beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

My mum and my brother did visit. Brother wearing a Groot shirt with Don't Push The Button. Is a good shirt.

We watched Black Panther :-)

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It's clever and I think a rewatch will be good fun too.

And I like every character as characters, even the ones you're glad to see stopped. That's some varied people they've got there.

I'm glad I bought it, even on blu ray, though the deleted scenes were not as extensive as I'd hoped. I'd watch a whole lot more of that world.

Today Sunday was swapped out for See Movie With Subtitles
yes
SUBTITLES
:-D
... yeah I maybe look overenthusiastic about that, but, it is a new movie, and the subtitles are on at a time of day I can get to, and it isn't even the only subbed showing this week.
*basks in the awesome*

... actually when is the other one? is tempting to go back...

So, I liked Civil War. And it would be really, really easy for me to not like Civil War, because see icon for whose side I'm usually on. But having seen the movie, I am actually mad at Tony, but not mad at the writers for what they did with Tony. Which is a tough balance. They did it plausibly. I'm disappointed in Tony, but I see what they did, and it worked.

I'm not best pleased with Steve either though.

And I did like the plot, I liked where the story went, which characters did what.

The gender balance is still ridiculous. I mean if you've got less than parity it's bad, but the more people they put on screen, the more they filter for which characters they want to still have around, the fewer women there are. That is unacceptable and I'm proper fed up of it.

I think they did okay by black men, in a movie with three superhero black men, but if the only speaking black woman in the movie had a name I did not learn it. Not cool. And having said they did okay, read a spoilers if you're worried: ( Read more... )

There was a lot of stuff in this movie and honestly I could have lived with there being much less characters, but I think they juggled them pretty well. There were several characters with an emotional arc driving the story, there were several with emotional arcs that nudged the story around, there were some that turned up to fight but still had a personality and some interpersonal stuff going on while they did that. Nobody was wasted.

Also it managed to be very funny at appropriate times and super tense at other times. I held my breath at one point, I just, like, forgot to breathe until we saw how that worked out. And yet, other times, much laughing.


SPOILER goes under the cut, where I start going on about actual plot and details and stuff, plenty SPOILERS here :
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I am super tired and I forgot to eat today. I mean, I bought food, but then there was a movie, and the food went all soggy in the bag instead of being eated, and then it was three hours later and it went straight in the bin. So my brain just sort of ground to a halt just there.

I'm too tired to squee... but I'm not sure it's a squee sort of film. I'm mostly thoughtful.



Oh, one other thing I bought today? They had Civil War cups. With a teeny tiny Black Widow figure on teh top.
... so yeah, I bought another Black Widow, for £2
but you can buy the cup without the drink
so I have a nice clean cup.

And a tiny Natasha.

*puts her carefully where I can see her*

*grins*




I will very probably write more about this film later, but that's it for now.
Need food.

My life is so boring. All of the parts are boring. Everything I try and do is boring.
Yes I'm familiar with symptoms of depression, it is not helpful.
I need to do more and more interesting things.

It has been two years since college finished and I've been trying to think of those things for ... well, substantially longer than that, actually.



Spider-man cartoons with Coulson in them are fun, but he's the grown up, so he doesn't get much to do except be the punchline. I watched a couple of episodes today, including the one where we find he wears a Cap uniform under his suit to go meet Cap. In MCU that would have ended in unfortunate bloodstains.

The endless MarySue 'verse in my head keeps High School Principal Coulson. He probably gets brought back in a slightly different way, needs more time to recuperate, gets set on duty that was not expected to be combat: oversee teenaged Gifted. Probably he brings some friends. And not friends. Somehow I can see Ward as a high school gym teacher. It's not flattering. But science babies teaching science to only slightly younger science babies would be fun. The whole thing would be super secret even from a lot of SHIELD, which is slightly different from the cartoons, but if you smush it into MCU then it has to be anyway because you end up bringing X-men and everyone along with. The school would be secret because attitudes towards Gifted within SHIELD are... mixed, and Fury is trying to protect them. Which is also one reason they're not at a SHIELD academy. I like the cartoons MJ, internet savvy reporter in training, but I mix back in the latest Gwen, because awesome. So then Osborn is even more of a problem.

When I watch the movies and cartoons and comics I separate out the different canons just fine, but none of them are the perfectly perfect version, so parts and pieces go back in the stew for the version to live with.

Hawkeye in my head is more the Fraction version, but probably older. Black Widow looks like MCU but is lying about her age, among a great many other things. But then the way they were together in EMH was cool.


