netgirl_y2k | Entries tagged with agent carter

-Agent Carter has been officially cancelled. And, well, season two was ten episodes of television that I... watched. There were good things about it; the Peggy and Dottie team up was excellent, and Whitney Frost was a good villain. But mostly it was hamstrung by a change of setting that never quite came off, and bogged down in unnecessary love triangles.

I don't know, maybe a lot of viewers main interest in Peggy always was 'who will Mr Agent Carter be?' and not 'so how did the founding of SHIELD go down?' or 'I would like to see Director Carter in action, please.' I liked Daniel fine as Peggy endgame love interest, and had since mid season one, but Peggy's love life was never what I was interested in.

It's a pity, I suppose, given how crazy I was about the first season, that my reaction to the cancellation wasn't 'it's a shame we won't be getting a season three' but instead 'I'm not sure we should ever have gotten a season two.'

At least, between this and being so very underwhelmed by Civil War I am now free of whatever tenuous interest I had in the non-Netflix MCU. My interest in the Netflix shows is being upheld by the prospect of Luke Cage and a second series of Jessica Jones; and maybe The Defenders, depending on how annoyed I am by Matt by then.

-Speaking of things I am probably free of, I kept up with The 100 until the S3 finale and I think I'm done now. ( The 100 3x16 )

Anyway, the back half of the season was pretty incoherent even from a show not noted for its narrative coherence. So, yeah, that was a weird, whiplash-y fandom fling.

-I was a wee bit nervous for the sixth season of Game of Thrones, as the show was finally going to overtake the books, but I've really enjoyed the first half of the season; I will forgive a lot for a bit of narrative momentum.

( GoT 6x01-6x04 )

-The final season of Person of Interest is finally airing, although I don't understand the schedule. First a hiatus that lasts forever and a day, and then burning through the episodes in some sort of incoherent, impossible to keep up with way. I have mixed feelings about the new canon; on the one hand, yay, new episodes; on the other, I am so not ready for this show to be over, and I kind of wish I was getting more time to process the new episodes. Particularly the Shaw episode, which blew. my. fucking. mind.

( PoI 5X04 )

Crossposts: http://netgirl-y2k.livejournal.com/547108.html

Agent Carter returned for its second season the other night.

Weirdly, given how much I'd loved the first season I wasn't too excited by the prospect of a second. I think it was that the show was stuck in will-they-won't-they renewal limbo for ages, and then when the second season was announced a lot of things that came out about it seemed to come from the mouths of people who hadn't been expecting to have to come up with a second season, and were panicking.

I wasn't too impressed by the change in location to LA. And while I wasn't particularly bothered by the absence of Angie (I did ship Peggy/Angie, but it was more jumping on board an active and cheerful femslash ship than actually feeling it in my bones, you know?), but it resulted in a lot of negativity among people I was following that left a bad taste in my mouth. And then the dreaded words - love triangle - were uttered.

So, it was with more antipathy than excitement that I watched the first two episodes of the season, which ultimately I liked much more than I had expected too.

( Agent Carter 2x1 - 2x2 )

Crossposts: http://netgirl-y2k.livejournal.com/545515.html

-Tumblr always makes me feel like an old fandom lady, never more so than when it took my dash about forty-eight hours to go from doing cartwheels about Agent Carter's renewal, to panicking about the change of setting for S2 and the possibility of Haley Atwell being the only returning cast member. I don't know-- well, nobody knows. It could be brilliant, if they're doing a time skip then we're into early fifties Hollywood which is pretty cool. It could well be that I was right the first time, in my failure to have much time for the MCU, and Agent Carter S1 was just a brief, glorious aberration. Either way, I don't have it in me to worry.

Plus, I came to Agent Carter via Merlin (which crashed and burned into a toxic mess of misogyny, bitterness, and resentment), Doctor Who (which at the very least teaches us not to fear change), and the endless, endless bloody sniping in ASOIAF/Game of that's your adaption choice? So I think I have earned my slightly condescending Oh, you sweet summer children moment.

