reason, man.  That strange animated swirling glowing spectral star system is something my people and I absolutely cannot stop making jokes about.  (We realized that True Blood‘s Iraqi smoke monster is another of the Ghost Galaxy’s cousins, too.)  It wasn’t like it was creepy, but it was just so random that we can’t stop talking about it.

9. A Minor Bird by Sucré
Due to the way the days of this year panned out, I’m still putting my Top 10 albums of the year up tomorrow, but three of them go into this category, none of which should be surprising.  (Not that any of this list should be an overall surprise, but hey.)  Anyway, though.  Stacy has always been my favorite DuPree sister (I mean, I love them all very much, but Stacy plays keyboards, and that endeared her to me from the get-go) and her solo project, or solo-ish project at least, is just a legitimately good album in and of itself.  It’s become one of my favorite I Am Getting Ready To Go Somewhere Fancy albums (it’s got that certain je ne sais quoi about it) and also one of my favorite I Am Doing Creative Things Alone albums, and certain of the songs I just love to turn up at full blast and listen to as I take in the world around me.

8. Brave
As I just said on Friday.  I’m sure I’m not the only one who could say “but I don’t think I can actually explain how much this movie means to me,” and that actually makes me very happy.  This is one of the few movies I’ve actually gotten into heated almost-arguments about; “but I heard it was really feminist,” I once heard someone say, sounding sniffy about the premise.  “Yes, so?” was my immediate retort, and I proceeded to summarily dismiss just about every argument I had ever read a critic making against the movie (there are plenty of dude role models, why can’t a little boy have a girl role model because little girls are expected to have boy role models, Merida is not a lesbian just because she doesn’t want to get married and likes archery BUT EVEN IF SHE WAS why is that a big deal but I’m pretty sure her sexual orientation is the opposite of the point, etcetera).  I mention to you guys every time I go off on these giant rants, which might make you think I do it a lot, but not so.  There are plenty of rants I’ve wanted to rant that I’ve refrained from, but Brave is one of those rants I will rant forever.

7. Mad Men season 5
As I alluded to on Tuesday, I’m still not sure what to make of the situation with my Joanie (Christina Hendricks).  Because Mad Men has so much going on, I’ve noticed they have a habit of spending an episode dealing intensely with one character’s emotions, then just alluding to it for the next few episodes, and the situation with Joan was close enough to the season’s end that they didn’t circle back around to another Joan Feelings Episode.  We did, however, get Meaningful Looks between her and Don (Jon Hamm) and her being a Super Total Badass both at the meeting and in their new office space, so that’s something.  I was happy for Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) deciding to do what felt right for her and go elsewhere, but I really do miss her around Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.  I do.  I, as mentioned, mourn Lane (Jared Harris); I am intensely curious about many of the other characters and the paths they’re taking, particularly Pete (Vincent Kartheiser) and Megan (Jessica Paré).  This was largely a gift just because of how long we had to wait for it, I admit, but it’s also one of those cases where my ambivalence about many of the situations they explored is actually a compliment.  I’m intrigued, I’m just torn.

6. Game of Thrones season 2
I never actually did a season 2 wrap-up post about Game of Thrones, largely because of the fact that the schedule I watched it on would have made it too late.  So I’m just going to link to my Game of Thrones tag, because gods know there’s plenty of meta scattered through the thousands of posts in there (and also because everything else gets a link, so consistency demands it).  Season 2 differs from A Clash of Kings more than season 1 differed from A Game of Thrones, and some of those differences were strange, yes.  (Having recently finished A Storm of Swords, finally, I’m looking forward to how they deal with the obvious changes Talisa [Oona Chaplin] is going to cause in the next seasons.)  But some of the changes, I actually… don’t entirely mind?  I don’t know exactly why Ros (Esmé Bianco), but a lot of the functions she serves are ones that other characters directly served and they’re just condensing it into one beautiful redhead, so that’s okay I suppose, and I’m fond of her for silly personal reasons.  For example.  And though I’ve gone off about this on my tumblr just a tiny bit, I guess this is the best time to really address the matter of Dany (Emilia Clarke) and her dragon drama (well, beyond the Doreah [Roxanne McKee] side of it, which I’ve already analyzed to pieces) here: anyone who says that Dany spent the entire season “just running around screaming about her dragons” is wrong and silly.  You know how long Dany actually spent “just running around screaming about her dragons”?  The equivalent of about one episode.  It was really “WHERE ARE MY DRAGONS?” (a reasonable question) then “OH you have my dragons” then she wasn’t in an episode then “OKAY I’M GOING TO GET MY DRAGONS NOW.”  I’m copypasting from a tumblr meme rant I did now, because this is also important: “Oh, and I actually really liked the changes to the scene in the House of the Undying, mostly because in the book, it came off sort of SUDDEN MAGICKS WHAT IS GOING ON OH NO HERE COME JORAH AND BLOODRIDERS TO HELP ME MAKE IT STOP and in the show, it was more HERE IS A LOT OF TEMPTATION, OKAY, BUT I KNOW WHAT I NEED TO DO EVEN IF IT HURTS, AND GUESS WHAT?  HERE I AM COMMANDING MY DRAGONS AND SAVING MYSELF.”  Also, it’s not like everyone else doesn’t “run around screaming about” one or two things, either.  So.

5. Halcyon by Ellie Goulding
As I alluded to last Monday and will discuss more tomorrow, this album is my jam.  I like that it’s a little darker than Lights (though don’t get me wrong, I love Lights too) and I feel a little more personally connected to a lot of the songs.  Also, I love that Ellie Goulding actually gets played on the “normal” radio sometimes (not enough to make my people grumble, like they do about Adele [which sucks, because she's still really talented, but], but enough) because it means that I know a song on the radio.  (“Only You” came on at a bar the other night; the friends I was with had been singing along to all of the Katy Perry, One Direction, and other insanity that played while I sat on top of the pool table and wrinkled my nose in confusion, but once there was Ellie, I could sit there whisper-singing to myself and smiling because finally I knew what was going on.)  This album is good for driving, for introspection; a lot of the tracks are good for exercising; it’s super morbid in places, even in the chipper-sounding songs (because really, “Anything Can Happen” sounds super-happy but isn’t, and I love that).  Also, she’s British.  This is a failing of mine forever.

4. The Avengers
Were there things this movie could have done even better?  Of course.  Perfection doesn’t exist, and once I heard that Joss had wanted to write in Janet Van Dyne to be played by Morena Baccarin, a hollow space of longing opened up in my heart (both because there should always be more lady superheroes and because there should always be more Morena Baccarin).  But did this movie do a lot of things really, really right?  Oh, yes.  The dynamics between the characters, the platonicness of every relationship (and I was thinking about this; it’s not rare to have a bunch of platonic dude relationships, but if there’s a woman, especially if there’s only one main woman, she’s almost always tied to one of the guys, but that is not the case here, thank goodness), the characterizations, the dialogue (of all of the characters, I actually think Nick Fury [Samuel L. Jackson] has the Whedoniest lines), the Whedonverse in-jokes (actors, references, anything in between) – it’s just overall warm fuzzies.

3. Synthetica by Metric
While Halcyon and A Minor Bird were sort of slow-burn favorites for me (there were tracks I loved intensely from the get-go, but the whole of the albums took a few listens to fall as deeply in love with), Synthetica was sort of instant.  I’ve been into Metric since junior year of high school, when one of the other editors on my school newspaper, who was graduating that year, gave me a whole stack of music to continue her Good Music During Newspaper Layout Parties legacy; I don’t think I’ve ever said thank you to her, because we haven’t actually seen each other… probably since then, actually, but I would very much want to.  Metric is a beautiful group, and Synthetica, while not perfect because that isn’t real, is almost a perfect album.

