Kiss My Wonder Woman

I know you’re all impatient to get to talking about Day of the Doctor, or at least I am, but I need a little bit longer to cook my opinion, so in the meantime, let’s talk about one of my absolute favorite animated films, and also one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen.

You guessed it (from the title), we’re talking about The Emperor’s New Groove.

One of the lesser known Disney films, The Emperor’s New Groove came out in 2000, just as Disney was starting to slide into mediocrity again at the tail end of its “Renaissance”. Starring David Spade as the voice of Kuzco, an Incan emperor in pre-colonial South America, the story is weird, original, and surprisingly progressive for Disney. Which was borne out when the film was released to solid numbers, but bad ones for Disney. The company made a couple of direct-to-video sequals, then pretty much just let this thing rot.

Which is a real shame, because digging in a little deeper, the film has a couple of things very few other Disney films, or kids films at all, can claim: actually good life lessons.

Also it’s hilarious.

I figure you know what I’m talking about. When you start to think at all critically about children’s films you begin to realize that most of the morals here are either neutral in their morality or actually downright harmful, the kind of thing you wouldn’t want any child to learn, no matter how annoying he is.

I’m talking about how Beauty and the Beast condones domestic violence, and how The Little Mermaid is about changing yourself to be more attractive (and also stalking), and how Sleeping Beauty and Snow White both glorify date rape, and Pocohontas is blearily racist, and so is Peter Pan, and so on and so on and so on.

Really, when you come down to it, there aren’t very many kids’ movies that don’t have a disastrous moral lesson attached.

Except for this one. Which is pretty funny. The movie, which was originally conceived as a more standard Disney flick based around Hans Christian Anderson’s story “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, eventually ended up as both a surrealist exploration of South America, and as one of the few childrens’ movies with a decent ending.

Like I said above, the movie is about Kuzco, an Incan emperor, who rules absolutely and loves every single second of it. Having been considered a divine leader since his birth, Kuzco has a sense of entitlement big enough to choke a man. He has no sense of proportion or humility. His people adore him because they have to, and Kuzco sees nothing wrong with that. So when he wants to build a new summer palace, the emperor sees nothing wrong with picking a spot already occupied: a sweet little mountaintop village, inhabited by the gentle farmer Pacha (John Goodman) and his family.

Unfortunately for Kuzco, his chief advisor, Yzma (Eartha Kitt), kind of sort of hates his guts with the fire of a thousand suns, and is plotting to kill him. But she can’t just kill him kill him, mostly because that isn’t diabolical enough for her. She’s not the most complex of villains.

Eventually, Yzma decides to just poison Kuzco. That way he’ll die and she can rule the empire. But since her assistant, Kronk (Patrick Warburton), was chosen for his studly good looks rather than his mental capacities, it all goes wrong and instead of ending up dead, Kuzco ends up a llama. And then instead of ending up drowned, Kuzco winds up in a sack on the back of Pacha’s cart, headed out of the city.

Hijinks ensue.

Or rather, Yzma decides that if Kuzco isn’t really dead then they have to go after him and finish the job. But Kuzco, who wakes up a llama and is very displeased, has made a deal with Pacha to help him get back to the palace. If Pacha gets him there in one piece, then he’ll agree to build his summer palace somewhere else. Yay!

What commences is a race to the finish line, full of weird adventures, emotional growth, and lots of jokes that only adults will get. Kuzco tries to go back on his word about every five minutes, while Pacha deeply questions his life choices and why he is so honorable as to save the life of a man (llama) who is perfectly happy ruining his. Yzma and Kronk are hilarious and diabolical – well, Yzma is diabolical while Kronk is mostly good-natured and lovable – and the whole story flows with a sort of zingy, madcap feel.

Which is to say that it’s very good and I like it. But the ending is what I like best.

By the end of the film, our heroes have finally made their way back to the palace, only to find Kronk and Yzma waiting for them with the proper potion to turn Kuzco human again. There’s a scuffle, some attempts at magic, and finally a decision. Pacha hangs from the edge of a ledge, dangling and about to fall to his death. The vial that contains the all important potion hangs off of another ledge. Kuzco can’t reach both. What does he do?

Well, this is a Disney movie, so he saves Pacha, and then together they get the other potion. All good and standard, right? Kuzco learns his lesson and builds his summer palace somewhere else, Yzma gets turned into a cat, and Kronk gets to go off and live a life of peace and quiet and teaching small children how to talk to squirrels.

Have I mentioned that Kronk is my favorite character? Because Kronk is my favorite character. In pretty much everything. We’ll get to that more in a bit.

So Kuzco learns his lesson, that his problems aren’t actually the center of the world, and everyone gets a nice happy ending. And that’s good, don’t get me wrong. That does in fact happen. But it’s a little bit more subversive than that. You see, the ending, where we actually get to see that Kuzco has learned his lesson shows us that in addition to learning that Pacha’s livelihood has value and that he shouldn’t be so selfish, Kuzco actually comes to repudiate his status as emperor. Not insofar as he actually gives up the throne, but enough that instead of building a summer palace (near Pacha’s house, instead of on top of it), Kuzco builds a little hut.

Okay, I get that this seems really tiny and insignificant, but it’s not. It says something a lot deeper than, well, pretty much everything else.

It means that Kuzco didn’t just learn humility, he also decided that some of the trappings of his office were actually unfair. He didn’t inherently deserve more than Pacha did. And so, he decided to be Pacha’s equal. That is big, guys. Bigger than big. That’s huge.

I mean, we talk a lot about the real hidden messages in movies on here, but I think this is one of the cooler ones. Kuzco comes out of his ordeal with a new perspective on life, and it’s one that is shockingly anti-wealth. Which is great. The Emperor’s New Groove is a story about a spoiled young boy who learns humility, respect for others, and that material goods only matter insofar as you let them.

Which is awesome, and also probably explains why Disney is so happy to forget about this movie. Because how the hell do you merchandise that?

One last thing before I go. Kronk. Let’s talk about Kronk. Or, more specifically, let’s talk about how Kronk, despite being kind of sort of the bad guy, is actually the most moral person in the entire film. I just, I just love him. I love how he’s super sensitive and sweet, how he looks like he should be Yzma’s henchman and muscle, and he’s clearly supposed to be, but Kronk is much happier making spinach puffs and hosting dinner parties and making friends with the wildlife. Basically, I love Kronk because instead of the normal henchman role, we got a huggy, sweet, happy man-child who just wants to do the right thing. And that’s fabulous. Also surprisingly progressive. So yay on all fronts.

The movie even passes the Bechdel Test. And all of the characters are non-white. And it takes place in pre-colonial South America. It’s weird and weird and weird and hilarious and I love it.

Okay. I’ll stop talking about this now.

Maybe.

Go watch it.

It’s kind of hard to believe that the Doctor Who 50^th Anniversary Special has now come and gone. As a latecomer to the party, I’ve still been a fan of the show for a full third of my life, and even went so far as to write my college thesis on it. That thesis? Was how I ended up doing this, talking to all of you nice people about popular culture. So, sometimes it’s hard to stop and think about how much Doctor Who has impacted my life.

Well, now that that’s out of the way, let’s rip this special to shreds!

I kid. Somewhat. The Anniversary Special, heretofore to be referred to as “The Day of the Doctor” was good, fun, very Whovian, and a pleasant romp through some nice nostalgic bits of Old and New Who. There were guest appearances, lots of Doctors, and a reference to the running gag with Queen Elizabeth I. All that is lovely.

But there were things, other things, that weren’t so lovely. Not that anything in the special was awful or offensive or anything like that, just that, well, I wanted more. I liked it, but I didn’t love it. I didn’t cry. And I have it on good authority that I’m not actually dead inside, so it wasn’t just me. This special didn’t connect to me in the way I really wanted it to. And I think I know why.

If you’re reading this, I assume you’ve watched “The Day of the Doctor” and therefore will not be recapping it. But generally, SPOILERS.

There are a lot of parts of the special that I quite liked. I enjoyed getting to see pieces of Old Whowoven in with the new, and honestly it was refreshing to get to see bits of Gallifrey again. While I appreciate the decision the show made to separate The Doctor from his home planet in the new series, I miss the place. It’s a cool place, and there were always interesting stories to tell there. So, I liked that we went back.

I thought the premise of the episode, that The Doctor must make a moral choice about whether the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, was very timely and emotionally convicting, but I do think that it stumbled a bit in execution. While I loved all the parts with John Hurt and Billie Piper snarking at each other and having deep philosophical debates, I hated all the stuff with the Zygons, which was cheesy, and was utterly bored by Elizabeth’s inclusion in the plot. Didn’t need her. Just made it more confusing. Like always.

Actually, while I enjoyed the episode, especially the parts where John Hurt’s Doctor got to stare into his own future and confront the reality of his choices, I felt a bit let down emotionally. It was all just so…Moffat. You know what I mean?

Maybe you don’t. Here’s what I mean: I mean that it was all flash, and no real substance. It was clever, full of witty lines and silly moments, with lots of running and zippy dialogue and beautiful women saying just the right thing at just the right time. It had space art and the importance of saving children and Billie Piper vamping it up in weirdly post-apocalyptic sweaters.

But it didn’t make me cry. It didn’t have emotion, real emotion at its heart.

I’m not entirely sure why this special didn’t emotionally connect for me. It might be because neither Smith nor Tennant is really “my” Doctor – I swear fealty to Christopher Eccleston, who wasn’t in this one. Or it could be because even though we felt a little bit of the chaos on Gallifrey as the Time War raged we’ve never actually gotten a really good feeling of what that war was all about, and therefore an entire episode debating the moral intricacies of a conflict we really know nothing about was kind of weird.

Or it could be that I am sick and tired of hearing about the damn Time War, and I want us to talk about something else. Because I’m tired of The Doctor being a “lonely god” or “the only one who can save us now” and I want him to just be The Doctor again, a weirdo who stole a time machine because he didn’t want to be a grownup anymore. I miss The Doctor helping people not because he’s the only one who can, but because he’s in the neighborhood and it’s the right thing to do.

I miss the everyday courage of Doctor Who. I’ve had my fill of prophecies and universe saving heroics. I want The Doctor to help a shopgirl see the stars, or try desperately to get a flight attendant to the airport on time, only to constantly be hijacked off into time and space. I want The Doctor to do normal things with normal people and have them be extraordinary for no other reason than that they might as well be. I’m done with exceptionalism. I want The Doctor to be a man again.

Again, this could just be me, but I really don’t think it is. Like I said in the Rose Tyler article, I love characters who are ordinary people put in extraordinary circumstances. The Doctor’s never going to be exactly normal, sure, but he can be normal-esque. He doesn’t really have any special skills, does he? And his preferred weapon is a really useful screwdriver. He runs from his problems. He’s just like half my ex-boyfriends in that sense.

What I mean is, I want to be able to relate to The Doctor. I think we’ve missed that. We’ve gone way too far in the other direction. And having Clara be the companion, pretty, perfect Clara, certainly doesn’t help.

Because Clara always knows the right thing to say. She’s the one who opens the door everyone else thinks is locked. She can tell when The Doctor’s about to make a decision and talk him around about it. She can do anything. She’s magic.

I mean she’s literally magic. We established that last season. And have I mentioned how much I hate that? Because I do. I really do. Can’t we have someone normal on this show for once? Seriously. I am really sick of everyone having a destiny or an epic journey or some kind of “only _____ in the universe” deal going on. It’s exhausting.

Speaking of exhausting, it was a bit tiring seeing Matt Smith and David Tennant enthuse at each other during the show. While both of them have very different takes on The Doctor, their styles are similar enough that having both on screen at the same time was hard. It was just so…bouncy. Flippant. Hair gelled.

Though, seeing the two of them together did give me the lovely mental image of seeing Christopher Eccleston and Peter Capaldi being The Doctor at each other, all repressed swearing and angry eyebrows. And that made me happy.

On the list of things I actually quite liked about the special, and I know this one is controversial, I personally loved that Rose wasn’t actually Rose in this. I am aware that this is virtually heresy, especially since I have established that I love her character, but hear me out.

I didn’t want Moffat to really get his hands on Rose to begin with, because I don’t trust him, but also because I quite like where Rose ended up. I mean, think about it. She lives in a parallel reality where her mother and father are alive, happy, and together. Where she has a baby brother and a job she loves. Where people ride around in zeppelins. Oh, and she happens to live with another version of The Doctor, one who can kiss her and love her and grow old with her.

I really, really didn’t want to see a story where Rose wasn’t in that happy world anymore. I want her in that world. It’s a good world.

So seeing that Rose wasn’t Rose here, but rather an Interface taking Rose’s shape was pretty cool. It meant that we got some nice Billie Piper action, but that it didn’t take over the story. Also cool? The idea that after The Doctor regenerated into his next form (Eccleston’s Doctor) he retained some vague memory of a “bad wolf” and a pretty blonde girl. And then he met Rose.

I do like that it comes full circle there.

And I have to admit that I like that the whole thing about The Doctor murdering everyone he’d ever known has finally been resolved. That’s a good thing. Maybe we can get away from the lonely god stuff now. Please, please let us get away from it.

But here’s my real disappointment with “The Day of the Doctor”: it wasn’t as good as the story I had in my head. And that’s always a bummer.

Now, the story in my head, what they could have done, though not what I actually expected them to do, isn’t particularly filled out, but I think it stands. I didn’t want to hear about the Time War. I didn’t want to discover a new, unspoken regeneration. And I really didn’t want to see David Tennant’s Doctor kissing people to figure out if they’re Zygons or not.

No, I wanted to see The Doctor before he became The Doctor. I wanted to see what he was running from all those years ago. I wanted to see the man before.

Imagine that John Hurt wasn’t playing another regeneration of The Doctor, but rather an earlier age of a regeneration we’d already met. By that I mean, his first regeneration. That John Hurt was playing The Doctor before he was The Doctor, back when he went by his real name, when he was friends with The Master (really friends), and when he lived on Gallifrey. What happened? What was so wrong that he ran and never stopped running?

