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.

Things in Print Thursday :: 6 coffee table books I own

As an English major, I can expect that my peers and professors may, in fact, ask me what books I have bought lately.  It hasn’t happened in a while, but I have come to actively dread the question: the truth is, while I reread a lot of books, I have to be careful about allocating my recreational reading time.  I’m reading so many books for school, after all.  I have to be selective.  (This is probably why two of the books I have bought in the past few months were parts of the Song of Ice and Fire series, another was a comic book, another was the fourth in the Heartsick series [which I had been putting off reading for ages], and two were books that are on the list I’m about to make.)  I’m not particularly proud of this, but at the same time, I like to think that I’m developing a decent collection of “coffee table books,” large, often hardcover publications that can pertain to a wide variety of informational subjects.

Most of the coffee table books I grew up with, for example, pertained to roses or other garden-related material.  Or rocks.  Other people have them about traveling to various exotic locations, about classical music, about athletics.  My collection, unsurprisingly, is entirely pertaining to various films, television programs, and theatrical events that I enjoy; it’s fairly small so far, but seriously, the hardcover ones are expensive.  They’ve almost always been gifts.

Also sometimes called things like “companion books,” or colloquially referred to by fans as the “so-and-so-topic Bible,” these books are a wealth of information.  Pictures, histories, interviews.  Scripts if you’re lucky.  And I’ve spent far too many hours to be healthy poring over them.  I do not regret this information.

So.

6. The Cabin in the Woods: The Official Visual Companion, by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard
Pictures, pictures everywhere.  Spoilers galore (I bought it in the company of friends who had yet to see the film, and thusly guarded it protectively; I’m pretty sure the only pages I actually displayed for them were ones featuring the lovely faces of Fran Kranz and Amy Acker, partaking not in spoilers).  Oh, and the full screenplay.  Yesss.

5. Serenity Official Visual Companion, by Joss Whedon
I have yet to acquire either of the Firefly official visual companions, mostly because the place I’ve been finding these (or at least found the Cabin one and the Serenity one for reasonable prices) hasn’t had them around when I’ve been in.  I really should, of course, but I did snap this one up immediately.  It has all of the goodies, but most importantly, it does, in fact, have the script.  I am a huge, huge sucker for coffee table books featuring full scripts.  It’s a running theme.

4. Grindhouse: The Sleaze-filled Saga of an Exploitation Double Feature, by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez
The only of the hardcover companion books I own that I purchased instead of being gifted it, mostly because I first saw it in the heyday of the Grindhouse experience.  It was relatively soon after the film’s release, but far enough removed for me to realize that I loved it way more than almost everyone else in the world I knew; if I didn’t buy this book, I figured (this is often my rationale), who would?  And it’s totally worth it.  It’s beautiful.  It helped me when I was putting together my Dakota costume Halloweens ago; it has the Planet Terror script in all its glory (not the Death Proof one, but I found that online, in a separate volume).

3. Wicked: the Grimmerie, by David Coté, Joan Marcus, and Stephen Schwartz
“Wicked is not just a musical, it is a phenomenon,” begins the synopsis on Google Books.  I… you know, okay.  This one was a gift (all of my theater ones have been) and it’s one I appreciated.  My relationship with Wicked is a weird one, because I’ve always… actually kind of liked the book better (being inclined toward the dark and all).  I do really like the musical.  I’ve seen it three times, it’s a given.  And I really loved to be able to see into how it’s put together, because that sort of thing is fascinating to me; Wicked is more of a Big Splashy Musical than the others I’ve studied so intensely, so it’s different in that way.  Also, libretto.

2. Spring Awakening: In the Flesh, by David Coté
Okay, yes, it has the most ridiculous title if you aren’t in on the references, but.  Again, libretto; also, so many pictures.  Most of which I’d already seen by the time I got the book, seen and seen again and then Photoshopped the bejeezus out of, but still.  There’s all sorts of delightful extra material regarding production and design in the book, and considering Spring is a definite time and place in my life, and still basically my favorite of musicals, it’s an obvious choice for me to have this book.

1. Rent,by Jonathan Larson
Rent is also a time and place, as you guys well know, but it tops the list because holy crap, my Rent coffee table book got so much use.  This is what I was referring to when I mentioned the Bible thing above; long, long before it came into my possession (originally a mutual possession with a friend, if I remember), I was hearing tell on the interwebs of the Rent Bible.  I didn’t even initially realize that that wasn’t the actual title.  It has pictures, it has interviews, it has the libretto; I remember embarrassing things about me and this book.  I remember awkwardly drawing stills from it with Sharpies and tacking them on my bedroom wall, I remember going over pictures to cosplay for the movie premiere, I remember using it for research speeches at school.  Oh, Rent Bible.  Such fuzzies.

–your fangirl heroine.

Spoiler Alert Saturday :: my thoughts on The Avengers

Tā mā de.

In the best of ways.

As with Cabin in the Woods (which I maybe watched again this afternoon, yes) I will not actually spoil this one.  Not at all.  But I will give some basically spoilerfree highlights.

