The Bournemouth Ultimatum... (get me the frak out of this airport)

Back from a whirlwind trip to Bournemouth Airport-Salisbury Cathedral-Romsey-Southampton-Bournemouth Airport and now I need a nap.

After a month of cripping homesickness with a side of loneliness that I dealt with by turning myself nocturnal and immersing myself in the Intertoobz, I can officially say that this student in Ireland thing? Doesn't suck.

Flew over to Bournemouth and saw me mammy and me stepdaddy & sis, ate steak and Thai, saw Salisbury Cathedral and a copy of the Magna Carta (a copied out and signed June 11, 1215 copy of the charter, not a reproduction) and some sheep in a field as we drove past.

I return to college and Dublin, mentally refreshed and physically wrecked - airports, planes and other closed environments push the migraine button in my head - ick - and really looking forward to work and maximizing my time here, sightseeing and traveling as much as I can afford. A writer, after all, needs to do three things to be successful: read, write and live.

Peace and light, LoQ

Oh, Intertoobz

Why, why is my flist and the Interwebs themselves not full of Bionic Woman porn fic?

Is this not the cracky girl-power* goodness for which fandom has been waiting.

*pause while I doublecheck that I typed that with a straight face*

In truth, I like my fannish glee to come in shades and varieties of broken: as a writer and all-around imaginative person, it leaves me places to go with the characters in my mind, OOC moments to fix, plotholes to close. In that sense, Bionic Woman reminds me of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" novels I used to read as a kid - so much potential, such shitty execution (Katee Sackhoff and Molly Price excepted for they are awesome like whoa). While Good TV is something to be savoured, as a viewer, I am forced to let the story and the characters unfold at a pace and in ways set by the storytellers themselves. And honey, sometimes that just takes too damn long. But at the same time, the view, once you get there, is fantastic.

Bionic Woman is more like the "Choose Your Own Adventure" novels I used to read as a kid - brilliant concepts, sucktastic execution. It is a show that begs to be rescued from the pile of suck by collective pop consciousness of fandom, polished up and set loose on the web to mutate and flourish. I suppose three weeks is too soon to expect this to happen (I did mention my problem with delayed gratification, right - i.e. the delay) and, to be honest, the majority of the episodes thus far have resembled a fannish Bataan - slogging scene after painful scene of bad writing, fetid dialogue, whinging sisters, plotlines so colossally contrived as to make Robert McKee wake nights in a cold sweat, and a directionless* lead actor for bare moments of cracky goodness both intentional (any time Sackhoff opens her mouth) and unintentional (the metatextual awesomeness of Isaiah Washington's beatdown in last week's episode).

*I mean that literally; I've been watching Jekyll - Steven Moffat, I want to have your babies - and Michelle Ryan's Katherine Reimer is everything Jaime Sommers should be - smart, pert, flinty, arrogant, over-confident and bit of a badass. Only Katherine is also well-written and directed. I'm pleased to see that Ryan actually has some chops - if only they'd actually give her something to work with.

Still, it would be nice if the intertoobz showed as much enthusiasm for faintly ridiculous, clumsily executed girl-centric action dramas as it does for the boys' own variety.

What about you, Intertoobz? What adds the crunch to your peanut butter?

The Politics of "Down There" in Comic Books and Pop (Pulp?) Culture

And if any of the disparate parts of my flist were wondering how I could simultaneously love both Alice Munro and Bionic Woman, I find BW, flawed though it is, to be a wonderful anodyne to portrayals of women in pop culture like this and, oh, every last single frame of the trailer to Good Luck Chuck.

For the record, when I rule the universe? Every last person involved with writing and filming GLC is going against the wall.

Meanwhile, some thoughts on the comic book solicitations for January '08:

Oh, Marvel, could you do me a personal favour a not adapt the Iliad for comics? Seriously, with 300 and the director's cut of Troy hitting this year, haven't the Classics suffered enough? Also, I shudder to think what the minds that came up with Civil War are going to do with an adaptation of the Iliad - what, the Trojans win this time? Athena in a crotch-skimming peplos?! (Oh, wait, that would be just another issue of Wonder Woman. Never mind.)

You notice anything missing from this cover? Or this one. And, nope, nothing here neither.

Ms. Marvel's Brazilian, on the other hand, totally appropriate for depiction on the cover of a mass-market book.

*eyeroll*

Ze double standard! Ooo, eet blindz!

Meanwhile, there's another cross-over going on in the X-books. Anyone remember the last time there was a monthly X-Men title worth buying?

Me, neither.

Meanwhile, in January, DC Comics is... boring. Impressive work, DC.

Also on the DC front, comic book gossip-monger Rich Johnson is reporting at CBR's "Lying in the Gutters" that, in the best tradition of DC editorial - and by tradition I mean continuity-raping, woman violating, character-assassinating misogyny run amok - DC is planning to do something terrible to Catwoman's daughter, Helena, to bring CW back over to the dark side.

At the best of times, I hate 'children-in-jeopardy' stories because it's cheap, lazy writing - rather than actually spend any time working on character or plot, the writer throws someone's kid into danger, or worse, kills it, as if that then justifies any action the parent character then takes (for an example, see Kill Bill*). Like I said, it's cheap and lazy, and it trivializes a subject that deserves to be treated with more sensitivity and seriousness. Also` talent and creativity.

I really hate 'children-in-jeopardy' stories when they're used in service of simplistic and sexist characterization as "she can't be the villain, she's a mom" or "she's evil and kickass because she doesn't have a kid holding her back". I find it especially galling that in most media, mothers are only allowed to be villainous if they're bad mothers. You never get a woman who's a kickass assassin by day and a leader of her local scout troop at night**. By the same token, for a woman, failure as a parent in fiction is virtually synonymous with failure as a human being. Men are allowed to be heroes and shitty parents - in fact, in some genres, it's damn near a job requirement (see any Schwarzenneger movie where his character has kids). But for a woman, if your kids hate you, you might as well strap on a katana and a glock and go kick puppies and skewer kittens in the high street because you are obviously an evil bitch and must be punished***.

Which is all by way of saying I think everyone on the planet knows women (and men but they win more in fiction, so I care less) who are fantastic moms and shitty human beings and shitty moms who are fantastic human beings and sweet moms who are shit-yourself-scary in a professional setting and caring professionals who are shit-yourself-scary as moms and just about every variation inbetween. And how fundamentally boring, sexist and lazy it is when TPTB decide that killing a child is just the plot-twist needed to drive mummy over-the-edge****.

*By the same token, while Kill Bill does posit that the worst thing you can do to a woman is take her child/her ability to have children, The Bride's out to get vengeance for herself - it's not that they killed her baby, it's that they betrayed her and killed her baby. Quentin Tarantino uses the loss of a child as the macguffin to start the plot but doesn't let the movie's subtext linger and die there.

**With the exception of Kill Bill's Vernita Greene, who coached her daughter's soccer team in her retirement. But as The Bride points out, getting knocked up isn't like going to confession - it doesn't magicall absolve you of all the shitty things you've done in your past.

***Note to self - you're treading perilously close to this line in the GCWA.

****It's also boring and lazy when they do it to daddy but it seems to me that men tend to get hit by this particular trope far less in pop culture than women. Particularly with regards to what I call "dispossable feotus syndrome" (see the Bionic Woman pilot for an example), which writers (male?) consider meaty enough to fuck with a woman's head but ephemeral enough to not actually impact any of the other characters or require a special wardrobe. For the record, I can't recall ever seeing a male character mourn a lost pregnancy outside of an episode of Party of Five (if you have other examples great but I don't actually care).