netgirl_y2k

Because there's only so long you can stare aghast at the BBC news, or overanalyse every word out of Nicola Sturgeon's mouth, let's talk about Person of Interest, which had its finale this week.

My initial reaction to the finale was that the last show I watched to stick its landing so well was Leverage.

( Person of Interest )

I only started watching Person of Interest after season four had finished, at the beginning of the world's longest hiatus, so the show being finished hasn't diminished my fannish feelings for it, I think because aside from these past, like, six weeks the show hasn't been on the air for the entire time I've been a fan of it. Plus, the door has been left open for ALL THE FIC. On that note have some fic recs:

( Recs )

I have spent an outrageous amount of time this week trying to process my feelings on this last episode of Person of Interest. It's really thrown me, and I don't think I'll know exactly how I feel until I see the final three episodes.

( The Day The World Went Away )

tl;dr? Here are my feelings in the form of fic about the low-key, underrated friendship between Sameen Shaw and Lionel Fusco; also an AI with multiple personalities: You Are Part Of A Machine (you are not a human being)

-God, I found the second season of Daredevil hard going. I don't know if it paled in comparison to its own first season, or just really paled in comparison to Jessica Jones, but actual costumed superhero Daredevil just didn't do it for me the way blind parkouring ninja Matt did.

I was really excited for Elektra, because I know my own mind and it is often preoccupied with hot women who could kill me, but man, if she and Matt weren't having boring feelings at each other, they were fighting boring ninjas, boringly. Their entire plot was incomprehensible, often too dark to see, and possibly kind of racist (...ninjas, really?) Plus, Elektra -- in S1 Daredevil really fell down on its female characters, and post Jessica Jones they seemed even more cardboard cutout; S2 raised the bar with Karen Page, but it needed more Claire Temple, and it really, really dropped the ball when it came to Elektra.

The best thing about this season was the Punisher. I would have watched an entire season of the trial of Frank Castle; ideally without any ninjas, and with an option on no Matt. I was kind of shipping Frank/Karen; I think it was the respectful way he called her 'ma'am'.

A ship that did nothing for me was Matt/Karen. Well, no, it worked for me as two people lying to each other and themselves about who they are, and I liked how quickly it fell apart because of that. I did not appreciate the hints of it coming back around or that there might be deeper feelings beyond 'I'm going to want this because this is what the person I'm pretending to be would want.'

Karen, honey, go for Foggy, who is a nice boy, or Frank, who is a raging lunatic but with whom at least you have chemistry, or, gee, Claire Temple, who could probably use a drink and a night on the town. Matt... eh, I don't really care; go to church, maybe.

idk, the first season of Daredevil and Jessica Jones were binge watch telly for me, I think I watched both in the space of a weekend. This time, I was getting to the end of an episode and going, 'well, thank god that's over.'

-I got fannish whiplash from The 100. When season three was starting my tumblr dash was talking non-stop about what a brilliant show it was, and how it was top-notch for femslash. So I ended up mainlining two and a half seasons in about a fortnight.

I think I'm a wee bit older than the intended audience for The 100. I spent most of the first season going 'will somebody please get these kids some adult supervision' and most of season two going 'not those adults, different adults, better adults.' But it's addictive; it's a show designed for binge watching. Everything happens at a bajillionty miles an hour, and the worldbuilding falls apart of you think about if for more than point three of a second; grounder culture developed in less than a century and the world was irradiated with a special sort of only when plot-relevant radiation, okay-doke, if you say so.

I mean it's dreck; but it's highly watchable dreck. And I was shipping Clarke/Lexa and Abby/Raven, and Octavia was tiny and furious, and what is Murphy's life, and I was having a good time. Then came the episode where Lexa died, and the fandom went into meltdown.

I have to admit, my reaction before I'd seen the episode was unsympathetic. I was surprised that people were surprised, because I thought Lexa's death had been telegraphed from, basically, space. Every scene she had in season three was either speculating about her death, or exposition about how her successor would be chosen. And then-- I was on the very periphery of the fandom, so I guess people felt like they were on a promise that Lexa wouldn't die, and from my outsider perspective it looked like overzealous spoiler protection met wishful thinking in the worst of ways; other people think it was more cynical, and that's fair, but in fandom as in real life, I like to assume incompetence before malice.

But then I actually saw the episode, and Lexa's death couldn't have been more the dead lesbian trope if it had tried. I'm at the right age that Tara from Buffy is my go-to example of bury your gays, and the most offensive thing about Lexa's death to me was its pointed similarity to something that first offended me twelve years ago.

