Woman of the Month: Zatanna

Zatanna Zatara from the DCU

Yes, she might be a third-tier superhero that the casual fan has never heard of, but no matter when or where Zatanna pops up, she’s always a delight. I’ve seen her in DC Superhero Girls, Justice League Dark, Young Justice, the graphic novel Zatanna and the House of Secrets – there was even talk of a feature film for a few hot minutes (though Emerald Fennell would have been at the helm so perhaps a bullet was dodged). She was apparently in a few episodes of Smallville as well, though I had checked out of that show way before then.

I’ll admit, I don’t know a lot about this character as she exists in the comics, but I like her style. And sure, we probably shouldn’t fangirl a character for their aesthetic alone, but what’s not to love about a stage magician in a form-fitting tuxedo and fishnet stockings who actually performs real magic for an unknowing audience when she’s not fighting crime? It’s a bit like the vampires pretending to be actors pretending to be vampires on Interview with the Vampire.

Perusing through her Wikipedia page, a few constants emerge: the House of Mystery, dealing with Doctor Fate, a relationship with John Constantine, and the nickname “Zee.” What I think I enjoy most about her is what’s often the case with superheroines: she is permitted to unabashedly wield hard power. And for her specifically, it’s magical power, which means she can go toe-to-toe with the likes of Wonder Woman and Superman (there’s a great scene in Justice League Dark where she does precisely this).

I mean, I’m a Merlin survivor, the show in which all women with magic were evil and/or dead, so for a young woman to be self-assured, proficient at her craft, and respected by her peers across all the different variations of her character is a profound relief. Long may she continue.

(Also, find and read Zatanna and the House of Secrets by Matthew Cody. It’s great!)

Reading/Watching Log #127

I’m swallowing my superhero fatigue in a desperate bid to clean out my hard-drive and make room for all the stuff I want to see in the not-too-distant future – which means that June is superhero month!

Either way, it’s long past time for me to wrap up the Arrowverse, of which there are still half-a-dozen shows I haven’t finished yet. By my reckoning I have one season of Supergirl, two of Batwoman, three of Legends of Tomorrow, three of The Flash and one of Black Lightning left to go. Oh, and the entirety of Superman and Lois. And was Stargirl ever part of this continuity?

When things ends before you’re given the chance to catch up with them, you inevitably lose a degree of investment, but I’m nothing if not a completist.

I also tackled the DC Animated Movie Universe, which is quite a mouthful, so we’ll go with DCAMU henceforth, though thankfully there were only four more to watch before their conclusion.

And yet while watching Superman getting killed by Doomsday for the third time, and Clark admit his true identity to Lois for what felt like the millionth, I realized that these types of stories are most akin to the King Arthur and Robin Hood legends in how they’re retold over the years. The origins of superhero stories are obviously not as ambiguous (I mean, they’re printed right there on the page) but we’re still dealing with a number of characters with set personalities and familiar stories that get adapted, readapted, rebooted and changed around until certain elements feel set in stone.

Robin Hood has an archery contest, the quarterstaff fight on the bridge, saving the poacher, helping someone marry their love, and rescuing someone from the gallows in the same way that X-Men has Wolverine struggle to remember his past, Jean Grey becoming the phoenix, someone returning to the past from a dystopian future, and Xavier’s School for Gifted Children getting blown up.

The Holy Grail was nowhere to be seen in the earliest King Arthur stories, but is now an essential part of any retelling. But is Percival the knight who finds it? Or Galahad? Or Bors? Different writers told different versions, and later versions handle the discrepancies by having all of them go on the Grail Quest.

This is type of storytelling is unique only to legends and comic book adaptations, and it’s quite fascinating to witness, as it’s the same story with the same characters every time… but not.

On another note, I realized I’m not hugely attached to superheroes. They were present in my childhood, but like The Wizard of Oz, were so American in nature that I never really felt a deep investment. This meant I wasn’t that phased about Zack Snyder’s dark-n-edgy take on the material, as it’s just another variation on the old stories – though I could understand why some people were upset. But as I said about Peter Pan in April, at some point you have to do something different, or else we’re just going to end up with twenty thousand identical adaptations.

(Though having said that, I watched Justice League Dark: Apokolips this month and was not ready for how grim that was gonna get).

Xena Warrior Princess: Animal Attraction, Them Bones Them Bones, Purity

Oh dear, it’s been almost a whole year since my last post on Xena Warrior Princess, so I’ll understand if you’ve forgotten I was even doing this. And looking back, I can see that I started these posts way back in 2018!

But hey, that’s what tags are for. Just press a single button and you can see all my posts on this subject as though I wrote them over the course of a single weekend instead of a number of years.

We’re still at the beginning of season five, in which Xena and Gabrielle have just been resurrected for what feels like the dozenth time – although this time around, Xena has come back from the dead with a little something extra in the oven…

Links and Updates

The last time I did one of these posts, it ended with news of Nicholas Brendon’s death. Now this one begins with news of Anthony Stewart Head’s passing, and – damn. This one hurts. That we’ve lost Dawn, Xander and Giles in such a relatively short space of time is unsettling, especially when everyone was getting excited about the (now cancelled) continuation of the show that made them famous. Hopefully I can kick my Buffy the Vampire Slayer rewatch into gear again soon.

But Anthony Stewart Head wasn’t only known for Buffy – perhaps his second greatest genre role was as King Uther on Merlin, in which he infused downright terrible writing with his gravitas, and never lost sight of a cruel tyrant’s humanity (which made the character all the more disturbing). That specific brand of dickishness was also used to good effect in Ted Lasso, in which Rupert Mannion was clearly a vindictive prick, but with enough charisma to let you understand how he got away with it.