What did he do that made him decide to never ever do any harm again?

That was what I wanted to see. And while I can appreciate that this episode was very clever and pretty and well done, which it was, it wasn’t what I actually wanted to know. And none of it touched my heart.

Call me a romantic, but aren’t things like anniversaries supposed to be about heart? Isn’t something like the fiftieth anniversary supposed to let you feel the things you’ve always loved about the show, and to drag your emotions around? I don’t want something clever. I want something true.

I also want Moffat to not be the showrunner anymore, to be honest. I think it’s time we had a bit more feeling and a bit less clever.

Accurate depictions of me yesterday.

I was going to have a real article today. Honest. But then it turned out that I could go see an adorable little two bedroom in a cute town that would be closer to work and screw everything that takes precedence. So. Entertain yourselves.

Or shop or do whatever you were already doing. I trust you.

Mostly.

Accurate depiction of house hunting.

Oh gosh guys, we're dragging towards the finish line here. It's been a crazy couple of weeks but the end is finally in sight, so thank you for all bearing with me, and I truly hope that we're coming up on a more peaceful era. Or at least some peace and quiet until Christmas. That would be nice.

Anyway, pilot season is finally starting to come to an end! Or, well, the actual pilot season ended a while ago, but our coverage of it is coming to an end soon. So that's nice. Today we're talking about Almost Human, then in the next week or so we'll cover American Horror Story: Coven and Masters of Sex and then we're done. Done. I can't believe it.

Well, done until we finish covering all those shows that come back after Christmas. Ah, television. It never stops, does it?

So. Almost Human. As you might know, the show takes place several hundred years in the future, as mankind is experiencing another jump in technological capabilities. Similar to what happened with computers, the technology is advancing much more quickly than the law is, and as a result there's a whole new ground for organized crime and other such degenerate things. The police force is woefully inadequate to keep up with both the evolving technology and the evolving crime that goes along with it, so they institute a new policy: all human police officers must be paired with an android officer.

And there you have it. That's the premise for the show.

The actual story focuses on one cop in particular, Detective John Kennex (Karl Urban), who has just returned to work after a seventeen month coma and period of rehabilitation. He's desperate to find the crime syndicate that put him in the coma and cost him his leg as well as his human partner, and he's suspicious that his girlfriend of the time is the one who betrayed them. Also, because an android refused to treat his partner and left them to die, John hates androids with a passion. He has a tendency to throw them out of moving cars. Charming guy.

Unfortunately for John, you can't be a police officer these days without an android partner, and since he murdered his last one, John gets stuck with the reject: Dorian (Michael Ealy). Dorian, or DRN, is a previous model of detective android, one that the makers rejected for being a little too human. They tried to make the droids as lifelike as possible, only to recoil in horror when that meant that their robotic slaves would occasionally go nuts and kill people. Because, as it turns out, people do that.

Dorian has a bad rep as a malfunctioning droid, but ironically that's what makes John like him. Plus, Dorian turns out to be a lot better at the whole detecting thing than most droids. He's intuitive and interesting and kind of weird. It's hard not to like Dorian, which I think is the point.

In the first episode, John and Dorian try to track down the syndicate that nearly killed him. The syndicate has been in hiding for years, and has just now suspiciously resurfaced. John is determined to bring them down, but it seems the syndicate is determined to bring down the police. They set a number of elaborate traps all designed to cut down on the police force before attacking the police headquarters itself. Only John and Dorian figure it out in time to save everyone and stop the syndicate from getting what they want: a mysterious piece of evidence.

It seems that this is the arc-plot of the show, which is cool, but ultimately a little unfulfilling. The mystery is so darn mysterious that we don't actually know what they're looking for, or why, or why it's really bad that they get it. We're just told that they're the bad guys, and it can't be anything good, right?

That's the basic frame of the show. In execution, it's a hybrid, with some episodic elements, like the crime of the week, and more serialized parts, like John's continuing character development, and whatever is going on with the syndicate. It has a fairly interesting cast, with Lili Taylor playing the police chief, and Minka Kelly stepping in as a fellow detective who is kind to Dorian and attracted to John (who can blame her?). But there is one problem.

I know. There's always a problem.

That problem? The only main character of color happens to be the only main non-human character. You get what I'm saying? I don't think this is intentional at all, mind you. In fact, I think it's great that they chose to cast Michael Ealy as Dorian. It's a great part and he plays it very well. But the fact that the rest of the cast is so overwhelmingly white means that Dorian's casting becomes a plot point. It becomes a little uncomfortable spot that the robot character, the one who isn't quite human, is played by a black man, from a people group that were historically considered not human and put in positions of demeaning slavery or servitude.

Unintentional racism? Yeah. It's a thing. And, unfortunately, it's a thing in this show as well. Really, though the problem has to do with the whole framework the casting directors are working under.

It's pretty well known in Hollywood, though no one likes to admit it, that if race isn't specified in the casting brief or in the script (I used to work in a talent agency, I know this for a fact), then it means white. I mean, it probably doesn't mean white, but that's what most casting directors and agents will read. No race listed? Must be white.

That's why it's so hard to find a properly diverse show on television. It's not because there aren't as many good actors of color, or that they're inherently better for different roles. That's total crap. Also? If gender is unspecified, it means male. This is the society we live in, where white and male is the default setting and everyone else is the deviation from the norm.

So my guess is that because the script didn't specify that more of the characters were non-white, and because they'd already cast a black man as one of the show leads, the casting directors and the showrunners figured they're good. They've done their job. Have your non-racist show, everybody!

Unfortunately, that's really not enough. It's not enough to say that because you cast one man of color in a show that the whole thing is therefore above scrutiny. There's no such thing as above scrutiny. And besides, shouldn't we expect better of our casting directors, and agents, and screenwriters? If we want to see more characters of color, and female characters for that matter, then a huge part of this means that we need to be vocal in our displeasure. Because maybe, just maybe, if we complain about this, someone will notice and think - hey! It doesn't say what race this character is supposed to be! That means I could cast anyone. Anyone. Wow!

It works for Sleepy Hollow is all I'm saying.

The other really big problem with the show is one that I have slightly more hope of seeing fixed in the near future. Namely that I am not yet emotionally invested in the story. Oh, it's cool and all, and I really like Dorian and John, but I don't yet understand why their struggle is important.

What's so bad about all these crime bosses? I mean, I get that some of them are really obviously criminal, and setting up bombs is terrible, that's not really a question, but what precisely are we supposed to be angry about? Why are they doing it?

I like my villains to have motivation, thank you very much, so that I can understand them while I object to them, and these guys so far really don't have a whole lot going for them. They're just bad, in a generic and mildly frightening way. You can do better, show!

On the positive side, I do appreciate that John Kennex is an amputee having trouble adjusting to his synthetic limb. Not only does it make him a less generic character (which is good, and he needs that), it explores interesting issues having to do with self-image and bodies of choice. Plus, always nice to see a protagonist who isn't just obviously able-bodied. A little bit of depth there. But you could always do more, show. Always, always do more.

And then diversify your casting, for crying out loud. Because right now, you're being very racist, if only by accident, and I would like you to stop that. Thank you.

You know, at some point I promise I'll write about a movie I don't love unconditionally for this segment (probably starting next week, actually - I'm eyeing you, Pocohontas), but for this week, let's delve deeply back into my little corner of nostalgia, shall we?

Prince of Egypt is an animated film, ostensibly made for children, that does an amazing job of telling the Judeo-Christian story of Moses and his leadership over the Israelites as they walked out of Egypt and into the Promised Land. Most of you probably know the story at least a little bit. The Israelites were slaves in Egypt for hundreds of years, until God called upon Moses, a Hebrew who had been raised in the Pharaoh's own house then cast out into exile, to come before Pharaoh and tell him to let the Israelites go. Understandably, Pharaoh refused, and God rained down ten plagues of grossness upon the people of Egypt until Pharaoh relented.

And then the Israelites, who were exceptionally human, proceeded to complain about their living conditions in the desert and suggest going back to Egypt. Oh, and build idols to gods other than the one that got them out of Egypt, and bitch at Moses, and generally kind of suck. Like people do.

That part isn't in the movie, though it does appear in the even less kid-friendly The Ten Commandments, but the rest of the film is pretty spot on with the accepted accounts. This makes sense, as the film Prince of Egypt was actually created as a semi-vanity project by director Stephen Spielburg, an attempt to entertain and educate people about the basic tenets of historical Judaism (and, by extension, Christianity). Also, it's a good movie.

Not a particularly kid friendly film, however, and that's what I want to focus on here. Because while we in America would see a lot of things about this movie that are "objectionable" when you consider its intended audience, in reality, they're kind of not all that bad. It's just that we have a weird tendency over here to coddle our young, and this film really flies in the face of that. But more on that later.

Prince of Egypt, like I said, is about the story of Moses. And not just Moses as high priest and prophet of Israel, the film is about Moses the man. Who he was and how he became the one to lead Israel. It starts with baby Moses being smuggled away from Pharaoh's guards, as the time had come for a population quell. The guards were to kill every child under the age of two or so that the Hebrews did not become "too numerous". And Moses' mom has a pretty reasonable desire to spare her son this fate. So she sticks him in a basket, prays hard, and sends him off down the river. (All to a kicking musical soundtrack, it should be noted. The music in this film is amazing.)

Moses' basket washes up on the steps of Pharaoh's palace and is picked up by none other than Pharaoh's wife (Helen Mirren), who figures, eh, what the hell, now she has another son. And so Moses is raised in the Pharaoh's household as one of his own sons.

The movie then skips forward to show us Moses as a young man, now voiced by Val Kilmer. He and Rameses (Ralph Fiennes) are fun, playful men who love to race their chariots, play practical jokes on the priests, and generally cause havoc. Their father, Seti (Patrick Stewart), despairs of both of them and seeks to instill in them a sense of responsibility, to varying degrees of success. Moses isn't such a bad guy, just a privileged kid who needs to work some stuff out, as we find when he helps a slave girl (Tzipporah, voiced by Michelle Pfieffer) to escape. But in that same scene he runs into Miriam (Sandra Bullock) and Aaron (Jeff Goldblum), his birth siblings. They recognize him and Miriam calls him out on their relationship. Moses goes home with a massive identity crisis looming.

Said crisis hits full on when he asks his father point blank for the truth, and Seti confirms it. Not only is Moses definitely adopted, he's the only survivor of the Hebrew slaughter. Understandably, this throws him for a hell of a loop and a finds himself reeling with no idea what to do. And in short order he manages to act out so much he gets his butt exiled. Into the desert. For speaking against Pharaoh in support of a slave.

Moses goes out into the desert, nearly dies in a sandstorm, and finds himself at a watering hole sticking his head in the trough next to a group of sheep, then saving a couple of girls from some bandits, and falling into a well, only to be saved by - wait for it - Tzipporah! Her family takes him in, against her intense desires, and romance very slowly blooms. They get married. They're happy. And then God comes knocking.

Or rather, he comes in a burning bush and totally blows Moses head away. Moses is given a holy mission - go to Egypt and tell Pharaoh to let the Hebrews go. It's total suicide, and Moses is absolutely going to do it. Tzipporah isn't about to let her husband get himself killed, so she comes along. And it's back to Egypt we go.

Rameses, now Pharaoh, gives Moses a great welcome home. That is, until Moses drops the whole "Free all of your slaves right now or else," bombshell. Then it's on. Rameses isn't budging, and neither is Moses, and what follows is depressing and horrifying and important. The plagues fall. People die. Lots of people. And finally, Pharaoh frees his slaves.

Only to change his mind and chase after them, prompting the race through the Red Sea (and the accompanying parting thereof) and the utter devastation of Pharaoh's army. But really, the story is mostly over when Pharaoh frees his slaves. Why? Because that's when Moses' character development is really done. He's done the thing God commanded him to do, he's lived up to the position of privilege he was given, and he's changed the world for the better. So yay on him.

It's a beautiful movie, in all the senses of the word. The visuals are stunning, the music is amazing, and the voice acting is some of the best I've heard. The story is wonderful, even if I am a little bit biased. And it's just the kind of movie that needs to exist. Hell, it even passes the Bechdel Test and the Race Test. So, you know, win!

But.

It's not very happy, is it? This is a film about systematic injustice, oppression, slavery, mass death, and war. It's about families turning against each other, about God asking men to do things that are essentially suicidal, about choosing some higher cause over that of your own safety. It's about sacrifice and bravery and did I mention that there's a lot of death? There's whipping and murder and sorcery and rivers of blood. It's not a happy story.

Which is precisely why it should be a kids movie. Hear me out. This is not a happy story, and it was never supposed to be a happy story. We don't tell the story of Moses and the Israelites in order to have a nice moment about how God made everything okay and nothing was ever bad again. That would completely miss the point. The point of the story is that sometimes even doing the right thing is hard, and difficult, and painful. That doesn't make it the wrong thing to do. And sometimes the people you're saving suck. Sometimes the person saving you is a complete schmo who doesn't know what he's doing. Sometimes you're completely relying on God because you're stuck between a crazy army and an ocean and you can't swim. Sometimes life is not happy.

Scratch that. Life is never as easy as they make it seem on TV. And that's not a bad thing. We seem to think it is, but it isn't. If life were that easy, the kind of easy where nothing ever really hurts and there is no sadness or tears, then nothing would ever really pierce our hearts in joy either. We need both, at least for now.

So, why is this an important movie for kids to see? Precisely because it's bloody and sad and full of death and killing. It's not a happy story, and it's important for kids to know that not every story is full of sweetness and light. It's honest. And scary, and true.

I, for one, would much rather that my kids grow up knowing that than that they grow up believing that if they wish hard enough they'll get superpowers and be able to race in the Indy 500 without a car. Just saying.

