(no subject)

[melannen]

1. Great, now I have the Guardian Exchange and the Guardian Challenge running at the same time on my reading list. This is the problem with globalization!

2. Newly discovered AO3 search tip: if you want some new good fic in your old fandoms but everything on Search By Kudos is the same old stuff, go a couple years back in your AO3 history and look for stuff you remember nothing about. It's good enough that you read it once! But you remember nothing, so it's like it's new! And because (apparently) the AO3 history actually only shows the most recent view of any work, the ones you keep re- until they're worn out won't show up in the old history.

3. I listed to a TAL segment on Stede Bonnet and Edward Teach (right after I was wading through a POTC-heavy part of my AO3 history) and now I want M/M epic based on that story. The effete rich boy playing at pirates but in way over his head who is taken in, mentored, and nursed back to health by the big burly pirate! Who then BETRAYS him, and he finally finds his inner pirate captain in seeking REVENGE for the betrayal! Somebody provide me this as a novel-length romance with a happy ending please.

4. Advice for slashers, that I have been meaning to post for years, but is apparently still needed based on stuff I'm reading: I understand that writing about safe sex is important for many people, for ethical or realism reasons. I support it, too! Safe sex is sexy. And there's lots of reasons characters might want to use condoms. But. Look. If your characters were literally bleeding in each other's arms last week - if A was using a hand they had sliced open on a sword to put pressure on B's massive gut wound - they are already as fluid-bonded as they're going to get. They really really don't need to wait to go get STD tested before they have unprotected sex. (Yes, there are a few STDs that aren't transmitted by blood contact. But most of those are not well prevented by condoms, and are transmissible by most of the oh-no-we-don't-have-condoms techniques. And honestly, it's more that if they were bleeding out onto each other last week, the testing should already have happened: my problem here isn't so much that they're being too careful about sex as that the medical aftercare they got for the bleeding out must have been sub-par, if they're still worried about fluid contact.)

5. I saw Captain Marvel! It's really good! It's much more a space movie than a superhero movie! I don't really have anything else to say except I liked all the things it did! And you should definitely stay for the last post-credits scene because it answered the only remaining question I had about the plot.

(this is my current AO3 filter.)

Comments

[skygiants]

I keep being thrown by people talking about the Guardian's coverage on Brexit at the same time as people shrieking about Guardian characters and briefly thinking how strikingly politically aware everyone's favorite slashy cdrama must be as a show --

[melannen]

clearly this calls for a crossover!

(no. no it does not. and that may be the first time I ever said that, so treasure it.)

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

It does! Just not that crossover. Here, Doctor Who and Guardians of the Galaxy.

[sara]

Nobody who had a massive gut wound last week should be having sex, either. IJS.

[melannen]

Look it's fanfic, maybe they have some kind of advanced healing technology (and maybe the wound wasn't as bad as it looked once it was cleaned and stitched) - but if you expect me to suspend disbelief there, you had better also have the tech to have cleared them of bloodborne pathogens when they showed up in medbay covered in each other's blood.

Or maybe you should be using "gut wound" rather than "no condoms" as your excuse to draw out the UST. That works too.

[kore]

I saw Captain Marvel! It's really good! It's much more a space movie than a superhero movie! I don't really have anything else to say except I liked all the things it did!

I find that interesting about space movie v superhero movie, do you want to say more? (And does that have something to do with the GOTG and Thor movies too?)

[melannen]

Oh, I don't have any very deep thoughts! But I felt like it was structured a lot more like something like The Last Starfighter or even the first Star Wars movie than your average superhero origin story, although of course those are often only about two steps away from a superhero movie.

But, sort of the way Cap 2 Was structured more like a war movie. And maybe it's that a big part of the superhero origin movie is traditionally, oh no I have these vast powers, how do I use them? How do I use them responsibly? And that's really not what Carol's journey is in the movie - the Yon-Rogg scenes at the beginning set it up to be that, but it very quickly comes clear that Yon-Rogg has done a pretty bad job at convincing Carol to doubt what she can do, and she's spending pretty much the rest of the movie confidently using her powers to the best of her ability and never really doubting that she should.

I think it's also maybe how the fight scenes are structured? Which again comes back at least partly to Carol being just that great! But even in her two one-on-one fights with Yon-Rogg, it's never really structured as being about her proving herself against a tough opponent; it's about her getting a job done. (Actually, the closest we get to this is her mental standoff with the SI, but even then, it never really feels structured like a one-on-one battle with a powerful supervillain; it feels a heck of a lot more like the climax of the Wrinkle In Time movie.) So we don't ever really get the big climactic supervillain fight I've come to expect in these movies; even the final fight scene is never really structured as being about defeating the bad guys.

Which is also related to how the stakes in Captain Marvel were never exactly the kind of stakes you expect in a superhero movie, which I've actually seen called out as a problem in wrong reviews that are wrong - actually there's a traditional structural advice for comics writers that you have to continually increase the scale of the threats, and in Captain Marvel it sort of felt like the threats were continually decreasing in scale - we started with trying to keep an evil empire from getting a weapon which could destroy the galaxy and ended with trying to save some kids we'd never met before, which did not drop the intensity at all because the stakes got more personal as they got smaller, which was actually really cool.

