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When God hates you and mothers run away
I meant to mention this earlier today, but the day happened: "After the Red Sea" has been highlighted by Bogi Takács as part of eir #diversepoems series. I'm honored.
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handful_ofdust's Tumblr: color photographs of women in the ATS in 1942. Some of those shots could be stills from The Gentle Sex (1943), but they're history.
Have now finished Season Two of Hannibal. Quotingrushthatspeaks: "Rocks fall, everybody Schrödinger." The season finale was extraordinarily beautifully filmed. Have now watched two more episodes of Twin Peaks (1990). It's wonderful; I am watching it with delight. Have also watched the first two episodes of Agent Carter (2014) and should write about them soon, because at the moment my reactions are a mostly positive incoherence centering around pulp sci-fi tropes, role reversals, excellent use of color and costume design, and Peggy Carter punching a lot of people, sometimes while holding a stapler. [edit: see comments!] I wish the show had slightly more budget and more characters of color, but it still has six episodes in which to fix the latter. I believe derspatchel when he says that lobster would have been too expensive to waste on a foley effect in 1946, but if that is my greatest historical complaint about a show, is it ever ahead of the pack. This is probably the most varied amount of television I have watched in a span of two days since I lived somewhere with a TV.
I cannot afford to fall into Flight Rising, but I have now been shown (by Rush) a breeding clan and there are some beautiful dragons in that world.
Courtesy of
handful_ofdust's Tumblr: color photographs of women in the ATS in 1942. Some of those shots could be stills from The Gentle Sex (1943), but they're history.Have now finished Season Two of Hannibal. Quoting
rushthatspeaks: "Rocks fall, everybody Schrödinger." The season finale was extraordinarily beautifully filmed. Have now watched two more episodes of Twin Peaks (1990). It's wonderful; I am watching it with delight. Have also watched the first two episodes of Agent Carter (2014) and should write about them soon, because at the moment my reactions are a mostly positive incoherence centering around pulp sci-fi tropes, role reversals, excellent use of color and costume design, and Peggy Carter punching a lot of people, sometimes while holding a stapler. [edit: see comments!] I wish the show had slightly more budget and more characters of color, but it still has six episodes in which to fix the latter. I believe derspatchel when he says that lobster would have been too expensive to waste on a foley effect in 1946, but if that is my greatest historical complaint about a show, is it ever ahead of the pack. This is probably the most varied amount of television I have watched in a span of two days since I lived somewhere with a TV.I cannot afford to fall into Flight Rising, but I have now been shown (by Rush) a breeding clan and there are some beautiful dragons in that world.
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I have a partly Kel- and Shuos-themed lair on Flight Rising. Some of the dragon-characters might be familiar. ^_^
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Very pretty!
Some of the dragon-characters might be familiar.
Jedao's scarf is great. I can see Kujen has taken great care with his jewelry.
(I don't expect Haiku is connected to anyone in particular, but I find her very attractive. I would probably try to raise Imperials if I decided to throw my life over and play the game. Thetis is well-named.)
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Haiku is a rescue--she was one of those pretty but cheap dragons whom I bought on an impulse. The lizard named her for me so I am especially fond of her for that reason.
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Right, that's hilarious.
Who is Khiruev named for? The rose in his teeth intrigues me.
The lizard named her for me so I am especially fond of her for that reason.
Does the lizard also play Flight Rising, or just look in on your game?
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I also like the fact that they're making an effort to get other women into the story, without undermining the sense that Carter really is one of those pioneers trying to make her way in what amounts to a man's world. She doesn't have a well-developed female social network, but she had a roommate who was feminine and not dissed for it, and she's got a waitress friend who isn't a badass -- I hope we get at least one plotline that involves the place Carter's living now, because that little glimpse into the life of an unmarried woman was excellent. Basically, no, there aren't any women at her workplace . . . but that doesn't mean there are no women in her world. All good.