A while back I wrote about Alanna the Lionness from the Song of the Lionness quartet by Tamora Pierce. I talked about how Alanna was an interesting character not only because she became the first female knight in hundreds of years in her fictional home country of Tortall, but also because she is so darned magical, and, well, exceptional. She’s an intentional feminist figure, a woman breaking down the barriers of sex, and she’s very very good at it.

But here’s the thing: I have never really felt like an Alanna, personally. I don’t feel like I’m that one person in a million who will prove the haters wrong once and for all. I’m not magical or extra-super-duper special. Or, maybe I am, but it’s a quieter kind of special.

This is a common problem in narratives about women who overcome great obstacles to break down gender boundaries. Or really in any narrative about an exceptional person who battles prejudice to prove the haters wrong. The point always comes when you have to think, “Well, yeah. But what about everyone else who isn’t an exception?”

That’s where Pierce’s followup quartet, Protector of the Small comes in. The story follows Keladry of Mindelan, the first female knight in Tortall after Alanna tricks her way through. She’s the first girl to openly go into page training and seek her knighthood, and she’s kind of blissfully ordinary. I mean, not completely, because that would be boring, but in comparison to Alanna? She’s a veritable pigeon of normalcy.

Kel starts out the series as the person we all felt like at age ten. Awkward in her own body, frustrated that her older siblings keep playing jokes on her or telling her she’s too little. She’s spent the past six years in the Yamani Islands (basically Japan) with her parents who are ambassadors there, and as a result she has a foreign perspective on the world. She doesn’t fit in. But she does know one thing: she wants to be a knight. Why? Because when she’s a knight she can do the thing she wants most to do in the world. She can protect the helpless.

I know that’s actually kind of a strange thing for a ten year old to want, but it fits really well with her character. Kel is stubborn, but endlessly compassionate. She really and truly cares about those around her, which is both a good thing, because it makes her a great person, and a bad thing, because it gets her in trouble.

The first book in the series, First Test, follows Kel as she arrives at the castle for her training to begin. Because she’s the first girl to openly attempt page training (Alanna was disguised as a boy until after she got her knighthood), Kel faces a lot of discrimination. A lot. Even the training master, Lord Wyldon, objects to having a girl there. Actually, Lord Wyldon especially objects.

Wyldon demands that Kel undergo a probation year, something unheard of. If she survives the year with no mistakes, and proves that she can keep up with the boys and make a proper page, then she will be allowed to stay. And since Lord Wyldon will be the one to judge her fitness, it doesn’t seem at all set that she will, in fact, be allowed to keep on. Naturally everyone objects, especially Alanna, who had hoped to be able to mentor Kel, but the King uphold’s Wyldon’s decision. Because the old guard will have so much trouble accepting Kel, they might as well prove her fitness early on, so that no one can object.

And so it begins. Kel comes in with an axe over her head to prove her worthiness, and she does. But she doesn’t do it through extraordinary acts of courage or incredible skills. She does it because she’s a hard worker and doesn’t complain. Because when one of the boys tries to play a trick on her and gives her a lead weighted weapon, she decides that she might as well keep it so that she can build her upper body strength. Because when Wyldon condemns her for fighting in the halls, she continues on her quest to rid the castle of bullying and other forms of injustice.

At the end of the year, it’s no surprise to anyone except for Lord Wyldon and Kel herself that he allows her to stay. She’s earned it, by being true to herself and working very, very hard. She saw the flaws she had – like lacking upper body strength and being trained in a different sort of archery – and sought to overcome them. In short, Kel wins over Lord Wyldon precisely because while she’s good, she’s unexceptional. There is no extenuating circumstance to explain her succees. She’s just tyring hard.

The second book, Page, then follows Kel as she continues on this path through her next three years of page training. She keeps on fighting bullies, hires a maid with a past of sexual abuse and teaches her to fight while economically supporting her business ventures, and collects a ragtag group of sparrows, dogs, and fellow pages who will support her. At the end of the four years, when Kel is about to take her final test to complete her page training, a rival in the court (who hates her) kidnaps her maid. Kel doesn’t hesitate at all in going off to rescue Lalasa, the maid, even though she knows that to do so is to forfeit her years of training and possibly have to take them over again.

That singular action is pretty much what drives her through graduation from page training, as no one can argue that Kel is unsuited to be a knight after that. Her self-sacrifice even wins over Lord Wyldon at last, which is impressive, and makes her known to a couple of benefactors, such as Lord Raoul, head of the King’s Own.

Raoul decides to take Kel as his squire, in the creatively titled third book, Squire. In this one, we see Kel grow up over the four years of her squire training, and blossom under Raoul’s mentorship. He trains her for command, refuses to accept that she is any less of a knight-in-training than anyone else, and eventually gives her a post of command in the King’s Own when they ride off into war. Oh, and he encourages her to enter tournaments, where she does quite well, thus giving the people an example of what a lady knight can be.

But mostly, through all of this, the story shows us Kel working hard. Her compassionate heart gets her into as much trouble as it does grace, and the third book sees her trying to learn how and when to be compassionate, and how to champion the small without killing herself. It’s an important lesson for all of us to learn, but it’s doubly endearing because Kel learns it so begrudgingly. She genuinely likes helping people. And that’s kind of the best image she could have.

In the final book, Lady Knight, Kel has finally become a knight, only the second woman to do so in hundreds of years. She’s finally gotten to meet Alanna, and have Alanna tell her that she could think of no better successor (which is awesome), and she’s been given her own shield and commission. Unfortunately, Kel finds that her new role in the kingdom is not on the front lines of the battlefield, but rather as the commander of a refugee camp, caring for those whose homes were destroyed by the war.

While Kel longs to see battle and have a hand in the fight, she finds herself arguing about barracks placements, placating townsfolk, and running patrols. She hates it. But. She can’t help loving the people, even when they annoy her, and feeling responsible for them. So when the enemy attacks, using black magic killing machines to kidnap her people, Kel forsakes her hard-won knighthood, deserts her post, leads a rag-tag crew of renegades deep into enemy country, and brings them back. She also kind of turns the tide of the war and nearly gets executed. It’s the little things.

When the series ends, Kel is famed and noted as The Protector of the Small. Her glory has spread throughout the land. The King has pardoned her, and praised her. Even Lord Wyldon gives her a rousing praise for her actions. And then, Kel goes home. To her command. At the refugee camp.

She doesn’t ride out into the sunset to complete even greater feats of daring and strength. She doesn’t take command of the army or serve as the King’s personal knight. She doesn’t even really get a reward. She just goes home, back to her people, the ones she saved, and keeps doing her thing.

That, more than anything, is why Kel is an important character. Because we can’t all be Alanna, the special wonderful amazing one who blows everyone away and becomes the King’s Champion because she brought home the famed Dominion Jewel and also is perfect (aside from that nasty temper). Alanna is the exception. Kel? Kel is the rule.

Kel succeeds because she tries. And not because she “believes in herself” in some silly Disney movie sense. She works very, very hard to achieve her goals. She doesn’t kid herself that it will be easy. And when she faces setbacks, she just decides to work harder.

Kel is the one who proves that girls have just as much right to be knights as boys, because she does it the same way the boys do. And, she does it without giving up her femininity. She wears dresses, has a boyfriend (in book three), and goes through an awkward and embarrassing puberty. Kel is normal, and that’s what makes her great.

So, remember Kel. Whenever you feel like your obstacles are insurmountable, or that the world demands something more of you than you can give. I’m not saying it’s easy. Kel certainly would never say that. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

Sometimes you're watching a movie (months after it came out because you couldn't be bothered to see it in the theaters), and you ask yourself, "Really? I mean, really? Did they really think this was going to work?"

And then you realize that they did. Either that, or the entire film was a Producers-esque scam to not have to pay taxes and hey I think I might know what happened here.

In case you didn't read the title above, today we're talking about RIPD, which I have finally seen, and which I now understand why it's okay that I waited this long to see. It's not a terrible movie, exactly. It has funny moments, and it's not horribly offensive most of the time (sadly, though, only mostly). What it is, is ludicrous. Weird. And not in the good way. The kind of movie that sounds really fun on paper, but surely someone must have looked at somewhere in the actual filmmaking process and thought, "Man, this is crappy."

I cannot be the only person who thought this.

Based on the reasonably popular comic series R.I.P.D., the movie is about a group of dead cops who police the living world, making sure that dead souls, or deados, that have lingered past their time go off to face judgment. Our hero is Nick (Ryan Reynolds), a dirty cop whose turn of heart and desire to turn in his ill-gotten gold gets him killed by his partner, Kevin Bacon. Kevin Bacon's character has a name, I'm sure, but let's be real. I have no idea what that name is. He's just Kevin Bacon.

Because Nick is a dirty cop, he doesn't go off to face judgment when he dies, instead being pulled out of the heavenly tunnel and plunked down in the Rest In Piece Department. The Proctor (Mary Louise Parker) gives it to him straight. Either Nick joins on with the RIPD and helps them catch deados for the next hundred years or so, or she sends him back to meet his fate, and she's pretty sure it isn't a nice one. Nick takes the deal.

He then meets his new partner, Roy (Jeff Bridges), a veteran of the force who died back in the Old West and whose speech is annoyingly spangled with cowboy-slang. It's funny at first, but then it's just annoying. Roy thinks Nick is a stupid rookie, and Nick thinks Roy is an old weirdo. Comedy gold!

On their first case back down on Earth, after Nick tries to talk to his wife at his own funeral (only to find that, as in Dead Like Me, he no longer looks like himself and instead resembles an elderly Chinese man), Nick and Roy arrest a deado who is trying desperately to hide some gold. Nick thinks something is up. Roy disagrees. Nick decides to investigate. Roy bitches. But, fortunately for Nick, they find something important. The gold involved is actually part of an ancient ritual that would send the dead back to Earth, effectively ending the world for the living. Oh, and Kevin Bacon is a deado. That's why he killed Nick.

So now our heroes have to save the world, using only their abilities at slapstick combat and basic cop skills, all while Nick tries desperately to contact his increasingly creeped-out wife, and Roy bitches about everything everywhere.

Spoiler alert: they save the world. It's okay. Not very climactic, but it happens. Nick gets some closure with his wife, the Proctor and Roy finally realize some of their incredibly wooden sexual tension, and Kevin Bacon gets vaporized. Cheers all around.

Like I said, it's not a terrible movie, per se, it's just not very good. It's not particularly funny or engaging or emotionally arresting or action-packed or weird. It's surprisingly bland, considering the subject matter, and I think that's the real problem here. For a movie with such an out-there premise, the story we get is the most generic possible tale. Deados are obviously evil with no real discernible motives, and therefore they want to end the world. Kevin Bacon is a deado because why the hell not? And he wants to be the deado Moses because again, why the hell not?

No one has a strong motivation for anything they do, really, and the use of deados as a morally unambiguous villain, who are both evil and also ugly, is just kind of lazy. And also insulting. I thought we were trying to get past that whole traditional physical attractiveness is directly linked to moral rectitude thing. I hate that thing. It's an annoying thing.

Anyway, the big problem with the movie is that no matter how wacky or witty or weird it is, it fails to connect on an emotional level. Not sure if this is because Ryan Reynolds is having trouble holding it together here, but whatever the reason, I just don't care about Nick. He's bland and kind of a jerk, and not nearly compelling enough for me to care that he hasn't gotten closure with his wife. Mostly I just wish he'd leave her the hell alone and let her get on with her life.

Also, the film has a fair number of problems with sexism, first among them being the fact that Nick's continuing pursuit of his wife, and minor assault of her, is supposed to draw our sympathy. We're supposed to be heartbroken that he just can't reach her. Meanwhile, from his wife's perspective, not only has her husband died and then she found out he was a dirty cop (which he was), now there's an old man stalking her and touching her face at inappropriate times. I would be carrying mace by the bucketload right now. Or possibly moving to another city.

This isn't the only problem, sadly. A running gag in the film involves the RIPD officer's meatsuits, or the bodies that they appear as on Earth. Like I said above, Nick appears as an elderly East Asian man, played to perfection by James Hong, and for the most part, that bit works. It's funny because you see an old man getting hit by a car and then jumping up brandishing a banana (instead of a gun).

Roy's avatar, however, is more of an issue. He appears as an incredibly attractive woman (played by Marisa Miller), and literally every joke about their avatars is followed by a long pan up her body, or a shot of people ogling her, or someone accidentally saying boobs around her. It's like there is absolutely nothing else noticeable about his avatar than that she is attractive. That's it. That's the whole joke.

It's not a very funny joke.

But really, the sexism in the film was almost expected. It's a film so bland and pandering that I would have been baffled for them not to include a couple of boob jokes. It's just that kind of movie. Which I think is probably the most ringing condemnation I can make. It's not even good enough for its sexism to be interesting. It's just there.

I think that makes me even sadder than the alternative. I mean, how sad do you have to be to not even be able to offend me properly?

It occurs to me in this moment, as I try to wrestle a small child into his high chair and persuade him to eat his lunch (okay, so that was actually an hour ago, but still), that I do not actually like strong-willed people. Or rather, I don't like strong-willed people that I am trying to convince to do something that they are not inclined to do. In this case, that would be eating.

It's funny, because I actually love strong-willed characters in fiction. I just have to stop every once in a while and remind myself that these characters are awesome and amazing in stories, and kind of annoying to be around in real life. Case in point? Tally Youngblood from Scott Westerfeld's Uglies trilogy.

Tally is the heroine in this story, and for good reason. In a society where everyone undergoes an operation to become "pretty" at age sixteen, Tally is one of the few people to see the society for what it is, and one of the only people who can stand against it. Mostly because she is so darn stubborn. She refuses to have her choices taken away from her, and therefore in any situation where she might lose her agency, or even when she's already lost it, she'll fight like hell to get it back.

She doesn't start out this way, of course. Tally begins the story as just another screwed up fifteen (almost sixteen) year old girl. She hates how she looks and can't wait for the operation that will cure all of her perfections and make her just like everyone else. She has a late birthday, so there's really not anyone else around for her to be friends with, until she meets Shay, who shares her birthday. Together they try to pass the time until their operation. And then Shay shares a terrifying secret: she doesn't actually want to be pretty.