2. The Cabin in the Woods
For so many reasons.  I’ve refrained from writing too too much Cabin meta, but this is mostly because I’ve read some really intriguing pieces of it by other authors.  (I tend to talk more about things I hear/see fewer people talking about, I think.)  I really do love this movie, though.  I love it for all of its meta, I love it for its simultaneous genre critique and genre overhaul; I haven’t seen a lot of the allegedly big famous horror franchises, but I have been known to enjoy a terrible straight-to-video horror film or ten, so I’m comfortably aware of the conventions, enough to enjoy seeing them ripped to shreds.  I love it for its social critique: as some of the meta I’ve seen has said, the pigeonholing of characters is uniquely American.  The athlete/scholar/fool/whore/virgin thing is a different version of the ever-referenced Breakfast Club: characters have to be reduced to one thing by others in order to make them understandable to said others.  Clearly, there’s much more to them, but that would be too complicated.  Men are defined by what they do (sports, academia, humor) but women are defined by who they do (or don’t do).  What this movie does, though, is both acknowledge that this is the way that we (and in this case, “we” ends up being a global evil corporation based in ancient rituals and monsters, which is oddly apt) often view things and acknowledge that viewing things in such a way can only lead to danger.  Reducing people to one dimension and then sacrificing them so that we may continue to go on our merry only leads to badness.

1. True Blood season 5
I’m linking here to my talking about the season premiere, then my talking about the season finale, then just my True Blood tag, given the exceptional amounts of discussion that goes on within it.  (Aside from day topic tags, the only tags I have that are more populated than the True Blood tag are the Buffy tag and the Dollhouse tag.  I’m sure this is mostly season 5′s fault.)  I was going back and forth about whether I should put Cabin or this at number one on this list, but I realized that honestly, it had to be this.  It couldn’t not be.  I have several friends who watch True Blood, and the reactions to season 5 have been varied; “I liked it,” one said, “I just didn’t understand all of it.”  And that’s totally valid.  It’s very different from the books by this point, but I’m, as I have mentioned 1000 times, more than comfortable with that.  There are bunches of reasons that this is at number one, almost all of which I talk about way too often: Nora Gainesborough (Lucy Griffiths), obviously, by herself and also plus Eric (Alexander Skarsgard) and plus Salome (Valentina Cervi), the joy of Pam (Kristin Bauer van Straten) and Tara (Rutina Wesley) like I mentioned on Tuesday.  Pam and Tara as individual characters, Eric and Salome as individual characters, Jessica (Deborah Ann Woll) as an individual character, Luna (Janina Gavankar) and Sam (Sam Trammell) by themselves and together, the utter adorable that is Emma (Chloe Noelle), the awesome that was dearly departed Molly (Tina Majorino), the twist of fate that is evil Bill (Stephen Moyer), the fact that Sookie (Anna Paquin) got to develop outside of the context of any romantic entanglements at all, the joy that is assertive Alcide (Joe Manganiello), the fun evil of Russell (Denis O’Hare) and his cuteness with Steve (Michael McMillan), the sassiness and wonder that is Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis).  The fact that the book is fun, but the show is just getting dark and going into serious things like hate crimes and religious fanaticism, but cloaking it in this seemingly absurd world of supernatural whatever.  The fact that here is this show that people routinely brush off, as I’ve said, as being SEXY VAMPIRE SEX OHMAHGAH, but it is actually dealing with these more serious topics.  The fact that yes, sure, horrible things happen to female characters sometimes, but horrible things also happen to male characters; power on this show is divided fairly evenly between female characters and male characters; Lilith may be evil, but it’s fascinating that vampire God is a woman; when characters try to coddle women, they get called out on it (like with Sam and Luna); femininity is not regarded as an inherent weakness, but not every character “does” their femaleness in the same way: this is actually, at least in my read, a pretty lady-positive show.  The fact that this show is open to and seems to encourage non-vanilla/heterosexual sexualities and, provided that they are consensual and not rooted in evil, treats them just the same; the fact that this show is intensely bisexuality-positive.  The fact that sure, there’s SEXY VAMPIRE SEX OHMAHGAH, it’s about vampires and shifters and werewolves and fairies and goodness knows what else, but the whole of it is actually very well-written and the characters are realistic.  (Maybe sometimes a little too: having just been down South, I can [re-]vouch for the fact that folks like the townspeople extras in True Blood do definitely exist, particularly though not solely in that geographical region.)  Clearly, I could go on about this for ages.

–your fangirl heroine.

Monster Monday :: on vampire sexuality

A year ago, I talked about vampire procreation, but that isn’t all there is to vampire sexuality.  Far from.  So as usual, canon-sorted.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel:

• To a soulless vampire, sex is just part of the fun.  It goes hand-in-hand with blood and killing: they eat, they kill, they bang.  Sometimes more of one of those variables than another, but that’s the basic equation.
• Sex, at least for the Whirlwind, both did and did not acknowledge the family structure that Drusilla (Juliet Landau) set up.  The “official” pairs amongst those four were Darla/Angelus, Dru/Spike, which held to at least the basic seniority involved, but then again, the official pairs were guidelines and not strict rules: “Intimate liaisons also occurred between Angelus and Drusilla, Angelus and Spike, and Darla and Drusilla,” says the Buffy wiki.
• And let’s just look at that for a second.  Both possible slash couples, though not seen liaising, are technically canon.  Angelus/Angel (David Boreanaz) and Spike (James Marsters) can be read as quite hetero-leaning; that they happened to interact sexually was probably more an exception than a rule.  Darla (Julie Benz) and Drusilla are probably hetero-leaning; they aren’t seen interacting sexually with other women, really, though there’s more basis in canon for the nature of their having proper intimacy and not just doing something.  This is to say: while sexuality as a whole is always fluid, vampire sexuality is more openly so, perhaps.  It was network TV, so much of this is implied and not seen, but hey.
• Now, Angel and the “true happiness” issue.  The curse that causes Angel’s soul to disappear being triggered by orgasm in the company of the woman he loved is an interesting metaphor.  It’s not just sex that does it (Angel does have sex later without the soul-losing repercussions) but sex with that person, well.  That this is what does it, and that it’s not fully revealed until after the initial incident, is pretty easy to read as commentary on at least the social connotations of acting on one’s desires.
• Spike has a fair amount of sex.  He’s routinely with Dru when we meet him, he’s eventually with vampire Harmony (Mercedes McNab), he gets with Buffy for a relationship that’s mostly sex without the strings of affection and trust, he probably gets with others intermittently if he can.  At least pre-soul, Spike is one of those who seems to need to have someone to define himself in relation to: he both belongs to Dru and cares for her, he has Harmony, he has Buffy and belongs to her simultaneously.  Angel’s identity is largely defined by his perceived inability to be sexual, and Spike’s identity is largely defined by the ways in which he is sexual.
• Oh, and let’s mention vampire Willow (Alyson Hannigan) and Xander (Nicholas Brendon) also; because this is canonical alternate universing, it’s not worth mentioning in many of these lists, but these guys are a perfect example of: flirtation, killing, all in one.