• Dear Joss Whedon, I know you don’t like being “that guy who kills everyone” in the way that some people seem to say it.  I know other people kill lots of people, too.  But I applaud the way that you have been willing to kill people in your work in the past not because nobody else kills people (though fictional murder could stand to happen more, in my opinion) but because it makes things, as I have said before, high stakes.  It makes my heart beat a little faster when characters are in risky situations.  It makes me care a little more, because you make people care about people, then you dangle them in these scenes where they could die.  The point is not that people sometimes do die, the point is just that they could, and that makes it more interesting and better.  It gets my adrenaline up.  So thank you, dear sir.
• Now this is the snarky Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) that I dig on.  Iron Man 2 Tony Stark was a little… off, somehow.  I don’t have a familiarity with… well, any Marvel comics.  I know.  I’m awful that way.  But this Tony Stark was, while a little bit of a d-bag, helpful and arrogant but not too arrogant and he grew into his intentions and he was sarcastic but amazingly so.  You always need someone to quip while being useful, and he provided that part of the team in a perfect fashion.
• And this is the Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) that I find interesting.  I, like everyone else, really didn’t like the Eric Bana Hulk.  (This could be because I saw it at a drive-in and could only halfway hear it out the car window, but I somehow doubt it.)  I could take or leave the Edward Norton Incredible Hulk.  Mark Ruffalo’s was just a guy who knew sciency stuff really damn well and, whoops, rage monster.  He had a dry sense of humor that didn’t come through a lot but was very necessary when it did.  He was a man on a journey, a man who was trying despite the rage monster within to do the right thing.  His struggle was hard.  But he worked with it.
• I am all right with Steve Rogers (Chris Evans).  I think that Captain America is a stand-up guy, and now that he’s taken out of time and removed from optimism a bit, I like him even more.  I like that he wound up the one who tried to serve as the glue for the bunch.  He tried to be a leader, to take care of the team in whatever way he could.  And watching every other character fanboy over him was the most adorable thing I have possibly ever seen.  Except for maybe watching him get all giddy about recognizing Tony’s Wizard of Oz reference.  He was so excited, he finally picked up on something, he finally belonged a little bit, or he was trying.  He was trying so hard to make sense of this life, no matter how improbably and crappy it often was.  And he was doing this because it was what he thought was right.  Not because someone else told him to.  Because he knew it inside.
• Yes, and I am good with Thor (Chris Hemsworth).  I think I’m going to go ahead and put him on my “I want you to read audio books or bedtime stories to me” list, but that’s neither here nor there.  He truly tries to have good intentions, to make sense of people.  Even if he doesn’t always understand them, he cares about them.  Not because he has to, but because he wants to.  It’s not his world, but he’ll look after it.  No questions or qualms.
• And I am kind of more than good with Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson).  I didn’t really have Black Widow feelings a la Iron Man 2, though I didn’t not have feelings.  (Somewhat because I have always sort of had a Scarlett Johansson thing a little, but.)  I definitely have Black Widow feelings now.  No questions about it.  That first scene, the one that was pre-released somewhat, the interrogation… oh yes, all right.  She is just.  She is a badass, and she is not by nature an emotional person, or one who thinks of things the way that others do, regarding sense of humor or turns of phrase or attitudes about things, but she’s not cold.  She’s often detached, yes, but by the end, she is loyal to these people, she will do what she can and must for them and for the world.  What is said to her at one point in the film doesn’t have the effect on her that she lets them momentarily believe that it does (and lord I loved that little “thank you” headtilt thing) but it does have an effect on her.  It helps her come to the conclusion about what is right to do, not for everyone, but for her as a person.
• And I am pretty good with Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner).  Hawkeye was the least-seen of the Avengers in previous films, so it was easy to not have a sense of him in particular.  And you don’t get a sense of him for a while, for reasons; then it works, there’s some him+Natasha friend time (more on this in a minute) and some OH DEAR kind of feelsy dialogue, and I recognize that he is just a good kind of dude.  He is a solid, solid man.  Reliable, badass, and he and Natasha do these things not because they have powers or enhancements, but because they are just really good at what they do.  They are trained, they are skilled, and it is what they think is right.
• And okay, Loki (Tom Hiddleston).  He is so talented at being the kind of bad guy that he was written as.  The particular traits.  The smug, the supercilious, the desperate-for-something.  Yeah, solid.
• And Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders).  Doin’ your S.H.I.E.L.D. thing like badasses.  Super points for Coulson’s previously alluded to fanboy moment and Hill’s… I don’t know, existence.  Just because I sometimes irrationally latch onto ladies who are making operations operate properly and shooting guns and being badasses quietly.
• And not-surprise bonus Enver Gjokaj and Ashley Johnson!  Hi you.
• Dear Joss Whedon, I know that this is a hypocritical statement somewhat, because many of your works include many of my big important “ships.”  You can craft romantic relationships that tug at my heartstrings so damn hard.  But you also craft absolutely rutting beautiful platonic relationships.  And this is a movie that is, in part, about platonic relationships.  The Avengers are not friends at the beginning, save Clint and Natasha.  The Avengers might not even really qualify as friends in the simplest sense by the end.  But this is a movie about the dynamic between people that includes absolutely no romance at all (unless you count the bitty Tony and Pepper [Gwyneth Paltrow], which was pre-established anyway and hardly present, yet still managed to have a moment of poignancy and a lot of banter) and that is awesome.  They are teammates.  They are able to relate to each other without there being weird, unnecessary sexual tension gŏ se.  This is particularly relevant with Natasha, because the tendency with women in action movies is to make there be some romantic plot regarding them, and… nope.  That is not what Natasha does, that is not what anyone does with Natasha, there is not so much as an approving sideeye as she walks past.  She gets her business done efficiently and awesomely and actually save those interrogatees at the beginning, no one makes a deal of her being a lady whatsoever.  And Clint and Natasha are allowed to be friends, friends who care about each other, friends who are teammates.  And that is it.  Also, Tony and Bruce seeming to bro down at the end a bit.  And anyway, Joss Whedon, I thank you for making a movie about platonic relationships that is so wonderful.
• Dear Joss Whedon, I think one of your greatest gifts is one for making the supernatural, otherworldly, or otherwise beyond the realm of possibility seem so absolutely brilliantly human.  All of these characters were in one way or another dealing with situations that are never going to be dealt with by regular human beings.  But it always seemed like something that could be related to.  Just like, for example, Buffy uses demons in high school as metaphor, this is using a struggle with supervillains and the existence and limitation of superpowers as metaphor: this is a bunch of people struggling to do the right thing, struggling because of a variety of reasons (arrogance, rage, a fear of the self, a detachment from the world, a rough past), but they go on actual understandable journeys to learn and fight through it.  They fight otherworldly monsters, yes, but it doesn’t seem like it’s too detached.  Also, it doesn’t seem too heavy-handed a metaphor.  And that is something that you do so well, Joss Whedon.  You make superpeople seem human.  You make super-situations seem like ones that we can understand.  You make us give a damn about characters no matter what.
• Also.  The second after-credits scene.  After it ended, one of the people who had stayed behind who was behind us exclaimed “well, that was stupid.”  To which I say no.  That, dear Joss Whedon, was you leaving no stone unturned.  And it was such a perfect moment.  It was sort of like, well, most of the comics that work off your series’: it wasn’t necessary to be able to understand the canon at large, no, you could have walked out of the movie completely satisfied without it, but it just added a very special, neat little something.  It added a little more shading to the picture.  It just made so much sense.  It was just so, again, human.
• Basically, dear Joss Whedon, thank you.

–your fangirl heroine.

Spoiler Alert Saturday :: my thoughts on The Cabin in the Woods

Or, the most awkwardly written review ever, because I am terrified of actually spoiling this one for anyone.

No, really.  I have never before been more terrified to ruin something for anyone.  I will openly discuss the details and plots of movies and television shows and books and things that didn’t much matter to me, so long as someone in my physical company hasn’t told me explicitly not to; I will withhold the details and plots of movies and television shows and books and things that are so absurd that you just need to experience it for yourself (things like Sleepaway Camp), even if they didn’t much matter to me in deep personal ways.  But things that matter to me, well, if they’ve been around enough that they’re generally common-ish knowledge, I feel no qualms in discussing on my blog; if somebody I know IRL is intending to watch a particular television program, for example, I’ll refrain from mentioning things like who dies; but if a thing is still fairly new in the world, I intend to shut the hell up.  I don’t want to ruin the fun.

As far as fans go, those who have seen The Cabin in the Woods seem pretty consistently good at doing this, too.  I like that we’re all partaking in this worldwide not-spoiling-for-reasons-fest.  Certain journalistic publications have not been so kind, but people on tumblr and things have been doing a good job, so far as I’ve seen.  And I don’t intend to be the one who screws that up.

Instead, this is going to be less of a movie review and more of a discussion of what I am like when viewing movies that I absolutely love right off the bat.  The experience is pretty consistently the same.  (And it will likely be peppered with exclamation-pointed declarations of my completely incoherent fangirling love of certain actors and actresses.)