Tally can't even really deal with this idea. Not wanting to be pretty? What does that even mean? But Shay shows Tally that there's a world out there, and people. People who have chosen not to become pretty, or who chose to leave after the became pretty, which is rarer. Once you become pretty, something changes, and you're not the same person you used to be.

And then Shay runs away. Tally has a sneaking suspicion where she's gone, but it isn't until Special Circumstances (the boogeymen or men in black of this world) turn up and demand that she follow Shay and infiltrate the rebel group if she ever wants to be pretty that Tally figures out the magnitude of the problem. She agrees to spy. And that one choice changes everything.

This story fits into the ongoing narrative we've seen about teenage female protagonists in overbearing dystopian societies fighting the system for those they love. But this is a little different. Tally doesn't want to fight the system at first. She wants to join it. She wants to join it so freaking hard. But she can't.

The whole time Tally is on Shay's trail, and uncovering more and more of the resistance, she struggles with the idea of what pretty actually means. She sees magazines and pictures of pre-pretty people. She thinks about it. She meets someone who was born completely outside of the pretty system. She changes. And she grows.

Unfortunately, Special Circumstances is still tracking her, and even though Tally has completely changed her views, they still want to bring her and everyone else in. Because totalitarian regimes only actually work if their control is, in fact, total. Tally and her friends flee, but most of them don't make it out. They do, however, figure out what's making the people change after the pretty surgery - it's a tiny brain lesion, but one that's powerful enough to radically alter personality, breed docility, and make for a captive human populace. The rebels have a cure. But they have no test subject.

And that's where Tally comes in. Distraught over having caused the capture of all those she's come to love, and having finally helped some of them escape, Tally decides to become their first subject. She writes down her consent to the procedure, then takes herself into the city to become pretty.

Only, she wakes up pretty and has no memory of any of that. When a stranger appears with some pills, Tally can barely focus enough to realize that she should actually take them. But then the craziest thing happens. Tally takes one, and Zane takes one (her boyfriend, who agrees to share the risk with her), and they both get better.

That shouldn't actually be possible.

You see, as with most advanced medical treatments, the pills were supposed to be taken together. They had corresponding jobs. By taking one pill each, they each only got half of a cure. More specifically, Zane got the brain-killing half, and Tally got the half that didn't do anything (except prevent the brain-killing). And Tally still gets better. Why? Because of the simplest idea of all, one that even the rebels didn't dream of.

Tally gets better because she wants to. She recovers not because she is so much better or braver or stronger than anyone else, and not because she got the cure. She recovered because she chose to. As it turns out, this is a story about consent, and about change. About how you can never actually change someone from the outside. They have to choose it for themselves.

Now, the story goes on from here, and there's a governmental overthrow, and even a series sequel set a couple of years down the road. But this is the really interesting part for me. Tally doesn't change because anything changes her. She changes because she wants to. Throughout the entire series, whether she's been turned into a pretty or a special, or even something else entirely, Tally always finds her way back to being Tally. She is so much herself that she cannot be anything else.

Throughout the books, characters are always calling Tally special. And that's true. But not for the obvious reasons. They imply that she has a special brain, or that she's inhumanly good at healing from the procedures. That's not true. What is true is much less complicated: Tally Youngblood is stubborn as hell, but she knows exactly who she is. And she never forgets.

Ultimately, that's what matters. And that's what makes her a compelling character. A strong female character, even. Because Tally doesn't let anyone else change her, the only things that are done to her (that stick, anyway) are the ones she consents to. While people play havoc with her body and try to mess with her mind, Tally retains her agency because she maintains the importance of consent.

As a heroine for teenage girls, it's hard for me to think of anything I like better.

So here's to you, Tally Youngblood. While I hate it when that two year old is being strong-willed, I love it when you are, because you being stubborn means that the world might just change for the better.

It's come to this. At last we are talking about the final pilot of this particular pilot season. I know. It's been a long time coming.

Slightly longer, in fact, because I have to admit that I didn't really want to watch this show.

I mean, I find it interesting, in a car-crash-on-the-freeway sort of way, but American Horror Story has never been my jam. Mostly because it is comprised of all the things I really hate in television: it's more about imagery and tone than it is about story and plot, it relies on being shocking to cover up the fact that it has no narrative structure or character development, and it's wildly racist and harmful to women. Also? It's a show without hope or any semblance of morality. So pretty much just a list of things I don't like.

Given that, then, you might wonder why I chose to watch this season of the show at all, or at least the first episode. And don't worry, I was wondering that right along with you. But the answer really is simple: I still have (had) hope that this season, with its emphasis on racism and sexism in history might just manage to make me invested, and could very well end up with something worthwhile to say.

I no longer have this hope.

The episode starts out with a flashback to the slave-holding South. Madame something-French (Kathy Bates) is desperately trying to ship her daughters off to the meat market, making sure to emphasize their gifts, even if they have no particular beauty. Which was funny, because all those girls were gorgeous, but I'm pretty sure this was a case of Hollywood Homely. One of her daughters, though, makes a racy comment and then eyes up a slave, and we know trouble is coming. That daughter is then caught with the slave a couple hours later, and her mother, incensed, takes the slave up to her personal torture attic. She blames him for defiling her baby daughter, even though he protests that he wasn't interested and she came onto him, and decides that as his punishment, she'll make him into a beast. Specifically, a minotaur.

Fast forward to the present, where two teenagers are trying to get jiggy with some disastrous consequences. Zoe (Taissa Farmiga) and her boyfriend discover mid-sex that she's actually a witch, which causes some unfortunate brain aneurysm action, and gets Zoe shipped off to a witch academy in New Orleans. Poor Zoe and her cursed vagina.

At the school, Zoe meets the headmistress, Cordelia Foxx (Sarah Paulson) and the other witches-in-training: Madison (Emily Roberts), a starlet with a bad habit of telekinetically murdering people; Queenie (Gabourey Sidibe), a "human voodoo doll", which is precisely as gross and racist as it sounds; and Nan (Jamie Brewer), who is clairvoyant and also the only likable character in the whole dang show. The girls get along about as well as can be expected of teenage witches, while Ms. Foxx tries to teach them how not to use their powers. Fun stuff.

Madison wants a new friend, because neither Queenie nor Nan is good enough, so she grabs Zoe and whisks her off to a frat party where they're the toast of the town. Madison acts bitchily to every boy there, while Zoe chats up the one nice frat boy. And then Madison gets roofied and gang-banged, while Zoe and her boy search desperately for her. Upon finding them, the boy is brutally beaten by his frat-mates, while the others get away. Zoe runs after them screaming, but it takes Madison staggering out and flipping their bus with the flick of a wrist to end the matter.

And then Cordelia's mother waltzes in. Fiona Goode (Jessica Lange) is the Supreme of all witches in her generation, and aside from being a cocaine-snorting weirdo who murders men for their ability to give her eternal youth (because all women are really that obsessed with being young, sure), she's also probably the worst mother ever. She grabs the reins of the school and decides that if these girls want to have a chance not to burn at the stake, they're going to have to learn some real witching. She then proceeds to teach them nothing of the sort.

She does, however, raise Kathy Bates from the dead, and lose Zoe, who has wandered off to the hospital. She wants to know if the one nice boy in that frat survived the crash. He didn't. The actual survivors are the two worst offenders, who came up with Madison's rape, so Zoe enacts her revenge. She murders them with her vagina.

And then the credits roll.

I mean, there are a few other things that happen. We find out that in the past, Angela Basset killed Kathy Bates, because the slave she made a minotaur was Ms. Basset's lover, and we discover that apparently people are burning witches again, but that's the major gist.

Here's the thing about this show: it's engrossing. I finished the episode, having been completely and totally disgusted the whole way through, wondering if I should track down the next episode so I could keep watching. And I didn't actually enjoy watching it. But for whatever reason I wanted to keep going. I didn't, for the record. I got up, got a cup of tea, and settled down to watch some QI, but still.

There's a whole treasure list of things I found distasteful in this show. I don't like to feel like an old prude, but this show brings out the Puritan in me. Or maybe it just brings out the reasonable. Either, way, I deeply object to a number of things shown in just the first episode. Here they are, roughly chronologically.

Every woman is obsessed only with her beauty and her age. There are two separate characters who are shown to be obsessed to the point of murder with making sure they don't have any wrinkles. Both Jessica Lange's and Kathy Bates' characters show that they are willing to do whatever it takes to look young. I don't object overall to having a female character obsessed with reversing the effects of aging. Some women are. But I do object to having the two older female characters, the only two, equally fixated. It suggests that once women reach a certain age, there is nothing else they care about than the tightness of their skin.

So that was problematic.

Also an issue? Queenie's magical power. While Sidibe does an excellent job making Queenie funny and interesting, her magical power is by far the most problematic one on the show. She has the power of being a "human voodoo doll", which means, I guess, that if she stabs herself, someone else gets hurt. It's imaginative, sure, but it's also, well, awful. Queenie is (at this point in the show), the only main character of color, and her power is to mutilate her own body. She's also the only main (at this point) plus-size character, and again, her power is to mutilate her own body.

And, of course, it's offensive that they gave the only African American character a voodoo doll power, instead of picking something with more historical weight instead of shock value. But that would go against the grain of the show.

Let's see. What else was an issue? Oh right. Zoe's cursed vagina and Madison's rape. I include these together because, make no mistake, they are directly related. The show has been set up so that the two images of sex we see in the first episode, including the two similar looking white girls, either include murder or rape. In the first case, where Zoe clearly consents, her boyfriend has an aneurysm and nearly dies, a pretty classic "punished for having sex" storyline. In the other, where Madison does not consent, she herself gets raped. So, either consent and kill everyone you love, or don't consent and get raped. Whoo!

Like with most things, I don't think the writers are sitting in their offices plotting out ways to be the most sexist, racist show on television. I don't think they're plotting at all. From what I can see, Ryan Murphy and company have done what they always do: they took a laundry list of things that people would find "shocking" and threw them together with powerful imagery in a way people could vaguely construe as art. Which is, ultimately, more offensive.

It means that Madison's rape and Queenie's mutilation and Zoe's curse all have no actual impact or importance in the story. They're just there to be shocking, to make viewers cringe. They aren't there so that the characters can grow and change, they're there to titillate and to make you gasp.

In effect, the show is repeatedly violating these characters, putting them through hell not for themselves or because they chose it, or even to give them some form of development, but because it can.

To which we say a resounding, "Hell no," and back away.

Okay, here's the thing. Over the years, a lot of you have commented to tell me that I'm taking this all "too seriously". That I'm "over-thinking it". Telling me to calm down, that it's "just" a movie or TV show or book or whatever. I've been called a killjoy, a prude, self-righteous and down-right mean.

I don't really deny any of that, for the record. I am.

But I also have a reason for it. There's a reason why I take all of this so unfailingly seriously, and there's a damn good reason why it's never "just" anything to me. And that reason is you.

I'm serious! (When am I ever not?) The reason I'm so manic about all this, about stories and character development and portrayals of racism or sexism or just bad writing, all comes down to you, dear reader. Well, you and everyone you know. Because I refuse to live in a world that does not properly value you. That does not confess your God-given importance in the grand scheme of things, and which does not cherish your humanity, personhood, and agency. The media isn't treating you right, my friend, and I want to fix it.

Or at least I'm going to yell at them until I go hoarse.

Now all of this sounds really lovely and kind (which is not an adjective often used to describe me, sadly), but what does it have to do with the daily nitty-gritty of me pooping all over the stories you love? Everything.

When you exist in our society (and here I refer mostly to English-speaking, Western society, but it could easily be expanded to include all of human society), you are engaged in a daily battle. The battle is not over your appearance, or intelligence, or happiness - not really. This battle is waged over nothing less than your right to consider yourself a human being. And you are losing.

Everywhere you look, from advertisements that reduce us down to well-oiled torsos and manically grinning zombies reaching for shoes, to politicians who reject compassion in favor of dogma, the world tries to put you down and convince you that, really, you are not a person. You are a consumer, a sex object, an extension of your job, a piece of furniture - anything but a living, breathing, believing human.

And the media is most egregiously guilty of this.

It doesn't seem so at first, not when you look at all the smiling couples in romantic comedies, or the beautiful animation in Disney princess films, or the pulse-pounding thrill of a good action feature, but it's true. These movies don't want you to think of yourself as a person. In fact, they take great pains to remove that option from you. The romantic comedy sells the idea that love, the fusion of two lives and souls into one, where souls are crushed and reborn, and where the danger is greater than anything else we will ever face is nothing more than an extended Pottery Barn advertisement. That women in love are shrill and disembodied voices and breasts, and that men are slaves to their instincts.

The action film suggests that rather than people, we are animals, doomed to repeat our mistakes and always fighting over the very last of the resources, utterly convinced that there is not enough for all of us, and insisting that you dehumanize the enemy lest you stop for a moment and realize the sheer body count that the "good guys" have racked up, all in the name of justice and freedom. But it appears to be a freedom more dearly bought, and less worthy of its price than any I've ever seen in real life. A freedom to torture, to fear for the sanctity of your world, and to end the lives of other human beings with extreme prejudice. The freedom to value your life above theirs, and the freedom to consider them so inhuman that you do not lose a night of sleep over it.

And then there are the children's films. The ones that suggest that if you look pretty enough, or you meet the right prince, or you just believe, then everything will be all right. That no one good has flaws and that faith in the impossible is more important than effort. That if you want a good life, you must be perfect. And that you have but two options: to be either an object upon which others can impress their own beliefs and ideas, and onto whom the world will interpret meaning - a completely agentless, limp simulacrum of a person, or to be a golden flower on a pedestal, beautiful and untouched, but equally without the ability to make choices, mistakes, and memories, a beautiful statue for the world to love, but who is never given the opportunity to breathe.

Those are your options, children. Choose wisely.