True Blood:

• SEXY VAMPIRE SEX OHMAHGAH.  That’s people who don’t watch True Blood talking about True Blood.
• But see… not only?  Yes, there is sex.  Many characters, vampire and not, regularly partake of the sex, because it is HBO where you can do that, but, uhm.  I’ve mentioned before that I have never really found it gratuitous, and that still stands.  And it’s not like there isn’t sex in the source material.  Maybe not as much, or as specifically strange, but it is there.  Because hey, you know what?  Sometimes people in life have sex.
• Buffy seems to have a sire/childe relationship imperative: rather, there are plenty of vampires who don’t end up sleeping with those they’re linked to by blood, but the main instances we see of Darla/Angelus and Dru/Spike are blood ties and intimate ties both.  True Blood is… fuzzier on this subject.  Which I talk about all the time, but I’m stating it here for the record too.  I’m just addressing this vampire by vampire.
• Bill (Stephen Moyer).  His sexcapades with Sookie (Anna Paquin) comprise much of the first seasons, which means that SEXY VAMPIRE SEX OHMAHGAH is already a misnomer: Bill is a vampire, Sookie is not, it’s not like this is just a show about vampires banging.  Actually, a reasonable amount of the sex we see is not vampire/vampire at all.  Bill did have a sexual relationship with Lorena (Mariana Klaveno) his maker, which ended when she released him; it is reprised in season three (and while I didn’t even find the head-turned-backward sex gratuitous, it was definitely nosewrinkle-inducing) and it’s definitely not of the good.  Then there’s more vampire/vampire sex when Bill hooks up with Salome (Valentina Cervi) in season five.
• Eric (Alexander Skarsgard).  He gets a fair amount of fangbanger action before he eventually hooks up with Sookie (this in contrast with Bill, who decidedly does not; this could be reflective of the fact that Bill starts as a super-mainstreamer, or reflective of the fact that Bill is kind of a prude).  He is unashamed of this, and it’s definitely not vanilla, nope.  When Eric gets with Sookie, it’s much more “normal” – sure, it’s outside the first time, then it’s in sex Narnia, but it’s still something like missionary.  And then Nora (Lucy Griffiths).  They have two different sex scenes, and this is more vampire/vampire sex, but unlike Lorena/Bill or Bill/Salome, it’s… presumably from a place of if not romantic love in the traditional sense then at least some kind of love.  Eric and Godric’s relationship… well, it’s never fully described, but there’s much speculation.  Also of note is the conversation between Eric and Talbot (Theodore Zouboulidis here credited as Theo Alexander), where they’re about to get to it and Eric comments that it’s been a long time since he’s done this, then corrects upon Talbot’s prompting that he doesn’t mean sex with a man, he means sex with a vampire.  We don’t see Eric getting with men, but he mentions that he has, and it’s unlikely that it’s a complete lie.  So that’s something.
• Pam (Kristin Bauer van Straten).  She’s gotten a fair amount of fangbanger play over time too, usually on the desk in the office; she’s lady-leaning, definitely, though presumably not entirely (“Let bygones be bygones, bi girls be bi girls” and whatnot).  She met Eric in the context of sex, and they were intimate, though they haven’t been in some time.  Pam is completely sex-positive, really.  And while she presumably is entering into a sexual relationship with her progeny Tara (Rutina Wesley), it wasn’t a given fact, it evolved over a bit of time.  The attraction grew like attractions do into what I will say again is the most beautiful phrase in the English language, cellar door be damned: interracial lesbian vampire couple.
• Sophie-Anne (Evan Rachel Wood): vampire/fangbanger time all the way, and “I haven’t enjoyed sex with men since the Eisenhower administration.”  And though she has favorites, she seems iffy on the concept of monogamy.
• Russell (Denis O’Hare), first with Talbot and then with Steve (Michael McMillan).  Definitely gay, which is not made an issue; he forces Sophie-Anne into that marriage of convenience, but there’s no pretense about it.  He seems to be more for vampire/vampire sex, yep.
• Franklin (James Frain) was a d-bag and a rapist and he’s despicable.  But I suspect that would have been true of his personality whether or not he was a vampire.
• Nora.  Reiteration, she has a fair amount of sex with Eric, and it’s vampire/vampire but not of the bad so that’s something.  Also, please allow me to elaborate on why I fully believe that the Nora/Salome kiss came from a place with background: the way I read her, intimacy in one way translates to intimacy in another for Nora.  She and Salome were crazy-close, so naturally they were going to have the sex, even if it was only implied (sigh).  Also, Nora feeds on humans, but she doesn’t strike me as necessarily the fangbanger type too often.  She’s more of a strictly vampire/vampire sex kind of girl.
• Salome.  Based in a story of seductive manipulation, which she then debunked, but either it was a lie in the first place, or she eventually learned that art.  Because wow, wow, all the sexual manipulation from this woman: she was in a relationship with Roman (Christopher Meloni) and presumably had been for a while, they shared a bedroom, she shed a tear (of debatable legitimacy) when he was killed, but do I think for a second that that wasn’t a strategic choice of hers?  Nooope.  Bill was a strategic choice, too, and I still can’t decide how much it turned real.  She was taught to define herself by who she liaises with, at least publicly, but do I think she saw herself as anyone’s strictly speaking?  Nope.  And here’s another reason why Salome/Nora: she looked at Nora like she didn’t look at any of the others, at least if you’re watching with lady-tinted glasses.
• Jessica (Deborah Ann Woll) is never seen having sex with another vampire, actually.  She’s with Hoyt (Jim Parrack), then with Jason (Ryan Kwanten); she feeds on fangbangers of both sexes, but she’s still fairly heterosexual.  She’s actually, I would say, the most heterosexual of all of the vampires on this show.  Even Bill gets innuendo thrown at him and participates in sexy dreams of Sam’s (Sam Trammell).
• Okay so I wrote a lot about these guys and sexuality but that’s because they live in a canon where they’re allowed to have more sexuality to write about.

Twilight:

• Presumably, Rosalie (Nikki Reed) and Emmett (Kellan Lutz) have a healthy sex life, Alice (Ashley Greene) and Jasper (Jackson Rathbone) have a healthy sex life, Esme (Elizabeth Reaser) and Carlisle (Peter Facinelli) have a healthy sex life.  Token “breaking a house” jokes go here.
• But do we know anything about these healthy sex lives other than those jokes?  No, because this is the kind of story where only major characters’ intimacies are really delved into, so we only hear about Bella (Kristen Stewart) and Edward (Robert Pattinson) doing it.
• I’m still shuddertwitching about the birth scene, though.  I haven’t seen Breaking Dawn yet, but I remember reading it and being horrified.  For one thing, half-vampire half-human baby?  How again?  At least there’s magic involved in the vampire/vampire conception on Angel that I’m still not up to yet.  For another thing, this is the actual grossest, and I have the strongest stomach of most everyone I know as long as there aren’t closeups on needles in spines or eyeballs.  But it’s gross psychologically, too, which I’m sure has been said many a time already on the internet.

–your fangirl heroine.

Fictional Friday :: 10 (being a variable count) more x3 cross-canon friendships that should be.

I say 10 is a variable count because a few of these are less “besties for life” and more “completely necessary support groups” containing more than just two characters.  But.

10. Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings, Thor) and April Ludgate (Aubrey Plaza, Parks and Recreation)
Please, please, please?  Can this deadpanning snark party of (former) interns please exist?  It would work, but it also wouldn’t be excessive: their snark styles are different enough to complement each other.  Darcy actually musters enthusiasm more regularly, April would never admit to doing such a thing, but I’d like to think they went to summer camp together (probably for something ridiculous and far too enthusiastic to seem in-character) when they were kids and occasionally send messages back and forth via Facebook or something.  Darcy sent inappropriately naughty congratulations to April upon hearing of her wedding, April likes to reply with questions about “that god your boss is hooking up with and all his friends,” it’s one of those friendships (I feel like I talk about these a lot) where it wouldn’t seem that amiable to an observer all the time, but they both know it’s meant with some semblance of love.

9. Dakota McGraw Block (Marley Shelton, Planet Terror) and Bennett Halverson (Summer Glau, Dollhouse) and Tara Knowles (Maggie Siff, Sons of Anarchy)
One of the support group situations, though I imagine this would end much more pleasantly than the other.  This is the the support group that turns into professional friendship for women who have experienced injury to their hand(s)/arms that somehow incapacitate them for a period of time or permanently and also they have things to deal with like potential crushes on badass ladyfriends (Dakota re: Cherry, Bennett re: Caroline) or issues with taking care of children (Dakota, Tara) or relationships that are sometimes adorable and sometimes leading to the bad (Bennett re: everyone, Tara re: …actually everyone too, but mostly Jax) or potential world-ending scenarios (Dakota re: zombies, Bennett re: tech).  They’d get together and talk about their various issues and then realize that hey, it’s nice to have friends who are other badass ladies with doctorates.

8. Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke, Game of Thrones) and Jax Teller (Charlie Hunnam, Sons of Anarchy)
I actually have this whole highly alternate universe (for Dany, mostly) scenario regarding these two, because in order for this to make any sense at all it needs to be put in a present day context.  (I just can’t imagine Jax in fake medieval times.  It just doesn’t work.  Since the motorcycle is so integral to his character, he needs to live in a world where it exists.)  But really, these two have a painful amount of things in common, and with the appropriate excessive timeline modifications, I can see hipster badass college Dany becoming friends (with benefits at first or not, either way) with Jax, probably pre-Sons canon.  Over time, they become epic pen pals (because while Jax keeps those journals for his boys or just in general, I can see him enjoying to have someone to share things – some things, not everything, though hipster badass college Dany is not naive to the world of crime or whatever) and occasionally she pops down to Charming to visit, they have a beer and he kisses her forehead when they say goodbye, they talk about whatever, they help each other out how they can.  Oh, and the rest of the Sons kind of like Dany too: eventually, the dragon queen is basically like everyone’s little sister or daughter.  Chibs especially takes a shine to her (it’s a United Kingdom thing, because even though hipster badass college Dany is in the States now, she’s British by ancestry).

7. Daenerys Targaryen and Snow White (Kristen Stewart, Snow White and the Huntsman)
I may have been sitting on this concept literally since I saw the movie.  But really.  It’s a deposed princesses taking their rightful thrones club.  This is almost a support group too.

6. Jon Snow (Kit Harrington, Game of Thrones) and Angel (David Boreanaz, Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel)
This was not my idea.  This was my everything to my everything friend’s idea.  But it is actually a great one.  She had mentioned drawing some sort of picture of it, the details of which I am now spacing, but this would have to be courtesy one of the Powers That Be’s interdimensional portals, because they both need their own contexts, but they still need to hang out.  Many discussions of honor, duty, and the repercussions of sexual activity could be had, they could both make their somewhat endearing awkward faces.

5. Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner, Game of Thrones) and Shilo Wallace (Alexa Vega, Repo! The Genetic Opera)
No, I don’t have a legitimate reason for this.  I can just imagine them getting along pretty well.  Maybe it’s that they are/have been both under varying degrees of house arrest?  This might have to be an interdimensional portal too, because Shilo’s history and personality depend on her context.  Actually, I think it’s just that both of them need friends.  There’s a reason why Sansa (and Dany for that matter) show(s) up on these lists often.

4. Sansa Stark and Ruby (Meghan Ory, Once Upon a Time)
…there is no reason for this either, except wolves.  Also, Sansa would probably benefit from someone with Ruby’s strong protective instinct, but at the same time it’s not smothery protective or protective-with-motives, it’s friendly protective.  Etcetera.

3. Ruby and Jessica Hamby (Deborah Ann Woll, True Blood)
And this?  This is somewhat in answer to Jessica’s actual canonical comment about wanting friends.  I racked my brain for who might suit, and while I couldn’t think of any other vampires who could pal down with Jess, I got the idea that maybe Ruby would get along with her well.  Obviously being a wolf is different, but it requires a lot of the same emotional reconciliation between one’s natures and instincts; also, Jess is generally willing to take other non-vampire supes on a case-by-case basis, so the wolf thing wouldn’t inherently be an issue.  After a while, she’d probably even think it was cool.  Similarly, I imagine Ruby would try to be understanding of the differences that arise from Jess being a vampire, and together they could hang out, go shopping for cute accessories, talk about how absolutely frustrating and absolutely cool it can be to be more than human, etcetera.

2. Pam de Beaufort (Kristin Bauer van Straten, True Blood) and Joanie Stubbs (Kim Dickens, Deadwood)
Oh, hey, I just thought of this the other night.  This might be a friendship arising from another support group, the “some number of sick assholes murdered some of the prostitutes in my brothel and I discovered this” group maybe.  Which is to say, flashback Pam is the one playing here (I’ll fudge a few decades of timeline to make it work).  It could also be a social club for “blonde madams with fabulous clothes who also mostly like to sleep with women.”  I think I postulated once that Joanie would be kind of an Angelesque redemptive mission vampire, but were that the case here, Pam would keep her from getting too preachy about it.

1. Nora Gainesborough (Lucy Griffiths, True Blood) and Faith Lehane (Eliza Dushku, Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel) and Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson, The Avengers)
This is a much more dangerous support group.  This is the “I have red in my ledger” group, wherein all of these women prooobably need to at least be around someone else who is in a remotely similar situation to them in terms of atoning for things.  I can’t imagine they’d talk a terrible lot about what was actually bothering them (none of them being exactly the type), Nora would probably wrinkle her cute little nose a lot and Faith would sigh and be skeptical about the fact that Nora is a vampire and Natasha would sit there with her arms folded just staring at everyone, but eventually they would start discussing something else unrelated to the reason they’re all there, like battle techniques or cool places they’ve traveled to (this one would mostly be Nora and Tasha, probably), and it would be a strange kind of relaxing for them.  Because no matter what kind of support they do or do not get from their teammates/quasi-families, said teammates/quasi-families cannot ever entirely know the weight of what they carry after the things they’ve done that they need to make up for (not that they’d be allowed to try much).

–your fangirl heroine.

Television Tuesday :: maybe I wear too much pink [a sartorial analysis of Pamela Swynford de Beaufort]

(Leave me alone, I just love using her full-full name.  It’s so fancy.  [Sidenote within a sidenote: once when, uhm, doing some recreational internet reading on the Plantagenet era, because I am awesome, I noticed that there was a woman named Katherine Swynford who was the mistress and later wife of the first Duke of Lancaster, John Gaunt.  Their illegitimate children bore the surname Beaufort, after a property of theirs.  There's a True Blood fansite that gets into this also, but I didn't find it until now; basically, the conclusion is that we still don't know if Pam is distantly descended from this line or if she just adopted the name to sound, well, fancy.  I sort of like the latter, personally, because goodness knows Pam costumes herself in other ways, tying into the rest of this post.])

There should be no surprise to anyone that my second hit of clothesmeta is all about my darling Pam (Kristin Bauer van Straten).  More than once have I made actual audible whimper noises in regards to Pam’s clothes, and even disregarding that, Pam is one of those characters whose clothes say a lot about her.  It also ties into the ambiguity of her fancy-ass surname because while she’s basically always presenting, it’s tricky to know which presentation is her and which is what she needs someone to see.  And this is beautiful as well, because they very well all could be her, just different parts of her.  True Blood is the kind of show where it’s easy to assume characters are switching sides/alignments/loyalties/what have you: Eric, Bill, Tara, Jessica, Nora, Jason, etcetera.  But while Pam’s motivations may shift to some extent, and while she may be presenting, she’s also quite easy to read on one hand.  Other characters may be perplexed, but we as an audience have learned that she’s fairly straightforward in a lot of ways.  And a lot of her presenting is tied up in her costuming.

1×04, “Escape From Dragon House.”  This is our first introduction to Pam (or Eric [Alexander Skarsgard], or Fangtasia and the actual vampire nightlife for that matter) and there is no mistaking that meeting Pam means meeting Vampire Pam, capitalization necessary.  It’s no surprise that Vampire Pam is not uniquely, but often, sighted in Fangtasia during business hours: to an extent, she’s a crowd pleaser.  She’s giving the patrons of their bar exactly what they came for, which is the idea of the pale, made-up, often-leather-clad, sexy, vaguely kink-possible vampires they’ve been fed their whole lives but in the safe context of mainstreaming.  This has it all: reddish lipstick, alluding-to-Gothic jewelry, everything leather, fingerless gloves, a corseted dress.  (My Pam is the queen of corseting.)  She is confident to the point of arrogance and highly aware of what she’s doing.  Another interesting thing to note is that this outfit and several of Pam’s others mirror things Jessica dons in season five when patronizing Fangtasia.  Her little black dress wasn’t a corset and her fingerless gloves were fishnet, but it was a similar effect: essentially, this is a vampire uniform.

