258.

[peaked]

So, I've been wanting to post a little more about fandom and things I've been reading/watching and figured I might post about this every Monday.

I've had a portion of this post drafted for a few weeks now and figured it was about time to just throw it into the wind.

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I finished Ed Brubaker's The Winter Soldier: The Complete Collection.

I've been waiting for this comic to arrive for over four months (thanks to COVID) and I was not disappointed when I cracked it open and read it. It's crazy to think that this is the comic that inspired Captain America: The Winter Soldier. (Let's not get into how poorly Marvel Studios treats the Marvel comic book writers and artists.)

While I do not have a background in reading Marvel comics, I really enjoyed this. I love Bucky and I love Natasha and I love the world Brubaker built around and with them.

The art was a bit dark for me in some instances where I couldn't quite make out what was going on. I did find some of Natasha's poses to be a touch unbelievable, but I also realise that comics like to draw women in certain ways. I guess we don't have bones in our bodies and are thus just flesh, blood and muscle and we can move with supernatural flexibility?

At least Natasha didn't have a plunging neckline and huge breasts and a big ass for this. I've seen a few of the costumes some Marvel and DC artists put women in and... glad that was a miss here.

WINTERWIDOW. WINTERWIDOW. WINTERWIDOW. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. It made me fall even more in love with them. Bucky loves Natasha so completely. I love that they are a team and they work so well together. I love that Bucky doesn't undermine Natasha in an attempt to "keep her safe". He works with her and admires her and knows that she's his partner through and through.

RED ROOM. I wish we got more of this! I wanted to know MORE. I wanted to know their history, every little bit of who they were to one another. I'm such a sucker for Red Room WinterWidow that I'm just hungry for more. I'm glad we got what we got but it just wasn't enough!

The writing was fantastic and I really enjoyed all the stories. Brubaker has a great knack for action, mystery, espionage and romance, even if the latter was a lot more subtle than the other themes. I appreciated how the romance wasn't so heavy on the page. It really made WinterWidow feel like a real couple that was built on a foundation of more than just sexual attraction.

BUCKY GETTING REPROGRAMMED AND HIS MIND WIPED. HE CHOOSES TO DO THAT BECAUSE HE'S DESPERATE TO GET NATASHA BACK. OH, MAN. I LOVED IT. I loved the Black Widow Hunt stories a lot more than the others. I felt like Leo Novokov was a really great foe, and I wish we got more on Bucky as a trainer of the other soldiers.

NATASHA AS A BALLERINA. I wish we got to see this in the MCU.

Two things I really disliked:

1) "Let's go get our girl" featuring Bucky, Wolverine, Barton... I really wish that line was omitted. I didn't mind it from Bucky because I like the trope, but when it comes from a group of men... I don't know. I just felt like it made Natasha seem overly powerless and that her value to this group of men was their ownership of her? I just didn't like the line at all. "Let's get your girl" in relation to Bucky is fine by me. I like that kind of language in terms of 1:1 relationships, but not 1:many.

2) Natasha was brainwashed and her mind wiped, and it was made very clear that Leo wanted Natasha to fall in love with him. While I don't think anything sexual happened between them, Natasha was still assaulted. I feel like we missed out on the fallout of this. I would've liked some closure for her as a character and for this particular storyline because it is extremely icky and I felt that Brubaker focused too much on Bucky's angst about it.

At times, Natasha didn't feel like she was her own person outside of her relationships with men.

WHAT WAS THAT ENDING? HOW IS THAT THE END? I love that Bucky refuses to have Natasha's mind messed with any further, even if it meant that she could remember him. That character choice is why I love Bucky so much. He is so cognizant of the ramifications of taking away someone's choices. He could be selfish and want Natasha back as she was before, but he thinks of her and her own trauma and puts that in front of his own personal grief.

I do wish we got a continuation of this storyline. I love this trope and I want them to get back together! WHY WAS THIS THE END?

I hope to read more Marvel Comics. (Does anyone have good recs for Bucky, Natasha, Yelena, Peter, Wanda and Elektra?) This was a lot of fun to see how characters who may never interact in the MCU interact in Marvel 616. (This is Marvel 616, right? Someone teach me! I tried to Google and it was hella confusing.)

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I also finished watching Raising Dion. This is a fun superhero show that's apparently based on comics. It's about a regular woman who is the mother of a superpowered son and has to help him navigate his powers and his grief for his late father.

This show is so underrated and I HATE IT. Alisha Wainwright is phenomenal in this. We have an all African American cast with a caucasian man supporting. THIS IS GREAT REPRESENTATION. An African American woman gets to wear her hair natural! We get to experience what it is to be an African American in America. IT'S SO GOOD. (We also have an Asian woman lead, who I wish got fleshed out a little more.)

The child actors are great. I think they carry their scenes well and have a lot of fun on screen. I love the kids' chemistry together and how they're allowed to be kids. The first season made me sad with how Dion was bullied by other kids, but this fortunately ends with Dion finding his own group of friends and us being able to focus on them supporting one another.

There's a little girl with disability who has her own arc and isn't defined by her disability. I wish we got to learn more about her and her life because I think it's too rare in 2022 for us to see people with disability on screen with their characters playing pivotal roles in stories.

