FMK: Felines vs. Evil

[melannen]

I finished another FMK book this week! Which means, according to the new rule I have just made up, that we get to have another poll this week.

The book was Danger in D.C.: Cat Crimes in the Nation's Capital, a mid-90s anthology edited by Harry Greenberg, which was voted in way back in the first Mysteries round. I thought maybe I would like it - it's cats! and local stories! and I used to devour Greenberg anthologies!

Alas, I did not.

First, when I put it in the poll as "The cats are the detectives", I was wrong. Maybe two of the stories had cat detectives. In all the others, the cats were criminals, victims, or just bystanders. In fact, there were a couple of stories where LITERALLY the only cat connection was that a character owned a cat that showed up as scenery a few times. Very few of them had any agency at all. You got the impression that many of the writers didn't even like cats, and the cats were just shoehorned in to make it fit the anthology.

Also, there were a worrying number of stories where the cat's only role was to swallow a gemstone in order to hide it, to the point where if there was a gemstone mentioned you knew it would end up in cat poop eventually. Now I have known some cats who would eat almost ANYTHING but even they didn't have a particular affinity for jewelry, so I am wondering where that came from. (Also, isn't amber, like, porous? I would not want to wear amber jewelry that had been in a cat poop.)

Also, the only interesting thing about cats + DC is that the president in the 90s had a cat. Now you know that, you're welcome.

Also, the only places that exist in DC are a) the White House, b) the National Mall and the monuments, and b) A Townhouse In Georgetown. Also, literally everybody is employed by the government, and the only POC in the whole city is one Black homicide detective. There you go, now you know all that there is to know about DC.

The stories weren't all terrible (which is the only reason I finished the anthology), although the only ones that stick out in my head as worth going back to were the Shirley Rousseau Murphy Midnight Louie story (which did have a cat detective) and the bureaucracypunk one about A Cat Named Dust, although that is probably because I have a soft spot for bureaucracypunk and also it wasn't really a mystery anyway.

Mostly, this made me think about HOW MUCH the short story world has improved in the age of the internet. I used to devour Greenberg anthologies, but that might just be because they were the only reliable source of genre short stories I had. It's hard for me to imagine that in this day and age, you'd get any shortage of people willing to submit to an anthology call about cats in DC who were actually interested in cats. (And, of course, it would be so much easier to fake actually knowing stuff about DC than it was in the mid-90s!)

Anyway, so this one is firm K.


I also read Black Panther: The Young Prince by Ronald L. Smith, which I had forgotten I put on library hold so that was an amazing surprise! It is a middle-grade novel that is a modern-day AU in which, for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, T'Challa and M'Baku have to go undercover as Ordinary Kenyan Exchange Students at South Side Middle School in Chicago, and it is everything that premise promises. It needs its own fandom. (Well, it could have had more M'Baku, but other than that it was everything.) Also it had teenage Hunter-aka-White Wolf in it, so it's not like Marvel is trying to erase him from history or something. :/

(I am continuing to be very Upset about White Wolf. Especially since I just encountered a tumblr thread talking about Shuri as the little sister Bucky never had and thirty people needed to comment to point out that actually comics!Bucky already had sisters but nobody felt the need to point out that comics!Shuri already had an adopted white boy brother too, and she even gave Bucky his codename and everything is awful, and when I said this I got snapped at for not having enough feels about Bucky's sisters? Tumblr, man.

(Hunter was a small broken white boy adopted by the Wakandan royal family when T'Challa was little, and as you might expect from a broken white boy raised in the Panther Clan, has a very complicated relationship with T'Challa and Wakanda, and eventually got put in charge of Wakanda's black ops with the codename White Wolf, and then got caught repeatedly overreaching his mandate and using interrogation tactics not approved by Wakandan ethics- because white boys, amirite- and when he refused to admit he'd done anything wrong, was exiled from Wakanda and ended up running his own private (sort of) pro-Wakanda intel and crime network, and it is all very complicated and sometimes ham-handed, and the only thing I can think of is that he was never spoken of so Shuri grew up with this big empty silence in all the family stories that she thought was just her uncle but wasn't, so when the staff and locals started calling the royal family's latest pet black ops white boy White Wolf she just went it (but of course Bucky knows the backstory, White Wolf came up in a lot of mission briefings) and anyway this is a thing and please somebody other than me needs to care about it.)

(I have figured out how to get my hands on the rest of the Priest trades! Also I have put up a "So You Saw The Black Panther Movie - What Next" display at work, which was my excuse to put holds on all of the Black-authored and Afrofuturist SF that's been on my reading list for years, so you might have to put up with a lot more of this for awhile, sorry.)

Comments

[rachelmanija]

Also, there were a worrying number of stories where the cat's only role was to swallow a gemstone in order to hide it, to the point where if there was a gemstone mentioned you knew it would end up in cat poop eventually.

The world did not even need one story in which that occurs, let alone more than one. Please tell me there were not more than two.

[melannen]

There were AT LEAST three, at that point they started blurring together.

[muccamukk]

You see, this is why we keep voting for you to read bad books. Watching you make faces at them is the best.

[melannen]

Hey, I'm not complaining, my goal is to read ones that I can then get rid of without regret. This is definitely there!

...it might be why I've been slowing down though.

[rachelmanija]

YECCH. Where was the editor???

[oracne]

I am currently working through the Priest comics, but I confess I didn't like White Wolf, not just because he tortured people but because I hated the way he was drawn. Though he wasn't as icky as some of the other art in volume one.

