schmevil

Chamber of Chills reveals are posted here. I wrote two ficlets for the fest:


Title: Sexy Sexy
Summary: Jen and Jazinda go shopping for Halloween costumes.
Characters: Jen/Jazinda
Word Count: 700

Title: C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁ (Or, The Science of Candy)
Summary: Science can make things taste really, really good. Tony and Vision set out to prove this by making candy. Carol and Wanda play lab rat.
Characters: Carol, Wanda, Vision, Tony
Word Count: 1430

So over on CBR, folks are talking about Carol's effectiveness, or lack thereof, as a leader. I said:

Carol is a good leader as written by Brian Reed, and most other writers. She's a bad leader as written by Bendis. His Carol is probably the most indecisive and mild she's ever been. Brian Reed, for all his other flaws, understands that Carol is supposed to be (as the slogan goes), the hard-hitting, high-flying Ms. Marvel and he's increasingly showing her to be the smart, aggressive, never-back-down kind of woman she's always been. He's also, very smartly, had her do a lot of introspection, examining her motives and methods.

I've talked before about Reed's issues on Ms. Marvel, but I strongly believe his treatment of the character is improving. In recent issues Carol has been less wracked by indecision and far more effective. She's starting to win a few, which is so important for this character. At the same time, he's not letting her get away with her more negative impulses - she's questioned her ethics and her tactics, and she's started to face the parts of herself she's ignored for a long time. Reed hasn't stopped throwing her curveballs, but she's getting better at hitting them.

I also said:

I'm starting to think that she needs to get away from Bendis to shine. Even more than she needs to get away from Tony. Under Bendis she's been marginalized as a leader, called a fat cow by Doctor Doom, and shown to be willing to abandon a group of her friends in the middle of a fire fight, in order to protect one friend. Of course, it's possible to put a positive spin on all of this, but I'm having trouble.

I really want Bendis to throw the character a bone during Secret Invasion. Not least because his record with the female characters he chooses to write about is looking pretty grim. Jessica Jones spent most of her time in NA supporting her husband and not doing much else. When she finally gets some agency, it's to take her baby away from Luke. Echo was a non-entity, until Bendis hooked her up with Clint - suddenly she's interesting? The Wasp is just sort of there and in a recent issue she even disappears completely, without explanation. Spider-Woman, well, you know.

Black Widow is the only female character in the Avengers books who gets to consistently be a superhero. I tend to think that's partly because she's a street-level character and a sexy superspy, two of Bendis' favourite types to work with.

When you look at it this way, Carol's ineffectiveness is hardly surprising.

And Carol is a largely ineffective leader in the Mighty Avengers. Her teammates make and execute their own plans, and command seems to rotate from issue to issue. Tony is constantly undermining her, and she hasn't confronted him about it after, what? Twelve issues? She seems baffled by battles as they're unfolding around her, and is constantly surprised. This is frankly bizarre, considering she's a former Air Force major, who operated both as a fighter pilot, and with special ops. She's also been director of security for NASA, headed the superhuman branch of Homeland Security, and currently runs an anti-terrorist strike team through SHIELD. Oh yeah, and in her brief civilian career, she ran a magazine.

This is not a character who should have trouble with command.

Granted, the Mighty Avengers is just stacked with strong personalities, but I don't recall a leader having this much trouble since Black Widow's tenure as chairman. And before that, Scarlet Witch. Hey wait a second, do you think that maybe there's a connection?! What's really vexing is that under Busiek and Johns, Carol ran missions as an Avengers field leader and not only was she good at it, no one questioned her abilities. There is a difference, obviously, between temporary and fulltime command, and yeah the transition can be difficult. I would feel a lot better about Bendis' portrayal of Carol, if he showed her struggling with and then working on her self-doubt, rather than constantly showing her as being inadequate, and knowing she's inadequate.

Please, Gods of Comcis, let Bendis have some awesome plan for Carol. Power of positive thinking, people. POSITIVE THINKING.

***

Yesterday I posted some pages from She-Hulk #29, in which we finally find out why Jen got disbarred. I'm mostly satisfied with the explanation, and interested in seeing where PAD takes it.

Proving once again that She-Hulk fans are the best fans (WHY AREN'T YOU READING THIS BOOK?!), posters took the opportunity to geek about: case law, language usage, puns relating to both birds and breasts, and ninja zombie nazi gorillas riding pirate dinosaurs with jetpacks and rocket boots. OMG.