It’s not until 1×08, “The Fourth Man in the Fire,” that we see off-duty Pam, Pink Pam as it were (there’s no coincidence that you absolutely never see her in a pink corset, I’m sure of it).  Pink Pam is much more casual.  Her jewelry and makeup are much more subtle, though still present: she is the kind of woman who, as we’ll see, does not ever go completely natural.  It would be easy to think that Pink Pam is the real her and Vampire Pam is a costume, but this is still very possibly a sort of costume.  It’s just the costume of off-duty respectability.  For goodness’ sake, that’s a cable-knit sweater and khakis.  It’s tame on purpose, because not all business, even vampire business, calls for Vampire Pam.  (Actually, a lot of Vampire Pam’s business is for humans.)

As we see here, evidenced in shots from 3×01, “Bad Blood,” and 3×02, “Beautifully Broken.”  Sookie (Anna Paquin) appears at Fangtasia that night in search of a disappeared Bill (Stephen Moyer), and there’s no reason that she won’t run into Vampire Pam in all of her glory.  This is actually one of the more ridiculous Vampire Pam outfits, and I mean that lovingly; it’s one of the first instances of the recurring “cut holes in all the things” theme to her clothes, so I’m not complaining.  Also, this hairstyle is similar to ones later seen in the Prostitute Pam flashbacks, though not in either of the pictures used below.  But later, we catch Pam off the clock: she’s still at Fangtasia, because that’s where she almost always is, but she’s not presenting to the crowd.  She’s slightly more comfortable, presumably, in another pink sweater (gold jewelry and buttons, of course).  Pink Pam is sort of a grown-up Regina George, but more mean because she’s disinterested than mean for pure cruelty’s sake.  (Most of the time.)  Pink Pam is very aware of what she presents, hence the post title, but it’s interesting that she says this to Jessica (Deborah Ann Woll), a fellow vampire: she presents Pink Pam, the colorful and presumably cooperative Pam, largely to other vampires.  They think she’s nice because she needs them to.

Including this mostly to point out two things.  One, at least not-corseted Pam wears a leopard-print bra with pink straps, which is oddly endearing.  I am not an animal-print person in the slightest, but Pam pulls it off.  (Much like I strangely don’t scream every time I see the matching hot pink Uggs that go with the velour track suit there.)  Also, this bra is almost girlish.  Those pink straps have a bow at the bottom of them, for goodness’ sake.  It’s cute.  Two, many of Pam’s jammies and hanging-out outfits are interchangeably used, and many of them are velour track suits.  But I guess not taking one’s jewelry or makeup off to sleep must be a vampire thing, because that second picture is right when she’s woken up, to which the only accurate response is damn.  Vampire Pam also appears when she needs to assert power in some way, and given the conflict with Nan Flanagan in the scenes preceding and following this, it’s only reasonable that Pink Pam and Vampire Pam are overlapping slightly here.

One of my all-time favorite tumblr posts was one derived from an interview, about Pam’s Barbie collection.  And really, I think it explains so much about Pam as a character.  Anyway, why I bring it up now and not in regards to one of the listed outfits is because the above brown leather/camoflauge combination, circa 3×11, “Fresh Blood,” and 3×12, “Evil is Going On,” is emotionally akin to the listed Safari Barbie outfit from season one.  This serves the same basic purpose; she’s had several outfits over time in this basic color scheme, and they’re almost always in similar situations.  Dealing with other people’s crap with a sarcastic smile, taking care of business but not in such a way that she necessarily needs to slip into the also listed Kill Something Barbie vibe.

This contradiction that isn’t, circa 4×01, “She’s Not There,” is interesting.  This is one of the only instances of Pink Pam being theoretically presented to the non-supernatural public.  The Barbie post calls this outfit Ladies Who Lunch Barbie, and I’d also attribute descriptions like First Lady or grown-up Elle Woods to it.  But the reason is simple: they’re doing vampire PR, of course Nan would want the allegedly nonthreatening “nice girl” Pam to be talking.  After all, that’s what Pink Pam is there for: lulling people into a sense of security.  This is the fanciest instance of Pink Pam, too, because while Pam may own multiple Barbie-colored track suits, like hell is she going to be seen on television in anything that’s less than perfect.  Later in that episode, though, she’s back to leather corset Vampire Pam.

4×04, “I’m Alive and On Fire,” ne of the only times we see Vampire Pam outside of Fangtasia, and that’s simple: she’s here to threaten Marnie (Fiona Shaw).  She’s showing she means business, and if business isn’t achieved, she has no qualms about dolng some killing.  Also, this is my (now second-)favorite Pam outfit of all time.  Then by the next episode, 4×05, “Me and the Devil,” we have Cursed Pam, who is almost wholly covered (a rarity for Pam) and, you know, decomposing, which is gross, but I read some actual official clothesmeta about this once, and I think it may have actually been Kristin Bauer van Straten herself who described all of this as Pam “mourning her beauty.”

Nooow it’s time for Kill Something Barbie in a couple of variations, circa 4×08, “Spellbound,” and 4×11, “Soul of Fire.”  The first picture here brings up a point I think I’ve mentioned before: every self-respecting vampire owns a leather jacket.  (One of these days, I’m going to make this a tumblr photoset, I swear, because it is so true.)  I include a sliver of Jessica wearing her leather jacket in the second photo to discuss something interesting about that whole series of scenes: yes, Eric, Pam, Jess, and Bill all go to be badass in their all-black, but unless I’m misremembering Bill’s outfit, Jess is the only one who actually wears a leather jacket in that scene.  Eric and Pam’s jackets certainly aren’t leather, at least.  And why is this?  Well, they’re all being badasses, but Eric and Bill both offer a different kind of bravery in their prospective self-sacrifice for Sookie’s sake, which is less of an active bravery and anyway doesn’t ultimately result in either of them getting their goal (Sookie’s affections).  Pam is a badass, but she also messes the hell up and has a serious falling out with Eric.  Jess is the only one who comes out of this scene relatively unharmed, even though that isn’t to last.

I had to talk about the 5×01, “Turn! Turn! Turn!” and 5×02, “Authority Always Wins” sweatsuit.  Of course I did.  Television canon Pam has her track suits, but they are immaculate.  They are stylish.  They did not come from Wal-Mart and they do not have kittens, flowers, and butterflies on them.  (I’m not sure if they rushed out to the 24-hour Wal-Mart to pick this up or if Sookie just had it laying around for… such emergencies?… but later in the season, Sookie is seen wearing a kitten sweatshirt, so.)  Presumably, Pam didn’t do much to her hair between turning Tara (Rutina Wesley), still in the above badass-but-not-leather outfit, and going to ground with her, but I’d just like to point out how Pam is apparently incapable of simple ponytails.  Even those have to be a little fancy.

Finally time for Prostitute Pam, circa 5×02, “Authority Always Wins,” and 5×03, “Whatever I Am, You Made Me.”  There really isn’t too terribly much analysis here, other than an observation that Pam has been costuming since she was a human and corseting just as long, but I have to throw them in.  (I think the latter dress, when viewed from all angles, was the one that got the loudest gasp out of me upon first sight.)  Prostitute Pam has more than a few things in common with Joanie (Kim Dickens) of Deadwood, actually.  Uhm.