Nicole and Dion have a really great relationship. Nicole even had a great conversation with him about boundaries and consent, which I felt was very powerful and a conversation we need to see more on tv.

Season 1 was an infinitely better season than season 2 because I feel like the storyline was written more tightly. I wish season 2 was a little more coherent in its plot. It had the potential but it didn't take it by the horns.

Pat as a character is very bland in performance. I thought it was really great that he was the Crooked Man and that he was aware that he had killed Mark and the other superpowered people, and I liked the implication in season 1 that he was fully in control and dictated by his newfound hunger through his power. The fact that he knew what he did and he still tried to get close to Nicole and Dion was stellar imo.

What I didn't like in season 2 was what I felt was a retcon of his powerset. The Crooked Man was a Crooked Energy that could possess someone else. While the Brayden actor did well with being the bad guy in season 2, I felt like the lore of the Crooked Man and Pat's arc was very bland with this choice.

Does Pat have electricity-based powers? Why does he not have his own powerset outside of Crooked Energy but the Crooked Energy could overtake Brayden who can control minds? I feel like Pat's whole character is a bit confusing. I just wish that they hadn't made the Crooked Energy its own entity. I liked it a lot more when it was just Pat. It was a lot simpler.

Why couldn't Pat be the Crooked Man wherein he chose to give in to his darkness and he owned his choices? I really didn't like that Pat was framed for a redemption arc in season 2 and then he just accepted the Crooked Energy back into his body by the end of it. I know the story wanted me to be like "Well, he's a bad guy now", but Pat was always a bad guy in season 2. Just because he was a white man who was a nerd asking for comics while detained and he helped find a cure for Nicole didn't make up for the fact he hunted down superpowered people and killed them. I felt like his character was a little inconsistent. Yes, the BIONA peeps were so mean to him, but he deserved their distrust considering his actions as the Crooked Man.

I just felt like Pat's character was a mess. Perhaps if he was portrayed by another actor who could amplify the material in season 2, I'd have liked it a lot more and would've bought into the fact that he was ultimately swayed by the Crooked Energy... but given that Brayden was able to resist him, it really speaks on Pat as a character that he was so overtaken by him.

Tevin and Nicole deserve more scenes and more of a romantic storyline. I liked Tevin (he's a hottie) and I like that Nicole was paired with someone who wasn't skeevy like Pat. I didn't like the pacing of their relationship. I felt like we missed out on seeing them butt heads, sparks fly and having them court one another. (I liked their meet-cute so much and wanted their bantering extended. They had great enemies-to-lovers potential.)

I don't like the Chosen One storyline where one person out of a whole bunch of people is Uber Powerful. I do like Dion as a character and I like his powers, but I do hope we see more superpowered people who have a powerful powerset. Dion being Uber Special is a trope I thoroughly dislike in these types of stories.

I do think the fact that season 2 was filmed two years later and thus set two years after season 1 didn't do it any favours, but I understand that this might have happened because of COVID. I felt like we missed out on some developments in the two years we didn't get to see.

One last note: I love that season 1 ended on the note that energy was always with you and that it heavily implied that those who had died were always with you. I hope we get to see Mark again, but even if we don't, I really liked that message.

I really hope we get to a season 3!

I would recommend this show if you like superpowers in modern society and characters having real problems. It definitely doesn't have alien showdowns (yet).

*

For Friday night movie night, we ended up watching The Mighty Ducks which was such a great nostalgic choice. I remember this franchise made me want to play hockey (this is not a career that even took off for me) and ice skate (something I very rarely do). While some of it is unbelievable (surely, hockey is a non-contact sport?), I really loved it. (The romance between Gordon and Charlie's mum was shoehorned in and so bad.)

QUACK QUACK QUACK.

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I ended up watching Turning Red and… I don't think I have words to say how good this movie is, so I will do very brief dot points in a non-spoilery context.

The normalisation of talking about periods was everything to me. We need to normalise this. The conversation that happened reminded me of the one I had with my mum where it was just so very pro-"your body is changing and I am here to help you" and I think it's very important for families with young girls who are going to menstruate to have these conversations in a positive tone.

Periods are normal ffs.

The story of a mother/daughter relationship was so beautiful. Ming and Mei's familial journey was just so poignant and the personal journeys they went through were beautiful.

The female friendships in this film are so good. No one is jealous of the other. No one is seen as lesser. It's filled with girl power and girls supporting girls. It's such a healthy representation of girls entering girlhood.

I really liked how no one was classified as the bad guy and that misunderstandings, intergenerational trauma and personal baggage were the villain.

It was so great to see Chinese culture explored and celebrated so positively. As someone who isn't Chinese, I felt the story was so beautifully constructed and really embodied what I knew about the culture from a friend.

The panda animation was really cute. The animation overall was stunning. It really did capture what I felt was very authentic visually for the Chinese culture.

The only issue I have is that it's set in 2002. I had to do a double-take. Of course, there's nothing wrong with that. It just made me feel hella old seeing those Nokia flip phones.

It disappoints me that some people have slammed this movie for its period talk and exploration of growing up, but I can safely say (with a lot of disappointment) that racism and misogyny have dictated a lot of those opinions. This is one of Disney's best movies.