I'd say the Thor movies (at least 1 and 3. We were just discussing after watching CM that none of us can remember any of the plot of 2...) do actually feel more like superhero movies than this one? Because they do have that ongoing character line of with-great-power-comes-great-responsibility and so on.

GOTG is a little different because it was a team movie from the beginning (and 'team superhero movie' is not something there's been as many to compare to), and it was definitely going for the Space Adventure vibe specifically, so you could definitely read it as less of a superhero movie too. But even within that, it still sort of had those themes around learning to work for the greater good, and around the structure of the final fight, and the increasing stakes? And GOTG2 (which I've only seen once, so I might be misremembering) actually felt even more super-hero-y, with the focus on Peter and his daddy issues.

(There was a Dark Phoenix trailer before Captain Marvel, and I actually found it really interesting to compare the two, because both of them basically have the plot of "woman has her mind messed with because of her vast cosmic powers" and yet Dark Phoenix is all about how dangerous Jean is and Captain Marvel is all about how awesome Carol is. Some of that is that CM was deliberately subverting all the tired misogynistic tropes in the Dark Phoenix plot, and you can totally still be a superhero movie while subverting that, but you gotta wonder what they were thinking sticking that trailer on this movie.)

[kore]

(sorry it took me so long to reply to this neat comment -- my husband and I have been really sick)

I felt like it was structured a lot more like something like The Last Starfighter or even the first Star Wars movie than your average superhero origin story

Aha, now I see what you mean. Yeah, I guess the (awful) Batman movie with Christian Bale is like the template for the superhero movie -- we still got the parent-shooting and the bats and the training and so on and on, even though by now it's a VERY familiar structure. I did like that we didn't get that structure for Carol (not sure, but also, didn't they avoid that for Holland's Spiderman?).

she's spending pretty much the rest of the movie confidently using her powers to the best of her ability and never really doubting that she should.

I saw it a bit differently -- more like she's been very hampered by the doubt the outside culture (patriarchy) has been trying to instil in her since she was a very young girl. Her dad's response to her going too fast and crashing isn't "Try again," but "I won't let you do this." Her fellow recruits are all telling her she can't do it, it's an actual plot point that she and Maria aren't allowed to be fighter pilots (which I loved, and I also loved the actual payoff to that later), Yon-Rogg (Lordy I find that name ridiculous) is telling her she can't control herself and needs his guidance, & &c. She has to keep punching (sometimes literally!) through all that to keep unleashing the actual power she really has, that so many people are literally trying to convince her she doesn't have and shouldn't use.

even in her two one-on-one fights with Yon-Rogg, it's never really structured as being about her proving herself against a tough opponent; it's about her getting a job done

He wipes her out in the sparring, though, and IIRC also on the observatory lab when he uses the photon inhibitor whatsit (the Power of Patriarchy!) and it's not until she gets herself back, with the montage that the SI's trying to use to beat her back down, that she's able to burst through the bonds and remove the inhibition and really use her powers. Like she says, she's been fighting with one arm tied behind her back (and not just with the Kree -- all her life). It's not just the external circumstances that have been against her, but the internal barriers those external things set up in her own mind. (There's a John Stuart Mill quote I always try to find, that's something about how external chains become internal inhibitions, and I just don't know where it is anymore, argh.) She doesn't win against him until she basically goes "fuck you" and photon blasts him -- which is a nice mirror to when she does it by accident in their first sparring round, and looks anxious about it and then she's taken off to be re-educated by the SI or whatever it does.

So we don't ever really get the big climactic supervillain fight I've come to expect in these movies; even the final fight scene is never really structured as being about defeating the bad guys.

I really gotta disagree there, there was the fight with the SI, and Maria's dogfight with Minn-Erva, and then Carol's big final stand against the ships that look like they could wipe out a large part of Earth. When Carol talks about the ruins of Tathos (I think that's the name), Talos tells her she's wrong, it's what the Accusers did, and I think we're meant to think that Earth is in that much danger and Carol is protecting it. She gives the same message to Ronan and Yon-Rogg: leave with your tail between your legs, and tell your bosses I'm protecting this planet. It was a very Dr Who moment.

in Captain Marvel it sort of felt like the threats were continually decreasing in scale - we started with trying to keep an evil empire from getting a weapon which could destroy the galaxy and ended with trying to save some kids we'd never met before

I do disagree there because of the final big fight between Carol and Ronan's ships -- that happens simultaneously/right after Maria's big dogfight with Minn-Erva. Maria's the one who has the Tesseract, and also the refugees. Carol is way up in space.

(There was a Dark Phoenix trailer before Captain Marvel, and I actually found it really interesting to compare the two, because both of them basically have the plot of "woman has her mind messed with because of her vast cosmic powers" and yet Dark Phoenix is all about how dangerous Jean is and Captain Marvel is all about how awesome Carol is. Some of that is that CM was deliberately subverting all the tired misogynistic tropes in the Dark Phoenix plot, and you can totally still be a superhero movie while subverting that, but you gotta wonder what they were thinking sticking that trailer on this movie.)