-Speaking of Game of Thrones, my overwhelming reaction to S5 continues to be: I understand why you made these adaptation choices, I don't necessarily agree with you with you about all of them, and I think in a few cases your execution leaves a lot to be desired. But my ambivalence is mostly drowned out by my gratitude that you're moving the story along before I was forced to perform a one woman reenactment of the Get On With It! crowd scene from Holy Grail.

And from episode five we learned ( Kill The Boy )

- I have signed up for remix, and I think other people should too. There's no qualifying fandoms this year, which I like, because I always thought they skewed towards old, slashy fandoms and locked people into offering fandoms they were otherwise pretty much done with. But I'll be interested to see how matching shakes out, and if it actually changes what people are writing that much.

See, this is what happens when you grow old in fandom, you start noticing changes in fandom trends, which is a highly specific and difficult to explain hobby.

Crossposts: http://netgirl-y2k.livejournal.com/539758.html

Dead Girl Walking - Christopher Brookmyre
The Unquiet Dead - Ausma Zehanat Khan
Faithful Place - Tana French
Broken Harbor - Tana French

All thrillers this month, for a change of pace.

Dead Girl Walking I was really excited about, because the last Jack Parlabane book came out, like, five years ago, and it's one of my favourite series. It's not Brookmyre's best title; nothing will ever beat Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks in my book.

It wouldn't surprise me if this was the last Jack Parlabane book; the way a lot of characters from previous books made what seemed like a finale farewell appearance, and the way Brookmyre, who's always seemed to be a pretty socially conscious writer, seems to have accepted that in this day and age you can't have your protagonist be a journalist who uses, ahem, extra legal methods and still pretend he's the hero. I do kind of admire writers who know when to retire a series, though.

Anyway, it was good; I enjoyed the central mystery, involving an awesome lesbian rock star, her violinist sort of girfriend, and a sex trafficking ring. But it's probably not the best place to jump into the series, more a fond farewell to some long established characters.

The Unquiet Dead, on the other hand, is the first in a series; actually, I think it's the author's first book. You can sort of tell; the pacing's not great, and the conclusion is ( spoiler )

It's a Canadian set murder mystery where the victim very quickly turns out to be connected to the Bosnian war; and the narrative is split between the investigation and flashbacks to the genocide. The thing that really elevates this book and makes it worth reading is that the author is apparently an international human rights lawyer who was involved in the war crimes trials and really knows her stuff; the chapter headings are taken from the statements of survivors, which adds poignancy to the whole thing.

I'd almost given up on the Dublin Murder Squad books after The Likeness. My problem with that book was the idea of a murder victim who was so the spitting image of an undercover detective that the detective could move in with her housemates for weeks on end without raising any eyebrows completely shattered my suspension of disbelief.

Thankfully the next two books in the series hew a bit closer to reality. Faithful Place is about a twenty year old cold case and a dysfunctional family, and Broken Harbor is about a family massacre and the early days of the recession in Ireland.

As much as I'm enjoying Tana French's patented blend of ambiguous endings and strangely dislikable yet compelling protagonist, I'm taking a break from the thrillers for a while, and I'm halfway through Elizabeth Bear's Karen Memory, which so far contains a steampunk version of the American goldrush, a group of friendly prostitutes, a central f/f relationship, and an evil mind control machine, and I'm absolutely freakin' loving it!

Only four books this month, but February is a short month, plus I fell into an Agent Carter fanfic shaped whole. I couldn't help it... Peggy/Angie is like the friends-to-lovers sprinkled coffee shop AU x spy AU of my heart.

Anyway, here are some recs for fics I have especially enjoyed.

Griffith House Rules by

The-Stephanois Five times Angie heard noises coming from Peggy's apartment and the one time she caused them.

take a look at what i found by

likebrightness Peggy knocks before she can think better of it. Hopes Angie wakes up before Miss Fry does.