I watch a lot of movies.  That is apparent by my frequent reviewing of them.  And I get pre-excited about… less of them, but a reasonable amount of them.  I was excited about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, for example, but not frantically so.  I was excited about the last Harry Potter, because it was a big-ass part of my life.  I was excited about Sucker Punch because people kept telling me it looked like a “me” movie, and I did love it, I don’t care.  I was excited about Scott Pilgrim way back in 2010 because it looked awesome even if I wasn’t initiate yet, and it wound up being probably the last movie that has made me react in the way I will detail soon.  I was excited about Inglourious Basterds way back in 2009 because of Tarantino reasons, and loved it wholly.

But honestly, the last movie I was this excited about, that I expected to give me these reactions, was Grindhouse.  In 2007.  A while back.  I was pre-excited about Grindhouse because A) Tarantino/Rodriguez, B) B-movies, C) it looked morbid and insane and ridiculous and stylized and fantastic.  All of those requirements were met and then some, because honestly?  You ask me what movies make me laugh the hardest?  That’s in the top 5.  Planet Terror especially.  I’ve seen it/them upwards of ten times now, probably, and I still just laugh my head off every time.  (This is part because I laugh at amusing dialogue/happenings and part because I laugh, like the morbid weirdo I am, at things like Planet Terror‘s particularly cartoon-bloody zombie kills or moments of exceptional badassery like Cherry Darling wielding her gun leg.)

I was spectacularly pre-excited about Cabin.  I first tumbled about it in July of last year, for example, and have been keeping tabs on it since then.  I would clearly follow Joss most anywhere, in terms of I enjoy his work and his style; I have a decided interest in Amy Acker; I would follow Fran Kranz most anywhere, decidedly, because of the part where I completely lose all capability for rational thought due to my enjoying him so.  Also, I love horror-but-not movies.  (See reason C, above.)  I love movies that are equal parts gore/death/whatever and humor.  I love movies that are sincerely mindbendy.  I love when I don’t see things coming because they’re artfully twisted and manipulated to be surprises.  I assumed that I would be enjoying this movie thoroughly.

We arrived fairly early for the movie.  (They were still cleaning the theater when we got to the door.  We were excited, all right?)  We made sure we were well-stocked with our giant sodas and our inappropriate starches.  We kicked back.  I reminded myself not to have a giant grin on my face right away, because that would be silly.

But one appeared justly pretty quickly.  I enjoy character banter even when it’s silly.  Kristen Connolly really was cute.  Chris Hemsworth was doing what he was supposed to and very well.  Jesse Williams and Anna Hutchinson did their jobs well, too.  Which sounds like an awkward not-quite-compliment, but mostly it’s me not wanting to discuss actual details.  Also: Fran.  From the moment he came on, I could both hear the audience laughing and not stop grinning.  He’s one of those performers that makes me do that.  I’ve seen people online being proud of him being a “fan favorite” and whatnot, and I second that sentiment.

The setup was seriously artful.  And I just kept laughing.  Laughing because I enjoy when people genrebend (which was done), laughing because I enjoy when people do sendups of genres (which was done), laughing because I enjoy when characters (especially ones played by people I adore) say completely unexpectedly random and yet hilarious things (which was done).

By the time the movie… got going, let’s say, I was doing the thing of perpetually biting my lip/touching my face.  Because of the humor, because of the aw, because of the interest, because of everything.  When certain things became… revealed, I could not contain my laughter.  To the point where one of my people actually jokingly told me to shut up.  (We four were laughing more than anyone else in the theater, I’m fairly sure.)  It’s this point where I’ll say: yes Tom Lenk,  yes Richard Jenkins, yes Bradley Whitford, yes Brian White, yes Amy Acker.  Good job, all of you.

Then there were moments of hell yes awesomeness.  Moments where I may have audibly exclaimed things like “YES” and “MY BABY.”  And moments where I was laughing because it was funny and also because it was just so awesome.  And moments where I was laughing at myself because I was enjoying myself so enthusiastically.  And moments where I honestly felt a little guilty for laughing so loudly because it was that morbid laughter and maybe not everyone there necessarily understood that, but then that’s just too bad for them.

And then… the conclusion.  They did a good job of, how can I phrase it, not letting things unravel all at once.  And they did a good job of pulling surprises until the end.  I didn’t know how it would end, honestly, but looking back I can’t imagine another way that it could have ended, everything having gone how it did.

I haven’t enjoyed myself this much and in this way at the movies while they are in theaters in a long while.  And I fully intend on enjoying myself at this movie in theaters again.

–your fangirl heroine.

Whedon Wednesday :: like an Amazon [an analysis of Tara Maclay]

I had a conversation with someone about Buffy characters recently, who we like and who we don’t, and they offhandedly mentioned that they didn’t really like Tara (Amber Benson).  Now, people are and allowed to have favorites and less-favorites.  It’s a part of fandom.  I completely understand why Tara wouldn’t be someone’s favorite.  That title often goes hand-in-hand with loud personalities, with funny and memorable quirks, with obvious badassery, with things that you relate to (or wish you related to) personally.  Since Tara was, for so long, there to be mostly “Willow’s girlfriend,” she wasn’t the deepest-developed character straight off.  I even understand when people say “I like Oz [and Willow] better than Tara [and Willow].”  I don’t think it has to do with Oz (Seth Green) being a boy and Tara being a girl in relation to Willow’s (Alyson Hannigan) sexual desire; it’s just personality, different things appealing to different people.  (I personally love Tara and Oz pretty equally, but they’re both the types that I often gravitate to.)  Whatever it is, people are allowed their opinions.

The person I was conversing with did allude to the “Willow’s girlfriend” problem being part of why he didn’t much like Tara; the other given reason was that she was “too nice,” and that was “boring.”  While people are allowed their opinions, this set me off a little.  Not then and there, of course.  But I think that reducing Tara to that is unfair: she’s quiet, she’s nice, she doesn’t do too many wacky, memorable things, but she’s her own kind of very necessary strong.

Tara was initially introduced as a counterpart to Willow; she existed mostly in that context at first.  Partly because her initial appearance is at the fail magic group that Willow attended, which makes sense; partially because, as Will explained,

“I just kinda like having something that’s just, you know, mine.”

At this point in Willow’s life, she’d recently broken up with Oz; she’d been Scoobying for a few years, but her identity was largely defined by her role in that group.  So she’d felt, for a while, kind of like “Oz’s girlfriend” or “Buffy and Xander’s friend.”  We get to see Willow as more, of course, and Oz was actually sometimes just “Willow’s boyfriend”; but that didn’t affect Willow’s self-perception or her need to have an identity outside of that world, one that she created herself and one that she had to herself.  And Tara was happy to be a part of that.