Finally, proper Vampire (Barbie) Pam is back, circa 5×05, “Let’s Boot and Rally” and 5×08, “Somebody That I Used to Know.”  In the interim, she’s had a couple of corsets, some vinyl, but this red dress is the first major reclaiming of leather.  This isn’t just Vampire Pam, this is Vampire Pam In Charge, with the bloodred lipstick and the hair full of secrets.  The second picture there represents what is actually my favorite Pam outfit as of seeing it, and I include Tara somewhat in the picture because the way that new mommy Pam not only dresses herself like a Barbie but dresses her new little girl in similar ways makes me so happy.  They’ve both got the leather and/or vinyl, the Asian-inspired dresses with giant cleavage windows, the corsets or waist cinchy belts over top.  It’s not so matchy-matchy as to be saccharine, but it’s Pam’s way of trying to make a place for Tara in her life.

Finally, we have the hybridized return of Kill Something Barbie, 5×10, “Gone Gone Gone” and 5×12, “Save Yourself.”  The before-seen-on-my-blog white leather jacket (which you can also buy through ModCloth, I learned) is interesting because, as said, hybridizing.  It’s sort of Kill Something Barbie with an emphasis on Barbie: she’s being made to play nice by the douchey new sheriff, she’s got white leather, pink lipstick, but she also has enough silver (colored, at least) studs to poke the hell out of someone.  By the time she’s in vampire jail for taking the blame for Tara’s so-called crime, she’s still got some leather there with the corset and buckles, because she is being a badass in several ways, but it’s also one of those corsets and tops with cleavage windows things.  She’s got pants like she knew she’d be kicking some ass, but she’s also dolled up.  Because on True Blood, ladies either rescue themselves or get rescued by other ladies after trying to rescue that lady in the first place, and she needs to have nice curly romance novel hair for her beautiful kiss of epic.

–your fangirl heroine.

Television Tuesday :: 6 ladies who are not “my own” but who I will nonetheless defend and love forever

Ladies who are “my own” are, for example, the eight women in my header .  Ladies who are otherwise ones I’ve claimed as being in one way or another or had assigned to me (via friends dibsing characters, via deciding it in my own head, via cosplay, via whatever).  Ladies who belong to the elusive chart that I keep hinting at forever.

Ladies who are not “my own” but who I will nonetheless defend and love forever are generally ones I don’t relate to as intimately or latch onto in quite the same way, for any number of reasons.  And I’m sure there are more, but this is a starter list.  One per canon to keep it simple.

6. Trudy Campbell (Alison Brie, Mad Men)
I don’t even have that much to say because I mention my slightly irrational Trudy feelings all the time, but I love Trudy, the end.

5. Priya Tsetsang (Dichen Lachman, Dollhouse)
This is also an obvious list.  I haven’t really gotten into a lot of Priya-by-herself meta, but this is not because I don’t have feelings about it.  Hey, I’m just going to do the thing of pointing you guys yet again to incomprehensiblelentils on tumblr, specifically her Priya tag.  Amongst all of the pretty pictures, there is far more articulate meta than I could ever come up with, and it’s well-reasoned and thought out and completely accurate because Priya is awesome okay you guys.  She first caught my attention in a “whoa, pretty” kind of way, yes, but as time went on and she was developed, I absolutely fell in love.

4. Jessica Hamby (Deborah Ann Woll, True Blood)
Actually, this is also a list of me reiterating what I’ve said before and putting it all in one place, case in point.  Jess is fantastic, Jess is assertive, Jess is a badass, Jess knows what she is and is not comfortable with doing and who she does and does not want to be in her life.  For all the ways that she’s relatively teenage-human-girl-”normal,” a type often associated with flightiness and foolishness (and indeed, she’s teased accordingly by Pam [Kristin Bauer van Straten] on the regular), with romantic idealism and emotionalism, she’s actually one of the more practical characters and at times a voice of reason.  Sure, she’s a romantic.  Sure, she does silly things sometimes, and sometimes she regrets them.  Sure, she gets really emotional sometimes.  Sure, she’s kind of “normal” and girly.  Are any of these things character flaws?  Well, in the eyes of some characters, maybe, but overall nope.

3. Tara Maclay (Amber Benson, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Like I was saying.  Tara is lovely forever, and I will have her back forever.

2. Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner, Game of Thrones)
I used to say “I guess I get why people can be frustrated with Sansa, but no,” and I won’t even do that anymore.  There are specific instances in Sansa’s past that were not good calls on her part, but you know what?  There are specific instances in basically everyone’s past that were not good calls.  Especially in Game of Thrones spotlessness is impossible.  I’ve heard people say Sansa deserves certain things that happen to her before, and, plainly put, nope.  I have actually gotten into real life arguments with people over their judgments of Sansa, and while they may not have been effective overall, they nonetheless took place, because I adore Sansa and cannot abide by blanket judgments of her.

1. Inara Serra (Morena Baccarin, Firefly)
As evidenced by the amounts of Inara meta I have produced over time.  I honestly think Inara is my all-time favorite lady character who is not “my own” in any medium.  She is so many things: suited to glamorous society, well-educated and talented in many regards, sexually confident (and bisexual!), a badass when she needs to be and not just by violence but with her words, a wonderful friend.  She is psychologically knowledgeable, feminist, artistic, sarcastic, mannered, determined, wonderfully flawed and yet fully realized.

–your fangirl heroine.

Television Tuesday :: 5 of the many different reasons for strength found in female television characters

Television women (and film women, and literature women, and theatre women, and real life women, and anything in between) can be strong in a whole variety of ways.  I’ve talked about this before.  It’s not the same as Strong Female Characters, but it’s characters who are strong and oh, look, women.  Tonight I’m exploring some reasons why characters exhibit strength.  This is by no means a comprehensive list, of course, I haven’t seen nearly close to everything there is to see.  But here are a few things off the top of my head.

5. Because of family.
Dear.  Dear god.  There are few things more tiresome than a stock Mother character, whose only purpose seems to be to blandly care for the children and her husband, cook dinner, clean house, and look pretty.  But being a mother does not by any means negate a character’s strength, and oftentimes it motivates it at least to an extent.

• Alma Garret Ellsworth (Molly Parker), the wonderfully flawed adoptive mother to darling little Sofia (Bree Seanna Wall), who I’ve discussed at length in the past.  Does she make mistakes in her life when acting as a mother?  Of course.  Does she love that little girl, despite the accidental circumstances of their becoming a family?  Of course.
• Catelyn Stark (Michelle Fairley), who… okay, yeah, I’ll own that the show hasn’t always done Catelyn right.  There are plenty of discussions of that on the internet already, so I’ll skip it, and just say: okay, but Catelyn Stark is actually pretty badass.
• Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey), who I have to bring up just because of those woe-inducing discussions about loving her children, even if Cersei and family is a much slipperier slope than that as a whole.
• Sarah Connor (Lena Headey), who I won’t say that much about because I’ve still only seen season one of this show (I know, chastise me) but who I would feel wrong not including.
• Joyce Summers (Kristine Sutherland), as long as we’re talking about moms…
• …and Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Dawn Summers (Michelle Trachtenberg) because family strength can be a sisters/daughters thing too.  Oh, the Summers women.  Again: they had their flaws, they did, but in the end theirs was a ridiculously strong family.
• River Tam (Summer Glau), because Simon (Sean Maher) spent the entire series taking care of her, but then it was her turn.
• Priya Tsetsang (Dichen Lachman), because I’m sure that having a baby in the apocalypse isn’t easy, if it doesn’t lead to terrible death (I’m raising my eyebrows at you, Walking Dead), and knowing that said baby’s father is off living on a flash drive can’t be easy, but there she was, looking out for T (Brandon Dieter) with everything she could.
• Gemma Teller (Katey Sagal), because while she has been in a very consistent downward spiral, but family is what she’d like her guiding light to be and that counts for something.
• Tara Knowles Teller (Maggie Siff), who is mother to both of Jax’s sons and even though Abel isn’t hers by blood, he’s her son.  And if you screw with those kids, or with Jax for that matter, Tara is not going to forget it.
• Luna Garza (Janina Gavankar), who has had to actively work to get her Emma (Chloe Noelle) back before, but who loves that little girl, no matter what animal she grows to turn into.