After the Applause by

tartanfics Angie doesn't have anyone waiting for her out in the audience. She didn't get to tell Peggy she finally got a part in a show; Peggy wasn't there to tell. She ran lines with Sarah from 4A. There's been not a word from Peggy, nothing, after Angie went to all the trouble of calling up her family and finding Peggy a way out of the city.

The Scheme of Things by

QuickYoke Angie manages to cross the pond to England during the last years of the War. But she soon finds that helping with the war effort isn't all that cracked up to be.

wake up where the clouds are far behind me by

ProfessorSpork Angie’s lips are half-cocked in a smirk but the eyebrows give her away, lifted in poorly-masked concern. “Still not sure what kinda errand needs doing on the Brooklyn Bridge alone at this hour. You sure you’re done, Pegs?” That’s the question, isn’t it?

Semi-related. I have a blanket permission to podfic statement tucked away somewhere on AO3, which I quite often forget all about until someone takes me up on it.

And

reena_jenkins took me up on it and podifcced Living Arrangements.

Now, I don't often listen to podfic of my own stuff all the way through. Not because I don't love that people record it, because I absolutely do, but because as soon as I'm listening to it all I can hear is my weird word choices and awkward sentence structures. But this I listened to all the way through. Twice. Reena's reading is so good that she managed to make me forget I'd written it.

Crossposts: http://netgirl-y2k.livejournal.com/537084.html

I didn't get to watch the Agent Carter finale until just now. It's not being shown over here (boo, hiss!) and as the UK is turning into Big Brother on the internet censorship front, watching anything suspiciously foreign has become a total pain in the arse.

One upshot of this is that I have been watching a lot more UK telly. This should really be a whole other post, but in short: The Wolf Hall adaptation is wonderful; The The Casual Vacancy one less so; Broadchurch probably didn't need a second series, no, but it beat the hell out of yet another repeat of Midsomer Murders, and Call The Midwife is Sunday evening telly at its very finest.

The other upshot is that it turns out there were a lot of US shows I was only watching out of habit and didn't mind dropping (Once Upon a Time) and the ones I do want to keep up with (Elementary, The Good Wife) do get shown here, albeit weeks or months after their original airings, but they're not shows where I'm in the fandom, so I don't feel like I need to stay current to keep up with the conversation.

But Agent Carter, oh, Agent Carter. It had its flaws, and I'm not blind to them, but to me it was worth every second of swearing at my elderly macbook and wrangling VPNs.

I was actually slightly spoiled for the finale by opening my e-mail this morning to discover, like, six comments on my lone Agent Carter fic going HOW DID YOU KNOW?

( Teeny spoiler )

Speaking of that fic, I'm actually kind of sorry that I can't get it together fannishly with the rest of the MCU, because not that I write fic for validation, and if I did, boy, would I be writing the wrong sort of fic, mostly, but damn, that there was some nice validation.

( Agent Carter finale )

Crossposts: http://netgirl-y2k.livejournal.com/536724.html

My one, and likely only, sidestep into anything Marvel related has probably ruined me forever for puttering about in more moderately sized fandoms.

Living Arrangements
Agent Carter; Peggy Carter/Angie Martinelli; PG; 3414 words

Angie almost says, I think Peggy and me are basically married, and I don't think she's noticed, just to see the look on Jarvis's face.

Crossposts: http://netgirl-y2k.livejournal.com/536551.html

I continue to be besotted with Agent Carter, a show I enjoy all the more for ignoring half of tumblr screaming at the other half about it. I don't know, I'm uncomfortable with anyone being told to watch something they're not interested in for great justice, or indeed any other reason (you do you, etc.) but I'm also a little uncomfortable with this being where the line in the sand is being drawn vis-a-vis diversity in the MCU.

( Agent Carter 1x6 )

Ah, well. If Agent Carter goes on past these eight episodes then that will be awesome; and if it doesn't, well, it'll be small and perfectly formed. And I'll have a better grounds for my half arsed grudge against the MCU than my extremely immature and mean spirited sulk that fandom is sobbing over this thing that I don't care about.