a vintage year for scoundrels

Since it is nearly 2016, here are some things that made me happy in 2015, sorted vaguely by category. There were probably more, but I can't remember what they were right now.

SUPERHEROES
- Peggy Carter, punching people so pleasingly, and realising that trying to win the respect of her male colleagues is trying to win a rigged game. If they don't value her, that's THEIR problem.
- Kara Danvers, dorky ray of sunshine and superpower.
- Jessica Jones, bruised and cynical and fundamentally heroic.
- Kamala Khan, noblest of dorks.
- Carol Danvers, punching the sky. The last issue of her comic made me cry; I am looking forward to seeing her have space adventures with Abigail Brand next year.
- Possibly stretching the definition of "hero" a tiny bit, but Loki: Agent of Asgard was one of my favourite comics of the year, despite the endless crossovers it got tangled up in, and I am sad it's over.
- Age of Ultron gave me NATASHA and WANDA and MARIA and HELEN, and also some boys, some of whom were also quite good, and it was GREAT. And then purplefringe made Wolf Like Me, a beautiful Natasha vid, and everything was excellent.

SPACE DORKS
- I played Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and fought a lot of lightsaber battles and lost a lot of money playing Pazaak and it was GREAT. Also this one time I found a gong and I clicked on it and it went bong. (I ask for very little in a computer game.)
- kathkin's lovely Second Doctor era fic made me very happy this year.
- seeing "The Trouble With Tribbles" and "Trials and Tribble-ations" (aka "Kirk Is Super Done With Everything About Today" and "Jadzia has the best day ever") with many excellent humans.
- reading Una McCormack's The Crimson Shadow and still wanting to draw hearts around it months later, for reasons of GARAK, and also ( spoilers )
- my gaming group is slowly starting to work its way through Mass Effect. I AM EXCITE.

BOOOOOOKS
- Sarah Caudwell's Hilary Tamar mysteries, recommended to me by raven, are a gem: witty and delightful.
- I read Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor the other day and, oh, my heart. People trying to be kind and to act rightly in difficult situations. ♥
- I followed Tansy Rayner Roberts's Musketeer Space, a retelling of The Three Musketeers, but with lots of women and queer people and brown people, and also set in space, as it was being serialised, and I loved it SO MUCH. Highly recommended! I want to read a million more things like it.

OTHER
- Hamilton! I feel like I have nothing to say that hasn't already been said at length elsewhere, but I really love it and am so excited about the fact that I'm going to see it next year. :DDDD
- Sense8! I didn't talk about this anywhere, but I really enjoyed it. I loved that it took its time and really immersed us in the characters, and I liked (almost) all the sensates and their associated humans a whole lot.
- Person of Interest's Sameen Shaw. PRECIOUS VIOLENT WEIRDO. <3
- KORRA. The last two seasons were SO GOOD.

I just caught Marvel's Phase 3 announcements on twitter before I went out last night! BLACK PANTHER. CAPTAIN MARVEL. FINALLY. It's true that making one (1) film about a black man and one (1) film about a white woman is pretty much the least they could do (I was bracing myself for having to break up with the MCU based on what I feared they might announce) and yes, it's taken years and we still have years before we actually get to see these films. And yes, I am sad that we are not also getting films for Black Widow and the Wasp and more. :/ (My subject line is basically what I want from the MCU, diversity-wise.)

But... T'Challa was so great in Avengers: EMH and now he's getting a film! And CAROL. She's my favourite Marvel character and she's going to be in a film and based on the MCU's track record, it is probably going to be a film I will like. \o/ (Which is something that I'm a bit more worried about with DC's Wonder Woman film, to be honest: DC's storytelling priorities aren't really matching the kind of films I want to see as well as Marvel's are at the moment. Which is not to say that I think that Marvel is superior, just that I'm finding their fictional universe more congenial at the moment.)