Tara seemed to be a fairly lonely woman.  Her family life was crummy; her mother, presumably the only one she was really close to, died years ago.  She was very shy, and she had a hard time speaking up or making social connections.  In this way, being “Willow’s girlfriend” was perhaps something that she craved for a time: it allowed her to gain some of those social connections that she needs, to climb Maslow’s hierarchy a bit.  Before, she was probably down around level 2, safety, and not even there fully.  She had the lowest level taken care of, and she did have “security of: body, employment, resources, health… property,” but not really family.  Once she had Willow in her life, she could go ahead and climb to level 3, love and belonging, because she felt like she has an intimate connection.

It’s no wonder that she felt she needed to be “Willow’s girlfriend” for a while in order to come out of her shell and blossom into a fully confident person.  Before, she was shy, but she seemed pretty secure in who she is; she just had a hard time expressing it completely.  She needed the esteem-boost that comes from knowing that other people care about her; not everyone probably needs that, but she did, and that’s all right.  She became even more confident once she was closer with the rest of the Scooby Gang; having a sense of belonging in every way, not just romantically.

Even before she became that somewhat more outspoken character, though, Tara was nice.  She was really nice.   The others didn’t really “get” her at first; she wasn’t not loud, she didn’t wear things on her sleeve, she cracked obscure jokes that they don’t understand and didn’t know how to react to (though, really, all of them do this at some point or another).  She was the newcomer, so she didn’t necessarily have as much of an “in” as the others, but she still treated them all with patience and care.  She had a bond with Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg), as per they were both less Scoobyish Scoobies, and more than once she proved herself a really good friend, particularly to Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar); she was respectful, intelligent, not show-offy, gentle, polite.  She might be the “nice one,” yes, but they needed a “nice one” desperately.  Back in high school, Willow was almost the “nice one,” but she was too busy being the “smart one” and then the “magic one,” and as the group expanded and grew up, they needed someone like Tara.  Someone who didn’t jump to rash or judgy conclusions in sticky situations, someone who could be the voice of reason from within their own generation (clarified there because Giles [Anthony Stewart Head] does act as the voice of reason at times, but his pronouncements are sometimes disregarded to an extent because he’s also representative of the authority figure, the adult in the group), the source of empathy.  And Tara needed them.

I don’t believe that there is such a thing as “too nice,” though, except for in the sense of being so nice that you let others walk all over you, and it seemed like she’s been that way with her family in the past, maybe, but with Willow and the Scoobies, Tara doesn’t have that problem.  She was nice, but she had a sense of humor, one that popped out more as time goes on and she got more comfortable.  She wasn’t afraid to be tough with people or to tell them what needs doing.  Even when Willow abused magicks in season six and therefore hurt their relationship, she doesn’t just hang around and let it keep up.  She said “okay, baby, stop doing that,” and Willow, being deep into an addiction, went “lolnope,” and so Tara said “you’ve crossed the line I drew.  I’m out of here, we’ll think things over again when you’ve got your issues figured out.”

This was an incredibly mature thing to do.  She realized that the situation wasn’t healthy, and she realized that until Willow could get herself healthy (again, going back to Maslow’s hierarchy; her addiction to the magicks takes her from the closer-to-the-top place she was for a while back down to struggling with level 2, and until she can regain her security [I note the presence of “morality” in level 2]) she wasn’t capable of maintaining any higher-level connections or personal happinesses.  I’m assuming that Tara didn’t sit down with Maslow’s hierarchy and go “I’m/she’s right there!!” because that’s something that most people don’t do, but she did always have an intuitive understanding of peoples’ “auras” and what generally is and isn’t emotionally healthy.  She expressed, too (notably when talking to Buffy about her thing with Spike [James Marsters]), that healthy reactions can differ from person to person, but she could see when Willow was struggling, and she realized that she couldn’t be in that relationship at that time: it hurt both of them.

Tara didn’t absent herself from the others’ lives when she broke up with Willow, though.  She was more than just “Willow’s girlfriend.”  She hung out with Dawn (something that Dawn sorely needs) and participated in Anya (Emma Caulfield) and Xander’s (Nicholas Brendon) nonwedding.  She was around for Buffy when Buffy needed someone.  She was seen socializing with other people on the UC Sunnydale campus, though we don’t get any of the details; even this is something we never saw before, because she wasn’t comfortable enough with herself to enter into a lot of friendships, but though her relationship with Willow has (temporarily) ended, she’s grown as a result of it.

Her returning to Willow didn’t come from a need to be defined by someone else again.  Filling the role of “Willow’s girlfriend” was a way for her to figure herself out, and now that she has, she’s comfortable being her own woman.  But she did love Willow, on a deep, biological level (even though Willow’s spell in 6×08, “Tabula Rasa,” is all kinds of bad because magicks do not fix everything, it does show that almost Priya/Anthony thing of feeling connected to each other even without memories or whatnot).  And she saw that Willow has grown, too: at least then, she was at an okay place with the addiction, she was getting her life back together.  And maybe it wouldn’t be the same, but she wanted to try.

“There’s just so much to work through. Trust has to be built again on both sides. You have to learn if – if we’re even the same people we were. If you can fit in each other’s lives. It’s a long and important process, and can we just skip it? C-Can you just be kissing me now?”

She wanted Willow back in her life, not because she needed her (proven by the way she continues to exist on the show and relate to the others), but because she just wanted her.  They’d been through a lot of bad by this point, but she thought it might still be possible to try again.  Might.  And trying is better than not trying, when it’s the right time to.

And then… oh, my darling.  If it’s not apparent, I’m very affectionate towards Tara.  Her death was untimely, horrible, brutal, completely devastating, all of it.  I’m just gonna copypaste in something from the Buffy wiki now.

“After Tara’s death, it was fiercely debated whether it constituted an example of a cliché in television that lesbian relationships usually turn out badly^[26], often with one partner dying or turning out to be evil. Joss Whedon later explained that Tara’s death had nothing to do with her being a lesbian, but it was just another plot twist designed to further Willow’s personality; allegedly, if Willow had still been involved with Oz in Season Six, he would’ve been killed just as Tara was, so Tara was doomed not for being a lesbian but for being Willow’s lover. In particular, it had become a well-known characteristic of the show that any couples tended to have their relationships brutally interrupted when they’re at their closest.”

Tara was doomed because she was in a happy relationship, but she was also doomed because when someone matters that much to everyone else around them, and is such a quiet, integral part of things, well.  I see it as the same thing as Wash’s death, really: she was in a relationship in which both partners, despite everything, cared for each other.  She was one of the most patient, caring people in the group.  Everyone’s death would affect everyone else, of course, but her death is one that had a certain terrible poignancy: an accidental happening, proof of the way that bad things can happen to good people even when they’re seemingly just going about business.  (Getting into the whole Willow-and-dark-magicks debacle any further will have to wait, though.)

So yes, Tara is the “nice one” of Buffy.  But “too nice” or “boring”?  Hardly.  Just because she was quieter didn’t mean she had less to offer to the group of friends, to herself, or to the show.  She offered sincere connections to those around her, ones that included things that they needed, and in turn she got the connections she needed.  She may not have been kicking ass and taking names, but she still displayed a very true kind of strength.

–your fangirl heroine.

