netgirl_y2k

-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.

Specifically, what I go for in a femslash pairing.

According to the AO3 I have both written and bookmarked the most femslash in the Merlin fandom. Which is interesting, if only for the fact that that you have to really hate yourself to be a Merlin femslasher.

I think Gwen/Morgana is the pairing I have written the most of in any fandom, and although I am slightly loath to admit it, in that case it was a one true character thing. As we discussed a couple of days ago, I am a mite obsessed with Morgana; I loved Morgana, I thought she was gay and wanted to ship her, and Gwen was the only other woman on the show. I would have argued there was a little more to it at the time, but in retrospect-- that was a good eighty-five percent of it. Especially as my interest in Merlin femslash (well, all Merlin fic, really) drops like a stone as soon as Morgana isn't involved. And that I subsequently shipped Morgana with every woman who came into her general vicinity; including Morgause, who may or may not have been her sister depending on your headcanon, the degree of AU, and assorted writing inconsistencies.

But my favourite, favourite was Morgana/Vivian. So, Vivian was a one episode guest star in series... two? And she and Arthur are cursed to obsessively love each other, and by the end of the episode Arthur's been saved, and Vivian's left under the spell (forever, I guess), and I hated that. I became fascinated by the idea that Morgana could somehow be the one to lift the spell from Vivian. I have this recurring theme in all my fics and fandoms about women somehow reclaiming agency that's been taken from them; but, you know, with humour and occasional dragons. Anyway, Morgana/Vivian, which I sort of have to take the blame for, because by virtue of my writing a few fics and never shutting the fuck up about them, they briefly became a thing in fandom, someone even wrote a really awesome big bang fic about them. That aside, Morgana/Vivian is a pretty good example of my fondness for super-rare femslash pairings that don't really exist outside my head. I actually still have a lot of fond feelings and nostalgia for that pairing, and I keep thinking I should revisit them once more; I think they'd be good in a modern AU, I have this image of them making out in the limo at Arthur and Gwen's wedding, partly because it's the only way to lift the spell from Vivian, but mostly because if Arthur's going to marry Gwen, Morgana is damn well going to make out with a pretty girl in something expensive that he's already paid for.

A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones is a fandom where I want more femslash. I mean, there's actually a pretty decent amount, and so much female character centric het and gen that I'm actually a pretty happy bunny, but I want more, and in the spirit of being the change you want to see, I endeavour to write a fair bit of it. I also do a lot of exchanges in that fandom, and I always put "any femslash, basically" in my sign-ups; which is how I come to write some slightly off the wall pairings like Arianne/Dany and Sansa/Myrcella. I actually enjoy writing those types of pairings because there's sometimes a moment when your brain just goes oh, something clicks, and it all makes sense; I had that when I wrote Sansa/Myrcella recently.

Speaking of Sansa, she's probably the closest thing I have to a one true character in ASOIAF, so I write and read about her a lot. There was an amazing prompt on the kink meme a while ago, for a canon era fic where Sansa was a lesbian, but because of her upbringing and the world she lives in, she has no word for it, no frame of reference; and hot damn if I could figure out a way to do it properly I'd write it in a heartbeat. I do read a fair bit of Sansa/Margaery, which is probably the biggest f/f pairing in the fandom, interestingly enough I didn't ship them at all in the books, where I found it pretty evident that Margaery was using Sansa. Then came S3 of the show and brought with it Natalie Dormer and the impression, at least to me, that Margaery does genuinely want to help, and care for, and flirt with Sansa, just so long as it doesn't interfere with her own ambitions or the advancement of House Tyrell, and that's way more interesting to me. The scene with the rose and "some women like pretty girls" didn't hurt either.

Although the pairing I'm most desperate for, that fandom seems determined to deny me, is Sansa/Brienne; it's a the lady and her knight thing, bulletproof kink of mine, but only if the knight in question is a woman.

Now with Once Upon a Time I finally seem to have found myself in a fandom with a major femslash presence, which is nice, but also-- You know how I said when I was in Buffy fandom I didn't care for Buffy/Faith or Willow/Tara, going for the basically nonexistent Tara/Anya? I'm a bit like that with OUaT. I didn't get into Emma/Regina in S1 when everyone else did because I don't generally like adversary shipping, and now I can see it, I can so see it, and although it doesn't take much for a vid or a graphic to convince me of them, I am ridiculously fussy about fics. Like, I backbutton out of nine out of ten fics I try to read about them, but I keep trying because one day I'll find one that does them right, and that fic will be spectacular. I don't even know what "doing them right" is; but I have a feeling it would involve a lot less woobiefying of Regina, and framing of Snow as the enemy.

And I do like, more than like, Aurora/Mulan ; it's the princess and her knight thing again, and I really want to write fic for them, which I'm not writing for the same reason I think lots of other people aren't-- where do you even go after the aborted declaration of love|pregnancy scene?

But the pairing I fell super hard for was Ruby/Belle which was basically sunk by Ruby's actress not being on the show anymore, and the decision to retcon Rumple/Belle into something cotton candy sweet and fluffy. It's frustrating; Rumple/Belle could have been super-interesting, if not my shipping bag of chips, but the more they deny that there's anything dark or creepy about them, the more I want Belle far away from him. I always wanted a fic where Ruby was Belle's beast instead. Of course I did; bring me all the lesbian fairytales! They played into my friends to lovers kink as well. Speaking of, somebody's going to tell me when Regina/Tink becomes a thing, right?

Spring arrived. But then it got frightened and went away again. So, it's been the perfect weather for sitting inside and watching telly.

Sunday evening was the last ever episode of Being Human, and I was pleased to see that the fifth series was keeping up the fine tradition of the odd numbered series of BH being the best ones, ( spoilers for the whole of series five )

There's also been Once Upon a Time, which I haven't had much to say about for the last few weeks because, shall I tell you my supremely unpopular OUAT opinion? ( Spoilers through The Miller's Daughter )

Greetings Earthlings! I have picked up a few new subscribers (using the dw parlance, as I'm making a bit of an effort to concentrate things over here) from the recent friending meme. I was going to post one of those intro to me posts that I've seen popping up hither and thither, but I thought I'd leave you all in the happy delusion that I am in any way interesting for at least a little while longer.

Instead, I thought I'd talk about the most recent episode of Once Upon a Time ( Queen of Hearts )