Links and Updates

That's it for another year, though it seems like just a few weeks ago I was joking about with some work colleagues and doing the old: "see you next year!" gag as we headed into 2018.

I had a few pop-culture highlights this year: going to Comic Con (which is called Armageddon over here) for the first time and seeing Katie McGrath, finding out that I'm a Slytherin (which has done wonders for my confidence – all I have to tell myself in difficult situations is: "I'm a Slytherin, I can handle this") and enjoyed a full season of Doctor Who with our first woman Doctor.

I saw so many stage shows, from Wicked to The Nutcracker to Jesus Christ: Superstar, loved the newest iteration of She-Ra, churned through J.K. Rowling's Strike detective series, discovered Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples, and began reposting my Xena Warrior Princess reviews, having watched the show in its entirety between 2011 and 2017.

I took a trip down memory lane replaying the Gabriel Knight trilogy (1993 – 1999) and re-reading Monica Dickens's The Messenger quartet (1985 -1986) and watched a whole heap of new material, with standouts including Star Wars Rebels, The Good Place, Lost in the Space, Infinity War and (just last night) Aquaman.

As for my own writing, I've been plodding away on my latest story, but found time to write up some metas on subjects that interested me: Defying the Fridge (on fictional women who survived their respective stories), Contrasting/Comparing Three Halloween Movies (exploring the differences and similarities between three of my favourite seasonal films) and my Merlin Retrospective (written at the conclusion of the show, and reposted here for its ten year anniversary).

And now here we are on the brink of 2019. So what's there to look forward to (fandomwise) in the New Year?

Reading/Watching Log #36

The New Year is just around the corner, and the most surprising thing about this December was how much time I spent at the theatre – between this month and the last I've seen five stage productions, which has to be new record for me.

And despite the business of the Christmas holidays, I managed to get a lot of books, movies and shows under my belt – a lot of light, cheerful stuff to keep me buoyed, especially filmic adaptations of children's books that I read earlier in the year.  Pretty much everything under the cut has a happy ending, and to paraphrase Anthony Trollope (who is featured below): if you're going to make someone sit through your story, you owe them a happy ending.

I don't know how true that is, but I was grateful for it this month.

Woman of the Year: A Retrospective 2018

It's that time of year again: time for my annual round up of fantastic female characters that I've discovered in film, on television, and throughout a variety of novels. Though I featured the twelve stand-outs for each month of the year, there are plenty more women who made the runners-up cut, and it's always fun to feature them in their own blog-post.

As it happens, there are three major themes to this year's women: Difficult Women, Superhero Women, and East-Asian Women.

In the first group we had a surplus of ladies who were given personalities and storylines that up until pretty recently only straight white males could get away with. Think Don Draper or Tony Soprano or Walter White or Dexter Morgan.

But my reading/viewing this year ran the gamut from women who are downright despicable (Villanelle from Killing Eve, Mary Anne Mowbray in Dark Angel, Serena Joy of The Handmaid's Tale, Gone Girl's Amy Dunne) to ambiguously unlikeable (Becky Sharpe in the new Vanity Fair miniseries, Grace Marks in Alias Grace, Annalise Keating in How To Get Away with Murder) to broken and/or complicated women struggling to do the right thing despite their spiky, brittle personalities: Camille Preaker in Sharp Objects, Rachel Watson in The Girl on the Train, Maureen Robinson in Lost in Space, the assorted housewives of Big Little Lies).

Heck, even Disenchanted's Princess Bean with her drunken irresponsibility fits in here.

And though I haven't checked in with them in ages, three major shows ended this year (or will next year) that starred women who could fall into any of the above three subcategories: Elizabeth Jennings from The Americans, Olivia Pope from Scandal, and Carrie Mathison from Homeland.

It demonstrates two things: firstly that actresses are getting better, juicier and more challenging roles, and secondly that female characters are being recognized as having just as much capacity for complexity and moral ambiguity as male ones. Of course, all but two of these women are white (unsurprisingly, the two exceptions feature on a Shonda Rimes show) so there's still plenty of progress to be make – and yet I'm an optimist.