Music Monday :: a love letter to the music of Jed Whedon

Predictably and obviously, I figured out the existence of this man’s musical career through the work he’s done with his brother, the lord my god Joss.  But I legitimately enjoy the music in its own right, too.

The first actual song of Jed’s I heard, not counting Dr. Horrible, was “Remains,” with Maurissa Tancharoen, his wife and my single favorite backstage showmance that was a romance before it was a showmance anyway, on the end of Dollhouse’s “Epitaph One.”  And it broke my heart into a thousand pieces.  (That can be proven by the fact that, once I’d downloaded it off iTunes, I spent an entire morning at my piano teaching some approximation of it to myself.  It’s the only new song I’ve taught myself in almost two years, i.e. a priority.)

Then I started rewatching Dollhouse, because it honestly felt strange not to have watched any of it in almost a year.  (Let’s not even get into the absurdity of that statement.)  And during “Belonging,” 2×04, there was another song of Jed’s.  “Drones.”  Which I realized was also on a mix my friend gave me.  I promptly began listening to it at top volume when I was alone and becoming, again, overwhelmed by the emotions.

And once it got to a point where I couldn’t survive on just that, I went and found his full album, History of Forgotten Things.  It’s under the name Jed Whedon and the Willing, and Wikipedia says that that means, among other people, dearest Mo and Felicia Day.  Which just confirms my theory that I want to be best friends with all of these people.  (Seriously, Mo Tancharoen is my heroine of life.)  And I keep playing it, over and over and over, and I keep being taken aback by how gorgeous it is.

It isn’t folksy gorgeous like I often fall for, and aside from the various Whedonmafia members, I didn’t know the majority of the artists listed in the first five pages of the Last.fm similar artists.  (I did make a mental note to try most of them out.)  Last.fm and iTunes couldn’t come up with a more apt description for the genre than “indie rock” or just “rock,” either; I’m the kind of person who has to internet search and manually enter convoluted combination genres for everything I have on my iTunes, so this doesn’t satisfy me, but I’m not exactly sure how to put it, either.  (Though they weren’t listed in the first five pages of similar artists, I just listened to the Postal Service’s Give Up before turning on History of Forgotten Things right now, and I feel like there could be some level of emotional similarity there.  The Postal Service are classed as “electropop,” “indietronica,” and “indie pop” on Wikipedia.  I think I like “indietronica.”  Not purely, but as part of the classification.)

I swear that this actually has nothing to do with the fact that Jed was one of the writers and I found his music through it, but my best classification for the genre is honestly “music that makes me think of Dollhouse.”  Which, admittedly, is probably my version of “indietronica” in a way (several Postal Service songs do give me that vibe, which is why I use a lot of them on mixes; ditto with Metric, who can be classed as “indie rock,” “New Wave,” and “post-punk revival,” for whatever that’s worth, not that I find Metric particularly similar to Jed Whedon’s music [though now that I think about it, there's a little bit of Emily Haines and the Soft Skeleton similarity at times] so that was irrelevant) but hey.

Whatever it means, I think this album is beautiful.  I think Jed Whedon’s music is beautiful, period.  It’s up but not too fast, thoughtful but not too slow, techie but not too processed, melodic but not too flowy, interesting but not too pretentious (actually, not really pretentious at all).  It’s basically perfect.

–your fangirl heroine.

Whedon Wednesday :: I don’t want to die at all [an analysis of Inara and mortality]

So Morena Baccarin did confirm, vaguely, based on someone’s overhearing from Joss himself, that Inara was in fact dying.  Of a terminal illness.  And there are plenty of hints throughout the series that could lead you to maybe believe it; the first time I watched Firefly, which seems like forever ago but was really… not that long, I hadn’t heard this theory/fact/secret/I don’t even know what to call it.  But I read it by the second or third time (it all starts to blend) and it definitely made me see things with new eyes.

I will begin this by saying, simply, that I adore Inara.  She’s a wonderful character, and I’m sure I have more analysis of her to offer.  But I’m focusing on the never-canonically-touched-on subplot because otherwise, this might get very, very lengthy.

Our first glimpse of Inara is one of her with a client, and after the sexing goes on, there are some brilliant moments where the client is talking to her, and she’s all smiles, but we have glimpses of her sighing, eye-rolling, “can this please be over?” faces.  I’m sure that’s just because she’s bored out of her mind, because he’s a dolt.  But it could be read, in a dying subplot context or not, as her regretting her choice of company.  Inara states more than once that the Companion policy allows them to choose their own clients, which is sort of ideal no matter what (although, given the boredom Inara experiences sometimes with clients and the frustrations she experiences other times, it must be said that even one’s own choices, being a part of human nature, are susceptible to fallibility).

In light of the subplot, though, one could extrapolate that Inara isn’t interested in wasting her time with people that she can tell right off the bat are tiresome.  It’s never said quite why she ships out with the crew, but the implication I got after discovering the secret subplot was that she wanted to see the ‘Verse, as much as she could.  She wanted to get away from the life that she’d known and the people she’d known, which could be because she craved a new experience or because she thought it would be easier than staying and dying around the people she’d known for so long.  (I’m making it clear, now, that quite a lot of this is my own extrapolation.  If that wasn’t already apparent.)

Also in the first episode, we see Inara handing Simon (Sean Maher) some medicine from her private stores, in case it could help with Kaylee (Jewel Staite).  A) As I said last night, Inara and Kaylee are besties, and B) I’ve seen this used as proof of the secret subplot, too.  It’s not as if it’s specific terminal illness drugs, because those probably wouldn’t help treat a gunshot wound or any related medical problems, but it stands to reason that someone who had an illness of a serious and private nature would have a store of extra medications, lest complications arise.

Another aspect of Inara’s relating to the crew comes out fairly quickly in this episode.  Mal is baiting her by insulting her profession, and the newly arrived Shepherd Book (Ron Glass) is observing.  With a snarky smile, Inara assures him:

“I mostly keep to myself.  When I’m not whoring.”

This goes, or it could, to validate the “wanting to avoid the connections that are painful to sever when one dies” theory stated above.  Though she then turns and heads off in Kaylee’s company, because sometimes, even when you do know you’re dying and you shouldn’t have serious connections, you do need a friend.  (I imagine that Inara and Kaylee’s friendship sort of snuck up on the both of them, honestly, but that’s best saved for another time.)

Maybe because Simon is a doctor, maybe because Simon is also somewhat of an “outsider” in the life of Serenity, Inara more than once includes him in her vague allusions to the dying subplot.  In “Out of Gas,” the two have a conversation that, while reasonable for anyone to have, is the biggest clue that people point to.

Simon: Always thought the name Serenity had a vaguely funereal sound to it.
Inara: I love this ship. I have from the first moment I saw it.
Simon: I just don’t wanna die on it.
Inara: I don’t wanna die at all.
Simon: Suffocation’s not exactly the most dignified way to go. The human body will…
Inara: (cutting him off) Please, I don’t really require a clinical description right now.
Simon: I’m sorry. I’m just… It was my birthday.