(Actually I think DC is definitely doing better diversity-wise right now, given that their film universe is much younger than Marvel's but they've still managed to announce one film with a female lead and two with non-white leads already (also, it's just occurred to me, do we know anything about Green Lantern yet? Could it be about John Stewart? *crosses fingers*). And yeah, you could argue that they HAD to do Wonder Woman (not sure I entirely buy that, given that they didn't seem to have much difficulty doing Green Lantern as their first non-Superman or Batman attempt last time round), but they didn't have to do Cyborg and they didn't have to cast Jason Momoa as Aquaman. Also I can't help but feel that making this about DC vs Marvel (which, yes, I just did) kind of elides the fact that they're both losing: both of them are still mostly making films about white men; neither are making films about queer characters or women of colour. Though while I am in these increasingly bulky parentheses, I will pause to daydream about a world where DC and Marvel DID actually start trying to one-up one another on the diversity front. DC announces Vixen and Batwoman! Marvel makes Daughters of the Dragon and rejigs Guardians of the Galaxy so that Phyla-Vell and Moondragon are the main characters! DC makes a Renee Montoya film and an Oracle led Birds of Prey one, with ALL OF THE WOMEN in it! Marvel ripostes with Ms Marvel and Fearless Defenders! etc etc etc.)

As for the rest of the Phase 3 stuff: I will probably see and enjoy Thor: Ragnarok. I do not care about Doctor Strange or Guardians of the Galaxy. I am deeply unthrilled by Captain America: Civil War, because I am just not here for superheroes fighting each other. (Though given how much I loved Winter Soldier, I am willing to be won over.) My initial reaction to Avengers: Infinity War was "oh no, not another multi-title crossover event", but I'll probably be more excited once I convince my brain that that's not what it is. ;) Inhumans I am agnostic on: I don't really know anything about them, so I am basically balancing "why couldn't that space have gone to Black Widow" against "well, Medusa's cool, plus this opens the door for Ms Marvel".

/thoughts on superhero films

Here are some thoughts about comics and comics based films and whatnot.

Fearless Defenders #6: ( spoilers )

Young Avengers #7&8: this comic is just so fun! (SMOOOOOOCH. :D) It has so much energy and willingness to be a bit silly. ( not really spoilers but cutting anyway just in case )

Red Sonja #1: I basically bought this for the gorgeous Fiona Staples cover, and consider it a major achievement that I made it back to work without getting run over, given the amount of time I spent staring at it. ♥ Anyway, I liked the comic itself a lot too: it was fun, and rather Xena-ish. I probably won't keep buying it, because it's expensive and I'm sorry but I just CANNOT get past the chainmail bikini issue, but I might get the trade.

Li'l Gotham #15: Batman and Robin go to Comic Con and it is AMAZING. I laughed! And then I cried a bit. This comic is so wonderful.

Smallville #56: Speaking of wonderful things... I started reading this again because Wonder Woman, and based on this issue I think I made the right choice. Great, intriguing introduction for Smallville!Wondy.

In other comics news, DC's next film is going to be Batman/Superman. Sigh. Aside from the lack-of-Wonder-Woman issue - which is NOT MINOR - this depresses me because WB seem to be too timid to actually do anything with the vast stable of rich, interesting characters they have to play with. A Justice League film is all well and good (at least it might mean Wonder Woman on the big screen, right?), but Marvel's kind of already got the shared cinematic universe team movie thing sewn up. Whatever DC does with Justice League, it'll be compared to The Avengers, and it'd have to be pretty special to win that fight. Plus, DC's not exactly starting from a strong position here: they have Man of Steel, but Green Lantern flopped and Nolan's Batverse doesn't exactly play well with others. I'd love to see DC going down a different route and trying to make films that can't be dismissed as " just another superhero movie". A Question film (pref Renee Montoya, obvs). Gotham Central (possibly better as a TV series?). Spoiler. Checkmate. Batwoman: Elegy could make a great film. A shared universe Oracle film would be amazing, though it might need a lot of adapting (ooh, maybe it could be combined with a Cass film - she rescues Babs, Babs steps up and uses her librarian powers to help Cass with the word bits of crime fighting, discovers she is REALLY GOOD AT IT etc). I would LOVE to see a Nightrunner film, in French, with subtitles. And so on. Basically none of these are ever going to happen, because they wouldn't be massive smash hit blockbusters, but done right... wouldn't they be great?