I have long believed that I would not be so angry if I did not care so much. And it's true. If I were a softer person, a gentler one, I wouldn't be so mad. I would shout less. I would be the sort of person strangers enjoy speaking to. I wouldn't terrify my students and have to constantly reassure my friends that they are not about to be eaten. But I do care, and I am angry. Why?

Because stories have so much power, and I hate to see them misused like this. Because I believe that you and your heart matter. I believe that stories are the closest expression we can get to representations of the soul, and it causes me physical pain to see so many stories where the people are unhappy, petty, small, and denied any opportunity for redemption. It kills me to see stories where the characters never learn or grow, where the women are objects, and where the people of color are barely represented, and if they are shown, are considered barely human. It hurts. Because stories are how we tell the truth about what we believe, and they are also how we receive truth from others.

Tell me a story and I'll tell you who you are. But don't ever accuse me of taking this too seriously, or claim that these are "just" stories. There is no such thing. There is only the verbal and visual language with which we create our society, and I refuse, I refuse to let that language, that process, these stories go unexamined.

And I will not apologize for that.

Oh my gosh, we're back! I'm sure you missed us. You did, right?

As some of you have guessed, I'm sure, KMWW took off the past couple of days so that I could move, and now that the move is over and done with (and hopefully not to be repeated for a good long time, thank you very much), we can get back to some semblance of normalcy over here. But before we let the world slide back into the usual, let's talk about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and how life is the big bad.

For those of you who haven't seen the show but who have probably heard about it (this is the internet, after all), it goes like this. Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is the one girl in all the world chosen to fight the vampires, demons, and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer. As such, she has super-strength, awesome fighting skills, and is crazy hard to kill. She lives in Sunnydale, California, which just so happens to be home of the Hellmouth, a literal gateway to hell, and attracts all sorts of nasties that are always trying to open the Hellmouth, kill the Slayer, mess people up, eat something human, or all of the above.

Buffy, who tries to live a normal life in between slaying and researching the latest apocalypse, can't do it alone. So, she has help from her Watcher, Giles (Anthony Head), and her best friends, Willow (Alyson Hannigan) and Xander (Nicholas Brendan). The four of them work together, often with other addition friends, significant others, and family members, to save the world.

It's a good show.

But somewhere in there, as you're watching the Scooby Gang (that's what they call themselves) fight yet another monster, you kind of start to realize that the real villain on the show isn't the forces of darkness. I mean, they're bad, sure. There is genuine evil and these characters are fighting it. But that's not the real villain that needs to be defeated. Or rather, the evil bad guys aren't the ones Buffy feels a need to save herself from. Nope, that big bad is life itself.

Whoa there, I hear you saying, that's kind of intense and deeply depressing for such a campy show. What gives?

Well, I answer, it's not super surprising to think that this show has a sad and deep core principle. I mean, it is written by Joss "Everyone You Love Dies" Whedon. But more than that, I think the very campiness of the show is what allows it to explore this idea. Because where else do you see someone actually fighting literal demons, only to go home and worry about whether or not she can pay the mortgage?

The theme is present all the way throughout the show, starting with their high school, where the Mouth of Hell is literally underneath their school, so when they say "High school is hell," they mean it. But it grows and develops as the show goes on. In a weird way, the greatest villain is never the evil creatures that Buffy has to fight. Those demons or vampires or whatever are evil, sure, but they're evil because they're evil. Because they were always going to be evil. They're demons. Yeah, there are a few exceptions, but for the most part, they're just doing what nature tells them to do, and Buffy's just doing what nature tells her to do. That's not the messy part.

The complicated stuff is all squarely in the human realm. Buffy spends so much time saving the world that she's failing all her classes. Her mother, who spends the first few seasons unaware of her daughter's extra-curricular calling, grounds her for her erratic behavior. She loses touch with her dad, because she can't always take time off from slaying to meet with him. She can't get a boyfriend who doesn't know about things that go bump in the night because he'll wind up dead. She loses friends, some of them die, she's a social outcast, she gets arrested a lot... I could go on.

And that's only in the first few seasons. As the show continues, the consequences of Buffy's calling become all the more clear. At college, she tries to be a normal student, but her college options are limited to ones in town, so she ends up at UC Sunnydale. And then she tries to date a normal college guy, only for him to wind up being part of an underground military operation experimenting on demons. It's a bad scene.

Then magic grants Buffy a little sister, Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg), right before their mother dies of completely natural causes. Buffy, now about twenty years old, is faced with taking the guardianship of her little sister, supporting them both, and still trying to save the world. She drops out of college, gets a menial job, deals with her sister's behavioral problems, tries to learn how to parent while still in the process of grieving... I think you get the picture. It's intense.

The point I'm making is not that Buffy is secretly a dark and deep hole of depressingness. That's not the point at all. Instead, I'd like to pose the idea that all this sadness, this life being the big bad thing, is good for you. Good for us. Much better for us, I think, than if the big bad were something external.

Life is hard. That seems like a really simple statement, but it isn't. Life is full of complications and it's messy, and sometimes it means that you have to completely change your idea of what constitutes a "good" one in order to stay alive and fed and ideally clothed and sheltered. Life is hard. But that doesn't mean you should give up.

You see, if all we saw on Buffy was external evil forces trying to stop her and take down the Hellmouth, then, first, the show would feel incredibly shallow and silly, and second, it wouldn't have any higher meaning. External evil that needs to be defeated, but can be defeated without any cost to myself or the ones I love? No problem! Evil that needs to be defeated, but isn't actually the source of the real pain and frustration in our lives? That's another story.

We need Buffy to struggle with life because that's how we can learn how to struggle with her. I honestly learned more from that show about moving on and keeping going and continuing to fight when I saw Buffy forgive her mother for reacting so badly to her Slayerness and when I saw Buffy break down and cry over another lost friend and when she was scrounging to pay the electrical bills than when she fought a demon or saved the world. It's the little things, because the little things are often the ones that matter most.

So, this week, as you go about your daily life, remember Buffy and the real big bad. Because if life is the big bad, then that means that we can fight it, and we can win.

I don't particularly feel like I'm making a big stretch here when I guess that most of you have seen Pocahontas, the mid-90s Disney attempt at cultural diversity, and I also don't think it's too much of a stretch to assume that it's not your favorite. I mean, maybe you like it, but this probably isn't your go to film. And that's fine. Seriously. I don't actually know anyone who likes this film that much.

Personally, I hate it. Which should come as a surprise to precisely no one if you've been paying attention.

I hate this movie because I feel like it represents everything misguided about Disney's general attempts to include diversity in their films. While the movie does include a strongly non-white cast, the whole film is about the white people who then meet that non-white cast. The main female lead, Pocahontas herself, is all about John Smith, to the point that I honestly can't pinpoint anything else she does in the movie, except not want to marry that really buff guy her father likes.

But it's not just about the paper thin plot and the fact that everything revolves around the white people. This film is also full of awkward and slightly offensive Native American "woo-woo" (I got that term from Fangs for the Fantasy, and I'm never giving it back because it makes me happy), attempts at cultural relevance that fall flat almost immediately, and the use of gay coding to make the bad guy more despicable.

Oh, and it seems to suggest that were it not for a few greedy people, the whole white people coming to American and grossly wiping out the indigenous populations would have been much more peaceful and pleasant for everyone involved, which is a rampant misunderstanding of history and also seems to suggest that the only people with agency here are rich white men. But I digress. We'll talk more about that later.

The actual story told in Pocahontas is a bastardization of the historical account. In the real story, from what we can gather, Pocahontas was a girl of about ten when the English made shore in Virginia. She was friendly with them, that's true, but not nearly so friendly as in this version. There is some dispute over whether or not she saved John Smith's life, but at any rate, there was no romance (we hope) because she was a little girl and he was a middle-aged man. Then, later in her life, Pocahontas was kidnapped by the English, married John Rolfe, and eventually moved to England, where she died.

Wooo. Lots of magic and talking animals and epic romance in that one, eh?

In the Disney version, the story is much cleaner, if completely bizarre. Here, Pocahontas (voiced by Irene Bedard) is a comely teenager who is already considering her romantic prospects when the English arrive. Upon seeing the white people, though, she is intrigued, and eventually falls into a relationship of sorts with a mercenary - John Smith (Mel Gibson). Pocahontas and Smith can communicate because the spirits have allowed them to speak to each other, and they share cultural ideas and heritage.

We see that Pocahontas' people (who are portrayed as pretty generic Native Americans, with no significant cultural markers, as well as having completely baffling religious references which match no known NA traditions) are noble savages, innocent of the treachery and jealousy of the white man. So naturally, when the English come they are "civilizing" Pocahontas and her people, and that before this they lived sweetly and gently, with no real conflict or war, but now, oh now, they have terrible fates because the white man brought greed and murder and badness along with him.

Except not all of the white men brought that. Just the bad ones. Actually, just General Ratcliffe (David Ogden Stiers), whose lust for gold inspired this mission, and who is the one character who cannot be swayed from his unflinching evilness. He's also intentionally campy, creating a pampered, mincing English villain, and if that isn't code for gay people are the bad guys, then I don't know what is. He also has an oddly close relationship with his manservant. Just saying.

Anyway, blah blah blah, the white people are greedy and bring the innocent Native Americans to the brink of war, until Pocahontas and her woo-woo magic can come and save the day by stopping her father from killing John Smith. And then there's a battle, and John Smith gets shot and has to go back to England, but now the English and the Native Americans have learned how to live peacefully together and will continue to do so...for the next six weeks, if memory serves.

So the story's kind of meh, and while the plot hits all the Disney required high points (forbidden love, disapproving father, absent mother, cute animals, love montage), it's not got a lot to recommend it. It's solidly middle of the road before you even consider all the other stuff. What other stuff? The racist stuff. And the sexist stuff. That too.

Actually, let's start with the sexism.

There are three major female characters in the film. Pocahontas, obviously, and her best friend Nakoma (Michelle St. John), and the weird talking tree, Grandmother Willow (Linda Hunt). The problem here isn't precisely that there are only three major female characters. That's actually pretty good numbers for a Disney flick of this era (sadly). No, the problem is that pretty much all they ever talk about is guys.

From the moment we first meet Nakoma and Pocahontas, while they're palling around and I'm breathing a sigh of, "Hey, it's two women who are just friends! That's nice!", Nakoma goes and brings up Kocoum, the man that Pocahontas is supposed to marry. It becomes clear very quickly that Nakoma really likes him, even if Pocahontas doesn't, and that this is going to drive a wedge between them. Which it does, in the least surprising turn of events ever. As the movie goes on, this becomes all that Nakoma does. She either disapproves loudly and angrily of John Smith (which is probably quite sensible of her), or she talks about Kocoum, or she kind of pouts that Pocahontas is ignoring her. So, not really the stuff of legends here.

Grandmother Willow does have more scenes with Pocahontas, and those scenes do sometimes circle around things other than men (though not often), but the real problem here is that Grandmother Willow, for all that she's supposed to be emblematic of how Pocahontas, as a Native American, is more in touch with the earth and all that jazz, kind of makes no sense and really isn't a particularly good character. Also, she never ever does anything but give advice to Pocahontas. So we've got two women of color other than our protagonist here, and one of them is the bitchy, man-obsessed best friend, and the other is the wise, platitude-spewing grandmother.

I can feel the diversity flowing through my veins. Wheeee.

And then the racism. Oh the racism in this movie. I could go a lot of places complaining about this, but I think we're going to stick to the big, over-arching complaint here. Pocahontas dehumanizes the Native American characters in one simple way: it assumes that before the white men came there was no war, or strife, or anger, and that all these things come straight from the English.

That is complete and total crap, and, actually, really offensive. Why? Because it assumes that the Native Americans were not human enough to have flaws.

No, think about it. If there was no greed or sin before the English came, then what does that make the Native Americans? What kind of people don't screw up? No kind, that's what. If they didn't ever have sin, then they couldn't have been people. Then they were, effectively, noble savages or animals or whatever else. All I'm saying is...racist.

It's a problem you see in a lot of films, actually, like Dances with Wolves and Avatar. The other problem you see in those films is the whole trope of "white guy is way better at being a member of the tribe than actual members of the tribe because white men are better at everything", but we can talk about that another time. In these films, we know that the filmmakers are trying to highlight the differences between the cultures, as well as show the terrible awful bad thing that the English did. And that's a fair thing to do. But they do it by presuming to show us how innocent and childlike the Native Americans were, and that's just not right.

People suck. Not to be a downer, but we do. We are all sinners and weirdos and terrible people inside. It's what makes us human. Honestly. Our ability to suck is what defines us. That, and our ability to rise above our suck.

That's why we're never very inspired by stories about people who sound too good to be true. People who never screwed up and just flounced through life being perfect and not doing anything wrong. We hate those people. Last time we had one, we murdered him with extreme prejudice because he made us feel really uncomfortable (Merry Christmas, everyone). The point isn't that some people are innately good and others are innately bad, it's that everyone is innately bad, and some people choose to be good.

So when you remove that, when you suppose that some people are innately good and don't have the option of being bad without outside force, then you remove what makes them human.

It's also dehumanizing on the other end. Because the bad guy in this film, Ratcliffe, is apparently all of the evil. He's the only actual bad guy here. No one else has a wrong motivation. Nope. This one person is responsible for the entire genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. One guy. Again, no.

It's easy to look at this film and not think too hard about it. To just think of it as a nice, middling Disney film. But to do that is to agree with it, and I'm not okay with that. Do we really want our kids to get the idea from this that the entire conquest of the Americas was full of singing and dancing, that everything bad that happened was the fault of some rich gay guy, and that the Native Americans were peaceful innocents?

I sure don't. I want my kids to know that people are people. We suck, and we can choose to do better, and life is always more complicated than we want it to be. Call me a killjoy, but that's what I really want for them.

It is a pretty movie, though.