Now, a lot of people don’t want to die.  That’s a perfectly normal human instinct to survive.  But there’s something in the way that Inara says it that completely sets my subplot aware heart aflame.  A look in her eyes: the way she glances away from Simon.  The tone of her voice.  She doesn’t just have a distaste for death like anyone does.  She has a distaste provided by her knowing that it could come sooner than she’d like.

Later in the episode, as Mal (Nathan Fillion) is readying the crew to split off and find help (or just last a little bit longer than they would on the dying ship), they’re talking about the plan.  As with any conversation had between the two of them, there could be much sexual tension extrapolated.  But there’s something telling about the exchange of dialogue:

Inara: Mal, you don’t have to die alone.
Mal: Everybody dies alone.

Somewhere in the course of the series, or in the course of her time on Serenity, Inara has realized that these people are family.  They’re not the acquaintances she sought to run from back home, the other Companions and the society she’d known there (perhaps dying around them would have been somehow less dignified, more pity-inducing).  They’re people that she cares for very much, and there are times that she acknowledges the feeling to stay with them until — whatever may come.  This is one of those times.

Of course, she is a woman in conflict, and by the end of “Heart of Gold,” she’s back to where she began.

“I learned something from Nandi, not just from what happened, but from her. The family she made, the strength of her love for them, it’s what kept them together. When you live with that kind of strength, you get tied to it. You can’t break away, and you never want to. There’s something – there’s something I should’ve done a long while ago. And I’m sorry, for both of us, that it took me this long. I’m leaving.”

She can’t put herself through it.  And she can’t put them through it, either.  She cares for them, but she’s not going to put her own suffering on them.  She’d rather distance herself from these people she’s come to love in one way or another than have to go through the painful experience of leaving them.  Through death.

This is especially telling for her relationship with Mal, specifically.  Throughout the series, they’re at each other’s throats, but there’s an attraction that passes between them too.  They repeatedly disrespect each others’ careers: Mal disrespecting her “whoring,” Inara disrespecting his “petty thieving.”  But it takes the happenings of “Heart of Gold” for Inara to really, truly realize that her feelings are stronger than she’s comfortable with, and – much like she did to get on Serenity, perhaps, much as she denies it – she runs.

By the end of Serenity the film, though, she’s not sure if she’s going to go back to the training house.  She’s thinking maybe she can stay with the crew.  They’ve experienced so much loss and so much love, and she is perhaps thinking that she can’t imagine being anywhere else.  Whatever feelings she may have, she finally knows she needs to explore.  In case or not in case, just because regrets are silly, sad things.  She tried running, but now that things are balanced a bit differently, she can’t run anymore.  She’s thinking that she’s going to stay and see it through.  Whatever it may be.  However long it may last.

–your fangirl heroine.

Whedon Wednesday :: and then the Epitaphs arc was finished.

(This is so relevant to my life always.)

Actually, I got and read this last issue of the Dollhouse: Epitaphs comic arc (by: Andrew Chambliss, Jed Whedon, Maurissa Tancharoen, Cliff Richards, Andy Owens, Michelle Madsen) last week.  But I took a couple of days to read it, because as excited as I was to, I also just didn’t want it to end.  Even knowing that there will probably be further Dollhouse comic arcs, I just… I still knew I was going to be a complete wackjob when I was done with it.  Because it would be over all over again, and I didn’t really want to deal with that.

But, the above-linked self-definition won out, as did my completist tendencies, and I’m not ashamed to admit that once I’d turned the last page I just sat there staring at my ceiling and laughing nervously and repeating “well crud, why do I feel like I’m gonna cry even though I know I’m not?” to myself.  The comic wasn’t even that sad.  Not compared to the show, which is still the most tragic end on television.  And it’s not the end.  And I know who’s gonna be okay.  But for howevermany months, I’ve had a bit of the world back in my life again, and now… well, thank goodness for re(watch)(read)ing.

I understand that I’m a nerd.  I understand that I’m a sap.  I understand that I’m not entirely sane.  I understand that I’m too invested in these fictional people.  I am unashamed.

I’m not giving away exactly what happened, because I know I’ve got friends who I still need to lend the issue to IRL and that means there are plenty of people elsewhere who need to read it, too.  I will say, though, that there were so many feelings.  Not in the “why did you die??!?!” way that could be expected (though that’s obviously because of its placement in the pre-existing timeline), but in every other way.

(Though, on the pre-existing timeline note, I will mention that when I read the first issue, I thought that maybe Ivy was RL Ivy, and they just hadn’t drawn her very Asian for some reason.  Seeing in one of the issues that the other Ivies discussed Ivy being in Tokyo made me smile: if Topher told Ivy to get out of LA in “Getting Closer,” and in the interim between that and the robocalls she found herself in Tokyo, well, that means that maybe dear little Ivy wound up there with Topher’s big rival Takahashi [he's mentioned a couple times in there and I remember these things] and that may have been passive-aggressive or it may have just been determined to do something or it may have been something I don’t even know what, but it’s still awesome.)

There was the d’awww Alpha.  I feel weird saying that, because of the psycho and the murderer and the creeper thing, but I’ve always enjoyed Alpha as a character.  I mean, I understand that he spends most of the series as a bad guy.  But he’s just so well-written and demented and perfectly so.  This whole “Alpha seeks redemption” thing was much less frustrating than, say, others seeking redemption: he’s still wry and badass and he’s not always succeeding but he’s not running from everything.

There was the hurrah my actuals.  For fairly obvious Felicia Day reasons, I always had a soft spot for Mag, too (that and I decided I should latch onto someone in the thoughtpocalypse since my other two girls were, y’know, very much dead), and someone had actually written in one of the letters in the back:

“When are we going to see Mags be a badass?”

Which was then responded to as such:

I think she’s perpetually badass.

So agreed.  Because really, even if she’s not shooting everyone ever, she’s a tough chick, and she’s doing what she’s got to.  She’s not heartless.  She and Zone and Griff have a good thing going, as much as they snappily banter.  (And the hurried introduction of Lynn just made me tee-hee, because even if it was in the background of a panel and it wasn’t ever show-explicit, I do like to believe that Mag had a little crush on Lynn, and maybe they had covert thoughtpocalyptic romance times once or twice.  And even backgrounded, I could totally read into the art a little smirky smirk of “oh, hello there.”)

There was the sexual tension.  Despite recent fanmixing, Paul/Echo isn’t my big shippy thing.  I don’t mind it, and could obviously find songs that suited it, but there’s the part of me that hung onto pre-OMGWTF-Mellie’s-a-doll Paul/Mellie, and there’s the part of me that occasionally wants to just smack Paul upside the head.  But, theirs is a pretty upsetting tragic-romantic journey, and at the end of the day, even if I don’t ship a thing that much, I still get sad when the characters are interested in each other yet cannot have each other for whatever reasons.  Who the characters ship themselves with does matter at least a little. And that page of “no we cannot, there is still an apocalypse” is one of those moments.  They’ll never be together, and as much as I don’t always spend a lot of spare time caring about if they’re together, they want to be together.  So that’s still upsetting.