HAH YES, we got the DP trailer both times before CM, and it was....interesting, because I still love the DP story, but it's the total patriarchal story about how the woman with power is dangerous and nothing but destructive and she must be destroyed (better yet, destroy herself) to save everyone else. And CM is about Carol awakening her power to save everyone else, nobody else can do it. Carol can't really unlock all of her powers until she gets rid of the inhibitor and fights back totally against the SI, though, and she gets the power through making a choice of her own -- shooting Lawson's engine so the Kree won't get it. Jean is basically possessed (women with power are demonic, &c &c). Whereas Carol has all golden light angel imagery in her movie, she's all about energy and flight.

(Anyway, hope it's not annoying I wound up disagreeing, it's a very interesting take on the movies anyway!)

[melannen]

Oh, I am a person you never have to apologize about late comments, given my own habits.

I would say Spider-Man:Homecoming does have all the things I mentioned here, though: he's spending a lot of the movie learning about his new powers (they're the suit's powers, not the spider's powers, but it terms of story structure it's there) and struggling with self-doubt about when he can and can't use them. And we have the climactic final battle where a plane almost crashed into his home city and he proves to himself that he really can be a hero, even without his special suit, by punching things a lot.

I mean, a lot of what we see as basic structure in superhero movies is just your standard hero's journey/save the cat formula, but the part where they struggle with self-doubt about both whether they can use their powers and whether they should use their powers is pretty strongly associated with superhero movies to me (which is maybe why the DC movies haven't been as good lately, traditionally in the comics that was more a Marvel thing.) Carol has constraints imposed on her from outside, but she never really seems to internalize them - it's never "well, maybe I shouldn't use my powers after all," it's "fuck you I'm doing it anyway." So I don't see it differently from you, I think, I just see that as fundamentally different from what's going on in even, say, the Wonder Woman movie, where Diana also has social constraints on her power, but both Diana and the movie structure spend time wondering if maybe Paradise Island's isolation was right after all. Whereas Carol was just plain unambiguously lied to.

And, yeah, I don't know. I don't disagree with you about your reading of any of the fights! But it's relevant that you list a bunch of different fights. And none of them (except yeah, maybe the mental fight against the SI, but there was no punching in that, which is rare a superhero movie) involve her having to stretch her limits to prove to herself that she's really a hero. (In fact, there really isn't any point in the movie where there's any doubt that she's a hero.) Her two big fights against Yon-Rogg are a sparring match where both of them are holding back and the fight in the lab, where she doesn't plan to win, just plans to buy time, and doesn't, in fact, win, and the fact that she loses isn't really a low point of the movie. The part where she photon-blasts him at the end isn't even a fight, it's her humiliating and annihilating him.

I'm not saying none of those are great scenes! "It's more a space movie than a superhero movie" was meant as a compliment, and the fact that there wasn't a forumulaic twenty-minute fight scene at the end where I zoned out is great. Just that they don't follow the emotional formula for the Climax Fight In A Superhero Movie.

And I do think I disagree with you about the stakes at the end: because I kept waiting and waiting for the apocalyptic threat against Earth to show up, and it never really did. After the Skrull reveal, I thought it would be the Accusers. I kept expecting it to be, and if you're looking for the formula it seems like they are, but actually they aim a very targeted missile burst against a military target in the middle of an empty desert, and given that our heroes were still in flight and the Accusers didn't know where they were, very likely the only named character who would have been killed was Yon-Rogg. (And also they were only in the game for about a minute, which wasn't really enough to build tension around it.)

Maybe the Accusers would have gone on to take out major population centers, but we only think that because every. other. superhero. movie. has a major threat to a civilian population; there's no movie-internal evidence that they deliberately target non-Skrull civilians, and some pretty strong evidence that they try to avoid it when possible - Kree warrior ethics are framed much more like US airstrikes than like "we're going to nuke Manhattan just to be safe". (though obviously Ronan also went off the leash later.)

...in fact now that I'm thinking about it I can't think of any scene in that movie where non-Skrull civilians are actually in any danger at all, other than Fury's car chase that Carol wasn't even involved with, which is both a) great and b) super-weird for a superhero movie, because "superhero must directly protect the innocent" is another major part of the formula.

And yeah, you'd expect it to end with "This planet is under my protection" but it doesn't - the message Carol sends back to Halla is actually "I'm leaving here and ending your stupid interplanetary war for you" and she doesn't mention Earth at all. Sure, maybe there's subtext there that Earth is protected, but only if you're looking for it; I think Ronan more got the subtext of "Vers is off the leash and does what she wants" than "Stay away from my home planet" (which he probably doesn't even know is her home planet.) And given that she leaves the Tesseract with Fury, she doesn't seem to be terribly concerned about Earth needing ongoing protection. It's possible none of that has anything to do with superhero formulas and really it just felt less like a superhero movie to me, though!

[cadenzamuse]

Lol, I love your advice for slashers re: fluid bonding.

[melannen]

Maybe you just have to have come of age during a very specific phase of the AIDS crisis, but the idea that unprotected sex is more dangerous (or intimate or transgressive!) than blood-to-blood contact is just... weird.