Today let's talk about two books, Trickster's Choice and Trickster's Queen, both by Tamora Pierce. Why are we talking about them? Well, first off, they're by Tamora Pierce and therefore fabulous, so we were going to get to them eventually in my ongoing quest to read every Tamora Pierce book and then enthuse about it on the internet. (That's what I've been doing, in case it wasn't very, very clear.)

But the real reason that these books are worth talking about is actually more complex than that, and it has to do with the subject matter of the story. Because it's kind of intense. And also awesome. Intensely awesome.

What is this awesome and intense stuff in the story? Well, the book portends to be about Alianne of Pirate's Swoop (Alanna's daughter) finding her place in the world and having an adventure and swordfights and battles and all that jazz. But it's actually about revolution, institutionalized oppression and racism, and how to deal with an imperialist regime with the minimal bloodshed and turmoil. And all of that is stuff that makes me deeply happy.

Like I said, though, you have to get a little bit into the book before you realize that's what it's about. This is because, like any smart person, Pierce hides her blistering social commentary well, like a pill under the mashed potatoes, and you end up being so swept up in the fun of the story that before you know it, bang! You just learned a thing.

It starts out with Alianne, or Aly as she prefers to be called, just chilling at home with her father, George, and waiting for her mother to come home from the war. Aly and her mother have a tough relationship (which was a brilliant stroke, actually, to show that the ever perfect Alanna really is hard to live with, even for her own kids), because Alanna so desperately wants Aly to figure out what's she doing with her life. Aly, meanwhile, just wants to have fun, flirt with boys, and learn how to be a spy like her father. Her parents are understandably against this last bit, since having a spy whose parents are the Master Spymaster of Tortall and the King's Champion of Tortall, and whose godparents include a king and a half-goddess might be the world's worst idea.

Aly, wanting to avoid confrontation, decides that now is a great time to pop down the coast for a visit. One problem: her ship gets nabbed by pirates and faster than you can say "bad life choices", Aly, arguably one of the most important kids in Tortall, has been sold into slavery.

The ship drags her off to the Copper Isles, or what passes for this world's version of India. There, Aly contrives to make herself ugly enough not to be sold for pleasure, and winds up being given away to the Balitang household. The Balitangs are actually quite nice to their slaves, and Aly does well there. She also keeps her ears open and learns lots of new things, like that the current king is sick, and that his probable heirs are all crazy or very young, that the locals really, really hate their overlords (which shouldn't be a surprise even a little bit), and that the family with which she's staying is suspiciously well positioned.

Suspiciously because it's a family that has ties to the luarin (white) royal family, but whose eldest two daughters (from the lord's first marriage) are half raka (not-white) as well. And as we quickly learn, this isn't an accident. The patron god of the islands, Kyprioth, has chosen now as the time for his power to rise again, and he's chosen Aly as his human servant on the ground to get it going. Partly because she's the best person for the job (her father is Tortall's spymaster, after all), and partly because it brings him glee to make the raka conspiracy led by a white girl.

The story pretty much takes off here, with Aly slowly gaining the raka conspiracy's trust, while she figures out precisely what is so important about this family - it's not much of a spoiler, that the lord's first wife was the last heir of the royal raka family, and so the two eldest daughters are royal on two sides, both luarin and raka royalty. Aly has to figure out how to navigate the dangerous political and racial tensions all around her, all while worrying about her family back home, and trying to stay alive as a slave in a country that doesn't treat its slaves all that well. It's a good book. They're both good books.

Like I said before, the story kind of grabs you before you can stop and realize that it's making you learn. Because you're just trundling along with Aly as she tries to survive, and slowly you start to learn things. Things about imperialism and racism and oppression, and how institutionalized oppression dehumanizes both sides and about the corrupting nature of power and all that messy stuff that you don't often hear about.

I mean, in books about revolutions, most of them take the tactic of tearing down the original society and then leaving it there. We're supposed to believe that it will be better now because it isn't the old corrupt system. Or, they go a step further, and show that now that the old system is gone, everything is peachy and wonderful. Maybe they get a little bit into the next steps of reconstruction and all that, but rarely does anyone address the realities of the situation.

That this has happened before. In real life. We don't have to go just to fiction to understand this situation, we can look at our own history. And while it's easy to compare this series to a fantasy exploration of British Imperialism in India and South Asia, I don't think that's the most accurate way of looking at it. I think these books are actually about South Africa instead.

Why do I think that? Well, Tricksters deals with institutionalized racism on a level not really seen in India. I mean, the situation there was messed up, there's no doubt of that, but it was a different kind of messed up, you know? The British occupied India for about one-hundred years before Indian independence, and the British never thought of themselves as Indian, not really. They were the British who lived in India, but they were always British, even if they lived their whole lives in India.

In South Africa, by contrast, the white occupation continued for hundreds of years, and only ended in my lifetime. The white South Africans considered themselves African, and with good reason. Their whole families were there, they were independent as a country, and they lives generations in this country. Which is why talking about the end of apartheid and South African segregation is a lot more complicated. And also why I love this series.

In the books, the luarin have been in the Copper Isles for close to five-hundred years, I think. A long time, at any rate. Long enough for them to assimilate to some extent, and for there to be a fair population of mixed race citizens. The sisters, Sarai and Dove, are the two best known examples of this, but the book alludes to others, and it only stands to reason that after so long, there would be a fairly large subsection that could claim heritage on both sides. What then should the revolution do? While it's explicit in its intent to end luarin-only rule of the islands, even their potential queens have luarin blood. Should they kill all the luarin and have raka rule? But then where do they draw the line?

It's messy and uncomfortable and a huge part of the books, for which I am immensely grateful.

I'm not thankful just because this book has a predominantly non-white cast, a non-White Savior heroine (they could do it without her, she just makes the revolution easier), and a whole host of awesome female characters. Not just because there is no default race in the story, but everyone is identified as luarin or raka if the story demands and for not other reason - there is no default whiteness. I'm grateful not only because this book is fun and well-written and because the romance is one of my all time favorites, but also because this book, above all things, does not shy away from the messiness of revolution, and the very hard decisions that must be made.

I think part of it comes from choosing to have the protagonist be a spy, rather than a noble warrior, but this story isn't about high ideals or the noble desires to have freedom for all men, or even really about ideas at all. It's about the simple reality that the government is corrupt and racist and needs to be torn down, and how to do that in the most efficient, bloodless, and peaceful way possible.

Noble ideas are all well and good. If you asked me ten years, ago, I might dislike this book because it so disdains them. But now, having seen how hard it is for idealism to conquer pragmatism, I quite like it. Because this is a book that completely concerns itself with enacting social change, but it does so without ever letting the issue become simple. It's a war, people will die, and they have to choose who and how many. It's not an easy book, and I'm grateful for that.

We need more hard books, especially when blind idealism becomes more appealing than sense. When pragmatism makes people call you cold and unfeeling. We need to remember that no issue can be described in 140 characters, and that there are always more avenues to discuss. There is a time for action, yes, but there is also a time for cold reason. And this series has both.

Plus, it's kind of really cool. So there's that.

by lauramw on deviantart

First, before we actually get into the article for today, I want to say that I am sorry that the site has been so erratic for the past few weeks (month), but that I have at last moved and unpacked and am now back to a normal schedule - at least until my parents arrive for Christmas and then my sister gets married and ALL OF THE THINGS HAPPEN WAY TOO FAST. It's cool. I'm cool.

Anyway, thanks for bearing with me.

Let's talk about Don't Trust the B's Chloe, as played by Krysten Ritter. It's telling that the title, which fully reads Don't Trust the B* in Apartment 23 refers directly to Chloe, and to a line said in the very first episode, when lovely and naive June (Dreama Walker) comes up to rent a room from the nefarious Chloe. Chloe charges her an extraordinary amount to move in, then tries to terrorize her into moving out so that she can pocket the money. June, however, turns out to be much more steadfast than the usual victims, and refuses to leave. And so Chloe is stuck with a roommate, and maybe an actual friend.

Usually for Strong Female Character Fridays I like to talk about female characters that are aspirational in some way. Characters whose behavior is impeccable, or at least understandable, who overcome great odds and who strive to make the world a better place.

Chloe does none of those things. In fact, her general mode of operation can best be described as "think of the worst thing someone could possibly do in this situation, now do it." She scams her roommates, tries to set June up with her (still married) father, solves problems by getting drunk or getting other people drunk, lies outrageously to everyone and anyone, walks into a magazine office and declares herself boss then manages to run the company for two weeks before anyone catches on... I could go on, but I hope you get the point. Chloe is a terrible person. And it's awesome.

It's awesome because this is a female character we almost never get to see, and we pretty much never get to see as the head of a successful sitcom on a major network. Chloe is pure id, pure "I want it so I will take it," and as such she flies in the face of what conventional wisdom tells us women are and do. She's openly rude, flagrantly sexual, angry, bitchy, the kind of person you would never want your parents to meet. She's that girl standing behind you in the checkout line stuffing candy bars in her purse while the cashier is distracted then blaming you for it.

And, again, she's awesome.

I'm not saying she's great because I think these are things that people should actually do. The entire joke of Chloe's character, and the show in general, is that she flies in the face of social conventions. No one is supposed to like lying or cheating or being generally awful, but Chloe is and does. She has no compunctions about her immoral behavior, which is what makes her funny. She says and does the things that the rest of us are way, way too moral or uncomfortable or sensible to do.

This is important because in her own weird way, Chloe is a step forward for women on television. She's a woman who is unapologetically bad, and who never gets punished for her behavior. There is no moral lesson on the show. She never turns over a new leaf. Chloe is a terrible person and continues to be a terrible person because she's good at it and she likes it and she has no reason to change.

We see male characters like this all the time. How I Met Your Mother's Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris) comes to mind immediately, but he is by no means the first man to embody this trope. What about Seinfeld's Kramer? He did weird, amoral stuff all the time, and the narrative never punished him for it. He wasn't unhappy.

But women? Women are supposed to be good. We're supposed to follow the rules and want 2.5 kids and a dreamy husband. We aren't supposed to recoil in horror when handed a baby or to try to scam the foster system into giving us a foster kid so that we can have a personal assistant for a few weeks. We're supposed to be nice. Chloe isn't nice.

I guess in a weird way, Chloe is aspirational. We all kind of want to be that bitch, who doesn't worry or care about what anyone else things, who goes through life like a hurricane hitting someone else's house. She's horrible and mean and sometimes I wish I weren't such a good person because it looks like being Chloe would be so much fun.

It's funny, because Chloe is based on Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany's. Like Holly, she's kind of sort of an escort, a woman who makes her living by "entertaining" powerful men. Like Holly, she's blissfully uncomplicated about the moral implications of her job. But unlike Holly, Chloe neither needs nor wants a man to take care of her. She doesn't want a fairytale ending, she's not a romantic at heart, and she doesn't particularly desire to mend her ways. She is never redeemed by the story.

And that's okay. I mean, obviously, I would have a huge problem with anyone who suggested that Chloe serve as a role model at all for anyone ever, but I like that she's out there. I like watching her subvert all the social norms, mess stuff up, be completely unapologetic, and then go do it all again. I like watching her help June find her inner bitch, and I love seeing the two of them learn to navigate a female friendship that isn't about baking and sweatpants, but about cocktail dresses and poor life choices.

I love Chloe because she is bad. Because she's the kind of bad that I don't actually want to be. I like her because she's fun to watch, and because she's the first girl I've seen who does that. Who doesn't take any crap, from anyone. Who is empowered and strong and cool, but still feminine. Who openly enjoys sex. Who says the worst thing at the worst time and doesn't mind.

I love her because she's my id. She acts out so I don't have to. And if guys can have Barney Stinson and Kramer and dozens of others, then why can't we have this one? Why can't I have Chloe?

Oh right. Because ABC cancelled her show. Whoo.

And, because I love you all, have a massive collection of Chloe gifs. Merry Christmas.

Gosh it's been a while since we did a Linksgiving post. Which means this is well overdue! In our sequel to last time, here's part two of links about women and gender (and racism and class and poverty and lots of things) on television.

Enjoy some nice links, while I curl up in my nice cozy new place and watch the rain (also my Hulu queue, because what are rainy Saturdays for if not television?).

1. On TV, Men Have Conviction and Women Have Issues from Salon. I don't know as I entirely agree with this article, since I think Sleepy Hollow's Abbie Mills is probably the best thing ever, but it's worth a read for sure.

2. TV's Strongest Female Characters Share One Stupid Flaw from Time magazine. Okay, now this one I will totally give them. It's a very valid complaint, that too many female characters are still defined by their messed up relationships with men.

3. The 99%: "There's Always Money In the Banana Stand": Class Passing on Arrested Development from Bitch. An awesome article on class signifiers and how Arrested Development is secretly subversive.

4. The Economics of a Hit TV Show from Priceonomics. Amazing explanation of how TV actually works and why shows we love often get cancelled anyway.

5. Spongebob Squarepants Is a Marxist! from Salon. BEST. ARTICLE. EVER.

6. Pink and Satiny, Part II from sobrans. A compelling (and exhaustively researched) article on Dean Winchester and the fluidity of gender presentation. It's pretty impressive.

7. 'Elementary's Joan: My Favorite Watson from BitchFlicks. I mean, the title pretty much says it all, but I agree wholeheartedly with the concept and execution herein.

8. 'Sleepy Hollow's Abbie Mills: a New and Improved Scully from BitchFlicks. Again, not super confusing in content, but well-written and worth reading.

9. Once Upon a Time: The Treatment of Regina from Fangs for the Fantasy. Dude, this article is amazing, and not just because I love Regina. But also because it really explains something that has bothered me: why does Regina never seem to catch a break?

10. Scandal: Lisa Kudrow Goes HAM in an Epic Speech on Sexism in Politics from Jezebel. It's just so good. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy and angry inside, like a wolverine with a cup of tea.

11. How Did NCIS Get to Be So Cool? from MacLean's. You know, I held out for a long time on the NCIS love train. But then I caved. And it is cool. And adorable. And fun. And also getting on there in years. Seriously, how long has it been on now?