I also posted some scans from Transhuman #2, and it continues to be very, very cool. Jonathan Hickman is telling the story of the development of the transhumanism industry. He frames it within a documentary film about the two companies that first had major breakthroughs. He follows them from initial research, to development, human trials and even their search for funding. It's a really smart book that interrogates the relationship between science and business, tackles all the big ethical questions without getting heavy-handed, and sends up genre conventions.

Remember the test monkeys? (WHY AREN'T YOU READING THIS BOOK?!)

What's up with the writers? I mean, really? I was thinking about writing a post detailing all the ways in which Dan Slott projected his conflicted feelings about sexuality onto She-Hulk. Then I saw this post by box_in_the_box, and I realized that we're not done with this phenomena, even though Slott's left the book.

PAD says:

I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to side with the "not a good idea" contingent. I think any normal man who would have sex with She-Hulk is courting disaster. I don't care how stiff your stiffy is: She-Hulk's vaginal muscles alone, if she were to orgasm, would be enough to earn you a trip to the E.R. The price of a tumble with She-Hulk being broken bones pales in comparison to the prospect of a broken boner because, yes kids, it can break, and not all the king's horses, men or Viagra will put Humpty back together again. Lambskin Trojans? Forget that. Tony Stark must have used an amored condom. The Invinicible Iron Man Thing.

Is it possible that She-Hulk can't reach climax? I suppose. That would explain her bed hopping: An ongoing quest to find a man who can send her to Happyland. Me, I wouldn't want to roll those dice. I'm not sure how any guy would consider the bragging rights inherent in bagging the She-Hulk worth risking the rest of his sex life for, should he happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when She-Hulk finally gets her G-spot hit.

So Dan Slott writes stories about the evils of promiscuity, and PAD thinks that She-Hulk is physicially incapable of having sex with a 'normal man' and that her 'bed hopping' is a consequence of her not being able to find a man who can withstand her mighty vaginal muscles. That's 31 flavours of fail right there, folks, particularly considering that Jen and She-Hulk are both sexually active, and both canonically enjoy sex. ( Read more... )

FIC REC

Title: Snape/Daredevil in a Nutshell
Author: tartanshell
Fandom: HP/DD
Excerpt: Two men sit before the drinks. One is a tall gent with long, greasy black hair, dark eyes, and a huge nose. A huge scar mars his neck and face. He is clad in black; sits warily. The other man is masked, wearing a red leather devil costume. He sits with the casual grace of a true master of martial arts and legalese.
Why you should read it: LULZ!!1!

***

Recently Tony Stark apologized to She-Hulk re the whole shooting-her-cousin-into-space-sleeping-with-her-under-false-pretenses-and-depowering-her thing. On CBR writer Peter David said:

Guys...it's very simple. After everything that Tony did to her, she's running around in the red Hulk series like nothing happened. When I first started writing "She-Hulk," I had NO idea she was going to be used in that series, allying with Tony Stark as if the status was quo. In fact, it's entirely possible--considering how early I started working on the book (keep in mind I was writing scripts beyond where Dan had finished scripting)--that not even Marvel knew at the time that She-Hulk was going to be there. So now we've got two wildly different portrayals of She-Hulk in two different books, and I felt I needed to lay at least SOME sort of groundwork for at least the BEGINNINGS of, at best, a truce between Tony and Jen.

You can dissect it into the ground if you want, but given the givens, and considering I didn't want to do something cliched and obvious like having She-Hulk and Iron Man slug it out for 22 pages, this was the best I could do for now.

Which is basically what I thought. *g*

***

Why I Hate Iron Man
He just goes out superheroing with no real impetus, and no real style. He's a walking ray gun, but without the Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon for readers to relate to.

Well. I do actually think that Iron Man has a distinct character. I find it bizarre that he's even suggesting that Iron Man doesn't have a personality. Dude (pre-secret-identity-reveal) had friends, and a nickname, and personal nemeses. You can't have those things without a personality! How many toasters do you know with nemeses? Excluding the blonde bombshell model of toaster. *thinky frown* But this silliness is a post for another day, when I will have examples, and possibly scans prepared.

(I seem to recall a conversation in crimsonquills' journal about the differences between Tony Stark and Iron Man - link?)