...yes I am picky.

[jesse_the_k]

The high point, cat detectives, seems truly unlikely, because it would require focus.

/dog owner

I'm happy to read about your White-Wolf biography in progress, and more Afro-Futurism, please.

[white_aster]

O..okay, now I want to know more about bureaucracypunk? Do tell!

[seekingferret]

#bluecatbuncle

[lannamichaels]

It is a middle-grade novel that is a modern-day AU in which, for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, T'Challa and M'Baku have to go undercover as Ordinary Kenyan Exchange Students at South Side Middle School in Chicago, and it is everything that premise promises

This sounds amazing and I haven't even seen Black Panther.

[melannen]

I'm not actually that fond of the White Wolf in the Priest comics, I agree, because yeah the design was not great, and at least as far as I've gotten, the story was... not subtle (he was pretty interesting in the five scenes where he appeared in the YA novel, though!)

But as a mantle for Bucky Barnes to inherit I am /// I don't even *like* the idea, I just can't stop thinking about it, because as a story seed, and resonating with the Wakanda in the movies and all its old dangerous secrets, it goes so many places.

[melannen]

I will have you know that there's an entire genre of cat detective mystery series! My mom has read most of them. Usually they seem to involve the cat sticking its nose it places it doesn't belong and its human trailing after, putting the pieces together.

(There are dog mysteries too, but not as many for some reason.)

[melannen]

I mean. It may be a genre I just made up. But, you know, stories set in a world of endless gray bureaucracy that aren't about overthrowing the system but about subverting it, about misusing the tools of bureaucracy to find your own freedom and colors? Or stuff that's just that aesthetic, pneumatic tubes and massive rooms of files and paper-shuffling taken all the way until it's its own beauty. Like the bureaucracy scenes in Jupiter Ascending? Or maybe, I dunno. Going Postal? Possibly Baru Cormorant, if I hadn't stopped reading before it got to depressing. Or "Papers, Please", that video game that came out awhile back where you're a border guard in Eastern Europe. I can think of more short stories (Like "Allamagoosa") or scenes in larger works, I guess. Or that run of PotC AUs that came out way back in the day where Jack Sparrow and crew were reincarnated as badass IRS agents.

[melannen]

I especially appreciated the way that it went through all your cliches about "civilized" people visiting a primitive tribal culture. Especially the bit where T'Challa goes to a pep rally and learns to appreciate the ritual performances by people wearing creepy primitive animal costumes. And the "ancient traditional puzzle toy" his American friends give him that is a Rubik's cube. And the fact that the main antagonist is a witch doctor who uses (vaguely realistic!) American hoodoo, so they keep finding these creepy curse bundles everywhere, and are like, well, that's about what I expected from America. And then they have sneak into the woods to spy on the initiation ritual for the secret magical society. But it's all done delicately enough that most kid readers probably don't even realize that's what they're doing.

Also it's now canon forever that T'Challa has a pet black cat he talks to when he's alone. And a shameless love of American folk foodways like deep-dish pizza and institutional jello cups.

[white_aster]

I figured that something like that was what you meant, and I whole-heartedly stamp my approval all over it. I have thought several times, if I ever write origfic, to write something about public servants using bureaucracy and the small authority they have to Do What Needs Doing (whatever What Needs Doing is...I'm pretty bad at overarching plots).

Also, PotC IRS agent AU just sounds AWESOME. Gods bless fandom. <3

[lannamichaels]

...So you're telling me that someone got their fic published and it's amazing

[oracne]

I am desperately hoping the Bucky/White Wolf thing is completely divorced from Mr. Guantanamo - I mean, they remixed M'Baku in a good way, so I have a lot of hope.

It would be SO AWFUL if Bucky became his enemies that I can't believe they'd do it.

[melannen]

I mean, it couldn't be exactly the same, because the War Dogs and the chronology are different. And they could remix it in a... less awful way?

I do kind of like the idea of Bucky, instead of rolling back to Steve and the Avengers, going "fuck it, I spy for Wakanda now" and, like, making use of but actively decolonizing his skill set with help from Shuri and Nakia, *without* ending up like Hunter. Let him be a do-over for the Wakanda royals. (There is still a lot of scope for that to fuck him up, of course, but that's where stories come from, right?)

(The fic I started writing right after the movie (which is going to be forever drawerfic but that's okay) is about Shuri setting up White Wolf!Bucky and not-actually-dead!N'Jadaka as spy partners, to teach each other how to be people again, which is a terrible idea on SO MANY levels, especially since they both know who the first White Wolf was but Shuri doesn't.)

OR it could just be that everything is terrible.

I suspect it's just an easter egg for the fans, but still, the fact that they went *there* for it is really screwing me up.

[melannen]

I mean, if it was my fic there would be more T'Challa/M'Baku content, but instead T'Challa becomes besties with the OC chess club captain, so it was probably *someone's* fic :P

(The no-particular-continuity original novels that Marvel has been putting out lately have been universally amazing. Some of them good amazing, even.)

[oracne]

I would read that....

This level of lexically-informed knowledge

[jesse_the_k]

...is why I eagerly anticipate your posts.

;)

[dhampyresa]

T'Challa has a pet black cat he talks to when he's alone

FUCKING SOLD

[melannen]

I mean she only turns up in like one scene because she doesn't get to come to America with him but this is now DEFINITELY CANON for ALL T'CHALLAs.

[dhampyresa]

she only turns up in like one scene because she doesn't get to come to America with him

WHY NOT

LET THE KITTY GO TO AMERICA