I should give both Hannibal and Twin Peaks a shot. Right now, though, I'm finishing off The Bletchley Circle, which makes a good pairing with Agent Carter: former GC&CS codebreakers teaming up post-war to solve crimes WITH VECTOR ANALYSIS.
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"I heard he got his personality shot off at Iwo Jima."
I am really enjoying Sousa both as a character and as a narrative element. I'm waiting to see whether he and Peggy and going to cat-and-mouse each other the rest of the season, or whether at some point she's going to take him into her confidence—he's the only person in her office who notices her, so he's going to suspect her eventually if isn't already starting to. He's the one who remarked that the mysterious blonde in the nightclub photos "really knows how to duck a camera." And he responds well when she tells him to back off on the chivalry. He's the closest of any of them to seeing the women men don't see. For all that, I am glad that he is not so far being positioned as a romantic prospect. Nobody so far is being positioned as a romantic prospect, which I think is great.
I am also enjoying the fact that, although Peggy's co-workers are jerks, they're not incompetent. She's ahead of them because she has information they don't, because she has the latitude of someone who's consistently underestimated, and because she's laid some misinformation of her own ("We had to get frogmen to fish him out"), but by the end of the second episode, they're racing toward the same objective. They provide some of the best comic lines in both episodes, but they're not the Keystone Cops, which makes the premise more plausibly textured and raises the stakes for Peggy.
And I love Peggy's physicality and her forthrightness; I love the role reversal of Jarvis being to her as she was to Steve Rogers; I love that she can weaponize anything. Her fight choreography is entirely in keeping with scenes in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011). She doesn't fight like a modern action movie, backflips, leg-sweeps; she fights with her fists, with any sharp or heavy objects she has to hand, with guns if she can get them and her opponent's weight and momentum if she can't, and she fights dirty. She's a strong woman; she's not a small woman; she doesn't handicap herself with a fair fight. I love that Agent Carter treats her two-fisted heroics as exactly that: heroic. Superheroic, the way the narrative and the camera frame her. It's nice.
a roommate who was feminine and not dissed for it
And who worked as a riveter, reminding the audience that Peggy's wartime service was the norm, not the exception.
Basically, no, there aren't any women at her workplace . . . but that doesn't mean there are no women in her world. All good.
Yes. I foresee hilarious clashes between the restrictions of the boarding hotel and the requirements of espionage (seriously, at the rate that nitramene is flying around, I think the Griffith Hotel has a fifty-fifty chance of imploding by the finale), but I was very happy to see her finally accept Angie's offer. I wouldn't mind seeing more of the other girls. Plus it would be nice for Peggy to get close to someone and not have them, you know, die.
Right now, though, I'm finishing off The Bletchley Circle, which makes a good pairing with Agent Carter: former GC&CS codebreakers teaming up post-war to solve crimes WITH VECTOR ANALYSIS.
Yes! I watched the first season and it was terrific. (References to it were made while watching the pilot of Agent Carter with
When I saw Captain America, I really wanted more of Peggy Carter. I know even a short-form serial can crash and burn before it's done—Children of Earth, I'm still looking at you—but I'm hoping this one won't. So far, I am remarkably happy with what I've got.
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They've had some nice, snappy lines. :-)
Sousa's been pleasing me a lot, yeah. I think the way disability makes him invisible is teaching him to see what he probably overlooked before. I hope he does get brought in, maybe not fully by Carter's choice -- he might catch her mid-derring-do -- but either way I suspect he'll roll with it, not hand her over to SSR. Whether or not that turns into romance, I don't know: The Winter Soldier had those interview clips where she talked obliquely about her husband. Sousa would need some key backstory filled in to be that guy, I think; Jarvis is probably Right Out. He might be -- probably is -- somebody else entirely. Which I'm okay with, because it means Sousa and Jarvis will just stay friends, or Sousa might be a temporary love interest who isn't The One. And that's good, too.