12. Seth MacFarlane's 'Dads' Is Bad - But Could It Have Been Worse? from Speakeasy. Shudder. Just read it and shudder. And then maybe weep.

13. American Horror Story and Gratuitous Rape from Fangs for the Fantasy. Have I mentioned that I love FftF? Because I do. So much. And also, they make a pretty important point here.

14. Emma Goldwyn and Sasha Spielberg's Girls Without Boys Picked Up by ABC and WBTV from Women and Hollywood. So, in news about shows that I will definitely be watching...

15. Kenyan TV Show Imagines European Refugees Fleeing to Africa in 2062 from io9. Also in news of things I really, really want to see (but am having trouble locating, sadly). Because I'm pretty sure this has potential to be my favorite thing ever.

16. What Steven Moffat Doesn't Understand about Grief, and Why It's Killing Doctor Who from Tea Leaves and Dog Ears. Just a wonderful summation of everything that annoys me about current Who.

17. The Women of Battlestar Galactica, in the Style of Klimt, Bouguereau, Lichtenstein from the MarySue. I like nerd art.

18. 20 Life Lessons We Learned from "Gilmore Girls" from Buzzfeed.

19. 16 Things Mr. Feeny Taught Us from Buzzfeed.

20. The 50 Most Important Lessons Learned from "30 Rock" from Buzzfeed.

21. 15 Things You Didn't Know About "Game of Thrones" from Buzzfeed.

22. What If Breaking Bad Was All Just Hal from Malcolm in the Middle's Dream? from io9 and also the internet at large. Heehee, that's what.

Well, that's about the shape of it for this week. We'll be back on Monday to talk about Frozen and Love Actually and Charlie Brown Christmas and all those lovely, wintery types of things, quick before Christmas is over and it's weird to watch Christmas movies again!

Until then, have a lovely weekend.

I know I've said this many times, but it really is hard figuring out how to talk about something you like in an uncomplicated way. By which I mean that I have trouble thinking of a way to analyze Love Actually or even say anything interesting about it at all, because I just enjoy it so darn much. It's been my go-to holiday feel-good movie ever since it came out - that one romantic movie that I really don't mind watching and that I can probably (shamefully) quote all the way through.

I mean, this is by no means the most shameful movie in my collection. I own a DVD of Drive Me Crazy and Wolves of Kromer, which still stands as the best bad movie I've ever seen. I don't even really think that Love Actually is a bad movie. It's not. I'd even go so far as to say that it's good. But it's nowhere near good enough for me to have such a strong love for it, if these sorts of things were at all logical.

Here are the facts. We'll talk about the feelings in a minute. The movie itself is one of those insipid romantic ensemble films, though it does win points for being one of the better executed examples. It follows nine different couples during the month before Christmas, culminating in the stunning finale at a school pageant on Christmas Eve, and then popping back in for an epilogue a month after that.

The couples run a wide gamut of (mostly) white, straight, upper-middle class love. You have Daniel (Liam Neeson), who has just lost his wife and is baffled by the revelation that his stepson has subjugated all of his feelings of grief into a frenetic crush on a fellow student. There's Jamie (Colin Firth), whose girlfriend cheats on him and drives him to finish his novel in France, where he falls in love with his Portuguese housekeeper, Aurelia (Lucia Moniz). Let's see... Mark (Andrew Lincoln) is in love with Juliet (Keira Knightley, whose character has the same name as the girl she played in Bend It Like Beckham, so headcanon). Unfortunately, Juliet has just married Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who is Mark's best friend. Sadness abounds.

Harry (Alan Rickman) engages in a dangerous flirtation with his new secretary, Mia (Heike Makatsch), while his wife, Karen (Emma Thompson) frets over her kids and her big brother, David (Hugh Grant). Oh right, except David is actually the Prime Minister and has just entered office, only to fall smack in love with his assistant, Natalie (Martine McCutcheon).

Meanwhile, Harry's employee, Sarah (Laura Linney) is desperately in love with her coworker, Karl (Rodrigo Santoro), and it would work out great, if she weren't always on call to care for her mentally ill brother.

Oh, and Billy Nighy and Gregor Fisher play an aging rock star and his manager who attempt to slither up the charts with a disgusting Christmas song, while Martin Freeman and Joanna Page play a surprisingly cute pair of actor stand-ins who meet while standing in on a remarkably filthy movie.

Did I mention that all of these people kind of know each other? It's like a giant tangled ball of string and familial obligations. Like any holiday, actually.

Anyway, because there are so very many characters and plotlines and interconnections and baffling moments, the story is actually really hard to follow if you take it as a whole. Or rather, it becomes very very simplistic on the whole. The plot, when you get down to it? Love actually is all around us.

That's it. There's a lot of love. Isn't that nice.

If you haven't gathered by now, I really can't stand things that are just nice. I like things that are good, things that are true, and things that are bursting with life. But nice? Vaguely holding the door for someone before you keep walking the way you were walking anyway is nice.

Remembering not to play your music loudly at one in the morning because your roommate might be sleeping is nice. Not parking someone in is nice. Nice is the absolute bare minimum of effort you could have expended here, and it is certainly not an adjective I would ever want applied to me. Not that I particularly think it would be, to be honest.

Anyway, and do remember here that I really and truly love this movie and we'll get to that bit in a moment, the movie's all right, but there's really not a lot there, is there? Because there are so many characters and plotlines going on, no one gets enough screentime for anything substantial to happen. You just kind of check in on the various plots. Also, because everyone gets so little screentime, the writers rely on cheap tricks, like "Oh no! The manuscript fell in the water! We'll both have to strip down and jump in the lake to retrieve it. Hope this doesn't raise a level of sexual tension and make both of us realize our feelings for each other." Sigh.

Oh, and the movie's pretty darn sexist and rather strongly racist. There are precisely three significant characters of color in the entire film. Four if you count the eleven year old's love interest, which you shouldn't, because she's a child and also on screen for about five minutes, during which time she has like three lines.

Anyway, those three characters of color are, in order of plot relevance, Peter, the guy whose best friend is in love with his wife and who remains blissfully oblivious of this for the whole film. Peter has no plotline, other than being happily married to Juliet. I mean, good for him? But it's still not enough. Also, there's Karl, who does get to be a little active in his love story, but his is one of the least important stories, and also we never get his side of view on it. Is he sad when Sarah keeps answering her phone? Does he really love her, or is he just kind of curious and willing to try it out? What's up with Karl?

The third major character of color is Tony (Abdul Salis), who has no romantic plotline and acts only as a foil to his wacky friend, Colin (Kris Marshall), and Colin's plan to go over to America and sleep with hot women. Also he shows up on set and directs the stand-in couple.

That's it.

Things aren't much better for the women. I mean, yeah, there are lots of women in this movie, because it's a romance and a remarkably straight one at that, but the women don't really ever get to do anything. Almost none of the female characters are the center of their plots. Nope. It's the male characters who drive the story, and the female characters who are the objects of affection. Key word there? Objects.

No, seriously. With the exception of Sarah, whose storyline still revolves around a man who controls her life, it's just her brother, none of the women are the leading players in their love stories. It's freaking depressing. They're just there to stand around and look pretty while the guys work through enough of their crap to profess undying love or whatever. It's annoying.

Except here's the thing. I really love this movie.

And as I just stated above, I don't have a very good reason to. It's totally not my jam. It's sexist and racist and annoying. It's nice. I hate nice.

But someone needs to direct those complaints to the warm squishy part of my soul that I haven't yet managed to stomp out, because this movie makes me giggle and squirm and laugh with delight. It makes me sad, and excited, and deeply, deeply invested in the characters and their love stories. Crap, I even care that Billy Nighy's execrable single hits number one, even though you know it will, and even though this movie came out in 2003 and I've watched it at least once a year since then, so I think I freaking know what's going to happen!

Doesn't matter. I still get super invested every time.

Look, no movie is perfect. Even the ones that I hold up as golden examples for the rest of us to bow before (except that's idolatry and weird, we'll just vaguely nod towards Pacific Rim, Bend It Like Beckham, Terminator 2, etc) aren't perfect. The key is finding a movie that's imperfect in exactly the right way for you.

Kind of like, well, love.

Aww crap. That got sappy on me. I feel dirty now. I'm going to go shower in cynicism and watch a cold Russian art film until I feel bitter again.

Gross.

A Charlie Brown Christmas is something of a tradition in my family. Growing up, we didn't watch television, and the only times I ever really saw it was when we went over to my grandmother's house for dinner on Saturday nights. Mostly I saw classic Looney Tunes cartoons, or maybe some Three Stooges, Marx Brothers, or Laurel and Hardy. Every once in a while it was Little Rascals or Rocky and Bullwinkle. You know. The classics.

But once a year, on Christmas Eve, we'd go over to my grandmother's after church and cluster around her television (which still had the old school knob to turn it on and off), and watch The Grinch (animated, obviously) and A Charlie Brown Christmas. Those are the Christmas specials I grew up on, and until I was in college, those were the only one's I'd ever seen.

So, obviously, A Charlie Brown Christmas is very meaningful to me and mine. That's not all that special in and of itself, particularly when you consider how long the movie has been around, and the fact that it doesn't just have a little bit of a message, it's kind of deeply political.

That's right. A Charlie Brown Christmas is hella political. Hold onto your hats folks.

For anyone who's seen it past the age of ten, it's actually kind of hard to avoid the political, or at least social, overtones in the film. Made in the 1960s, it was a blatant reaction to modernization, and a comfortably strident critique of the commercialization and secularization of Christmas. Charlie Brown, our hero, is down and out because he doesn't feel like he fits in the Christmas spirit. Everyone he knows is asking for lots of presents and putting up lights and doing plays, and he just wants to talk about what it all means.

One of the more memorable scenes (the film is fairly episodic, following little strong structure, and that's okay) has Charlie Brown and Linus searching for a Christmas tree in a lot right before the Christmas pageant. All the trees are brightly colored, made of aluminum or plastic, all kinds of fake, except for the one, spindly little Christmas twig that Charlie Brown takes and buys and demands to be loved.

Of course the other characters hate his little tree, because it's sad and ugly and "not in the spirit of Christmas". So they hurl abuse at Charlie Brown, as per usual, and demand he get a better one. It's not until Linus reminds everyone of the true meaning of Christmas, in that it is a celebration of Christ's birth two thousand years ago in a place where trees weren't particularly common, that they all get over it and agree to help Charlie Brown decorate the tree. Then everyone holds hands and sings Christmas carols.

A lot of people like to hold up this movie as one of the strongholds in the fight against the "War on Christmas". But I disagree. Or rather, I don't disagree, but I disagree with everything else those other people think. That was confusing. I'll explain.

I don't particularly like FOX News the rest of the year, but they really irk me around Christmas. On top of their seeming inability to acknowledge any other holidays, they also always go on and on about the "War on Christmas". How too many people are saying "Happy Holidays!" and how it's awful that some towns aren't comfortable showing an openly religious scene, like the Nativity, in a public space because that would be rude to some folks. Or how if you aren't buying lots of presents and reassuring people that Santa was a white guy, you're anti-Christmas.

I have news about this. I am not anti-Christmas. I love Christmas. It's one of my favorite holidays. I'm a Christian, and it's a celebration of my Lord and Savior's birth. I'm totally down with that. In fact, I shall be spending tonight with my nearest and dearest, singing carols and opening precisely one present each and eating traditional German desserts because that's how we roll.

I do believe there is a War on Christmas. But it's not coming from the people who want you to say Happy Holidays, or the guy who rightly points out that religion doesn't actually belong on the public land because that's literally illegal. It's coming from you, FOX News. You and your incessant need to dumb down Christmas.

The reason I love The Grinch (animated) and A Charlie Brown Christmas is because they're right. Christmas is completely unrelated to commercialism, or at least it should be. We don't give each other presents at this time of year because we need to or because it's good for the economy or because we "want to win at gifting this year". Or at least we shouldn't give presents for those reasons. The presents at Christmas are meant in some way to remind those we love of how much we love them, because, if you are really trying to get at the Christian meaning of Christmas, this is the day when we remember how crazy and hard and bloody it was for the Son of God to decide to become a messy, stupid human like the rest of us, all so that he could die some thirty-ish years later in a way both painful and important.

Christmas isn't about toys. It's not about lights or trees or "holiday spirit". The war on Christmas isn't coming from the people who just want to have a nice time. It's coming from everyone who screams so loudly that they represent Christianity and Christmas, while promoting the things we are actively supposed to abhor.

Biblical Christianity is strongly against commercialism, and excessive personal wealth, and self-righteousness, and judgment. This is the time of year when we remember how much God loves us, and are you really suggesting that we should do that by trying to "win" at commercialism? Hell to the no.

There is a War on Christmas. But it's coming from the people who are trying to dumb Christmas down into a nice sweet, "Christian" holiday where we give presents and we worship Santa. Christmas isn't about that. It's about an unwed teenage mother and her much older fiance. They're poor, so poor that they have to rely on handouts, and when she gives birth, it's messy and loud and painful. But it's good. Because that kid? He's going to change the world. And then he's going to die. Christmas is about remembering the beauty of how much that all hurt and what that means about God's heart for us.

By all means, drink cocoa and set up a tree and watch some holiday specials. But remember that Christmas isn't really a nice holiday. It's not sweet. It's bloody and strong and it means something. And I dare FOX News to talk about that.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

So, here I was, minding my own business, celebrating Christmas with my family, watching A Muppet Christmas Carol on repeat because I freaking love that movie, and eating lots of cake, when I decide to sit down and watch the Doctor Who Christmas Special. It's tradition, right? And I love Doctor Who, right?

Consider my evening rather thoroughly dampened by the giant cloud of rage that hung over my head for the rest of the night. By which I mean that I didn't really like this special. Not so much. Or even a little bit.

In fact, it royally pissed me off. Why? Let me count the ways.

[Okay, you guys know the drill, or at least I hope you do. SPOILERS from this point out.]

