melannen | (no subject)

So I finally saw Guardians of the Galaxy in a Friday afternoon matinee. It was a very fun and very very pretty movie and the plot even mostly made sense, which is a sadly high standard to hold action movies to these days, but sadly I can no longer watch a movie without noticing all the times it takes the lazy way out and could have done better. (Note : never read "Save The Cat" if you want to be able to enjoy an action movie ever again.) Anybody still interested in talking about that movie? About how Rocket's thing with prosthetic limbs was simultaneously a one-note disablist joke and a really deep commentary on prosthetic as disability vs. cybernetics as enhancement, and on the concept of the social model of disability in a massively polymorphous society? About Groot growing his flowers around little girls and how CREEPY that is when you think about it? About how they apparently couldn't resist throwing out all of Drax's literalism out the window in favor of a snappy one-liner (is that a rule for Marvel movies now, they have to do that to at least one character.) About how, for a movie with only .5 of a human character, it managed to be SO FREAKING WHITE that I have to come home and re-read all three Saga trades to get the taste out of my mouth?

(about how Saga needs to be a blockbuster movie okay)

(about how I maybe wouldn't even have noticed it if I hadn't just come off Pacific Rim - which has its own issues, whoa boy - but which never ones depersonalizes a woman in order to make a characterization point about a man - and it wasn't even OOC for the characters in GotG the way Tumblr lead me to believe, but as Pac Rim proved, it's just so freakin' unnecessary, when you're building a world from scratch, to build it on the bodies of disposable women.)

Anyway yes it was a really fun movie but I think the only fanfic I came out of it wanting was a) something about what the little girl did with the groot-flower, and b) Bucky and Rocket bonding over being torn apart and then woken back up as a different person in a body that's not yours.

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I went into it expecting to hate that scene because I'd seen un-spoiler-cut stuff complaining about it, and I didn't actually mind it as much as I'd expected? I mean it established Peter Quill as an asshole, but it was meant to do that (and it also sets up the scene later where Gamora rejects him because he's got a reputation of being an ass to women, yay). And he doesn't actually dismiss her, he has breakfast and friendly conversation with her and lets her use his comconsole and presumably drops her off on Xandar and there was no slut-shaming at all not even by context nor was she treated as hysterical or over-attached.

Admittedly my standards are VERY LOW and I wish they could have, you know, not brought in a woman as a disposable sex object in order to establish a character point at all, as they did REPEATEDLY over the course of the movie, but in terms of Peter's actual behavior with her it didn't seem all that dickish?

Like, if that scene had been America Chavez stealing an artifact from an alien temple and then fleeing full--speed back to her ship and then being confronted with her one-night stand wearing just her jacket, whose name and existence she had momentarily forgotten in the heat of running for her life, and then they have breakfast and bid each other farewell at the next port, I would have thought it was an awesome scene and America was awesome. So it's not Peter's actual behavior that bothers me, I guess, just the lazy and stereotypical narrative choice involved in them using that scene.

(It would also have been a 10000x better movie if that scene had been America Chavez and Kate Bishop, but that's a given.)

(but oh god I forgot I also want fic about Billy Kaplan counseling Peter Quill on how to dealing with occasional incidents with transuniversal supreme power. And then Peter Quill turning out to be slightly gay because everyone who hangs out with the Young Avengers turns out to be at least slightly gay.)

"Look, sometimes you get incredible cosmic power and warp reality with your subconscious thoughts, and it's okay to be a bit scared by that. I mean, were you always slightly gay, or are you slightly gay because you met me and my friends? You can't even answer that because if it is the case, you will have always have been gay. Uh... always would have been gay? The point is I try not to think about it too much, because that would mean I might have turned Captain America gay, and that would be so embarrassing that'd I just burst into... you do know who Captain America is, right? I think I'm getting off topic."

Edited 2014-09-13 02:42 (UTC)

YOU ARE NOT MAKING ME NEED THIS ANY LESS

oh god MCU!Peter Quill having a gay freakout in the same room as Billy Kaplan having a freakout over whether he accidentally turns people around him gay and they both completely forget about the vast cosmic powers part it would be the bessst

Definitely I"m for more Slightly Gay characters!!!

Young Avengers is definitely the place to go for that! (Okay, some of them are more than slightly gay.)