netgirl_y2k: (kahlan white dress)
-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 )
netgirl_y2k: (Default)
-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.

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