I know that the next arcs, if they do end up existing (which they plan to), won’t be for a little while (“not the near, near future”).  But knowing that they likely will come to be is a comfort to me.  Knowing that we’ll get more thoughtpocalypse exposition (Priya/Anthony please?  There is so much I want to know there.  Also metaphorical-tear-inducing crazy!Topher, which will induce more ceiling staring and under my breath muttering) is good.  I mean, it’s not necessary.  We know how it ends up.  But I am a fill-in-the-blanks kind of girl.  And I’m just thankful that the comics are around to do that for us.

–your fangirl heroine.

(Also, unrelated to Dollhouse comics but semi-related to Dollhouse and to the Whedonverse and to things that make me squee embarrassingly like the fangirl I really am, Emerald City’s announced guests.  For fear of seeming creepy, which I’m not, I swear, just enthusiastic and babbly, I’ll refrain from typing out my various exclamation-pointed thoughts.  But.)

Television Tuesday :: death on television (there isn’t always enough)

I’m not saying death is good.  It’s not.  But death is a part of life, it’s just something that exists no matter what.  And when characters go entire seasons without anyone they even remotely know dying, it just starts to feel unrealistic to me.  I don’t know.  Maybe I’m just morbid.

I’m the kind of girl whose reaction to television death is usually one of three things:

1. Good!  That character deserved it, because they were bad and mean.
2. NO!  My baby, you can’t die, I love you too much.
3. I’m sad that you’ve died, yes, but I’m also applauding the writers having the courage to kill you off.

3 is my pretty constant refrain when watching, say, Buffy (I was originally going to make this a statistics problem, comparing how many people die in various television shows that represent various genres, but then I realized that it would take too long to count how many people die on Buffy, because seriously, SO many people die, random people and important people both; one of these days I will do Depressing Whedonverse Deaths, but that’s not today).  Lately, though, I’ve been attributing it to other things: True Blood, at least the last season (which we all know), and though Sons of Anarchy hasn’t killed off that many people, it’s putting a lot of people in near-death situations this season.

When characters are prone to dying on television, it’s more high-stakes, and that makes it more fun for me.  If I think that a character might actually die, I get tense, and I get more wrapped up in the story as a result.  If I think that a main character could die, I have to applaud the writers.  It’s not unheard of, but it’s rare.  (To say again how much I adored this last season of True Blood, I will just point out that they spent the first two seasons playing it pretty safe.  They killed off random waitresses that boinked people and random vampires and random hillbillies, they killed off their Big Bads.  Season three was a little more risky.  Season four, though… I mean, the season finale saw the deaths of how many characters in the opening credits?  Four?  And Marshall Allman, who played Tommy, had died previously, but was still in the credits, so that makes five. That’s a lot of death.)

Not every show has excuses for massacres, and that’s perfectly all right.  It makes more sense to have higher body counts on Buffy or True Blood or The Walking Dead or even Dollhouse, because of the nature of the programs.  There are monsters (or technology, or guns, or some combination thereof) that will kill you, period.  You don’t have to kill off everyone on, say, Mad Men, but I wouldn’t be opposed to someone not ancient (I’m looking at you, Ida Blankenship [Randee Heller]) getting killed off somehow.  (Not my girls, my Joanie [Christina Hendricks], Peggy [Elisabeth Moss], Sally [Kiernan Shipka], not Don [Jon Hamm], but someone… maybe a little bit less important but still important enough to have more than one episode’s worth of impact, like Greg [Sam Page].  He should die due to army things.)

Generally, the number of television deaths can be sorted out pretty easily:

1. Anything Joss Whedon touches
2. HBO
3. Showtime/Starz/etc.
4. Other programs about monsters or an apocalypse; sometimes war-related things too
5. FX/AMC/etc.
6. Miscellaneous medical/criminal dramas
7. Network dramas
8. Regular comedies, if you’re lucky
9. Sitcoms (seriously.  During the entire run of Friends, less than ten characters died.  That’s not even one per season.)

I know.  I’m morbid.  I don’t even care.

–your fangirl heroine.

Whedon Wednesday :: building the magic bullets [an analysis of Bennett Halverson]

When, all that time ago, I heard Summer would be guesting on Dollhouse, I was giddy.  I’d only seen the first season once it was out on DVD, as my great Whedon revelation occurred in the summer during which those DVDs came out, but I was attached pretty quickly.  I want to say I watched the first season in maybe three sittings, then immediately started rewatching with friends.  And being as I love Summer with every fiber of my being, I was prepared to love whoever she played.  I wasn’t prepared for Bennett, though.

She’s in 3 out of 26, 11.5%, of the episodes (4 or 15% if you count her beyond-the-grave video lecture in “Epitaph Two,” though maybe you should just count that and her appearance in “The Public Eye” as one whole episode, since they’re both fairly minimal screen time) but damned if she isn’t one of my favorites, in the Whedonverse or in anything, and one of the most intriguing in the ‘verse, too.  Dollhouse is a morally gray show, but she’s the morally grayest of all; she’s not evil, she’s not crazy, she’s not anything as definitive as that.  And I will defend her till the end of time.

When we first see Bennett in “The Public Eye,” we’re right to be wary of her.  The ambiance of her first scenes is one of a calm and cool supervillain, a hyperbrilliant prodigy, or something in between.  In actuality, though, the best description of Bennett (and just about every other character on this show) is something that Topher says philosophically in 1×01, “Ghost”:

“You see someone running incredibly fast, the first thing you gotta ask is, are they running to something or are they running from something?  The answer is always both.”

It would be easy to see Bennett as the calculating, heartless woman that you’re led to believe she may be at first, but that’s an oversimplification.  We’re made to distrust her as she’s setting up to torture Caroline/Echo (Eliza Dushku), but by the next episode, “The Left Hand,” we begin to see her reasons.  Is her methodology wrong?  Probably.  Are her reasons wrong?  Well, not everyone processes things in the same way, and someone else might just get over it, but she’s not someone else.

She does have a right to be angry, even if her memory of what took place is mildly distorted.  Which is perfectly reasonable, in my opinion, and not just something that she did subconsciously-on-purpose to give her a reason to really hate Caroline; traumatic events like that, especially ones that involve physical injury, can be hard to recall just naturally, and considering she was probably on some pretty heavy drugs for a little while during her recovery, some of which were very possibly at least semi-amnesiacs, well, there’s a technical explanation that’s headcanon, but headcanon I firmly believe.

(Now I’m going to direct you to a great essay about the Caroline/Bennett relationship, by incomprehensiblelentils on tumblr.  I go back and forth about whether or not theirs was a romantic relationship, as I believe that platonic friendships can inspire such intense feelings as Bennett has towards Caroline, but I also own that not platonic friendships were my first impulse upon viewing the college flashback scenes in “Getting Closer.”)