Co-workers being competent: YES. This is not the kind of shallow story where Carter is awesome because everybody around her is stupid. They're good at what they do; but so is she, and so far her slight advantages are enough to keep her a half-step ahead. How long that will persist, I don't know. Somewhere in here they have to get around to founding SHIELD, which I suspect means the Powers That Be will eventually find out what Carter's been doing, and (grudgingly) approve. Until then, however, she's going to have to scramble.
(I can't help but having Neil Burnside from The Sandbaggers in my head. He would light Carter on fire for haring off on her own agenda like that, in ways that compromise the directorate . . . but he would also recognize her competence and leverage it long before she hit that extreme. Then again, it's better for Carter that she isn't working for Burnside: she'll stay a good person this way.)
Fight scenes: it bugs me that she was slugging it out atop a moving truck in heels, but I have to just let go of the physics there on account of genre. I do like the fact that when she beat that guy's head in with a stapler, they didn't overplay the "hey, she gets stuck with secretarial work; lookit her using a woman's weapon!" They just had her flip it open and beat his head in, and you can see the overtone there, but it's not shoved in your face. They were more heavy-handed with juxtaposing her stuff in the second episode and the Captain America radio serial, but there were enough angles to that one that I liked the effect.
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I thought he was one of the Howling Commandos, but I don't have a quote filed mentally to back that up. In the comics, she was involved with Gabe Jones. I'd love for that to be movie/TV canon as well.
Sousa would need some key backstory filled in to be that guy, I think; Jarvis is probably Right Out.
I can't tell if we're being set up for some kind of reveal with Jarvis' wife, since we haven't seen her (although I would be tremendously amused if she turned out to be some kind of Columbo-like running gag—she's real, she exists, she's perfectly normal, she's just never, ever onstage), but until that occurs I will go on taking her existence as extra-textual reinforcement that we are to consider Jarvis romantically off-limits, aside from all the in-character reasons it seems unlikely. His chemistry with Peggy is very good and very classically of its genre and I am much more interested in the directions it's promisingly pointing than in the possibility of emotional openness flashing to physical attraction.
Basically, where I've settled on the scale of Romances I Want to See in Fiction: More queer romances, yes, always. More romances on other underrepresented axes, yes, always—people of color, people with disabilities, kinky romances, intersectional romances, all-round non-fetishistic portrayals of people not traditionally allowed romantic leading roles, is what I'm saying. More non-romantic relationships (that are not being used to divert or erase the previous), hell, yes, always, because in the wild they are varied and nuanced and complex and in fiction they so rarely exist. Mainstream fiction is terrible at emotional motivations that are not the importance of family or I'd hit that. Sadly, those are the motivations that most often interest me.
Nonetheless, I think this is a great list.
I can't help but having Neil Burnside from The Sandbaggers in my head.
(I have not seen The Sandbaggers.
it bugs me that she was slugging it out atop a moving truck in heels, but I have to just let go of the physics there on account of genre.
That's pulp!
The weird science is also pulp and I am enjoying how much of it is flying around the show and how little of it is actually sourced or explained—Howard's molecular nitramene, Peggy's safe-cracking wristwatch and knockout lipstick, the Leviathan agent's two-radio radio typewriter (which
I do like the fact that when she beat that guy's head in with a stapler, they didn't overplay the "hey, she gets stuck with secretarial work; lookit her using a woman's weapon!"
Oh. I thought she hit him with the stapler because it was there. I guess that too.
They were more heavy-handed with juxtaposing her stuff in the second episode and the Captain America radio serial, but there were enough angles to that one that I liked the effect.
I loved the radio hour's foley providing the sound effects of Peggy's fight scene. That was beautifully done. The Captain America Adventure Program itself could have been more subtly done, but I like the way it runs as both a commentary on the tropes of the genre, a commentary on the events of the episode itself, and a direct reminder that Peggy lives in a world in which superheroes are both pop culture and real. That interplay was one of the elements I really enjoyed in Captain America and was sorry to see absent from The Winter Soldier until the post-credits scene, so I'm actually hoping it sticks around in Agent Carter. When your world comes with its own meta, you might as well do something with it.