All send a clear message: women don't have to be nice to have interesting stories to tell.

Then there's the ever-increasing roster of female superheroes emerging from the shadows to enjoy the spotlight. In the wake of Wonder Woman's 2017 debut  came a host of other crime-fighters, and this year alone I had Woman of the Month posts focusing on Sara Lance (Legends of Tomorrow), Shuri (Black Panther), Misty Knight and Colleen Wing (Luke Cage/Iron Fist).

We're now into our fourth season of Supergirl, and the second of Jessica Jones. We got our first look at Batwoman on Arrow, and an exciting new trailer for Captain Marvel. Sequels were also kind, with Ant-Man sharing the spotlight in Ant-Man and the Wasp (the first Marvel film to have a female superhero in the title), Helen Parr returning as Elastigirl in The Incredibles 2 and Domino being an unexpected delight in Deadpool 2.

And though I haven't caught up yet, I heard Iris West had a great season of The Flash along with her time-travelling daughter Nora, a host of animated girls in Marvel Rising: Secret Warriors, and news on the development of films involving the likes of Silk, Black Cat, Batgirl, Black Widow, Birds of Prey and the Gotham City Sirens.

Heck, there were even YA novels by Sarah J. Maas and Leigh Bardugo that explored the backgrounds of Selina Kyle and Diana Prince before they took on their superhero (or villain) mantles.

And of course, though it stretches the definition of "superhero", we finally debuted our first female incarnation of the Doctor on Doctor Who.

After so many previous disasters to bring superhero women to the big (and small!) screen, they have finally ARRIVED.

And finally, an increase of East-Asian women, from the runaway success of Crazy Rich Asians to my revisit of Grace Nakimura in the Gabriel Knight games of the nineties. Kelly Tran penned a passionate defence of her right to exist in The New York Times after increasingly gross attacks, and so many more Asian faces appeared on my radar:

Jessica Huang in Fresh Off the Boat, Mia in Humans (whose actress will also be Minerva in Captain Marvel), Constance in Ocean's Eight, Lara Jean in All the Boys I've Loved Before, Hazel Wong in the Wells and Wong detective series, Colleen Wing in Iron Fist, Sun in Sense8, Anna Fang in the Mortal Engines film (and book Night Flights that was inspired by her fantastic performance) and even Nagini in the Harry Potter verse, contentious though that development may be.

It sounds as though Michelle Yeoh is getting her own spin-off for her character in Star Trek: Discovery (hopefully not her evil counterpart) and let's not forget the upcoming live-action Mulan starring Liu Yifei, or the short Pixar film Bao involving a Chinese-Canadian mother dealing with empty nest syndrome.

Okay, so bottom left is a picture of Katie Leung from a Poirot
mystery, BUT she was the inspiration for Robin Stevenson's
Hazel Wong, so she's featured here honorarily.

And on a personal note, I even saw a Beauty and the Beast ballet this month which featured Sophia Bae as an Asian Belle.

Oh, and a special shout-out to Artemis from Young Justice, who'll be returning early next year and who manages to fit into ALL THREE of the above categories.

On a broader note, I also ended up reading a lot of children's fiction this year (and watching their subsequent film adaptations), and found they involved a great deal of young heroines: Arietty Clock from The Borrowers, Mary Smith from The Little Broomstick, Princess Cimorene in Dealing with Dragons, Anna Sasaki from When Marnie was There, Maria Merryweather in The Secret of Moonacre, and even an unnamed little girl in the adaptation of The Little Prince.

Women negotiating power, women who were difficult without being villains, women from classic literature, women facing the relentless difficulties of male-dominated spaces – there was something for everybody. So perhaps in place of Difficult Asian Superheroes, I should simply say: this was the year of Unapologetic Women.