4. Because of friends.
Since as I always say, family ain’t always blood.  I’ve discussed all of this before, basically, but I’m just going to list it out anyway.

• Pam de Beaufort (Kristin Bauer van Straten), Tara Thornton (Rutina Wesley), Nora Gainesborough (Lucy Griffiths), Jessica Hamby (Deborah Ann Woll), who are family but aren’t family and did some ass-kicking for the sake of such things to some extent (also for other reasons, listed below).  Special shout-out to Tara (because taking a bullet for someone, even if they misguidedly get you turned into a vampire after, is pretty badass; also because “and you still owe Pam”).
• Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), who regularly kicks ass in the name of her friends (and [former] lovers too, and her brother sometimes but whatever Jason) even when it’s maybe not the best of ideas and especially when nobody else will.
• Echo (Eliza Dushku), and at this point it’s easier if I just restrict this to talking about mid-season two and onward Echo so there aren’t issues of Caroline thrown in there (other people, again, can discuss Caroline much more intelligently than I), who leads her friends into the fight to save the world, then has to deal with the fact that the world hasn’t been saved and continues to fight anyway…
• …and here I’m just going to list off Priya again and Adelle DeWitt (Olivia Williams) and Mag (Felicia Day) and whoever else, everyone involved in the Epitaphverse.  These guys.  Fighting to protect themselves and those they love and whatnot.  And while Echo is inherently a fighter, these guys are largely not.  Priya fights when she has to, but it is not her default.  Adelle is much more of a fighter-with-words.  Mag, as I’ve previously discussed, probably wasn’t Combat Girl pre-thoughtpocalypse.  Etcetera.
• All of the Scoobies.  Period.
• All of the women of Serenity.  Period.
• Trixie (Paula Malcomson), going to shoot at Hurst (Gerald McRaney) as revenge for Ellsworth (Jim Beaver) with no thought to the consequences, just to her complete rage.  Among other things.
• Also Alma, and Joanie Stubbs (Kim Dickens) and Jane Cannary (Robin Weigert) and everyone else ever on Deadwood.  Period.

3. Because of self-preservation.
Surviving can take special effort sometimes.  And I celebrate it always.

• Yet again Priya.  I’m just going to let the instances of “Belonging” speak for themselves.
• Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner), because my darling is literally the definition of this category.
•  Can I just say all of the Scoobies again?  Because all of the Scoobies, in one way or another.  Buffy persevering through countless ordeals, Willow (Alyson Hannigan) struggling her way out of a dangerous addiction at least somewhat, Anya (Emma Caulfield) learning humanity, Tara (Amber Benson) finding a voice amongst everyone, Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter) and her personal journey that I am largely unfamiliar with on Angel, and I’m just going to say Fred (Amy Acker) of Angel too even though I’ve seen literally three of her episodes yet but I know she is this kind of strong especially, Faith (Eliza Dushku) fighting to redeem herself, Dawn working to be taken seriously amongst the group, everyone.
• Tara Thornton is getting some extra credit here, too.  Damn, that woman has been through a lot, and maybe it took her being a vampire for me to actually get affectionate toward her for whatever reason, but special points given for literally trying to destroy oneself right off the bat and then learning the reasons why, even if she still isn’t forgiving Sookie for arranging it, being a vampire might actually be working for her.
• Joanie Stubbs, holy moly.  Joanie who could easily have collapsed under the weight of all that was on her shoulders, after her failed business venture particularly, but who soldiered on as best she could.
• Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke), because surviving her d-bag brother all those years and finally ending up the stronger for it is the greatest ever, and because self-preservation is also a good way to encompass the fact that I love that my Dany learns from her mistakes.
• Bennett Halverson (Summer Glau), because I can’t get through a list like this without mentioning her somewhere.  Requisite “yes, she made some questionable choices, particularly re: her torturing Caroline-Echo plan” comment, requisite “but holy crap, she was a genius and did not let anything diminish that” comment.

2. Because of injustices that need to be combated.
Injustices of all sorts.

• Joan Holloway Harris (Christina Hendricks) and Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) both, in their ways, combat the injustice that is icky 1960s sexism.  And also the injustices of (in Joan’s case) d-bag husbands/lovers and (in both cases) d-bag bosses.
• Caroline Farrell, who I am mentioning here briefly to note that she was seeking to combat the injustice of animal and then human testing.  Among other causes, I’m sure.
• Echo, on the other hand, joins the abovementioned entire cast to, in one way or another, combat the injustice that is the thoughtpocalypse.
• Nora Gainesborough is getting a shout-out here, because I can’t not, and also because combating the injustice of the Vampire Authority that she had recently defected from after a moral epiphanyis pretty hardcore.
• And yet again, all of the Scoobies.  Combating the injustices of high school, college, demons, vampires, the Watcher’s Council, each other, personal struggles, interpersonal relationships, evil, and anything in between.
• And all of the women of Serenity.  Combating the injustices of the Alliance, d-bag criminals, d-bag clients, interpersonal relationships, and anything in between.
• Margaret Schroeder Thompson (Kelly Macdonald), combating the injustice of poor reproductive health education for mothers in the 1920s (among other things, but the “come talk about your vagina” line is my favorite forever).

1. Because why the hell shouldn’t they be.
This is the part where I point out how many of these listed women repeat.  Because strength is for everyone, for every reason, for anyone, for any reason.

–your fangirl heroine.

Television Tuesday :: the varyingly speculative True Blood ladies MBTI

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these; I set about to put together a True Blood main characters MBTI, with the potential for a minor characters one later, but considering how “main” and “minor” vary on this show, and considering how I just… I find the ladies so much more interesting, as I before have said, well.  This ended up happening instead.  Analyses, as always, from typelogic.com; also as always, there are of course parts of the overall type analyses that don’t match up, but.

(Seriously, I’m sorry, guys.  This just… hasn’t stopped being where I live yet.)

Jessica Hamby (Deborah Ann Woll)
ESFP.  “ESFPs love people, excitement, telling stories and having fun. The spontaneous, impulsive nature of this type is almost always entertaining… The dominant function of ESFPs is concerned with the reality that is perceived through the senses. This type’s prime directive is to examine the tangible through taste, touch, sight, feeling and hearing. ESFPs’ need for new experiences surely results from this function. Feeling gives focus to the collected information, producing the amiable nature of this type… ESFPs do well to seek out confirmation of the soundness of tough-minded decisions.”  Jess is one of those who I have a hard time E/I typing on one hand, but on the other, no, she’s an extrovert, easy.  She has introverted moments, but lots of extroverts do.  (I once saw a Firefly MBTI that typed Kaylee as an ESFP, and I think the same goes: introverted moments in certain circumstances, but extrovert overall.)

Nora Gainesborough (Lucy Griffiths)
INTJ.  “To outsiders, INTJs may appear to project an aura of “definiteness”, of self-confidence. This self-confidence, sometimes mistaken for simple arrogance by the less decisive, is actually of a very specific rather than a general nature; its source lies in the specialized knowledge systems that most INTJs start building at an early age. When it comes to their own areas of expertise — and INTJs can have several — they will be able to tell you almost immediately whether or not they can help you, and if so, how … Whatever system an INTJ happens to be working on is for them the equivalent of a moral cause to an INFJ; both perfectionism and disregard for authority may come into play… INTJs can rise to management positions when they are willing to invest time in marketing their abilities as well as enhancing them, and (whether for the sake of ambition or the desire for privacy) many also find it useful to learn to simulate some degree of surface conformism in order to mask their inherent unconventionality…  Whatever the outer circumstances, INTJs are ever perceiving inner pattern-forms and using real-world materials to operationalize them… Evaluation begs diagnosis; product drives process. As they come to light, Thinking tends, protects, affirms and directs iNtuition’s offspring, fully equipping them for fulfilling and useful lives… Some question the existence of Feeling in this type, yet its unseen balance to Thinking is a cardinal dimension in the full measure of the INTJ’s soul.”  I bet absolutely none of you are shocked by this, either the typing out or the length of the analysis.  Also, it’s lengthy because she displays different aspects of type all the time re: her playing every side thing.