Here's my best summary of what happened in this episode. If it's not super coherent, that's not my fault. Seriously. This episode was whack.

A really loud broadcast is suddenly heard from this random planet in the middle of nowhere. The broadcast is really scary, so all the bad guys of the universe decide to (for some reason) park their spaceships right outside the planet and hover there in a giant villain swarm. But a couple of good guys turned up too. Namely, the Doctor and the Church of the Papal Mainframe whatever whatever something.

The Doctor tries to figure out what's going on while Clara calls ceaselessly demanding that he come over for Christmas dinner because she invented a boyfriend who was coming over for dinner with her parents. Who are apparently not dead. When did that happen?

Anyway, the Doctor comes to save Clara from her little female problems, like family members, romantic woes, and apparently being a terrible cook, and whisks her off to the planet, where they find the source of the distress call. Well, first they get naked and chat with Tasha Lem (Orla Brady), the Mother Superious of the Church of the Papal Mainframe, and then they pop down to investigate.

Turns out that the place the signal came from was a quaint little town named Christmas, where everyone is very nice and tells the truth (for the first bit, until later in the episode when characters can lie apparently because of reasons shut up). They trace it back to a giant tower in the town, where the Doctor finds, dun dun DUN, a crack in the wall. So we're back to this all.

On the other side of the crack is Gallifrey, which is broadcasting a single question through all of space and time. You see, they're outside the universe and want to make sure they've got the right place before they come in. So they're asking a simple question: "Doctor who?"

If the Doctor says his name, Gallifrey will emerge from the crack and everything will be all better, except for the bit where it starts the Time War over again, and everyone dies and badness. The Doctor can't say his name. But he also can't let anyone else get at the crack. So he ships Clara off home because he needs her to be safe and out of the way, I guess, and plunks himself down in the town, to keep it safe forever.

Also the Church of the Papal Mainframe goes kind of nuts and turns into the Church of the Silence, wherein we get The Silence, and then they try to kill the Doctor and kidnap River and lots of other stuff that has already happened on the show, but which they think this explanation will make more clear (it really didn't). Clara, meanwhile, manages to come back about three hundred years later, and tries to get the Doctor to leave. He's much older now, and looks it, but even though he saves Tasha Lem from becoming kind of Dalek-y and fights off more invasions, it seems he's learned absolutely nothing, and sends Clara away again.

Then she comes back...sigh....and he's super old now, but the war is still raging and he's dying, so Clara takes a moment to whisper into the crack that if they love the Doctor (which is a weird thing to say to a planet), then they'll understand that he doesn't need a name, and also that they should piss off and leave him in peace.

So Gallifrey does just that, but not before whipping him some regeneration energy. The Doctor, who is now dying of old age, I guess, starts to regenerate and manages to regenerate so hard he blows up the Daleks. And then he whines for a bit, and turns into Peter Capaldi.

Ugh.

There are a lot of things I hate about this particular episode, and, honestly, very few things I loved. Actually, I'm not sure there's anything I loved here. Maybe Handles, the dismembered Cyberman head. He was fun. But everything else? Sucked.

The biggest problem is pretty simple though: this plot made absolutely no sense. It didn't make sense emotionally, thematically, logically, in the story, or even as a bit of comedic relief. Instead, this seems to be an attempt to wrap up every single Matt Smith Doctor storyline into one big bow right before he goes. So now The Silence and Trenzalore and the Name of the Doctor and Gallifrey's return and River and the cracks in the universe and also Clara's weirdness and holy crap everything, it's all tied up into one Gordian knot of weirdness. And I mean that honestly. None of this actually makes sense if you look at it for two seconds.

Why the hell were only bad guys gathered outside the planet? The Time Lords weren't the only reasonably good species with time travel in the whole universe, were they? And why do the Daleks keep using human-Dalek shells to hide in? Don't Daleks think everyone else is inferior for not being a Dalek? Why hide as humans?

Why the poop are the Weeping Angels there? HOW THE HELL DO WEEPING ANGELS WORK NONE OF THIS MAKES SENSE.

Also, aren't Clara's parents dead?

Basically, none of the story, not even a little bit, made sense. And it didn't make me feel sufficiently emotional for me to forgive that. Mostly it just pissed me off. Because I am a creature made of caffeine, rage, and library cards. (I'm sort of kidding, but sort of not. I have six library cards, all still valid.)

This, of course, isn't even counting my other big problem with this episode, and Moffat's whole tenure on the show in general. That is, simply put, the sexism. Oh the sexism. I hate it. And he is rife with it.

In this episode alone, there are about five female characters altogether. Total. At all. Which is actually pretty good for a Doctor Who episode, sadly. Of those characters, only two had significant amounts of screentime. The others were just in it for brief moments that served little to no purpose, that being Clara's disapproving mother who only wants her to find a nice boyfriend and settle down, and her alarmingly randy grandmother who keeps hitting on the Doctor.

The third female character of little screentime was Amy Pond, who showed back up again in a dream sequence of sorts right before the Doctor regenerated because I guess he really needed to see her again and isn't that sweet? Only it just serves to reinforce the whole, "Amy's life revolves around the Doctor to an alarming degree," thing, because even if it was just a dream, it still makes it so that Amy's entire run on the show is wrapped up in the Doctor and his needs, and her character development is completely secondary.

Of the two major characters, Tasha Lem and Clara, both of them had pretty much the same problem. They both fancied the Doctor, and he kissed both of them and let them down and ignored him until it was convenient for him to remember them and they strived and fought to help him and in the end he kind of did nothing to save the situation and all their striving was a bit pointless, but isn't it nice that they loved him so much?

Excuse me, I need to find a bucket in which to barf.

Look, I really hate that all the women of the Moffat era have been romantically obsessed with the Doctor, seem to have no lives outside of his orbit, and who are incapable of functioning without him. Women who sacrifice everything for this epic great man. Only this epic great man does jack shit in the whole episode.

Like, oh, it's nice that you're holding off all the bad guys, but you're not actually producing a proactive solution ever at all even a little bit. You're just going to fight until you die? Seriously? And when push comes to shove and the end comes you...magically get out of the scrape with almost no consequences because those are for meanies?

Anger. Rage. Fire.

I'm not saying that you can't like Doctor Who as it is right now, written by Steven Moffat and filled, as it is, with racism and sexism and bad bad terrible writing. You can like that. I like Teen Wolf, I really can't judge you. But I do demand that you recognize the flaws in the show. Because I refuse to believe that it's better not to notice these glaring problems. You can still love something cracked and broken. But to deny that's it's messed up in the first place? That's just blindness.

Last night (or tonight, if you want to be technical about when I'm writing this - I write these things the night before, don't you know?) I saw Frozen for the surprising second time. Partly, this was a result of my sister's intense desire to see a movie and my family's intention to see a movie that wouldn't make anyone cringe (we'll talk about how fun it was to watch American Hustle with my dad next week). But another part, the reason I actually went back, is because I really wanted to sort out my feelings about this movie. It's not Turbo, which made me immediately and irrevocably angry, and it's not Lilo and Stitch, which made me coo with delight.

Instead, this is a movie that has good and bad parts, like most things, I guess. It's got things about it that I love, like Olaf and Sven, and things I hate, like all that cultural appropriation business and the comedy relief but awkwardly kind of racist trolls. And it's got things I feel pretty neutral on - everything else. Oh wait, except for Anna and her "look at how quirky and clumsy and silly I am!" persona. I was slightly more annoyed than neutral on that one.

Anyway, I don't think it's a bad thing that this movie is slightly more complex to analyze than your average kids flick. I think that's actually a great thing. Granted, I would love it if the film had managed to do without the things that pissed me off, but nobody's perfect.

(Except for Pacific Rim. Holy crap do I love Pacific Rim. Aaaaaaaa, Pacific Rim.)

The problem I have with this movie is that it's a very nice movie, with a surprisingly good ending, but that it never quite manages to stick the landing. It's not bad, and I think on balance this movie is actually more of a good thing than a bad thing, it's just...why did it have to have those bad things in the first place?

Allow me to explain. (SPOILERS from here on out.)

The film starts when Elsa (Idina Menzel as an adult) and Anna (Kristen Bell) are little kids, the princesses of the small kingdom of Arendelle. Elsa has a magical gift - she can create ice and snow - but she's not able to control it. When some childish fun gets out of hand, Elsa accidentally hits Anna with a ray of ice magic, and it nearly kills her sister. Their parents race them off to get help from the awkwardly stereotyped trolls. The trolls are able to heal Anna, but in so doing, they remove all her knowledge of Elsa's magic. And Elsa is warned that if she doesn't learn to control her magic, she could really hurt someone. So their parents take them home, and Elsa becomes an elective hermit, desperately trying to control her powers, while Anna is hurt by her sister's sudden coldness and the distance between them.

Years pass, the girls grow up, and tragically their parents pass away. Elsa becomes queen, and there's a coronation. Unfortunately for Elsa, but fortunately for Anna, the castle must be opened up for the coronation, and that's where the trouble starts. Anna goes mad with freedom and launches herself at the nearest available and sympathetic guy - Prince Hans (Santino Fontana). Hans and Anna, both romantics, it would seem, decide that they've both found "The One" and that they need to get married. Right now.

Weirdly, Elsa doesn't love this plan. When she refuses to give Anna her blessing, Anna freaks out and starts the big emotional confrontation that Elsa has been afraid of pretty much her whole life. Because Elsa's magic is linked to her mood, it's not super helpful when her sister freaks her out. Elsa panics and accidentally starts an ice storm before being run out of the castle by people accusing her of being a witch. She flees up into the mountains.

Anna, realizing that this was kind of a jerk move on her part, chases after Elsa, only to find herself woefully unprepared for the wilderness. So she hires some help: Kristoff (Jonathan Groff), a weird, antisocial ice deliverer whose business is down the tubes now that Arendelle is stuck in an eternal winter.

There are adventures and mishaps, and a lovably misinformed snowman named Olaf (Josh Gad), and finally out heroes reach Elsa's ice castle. Anna goes in and tries to reason with Elsa, but Elsa's working on some pretty hardcore repression and isolation feelings, as well as about ten years of emotional crazies to work out, so it doesn't go very well. Elsa accidentally lashes out and hits Anna in the heart with another ice ray. And then chases them out of her castle with an abominable snowman.

Kristoff realizes that there's something wrong with Anna and takes her to the trolls to be healed (because the trolls adopted Kristoff and Sven at some point, a cute but kind of weird plot point). The trolls try to set the two of them up before realizing that Anna has ice in her heart, and can only be saved by an "act of true love". Kristoff lovingly brings Anna back to Arendelle so that Hans can kiss her and save her life.

Meanwhile, Hans isn't in Arendelle. He's come looking for Anna, and in the process found Elsa. He brings her back to Arendelle, only now in chains, and keeps her in a cell while they try to figure out what to do with her. The storm gets worse. Elsa kind of figures that this isn't going to end well, and that the only way out is for her to get as far away as possible.

At last, Anna and Hans are reunited, only for Hans to reveal that he's a jerkface who doesn't love her and only wants her crown. Which actually makes more sense than the alternative, so that's okay. He leaves Anna to die and goes off to kill Elsa.

But what's that? Kristoff and Sven riding back in to kiss Anna and save the day? Yep. Except just as Kristoff and Anna are finally in kissing distance, Anna sees Hans about to kill Elsa, and races in between them to save her sister. And that's the act of true love that saves a frozen heart. Awwwww.

Elsa uses the power of love to save Arendelle and is accepted as queen again, Hans gets punched and thrown in jail, and Kristoff and Anna get their kiss. Oh, and Olaf gets to see summer without melting. Everyone gets what they want. Except for me, sadly.

Look, I actually really like a lot of things about this movie. The whole thing about true love not just being romantic? Love it. The bit where it's Anna's act of true love that saves her? Amazing. The thing where Anna finds her true love and everyone questions her because she doesn't really know the guy and it turns out that they were right to question? I need that in my life.

But there are other things I really, really don't love. For starters, why the hell is this movie so white? I get that it's set in a fantasy European kingdom, vaguely based on Sweden or something, but do the animators really believe that brown people were only invented a hundred years ago or something? Have they not heard of the Sami culture, the indigenous tribes native to Scandinavia who are, and especially were at the time this story is set, quite brown?

I mean, clearly they've heard of the Sami, since they use Sami chanting over the beginning credits, and therefore almost literally define cultural appropriation. Using an element of the culture out of its context for the purpose of making oneself look more interesting or dramatic? Check, check, and check. Also, they obviously know what the Sami looked like in the 1800s, as Kristoff, the blond white guy, is wearing an incredibly accurate Sami wardrobe and performing a traditional, protected Sami job - reindeer training.

So, I don't think we can claim full ignorance on this one.

And, as I mentioned above, the trolls are there too, a sort of uncomfortable bit that really doesn't mesh with the rest of the movie and has deeply weird overtones. The trolls are the mystical sages of the kingdom, but they're just kind of there. They perform the filmic role of the magic black man - that is, they are an othered group that performs no function in the story but to serve and advise the white protagonists. Also, they perform a literal minstrel show and "love experts". Like most things, I don't think this is intentional, but it sure as hell made me uncomfortable.

I don't love that this film felt the need to rely on a love triangle to get through, and when the real love story is that of the two sisters, I kind of wish we'd spent more time with the two of them, letting them really feel the relationship. I wanted more. Less of the boys, more of the girls. Which is a pretty usual complaint.

This is not to say that I thought the movie was bad. It isn't. It's quite fun, actually, and I ended up adoring Olaf, who I was all set to hate with the fire of a thousand suns. He's just too cute to hate!

Overall, I think the good outweighs the bad here. It's a movie about the true love of sisterhood, and given that I went to see this movie with my sister (twice), that's something I can get behind. I just wish that one of these days I could have a movie like this where I don't find problematic things lurking in the bushes when I want to enjoy it.

We all have dreams.

Some dreams are more realistic than others.

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