And meanwhile, Marvel still hasn't announced a Black Widow film, or a Captain Marvel one, or a Black Panther one, etc etc etc. *taps watch impatiently*

Read "Bruce Wayne: The Road Home" last night! ...I don't think I was fully prepared for the reality of a book based around a recently back from the dead being lost-in-time Bruce Wayne lurking creepily around Gotham judging all his friends. D: (To quote an old children's radio play: "you've been back from the dead for five minutes and already I'm fed up with you.") But I was mostly reading it for the Batgirl bit and that was a DELIGHT, so. Quality Oracle and Steph snark! Setting up those brilliant pages from Batgirl #15 where Steph explains the Batfamily! And of course the glorious moment where Steph finds out what Bruce is up to, and slaps him in the face. YES. And then panics and runs away, but I can't really blame her for that. Especially since she then comes BACK and tells him off for how he treated her when she was Spoiler and Robin, and tells him that she's not going to let him take being Batgirl away from her. YESSSSSS. I kind of hate the bit on the next page, though, where Bruce explains that Steph being Batgirl was ~his plan all along~, ugh. I'm torn between being glad she didn't hear that, and wishing she had, so she could hit him again. And then call Cass, because their friendship is the BEST and I miss it. I've read quite a few of the Cass!Batgirl issues with Spoiler in them recently, and I love them SO MUCH. Especially when they hang out with Oracle. Babs-Cass-Steph team ups forever, please. TEAM BATGIRL.

Speaking of Steph, I am ridiculously upset about her being dropped from the Smallville comics. Not least because it's really dented my love for them. :( I was really looking forward to the Detective arc, and now I don't think I'm going to bother with it. (Not boycotting Smallville altogether! Just skipping that arc, because I don't want to spend money on stuff that will make me unhappy.)

In other comics related news, very disappointed that none of Marvel's recently announced films are about Black Widow. Or Monica Rambeau. Or any of the other Marvel women. SIGH. The worst part is, I'm not really surprised, either.

Well. This post got grumpier than I expected. Non-grumpily, ds9_rewatch have got to season four, which is where my own rewatch had got to, so I have jumped back in! I'm pretty bad at actually saying much in the chats, due to my general failings, but they're still really fun. Next up is "Little Green Men", I believe!

I have been working my way through various female led action/superhero films! Here are some of the things that I have watched:

- Resident Evil: bizarrely, this was the second film in as many days to contain Unexpected James Purefoy (the other was Bedrooms and Hallways), well done there, film. I enjoyed it a lot, although it is rather gorier than my usual fare: it turns out I am fine with zombies but very freaked out by ( possibly getting into spoiler territory? )

- Next up was Elektra, which is not a good film, but overall I feel very positive about it as it contained one element that I really loved: ( spoilers )

- Also I watched Aeon Flux, which was... odd. ( not really spoilers but I have got into the habit of using cut tags now, so )

- After that was Supergirl; I've been trying to get into the Supergirl comics recently (because of how she and Batgirl fought vampires that time), but they are SO CONFUSING, so I was a little dismayed to see a whole other backstory for her that wasn't the one I knew. But that issue aside, I liked it a lot - not necessarily a good film, but an entertaining one. Overall I would characterise it as "deeply cheesy, but nevertheless rather charming". I am thinking particularly of the scene where ( vaguely spoilery, maybe )

- And finally, Milla Jovovich again in Ultraviolet! I was expecting to enjoy it based on the fact that she had a sword on the DVD cover, but I was rather put off by the fact that everyone looked oddly smooth and glowy for some reason. Step away from the effects box, people! I was also unimpressed by the almost complete lack of female characters who weren't Violet, grrr. On the plus side, it did pick up a fair bit when the swords eventually came out, and I enjoyed the final fight scene a lot: ( spoilers! )

I feel like I should have some concluding thoughts here, but I don't. Well, nothing beyond "make more superheroine films! And make them better!", but I had that one before I started. Actually, thinking about it, I would like superheroine TV serieses even better, since I prefer TV to film as a medium. GET ON THAT, PEOPLE WHO ARE IN CHARGE OF THESE THINGS.

(I typed most of this out in Google Docs, which has helpfully corrected a selection of my straight quotes to curly quotes. Why do you hate me at the moment, Google?)

I have lots of things I need to get round to doing, mostly of the tidying-up variety, and today I had the afternoon off. So I spent it eating cake and watching Iron Man. ( spoilers )

I am going to have a go at listing all the books and films wot I read and see this year, hopefully with not entirely uninteresting comments about them. Of course this is all dependent on a) me not being lazy and b) me working out how to edit posts (I've done it before but can never remember how) (ETA I worked it out! It was indeed very obvious). So here goes:

( Books of 2007 )

( Films of 2007 )