Pam de Beaufort (Kristin Bauer van Straten)
ENTJ.  “ENTJs have a natural tendency to marshall (sic) and direct… ENTJs are often “larger than life” in describing their projects or proposals… Few other types can equal their ability to remain resolute in conflict… When challenged, the ENTJ may by reflex become argumentative. Alternatively (s)he may unleash an icy gaze that serves notice: the ENTJ is not one to be trifled with… Clarity of convictions endows these Thinkers with a knack for debate, or wanting knack, a penchant for argument. The light and heat generated by Thinking at the helm can be impressive; perhaps even overwhelming… When it be awake, feeling evokes great passion that knows not nuance of proportion nor context… Feeling in this type appears most authentic when implied or expressed covertly in a firm handshake, accepting demeanor, or act of sacrifice thinly covered by excuses of lack of any personal interest in the relinquished item.”  Honestly, I think that last bit explains it all, such as with this season, concluding her hugging it out with Tara with a shrugged “get back on that pole.”  Pam does not always know how to feelings, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have them for the select few (and by select, I mean Eric and Tara).

Sophie-Anne Leclerq (Evan Rachel Wood)
ESTP.  “ESTPs are spontaneous, active folks. Like the other SPs, ESTPs get great satisfaction from acting on their impulses. Activities involving great power, speed, thrill and risk are attractive to the ESTP… Gamesmanship is the calling card of the ESTP. Persons of this type have a natural drive to best the competition… Almost unconsciously the ESTP looks for nonverbal, nearly subliminal cues as to what makes her quarry “tick.” Once she knows, she waits for just the right time to trump the unsuspecting victim’s ace and glory in her conquest… The ESTP preference for mental, physical and emotional toughness surely can be traced to this detached, rational function…Feeling is such a ready hand-puppet, expedient in disarming the “victim” and exposing the jugular. Sincere Feeling is tertiary and thus relatively simplistic in this type.”  That we didn’t get too too much Sophie-Anne is one of my greatest sadnesses, because I think she was a certain kind of fun that none of the others have been.  A little more power-for-the-fun-of-it than any of the others have really been.

Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin)
ISTP.  “…unlike most ESPs they do not present an impression of constant activity. On the contrary, they lie dormant, saving their energy until a project or an adventure worthy of their time comes along–and then they launch themselves at it. The apparently frenzied state that inevitably ensues is actually much more controlled than it appears…  ISTPs are equally difficult to understand in their need for personal space, which in turn has an impact on their relationships with others. They need to be able to ‘spread out’–both physically and psychologically–which generally implies encroaching to some degree on others, especially if they decide that something of someone else’s is going to become their next project. (They are generally quite comfortable, however, with being treated the same way they treat others–at least in this respect.)… Auxiliary Sensing provides Thinking with all manner of information about the physical world. ISTPs possess heightened sensory awareness… The inferior (least) feeling function is extraverted and, when operative, quite visible. As with all types, the inferior function is relatively simplistic and often operates unconsciously in an all-or-nothing manner. When operative, Feeling’s sensitivity and loyalty has the potential for great benefit and utter peril. It would seem that ISTPs would do well to nourish and cherish Feeling judgement (sic), but to vigilantly supervise and protect it from predators and other catastrophes.”  Sookie is an introvert largely because of the mind-reading thing and how it’s always set her apart: she’s an introvert by necessity, to some extent.  But again, the last part is very telling: she tries to be straightforward about things, but in some situations, she makes snap judgments based on that sensitivity and loyalty.

Arlene Fowler Bellefleur (Carrie Preston)
ESTJ.  “ESTJs are joiners. They seek out like-minded companions in clubs, civic groups, churches and other service organizations. The need for belonging is woven into the fiber of SJs. The family likewise is a central focus for ESTJs, and attendance at such events as weddings, funerals and family reunions is obligatory. Tradition is important to the ESTJ… They love to provide and to receive good service… ESTJs have an acute sense for orthodoxy. Much of their evaluation of persons and activities reflects their strong sense of what is “normal” and what isn’t… Extraverts are attracted to the “object,” the external things and people in observable reality… Under the leadership of the Te function, iNtuition gravitates toward the discovery of broad categories which at worst amount to stereotypes.”  It’s that last that makes Arlene the one I have the fewest fond feelings toward: it’s often a flaw, and not always one she’s 100% aware of, but it’s not a tragic flaw by any means.

Tara Thornton (Rutina Wesley)
ESFJ.  “ESFJs are easily wounded. And when wounded, their emotions will not be contained. They by nature ‘wear their hearts on their sleeves,’ often exuding warmth and bonhomie, but not infrequently boiling over with the vexation of their souls… An ESFJ at odds with self is a remarkable sight… The world is a dangerous place, not to be trusted. Not that the ESFJ is paranoid; ‘hyper-vigilant’ would be more precise… ESFJs have the ability to express warmth, rage, and a range of other emotions. Actions are encouraged or rebuked based on how they affect other people, especially people near and dear to the ESFJ… The strengthening effect of Si on Fe may be responsible for this type’s reputation for wearing their ‘hearts on their sleeves.’ At any rate, ESFJs reflect the ‘black and white’ view of reality which is common to the SJ types.”  Similarly, the ‘black and white’ SJ view thing is one of the reasons I had a hard time connecting to the Tara of the first seasons.  I understand that she definitely had her reasons, but it’s not a thing I grasp particularly easily.  She is definitely tempestuous, though.  This is a spectacularly tempestuous type.

Luna Garza (Janina Gavankar)
ISFJ.  “In the workplace, ISFJs are methodical and accurate workers, often with very good memories and unexpected analytic abilities; they are also good with people in small-group or one-on-one situations because of their patient and genuinely sympathetic approach to dealing with others… While their work ethic is high on the ISFJ priority list, their families are the centers of their lives. ISFJs are extremely warm and demonstrative within the family circle–and often possessive of their loved ones, as well… Like most Is, ISFJs have a few, close friends. They are extremely loyal to these, and are ready to provide emotional and practical support at a moment’s notice.”  I think it’s mildly fascinating that one of the proposed careers for ISFJ types is teacher, which Luna is; very telling.  I think Luna is, overall, more confrontational than the prototypical ISFJ, but the family loyalty is very accurate.

Salome Agrippa (Valentina Cervi)
ENFJ.  “They have tremendous charisma by which many are drawn into their nurturant tutelage and/or grand schemes. Many ENFJs have tremendous power to manipulate others with their phenomenal interpersonal skills and unique salesmanship. But it’s usually not meant as manipulation — ENFJs generally believe in their dreams, and see themselves as helpers and enablers… ENFJs are organized in the arena of interpersonal affairs. Their offices may or may not be cluttered, but their conclusions (reached through feelings) about people and motives are drawn much more quickly and are more resilient than those of their NFP counterparts… As extraverts, their contacts are wide ranging. Face-to-face relationships are intense, personable and warm, though they may be so infrequently achieved that intimate friendships are rare.”  Oh, hello, speculation.  I understand why Salome had to meet the true death this season, but I would have liked the chance to get to know her better also.  The contradictions of her were fascinating, as were the ways she interacted with others.  Uhm.  Yes.

–your fangirl heroine.