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I thought the way they phrased it left things vague so they could go that route or not; they hadn't committed to anything. But I could be misremembering, and cannot at present fire up the movie to check.
More non-romantic relationships (that are not being used to divert or erase the previous)
Men and women in relationships that are neither antagonistic nor romantic are high on my list of Favorite Things. Friends! They can happen! So can teachers and students, bosses and subordinates (even female bosses and male subordinates, shock, gasp), partners who don't fall into bed together, and so forth.
I think you would love the hell out of The Sandbaggers. It is carried entirely by the script and the acting, because the production values are crap; I forgive its periodic cynicism because the writer is all but confirmed to have been a career intelligence officer writing from experience. (One of his scripts got censored under the Official Secrets Act, because it too closely resembled a real event.) It is my favorite go-to source for actual politicking in fiction, rather than the paper-thin facsimile that is all most writers can manage.
That's pulp!
Oh, sure! It's just a pet peeve of mine, because the default assumption for most media is that women can do kung fu in high heels. (I mean, we can't have them in flat shoes or boots; that wouldn't be sexy.) This show has more justification for it than most, at least, because genre.
I headdesked a bit at the fact that Peggy has a safecracking wristwatch but no communication device better than a bulky radio that alerts the bad guys to her presence. Then again, I can believe Howard Stark's priorities might have gone in such directions.
Oh. I thought she hit him with the stapler because it was there. I guess that too.
And that is what I mean by them not overplaying it. Hell, it might not even have been intentional -- but it worked for me regardless.
The Captain America Adventure Program itself could have been more subtly done
I'm pretty sure it's about as subtle as the real-world examples it models itself on. :-P
When your world comes with its own meta, you might as well do something with it.
Amen!
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Post-comments edit: that should have been "two-way radio typewriter," obviously.
(One of his scripts got censored under the Official Secrets Act, because it too closely resembled a real event.)
Has it been published since?
This show has more justification for it than most, at least, because genre.
I'm hoping someone with a better knowledge of 1940's fashion than myself can answer this question, because I feel like it would have been difficult to leave the house in genuinely flat shoes unless we're talking penny loafers (sneakers as casual wear don't really take off until the '50's) or skipping straight to unearthing the pair of ex-servicewoman's brown boots in your closet, but I also agree that if Agent Carter were a comic book in 1946, of course she'd be fighting hand-to-hand on the roof of a moving car in high heels, so whatever.
Hell, it might not even have been intentional -- but it worked for me regardless.
We could see if anybody mentions it in interviews. If she'd flattened a guy with a file folder, I think it would have registered to me as a play on office work. The stapler was just more ". . . wasn't expecting that."
I'm pretty sure it's about as subtle as the real-world examples it models itself on.
And this question I want to hand to
Amen!
In the meantime, there's always the cast shipping their show.
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Not to my knowledge. They don't say anything about that on the DVD interview with the cast members, anyway, which is the most recent news I have (now well over a decade out of date). Nor, at that point, does anybody seem to have figured out what happened with Mackintosh (the writer) -- he vanished under honest-to-god mysterious circumstances, partway through S3, in a way that genuinely had everybody on the show wondering if he'd defected to the Soviet Union. But apparently when the Iron Curtain fell there was no sign of him there, either, and so far as I know it's still a mystery.
Anyway, if you watch the show and think half of S3 isn't up to snuff, that's because Mackintosh didn't write it. They had to get other people in to finish it out.
Shoes: yeah, I don't expect she even owns flat shoes except for house slippers and maybe some penny loafers. Geez, it says enough about the differences in time period that when I watch The Bletchley Circle, it's weird to me that people are wearing shoes inside the house. Round about high school and my brother's mostly-Asian friends, I got firmly imprinted with "you take them off at the door," and I haven't looked back.
the total token uselessness of "Betty Carver" felt a little overdone to me.