He did the rounds on shows like Doctor Who, Spooks, Bridgerton, Harlan Coban’s The Stranger, Still Star-Crossed, Galavant, Manchild, Little Britain, Dancing on the Edge… that at least, is the material I’ve seen him in. People are talking enthusiastically about something called Repo! The Genetic Opera, though I’ve not had a chance to find out more about it.

In any case, he’ll be remembered best as Rupert Giles, who started as a befuddled and rather nebbish librarian, secretly moonlighting as Buffy’s Watcher, only to almost immediately start demonstrating hidden depths: his softer side with Jenny Calendar, his fatherly instincts to Buffy and her friends, his sarcasm and wit, the glimpses of his younger years as “Ripper,” his expansive intelligence – not only in the arcane arts, but emotionally as well. One never forgets his talk with Buffy at the end of “Lie To Me.” And every now and then, whenever he was pushed to anger, he would become more frightening than any demon or vampire.

Offscreen, there was never any indication that he wasn’t exactly who he presented himself as: a very chill, kind, personable and down-to-earth man. He was a stalwart presence throughout my adolescence, and in a way (and with the full understanding that he actually has real daughters) it feels like I’ve lost a dad.

So, a very sad start to the weekend. Behind the cut you’ll find a heck-load of trailers, and plenty more projects to look forward to…

Woman of the Month: Stacie Munroe

Stacie Munroe from Hustle

The feminist debate on whether or not a woman can (or should) use her sexuality to get what she wants in life isn’t anywhere near over, and most people can’t even agree on what exactly it might involve. Batting your eyelashes to get out of a speeding ticket? Or a full-blown honey trap to trick an old man out of his life’s savings?

I mean, society looks down on gold diggers and trophy wives and sex workers, dismissing them as manipulative, shallow and deceptive. But in fiction, isn’t it kind of fun to watch? And I mean as wish fulfilment for women, not as catering to the male gaze.

Stacie Munroe encapsulates this debate perfectly: she’s a grifter who doesn’t hesitate to use her beauty and sex appeal for a range of different cons. She’s posed as anything from a museum curator to a high-priced escort, and it’s almost a given that any episode featuring her will include the mark getting Distracted by the Sexy that she brings to the table as a crucial part of the con the team are engaged in. (Though in at least one episode she deliberately subverts this by wearing big glasses and false teeth… while still shamelessly flirting with the mark).

And yet there’s no denying that she’s also an incredibly intelligent woman: not only do you have to be a good actress and a quick thinker in her line of work, but she’s fluent in Japanese and Spanish, is the team member who balances the books, and often steps in as Team Mum when the boys are fighting. Her attractiveness is not even remotely the entirety of her character, and yet she’s a quintessential Femme Fatale, right down to the fair skin/dark hair combo.

Perhaps it’s better to say it’s a role she deliberately embodies rather than an intrinsic part of her nature, and the jury is still out (and will probably never get back in) as to whether a self-aware Ms Fanservice could ever be empowering or feminist. There will always be some that insist she’s giving women a bad name and reinforcing a stereotype, while others point out that if using your sexuality works, then go ahead and use every tool at your disposal.

Reading/Watching Log #126

As well as continuing with my-read through all the most significant children’s classics (this month it’s Winnie the Pooh) I also had a very important goal: to watch as many movies as I could that I only want to see once before deleting them from my hard-drive to make more room on it.

As such, this month’s viewing/reading material is very scattershot, with no unifying theme. And if it feels like I didn’t do a whole lot of reading, I’ve actually gotten though two and half books in Katherine Woodfine’s Taylor and Rose quartet (the follow-up to The Sinclair’s Mysteries). I’ll just wait until next month, and the completion of the final book Nightfall in New York, to discuss them all together. After that, I’m looking forward to tackling Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series.

Meta: Rebecca and Rowena; Part II: The Texts

Part I: Introduction

In my last post on the subject of Ivanhoe, I wrote about how female characters (especially if there’s only two in any given project) are inevitably used as narrative foils to one another, whether it’s in the role of love interest, the embodiment of womanhood, or just in general. Sometimes it’s deliberately done by the writer, though often the audience does the comparative work on their own. After all, what’s even the point of having more than one female character if we can’t unfavourably contrast one with the other?

And the binaries these women inhabit are very often based on the fact they’re women. We’ve got the Madonna and the Whore, the Good Girl and the Bad Girl, the Dark and Light Feminine, Betty and Veronica, the Tomboy and the Girly Girl – I could go on.

For example, MGM’s latest take on Robin Hood has a pretty clear-cut Madonna/Whore dynamic (albeit with a degree of nuance) at work with Marian and original character Priscilla. Marian is virginal and sweet-natured, while Priscilla is a sexually active manipulator. The show also introduces a third type: Ralph, a girl living rough in the forest in the guise of a boy, who is obviously much more tomboyish than either Marian or Priscilla, and who makes up the third point of a love triangle with Robin. That each woman exists as a direct contrast to the other two is very deliberate.

But now I want to take a closer look at Rowena and Rebecca as they exist within Walter Scott’s novel, and then William Makepeace Thackery’s parody Rebecca and Rowena. The point that fascinates me is that they are very seldom compared to each other in Scott’s original text, but Thackery’s treatment of each character is a quintessential case of how fandom (or audiences in general) is predisposed to judge women by pitting them against one another.

And in a way it’s a shame, as Scott’s text invites no such treatment of them.