And I was annoyed, because it was a bit on the nose, especially from a show that had been courting both viewing figures and headpats for having a girl/girl main couple, but it wasn't a dealbreaker. I liked Lexa, and have spent a good few weeks searching for Clarke/Lexa fixit fic that doesn't read like it was written by a tween, or give me second hand embarrassment and make me want to apologise to the Fear the Walking Dead fandom at large; why is a straight-up canon AU so hard to find? But I still wanted to watch the show.

Right now the thing I hate most about the AI plot is that I don't hate the AI plot. The chick who plays Raven is knocking it out of the park; it makes the factoid about the commander's spirit more than a dangling thread from that terrible killer gorilla episode; and it ties Jaha and the city of light into the main story, a sideplot I'd previously assumed was only still ongoing because Jaha's actor had incriminating photos of the network muckity-mucks and couldn't be fired.

It's still dreck, but highly watchable dreck.

-I feel like there should be word in German for when a lesbian gets suckered into watching a show because there will be lesbians in it, and I feel like it should be a synonym for that feeling when you know you're being played but can't stop yourself from walking right into it.

On that note, I watched this week's episode of Once Upon a Time.

I haven't watched OUaT regularly since season three, and the last episode I watched was the one where Ruby and Mulan met. I tuned in this week because it was being touted as the one where Ruby and Mulan would get together.

Obviously, I was surprised when Ruby and Mulan did not get together, Mulan wasn't in the episode for more than five minutes, and Ruby got a female love interest in the form of Dorothy (of the Wizard of Oz fame).

I mean, it's awesome that OUaT has finally made it explicit that same-sex couples get true love too, Ruby's actress really sold me on her feelings, and I loved that they really went for it with the kiss; tbh, I'd been half expecting true love's awkwardly protracted hug.

But mostly I'm just confused. The show's been getting pressure to include a same-sex couple since forever. For the sake of avoiding arguments let's stick a pin in Emma/Regina and agree that it was always going to be a background couple. Mulan/Aurora were set up perfectly to be that couple, but the show dropped the ball spectacularly badly and were left with the unfortunate implications of the only implied non-straight character on a show about true love being sent off to be forever single in the woods. So Mulan was brought back and introduced to Ruby, which tbh even then smacked of: what unattached tertiary female character can we throw at Mulan? Only for Mulan to barely be in the episode where Ruby gets her happy ending with another, even more random, female character.

I mean, maybe Mulan's going back to DunBroch to makeout with Merida, but somehow I highly doubt it. And if she's not I would love someone who was in the room at the time to talk us through the decision tree that led us to Ruby/Dorothy, mostly because I want to see if they could do it without hinting at studio interference or admitting racism.

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 )

Well, that was the first Doctor Who episode I have really enjoyed in, gosh, simply ages.

( Deep Breath )

Excellent, we have finally achieved an episode that didn't offend or annoy me! And it's only taken half the series. Keep up the good work, show!

( The First of His Name )

I have been bad at posting of late, fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your perspective) the new series of Game of Thrones just started, and I can always talk about that.

I was of mixed feelings before the first episode. On the one hand, I really like the show (sometimes I think I prefer it to the books, but that's at least a little bit because I want to know how the story ends, and I honestly think the show is the only reason we're going to get there in anything like a timely fashion) and the trailers were getting me really excited. On the other hand, the part of fandom I hang out in is mostly book-fans and there's a lot of negativity towards the show - of the HBO ruined everything variety. And I know I'm in a minority here, but while I have been annoyed by some of the changes the show has made, I genuinely think most of them are in the service of trimming the fat and making the narrative more streamlined and watchable. For instance, if Asha Yara was to go straight to the north and we were to skip the kingsmoot and never see a Greyjoy nuncle, I would never complain about the show ever again. That's a lie, but I still think that it would be the right way to go.

Of course, some of the changes are in the service of more boobs, and that's annoying for a different reason.

My other unpopular opinion is that I don't think the show is any worse at female characters, misogyny, or sexual violence than the books.The show is more exploitative, and in desperate need of some naked dudes to even things up (I vote for Oberyn Martell), but thus far I haven't felt that the show has fetishised sexual violence in the same way the books sometimes tilted at (Lollys Stokeworth and her fifty rapists). Dany was raped by Khal Drogo in the books, if not on her wedding night then definitely afterwards, and I had no problem with the show making that explicit.

Eek, that's quite a lot of words before I've even started talking about the new episode, so ( Two Swords )