Now that Caroline-who-is-really-Echo is back in Bennett’s life, Bennett wants to hurt her.  She wants to hurt Caroline like Caroline hurt her, and the how is maybe immoral, yes, but the why is reasonable.  Not just the perceived betrayal, but the nature of it, because Caroline had been Bennett’s closest relationship, however you look at it.  But even as Bennett’s inflicting torture on her, she’s no barbarian.  She’s giving Echo water, she’s brushing tears from her eyes.  What she’s saying is chilling, not entirely sane, but it’s not inaccurate.

It’s easy to assume that Bennett’s just crazy.   And sure, Bennett isn’t  100%  psychologically normal. She’s got antisocial tendencies, which you might argue that a Rossum employee would need to have to some extent.  She’s maybe a little bit of a sociopath.  Her page on the Dollhouse wiki says that she could be a nihilist (the psychiatric definition doesn’t fit her, but the others could come close).  But that doesn’t mean she’s crazy.  Her actions towards Caroline/Echo and as a programmer in general don’t automatically make her a bad person.

She doesn’t think about “right” and “wrong” like everyone else, though.  The definitions thereof aren’t black or white, they’re, well, gray.  She processes uniquely.  She’s intelligent enough to do things most people couldn’t pull off or even fathom.  They’re not always the right things to do, but doing them doesn’t make her as a person wrong.  The scientific possibility is more valuable than alleged ethical constraints to her.  And at least she’s a semi-sociopath with a sense of humor (she’s remote-programming Perrin to kill Echo, and she replaces Echo’s parameters with “puppies.”  Messed up, but awesome at the same time).

A friend of mine asked if Bennett was really actually attracted to Topher (Fran Kranz).  My immediate response was “Hell, yeah,” and then a very long rant occurred.  (I can’t help it.  They are, as they say online, my OTP – well, one of them, but one I’m devoted to the idea of wholeheartedly.)  To synopsize, I think it’s unquestionable that she likes him.  She knows his tech by sight, knows the handiwork.  She hears he’s coming and, even not having met him before, she’s all a-flutter.  She’s going to fix her cute little plastic barrette, she’s tugging on her cardigan sweater.

“But which one of them is actually smarter?”  Technically, she is.  She’s labeled a genius by Caroline, by Topher, and by her own humble admission; the extent of her genius was never fully explored, but Topher “said she was a genius and that if he thinks someone is a genius then ‘double it.’”  But it’s a silly question to ask when you’re talking about people as genius-y as Topher and Bennett are.  She may be smarter, but they’re both crazy smart, and their smarts and attitudes towards them manifest differently.  Bennett is more for the quiet discovery, quiet work, putting everything else second, technicalities, the end; Topher is more about flash, impossibilities, the means.  And their attraction stems at least partially, I think, from recognizing the other’s smarts and the balance they so clearly give.

There’s also something to the notion that even before meeting, they assume a kindred spirit-ness: when you’re as something as they are, in their case smart, the majority of other people just seem tiresome.  Topher can make surface buddies with the other people at the Dollhouse because he’s a small-group extrovert and he cracks snarky jokes about everything, but he’s still lonely (1×10, “Haunted”), whereas Bennett is an introvert’s introvert who’s not even going to waste her time with people who don’t interest her intellectually.  Topher hopes for someone that he can connect to more deeply than on the level of snarky jokes and juice boxes; Bennett hopes for someone who’s close enough to being on her level that she doesn’t feel like she’s talking over their head all the time.

Bennett’s clearly into him, and the signs are all there: her nervous fluttering before they actually meet, how once they meet she’s all nervous, giant smiles and babbling.  That’s hardly the collected prodigy drinking her tea and torturing Echo that we saw before: her nerves are sincere.  If you had no heart, you could suspect she was faking it, but that’s just not true.  Sure, she’ll go behind his back to kill Echo, but vengeance is wacky that way.

When she’s brought to LA in 2×11, “Getting Closer,” she’s still plenty civil at first.  She isn’t attacking everyone on sight, even though they’ve kidnapped her.  Her harming Topher is, again, purely to do with her anti-Caroline mission.  But she’s not completely irrational: when Echo promises that she can do whatever she wants to Caroline, that she “will hold the bitch down,” it calms her down.  She doesn’t want to attack anyone else, she’s not a murderer.  She’s just very, very hell-bent on hurting Caroline.  That Echo would cooperate is enough for her.

If the truth of her attraction to Topher needed more evidence, I’d point you to the kissing scene in that episode: she’s sincerely apologetic that her need for revenge got in the way of her burgeoning something with Topher.  She’s not heartless.  And once they kiss, finally, she’s into continuing, agreeing very, very adamantly when he asks, “More of that if we prevent the end of the world?”  She cares about him, he cares about her, it’s a big caring festival.  The positive of Topher (and of knowing at the back of her mind that she can hurt Caroline) is enough to make up for everything else.

Then… damn you, sleeper Claire (Amy Acker).  Her musings do make sense, though.

“I honestly didn’t think he was capable of admitting the existence of another human being, let alone loving one. I think you’re the remarkable one.”

That’s what she tells Bennett.  The connection between Topher and Bennett is palpable and very real, which means, of course, that it’s doomed.  Bennett has to ask Claire, sincerely anxious and very likely experiencing a rare girly gossip feeling,

“You really think he likes me?”
“I didn’t say likes.”

Claire corrects her, which would be really sweet, if she didn’t go on to shoot Bennett in the head.  (I will admit I had about 1/10 of a second of hope that it’d been a graze, since the bullet seemed to hit the side of Bennett’s head, but of course not.  Joss just had to go and be Joss.  Which I understand the reasons for, I do, but it made me sadder than these things really should.)

Her murder was really just something that would further expedite Topher’s Epitaphverse crazy.  Yes, he loses his mind because he inadvertently destroyed the world, but he also was more or less responsible for the murder of someone, the only someone, that he loved.  When we get that video lecture in “Epitaph Two,” it’s about the most heartbreaking thing ever, as Topher’s watching with what is clearly still love in his eyes (even ten years later and crazy) and touching his finger to the screen.

“Her face has a look about her.”

For all of her moral ambiguity and all of the possibly bad things she did in the name of science and revenge, Bennett meant something to him.   And yes, he did some bad things in the name of science, too, but that didn’t make either of them evil.  Rossum was evil for exploiting the technology they had created so as to destroy civilization as we know it, but they weren’t evil for inventing something theoretically or using what technology they had.  Maybe ethically detached, but that’s not the same thing.

I firmly believe that if the series hadn’t been cancelled and trying to finish up what must have been several years of plots in a few episodes, she wouldn’t have been killed then.  I believe that if the series had gone on we’d have had more time to explore both her past with Caroline (that would be, I’m assuming, both explored and clarified) and her present/future with Topher (the adorable would have been allowed to grow) and in relation to Rossum as a whole.  I think more of a breakthrough would have been allowed her, perhaps not a coming to terms, but something, and I do think she’d have eventually become main cast.  (It would have had to take a season or two, but it would have happened.)  But we weren’t so lucky, so instead we get my tl;dr headcanon and analysis.

ETA: This panel video is also worth mentioning, because A) Summer is making points that are valid and good and beautiful, and B) Summer herself is that, too.

–your fangirl heroine.