EMH needed more women more often. Black Widow was on all the boxes but not in many of the episodes. The Spider-man cartoons treat women like they're rationed, so you get one, maaaaaybe two per episode. Weird and creepy. And there's a whole disc of him meeting Avengers but so far only the guy Avengers. In fact in his little fantasy of being able to yell 'Avengers Assemble' only Hulk, Iron Man, Thor and Cap appear to be relevant. That's it for Avengers in that 'verse. Unacceptable.

Basically if I want women in my daydreams I have to draw on more than one canon to get them properly plural. Ridiculous.






I'm reading a book right now with a whole lot of women in it. It's just also a weird preachy Gaia worshipping dystopia of evil mind controlling environmentalists. Which... I am not seeing the appeal of.

So then I'm left holding a book full of women relating to other women in a variety of complex ways, in a multi ethnic society, with assumptions about sexuality changed so it isn't right to say queer characters cause they wouldn't think of it that way in such a queer world... but I'm epically and completely bored.




Yeah, I know, if I don't think the perfect book exists yet I should sit down and get to writing it. (hah)




I been thinking about multi generation stories, like I complained were missing from the shagging-and-politics stories. It's weird because it seems like only one generation gets to be actual characters at once in a lot of stories. Like, if it's a kids story, the kids will be well rounded characters with agency, plans, hopes, dreams, inner lives, and... parents, or parental units, or older type people, who kind of exist but aren't really properly real. But then if the story is meant to be for adults then the children are kind of empty and just exist to be threatened and maybe stand around whimpering? Well, not in every genre, but the contrast between Home Alone and what the average kid does in a not-kids movie is kind of huge, even though I think we all though up elaborate death traps with our toys at some point in our bored younger lives. ... didn't use them, obviously, and I can buy a tiny minority of kids would reach the point where they feel the need to do something like threats are real even when there's grownups around. But there's also an absence of elders in either of those stories, pretty often. Grandparents seem rare. Parents even, for adults. So many fantasy stories and even some SF start when a parent dies, like that's some kind of necessary prerequisite and otherwise you'd hide behind them. Not all parents are going to be skilled in relevant areas? And even if they are it could be cool like Indiana Jones, both knowledgeable but in such different ways.

I keep coming back to Batman and the Bat family, as they seemed to me in the 90s when I was reading comics. Like, you've got Batman, Nightwing, whatever Jason is calling himself at the time, Tim Drake Robin, and eventually more Robins after that. You've got Batgirl who became Oracle, and Batgirl who was Cass, and also Spoiler. They're all in different decades, but they're kind of two generations, only Batman as an Older, and that kind of only just. Like, he was an adult when Dick was a teenager, but probably he was in his 20s then, not in fact old enough to be his father. Maybe he was older when Dick was the Robin in the comics? But the sliding timeline landed them closer together while I was reading. The only definite different generation was Alfred, who rocks but seems to parent every last one of them without the rights to go with the responsibilities. But for a long while Tim also had a surviving bio parent, he just wasn't very helpful. And Spoilers parent was, like, the source of her problems. Oracle's dad is still around, but can't actually solve anything for her, cause the problems are bigger. There are multiple ages, at least two generations, and they still all seem weirdly teenage.

In the Spider-man cartoons Coulson is a joke, because if he was a competent grown up that could handle the problems for them then why would they hero? Well, because there's more problems than that, obvs. But by extension SHIELD is a joke, to make it so teenager supers are a thing. Like, whenever the team runs back to SHIELD for protection and support, SHIELD get kicked and the team ends up doing the fighting. Which just seems unnecessary? Like, law enforcement is a real thing that tends to work, and yet crime happens because police have to actually arrive after they're called. The episodes are only 20 minutes long, run them in real time and New York traffic and do you really need an excuse for why SHIELD aren't there yet? Well with a helicarrier that's always above the city then yes you do. But still.


It's like how urban fantasy mostly makes it so the police can't help, could just get themselves killed, so the 'hero' can ignore the whole concept of law and law enforcement and capturing criminals and holding them for trial and trials and prisons and sentences and appeals and, you know, civilisation, and instead can just solve problems with violence.

The way most superhero stories are set up, they're left on their own to solve problems with violence, and prison is a revolving door, treatment ineffectual at best, and capture kind of futile. Why write it that way? Why not have the hero be part of a loyal law enforcement team that works within a system that has trials and lawyers and all the rest?

Power fantasy. Blergh.




Stories need different generations to be actual people on the inside, systems to be set up so that humans can be human and it actually work, diplomacy and redemption to be actual useful words. Otherwise they're all twisted up small and turn into long fight scenes.



... or I could watch different genres.


... but I kind of like these ones, with some tweaks, I just complain about them a lot.
*facepalm*