It didn't feel overdone to me -- but I'm willing to grant that might have been it reinforcing my assumptions, rather than accurately representing its own genre.
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Well, that's . . . not a problem suffered by most television shows. Fascinating.
Geez, it says enough about the differences in time period that when I watch The Bletchley Circle, it's weird to me that people are wearing shoes inside the house.
The ubiquity of makeup is personally disorienting to me even when I know that for many people nowadays it's the norm. It has crept up on me over the years that I would have been a lot less gender-conforming if I'd been born a couple of generations earlier than I was. [edit] I don't mean that I am an especially gender-conforming person now; I mean that the parameters have, thank God, shifted.
Round about high school and my brother's mostly-Asian friends, I got firmly imprinted with "you take them off at the door," and I haven't looked back.
My parents have always been like that about shoes, I think just for ease for cleaning. I didn't wear anything on my feet when at home until last winter when it was suddenly slippers or chillblains.
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This points at a can of worms I don't even begin to know how to open, about the interrelationship between the gender roles of a given time period/place and the incidence of transgenderism. It's a thing I've wondered about from time to time, but since our data for transgenderism in the past is, shall we say, a wee bit fragmentary, it's probably an unanswerable question.
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I wrote a fairly lengthy reply to this comment, but it's a quarter to three in the morning. So without, I hope, TMI: my body is frequently a difficult place for me to be in. It's just nice that I don't have to take additional flak every day for not putting on makeup and other visible observances of femininity.
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What you say here is exactly the kind of thing I'm thinking of. The extent to which society enforces a narrow stereotype of a gender has to affect, I would imagine, the extent to which a non-conforming person feels like they are not that gender, as opposed to just being an unusual member of the category. Kind of a spoiler, but in the third book of the Memoirs of Lady Trent (the one that's coming out in a couple of months), Isabella spends some time in a society that a) has a third gender and b) identifies her as a member of that gender. Somebody else asks here whether she thinks that's right, and her response is that she doesn't buy into the cosmological view they have of that concept -- but her behavior does mostly fit what they describe. And where her own culture is concerned, she says that "so long as my society refuses to admit of a concept of femininity that allows for such things [...] one could indeed say that I stand between." She mostly just feels like an unusual woman, but she wouldn't have to go much further out on the spectrum to question her identity as a woman -- whereas if she were in 21st century America, she wouldn't even feel that terribly unusual.
But you'd pretty much have to transplant modern Western notions of transgenderism onto a past century to know whether the incidence of the concept is indeed higher when gender roles are narrower and more stringently enforced. There's a tangle in there of the behavioral side vs. body dysphoria and so forth that I am not remotely qualified to guess at, let alone properly unpack.
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I am not sure about that. All the societal latitude in the world does not ameliorate the problem when it is the body itself that is wrong.
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All of which is long and rambly and not really on the topic of this post, so I apologize for dragging it off-thread. I just think about these things any time I see non-gender-conformist characters in historical media: which ones would call themselves trans if the category existed for them? Which ones would feel more comfortable in their gender if the boundaries were different?
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Of course, presumably the ones who really did identify as men kept up the identity the rest of their lives, so barring accidental reveals, we don't hear about them.
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Semi-related -- last night I listened to the Suspense episode "Blind Date," (short version -- Charles Laughton as a fanboy stalking a vaudeville performer is creepy enough to almost warrant a trigger warning), and noticed that during the afterword-from-our-sponsor that it was the lead actress, June Havoc (that's "Baby June" from Gypsy, btw) who did the pitch for car batteries, with the announcer pointing out that more women were driving than ever before and they were interested in their cars' inner workings. It was 1949, so likely a good many of them were indeed trained mechanics.
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(a) Awesome!
(b) I'll have to listen to that. A two-hander with June Havoc and Charles Laughton sounds great.
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Nine
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Oh, nice. (The tin hat and the sky-watching attitude.)
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Like!
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Thank you!