Here are the rest of the standout women I discovered in 2018...

Xena Warrior Princess: Callisto, Death Mask, Is There a Doctor in the House?

There's only a few days left until 2019, and I've only just remembered to squeeze in the final episodes of Xena's first season before the New Year.

And it's a good thing I did, as the last three episodes are some of the best the show has to offer, introducing one of the most important villains not only of the show, but of pop-culture in general: Callisto. There's so much to be said about her, most of which is under the cut, but truly she's one of the most iconic baddies in sci-fi/fantasy.

Doctor Who: The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos

Christmas is only a week away, and so my watching schedule has been rather slow, but I've made it at last to the finale of this season's Doctor Who (though we've still got a New Year's Special to go).

The whole season has had an interesting structure – though most of the intervening episodes have been standalones, the premiere and finale are closely connected; essentially a story and its sequel. There was no real arc in between the two as we saw in the Russell T. Davies era (such as the Bad Wolf and Saxon clues that were strewn across each season) rather Chris Chibnall was content to let others tell their own tales before wrapping up his own.

Though did we ever get an answer to the "Timeless Child" comment made in The Ghost Monument? Maybe that's being saved for the Special.

Doctor Who: It Takes You Away

So... that was pretty weird, right? I'd seen this episode described as "the trippiest Doctor Who episode we've seen in years," and that about sums it up. It was so trippy in fact, that I'm not even sure how I feel about it. Here are some brief thoughts...

Doctor Who: The Witchfinders

This was a fairly solid episode, and one that made the most of the Doctor now being in feminine form. It could have very easily played out the same with Eleven or Twelve (after all, men were accused of witchcraft too) but there was certainly a deeper resonance to it with her as a woman, as well as some pertinent themes about fear-mongering and the complexity of human nature that worked surprisingly well.

So as ever, this season keeps proving that its historical episodes are its best.

Reading/Watching Log #35

This reading/watching log is a little late: I usually like to have it posted before the month in question has passed, but it's been a busy few weeks and a pretty long month. For all that, I managed to get a surprising amount of reading done – in fact, I think I read more than I watched! As well as that, I managed to sneak in a ballet and an Agatha Christie play, so it's been pretty productive four weeks all things considered.

Along with nutcrackers and crime, it's also been a time for the fourth books in ongoing series, the book or movie counterparts to children's classics, a bunch of superheroes in their formative years, a few spins on traditional fairy tales, and of course: SHE-RA!

Woman of the Month: She-Ra

Adora from She-Ra

This was a bit of a no-brainer.

I was intrigued by the decision to reboot She-Ra: much like Xena Warrior Princess, she started off as the Distaff Counterpart to a previously existing male character with his own show – in Xena's case it was Hercules, in She-Ra's case it was He-Man. (Coincidentally enough, up until recently a Xena reboot was also in the works without any mention of her male counterpart).

In any case, the eighties' take on She-Ra was actually a pretty fascinating one: as the long lost twin sister of Prince Adam (He-Man's alter-ego), Adora was raised by an evil faction known as the Horde, who sought to dominate the planet of Etheria. To continue with the similarities between Adora and Xena, it's Adam/Hercules who brings her to the side of the angels by showing her the truth of the world and appealing to her better nature.

Of course, the long-lost twin angle naturally leads to comparisons with Luke and Leia in Star Wars (complete with alliterative names) and there's also a debt to Wonder Woman – for as Adora soon discovers, she's the chosen warrior known as She-Ra, a woman of incredible strength and agility. Throw in a magic sword (thanks King Arthur) and you have a pastiche of several different stories rolled into one.

Which necessarily isn't a bad thing, especially when the eighties show has at least one solid, original idea to its name: how does a girl react when she discovers her whole life is a lie, and the people she's been fighting alongside are actually the bad guys? It's a surprisingly complex set-up, but one the original cartoon wasn't all that interested in exploring – after all, the main impetus of the show was to sell toys.

But if you're going to remake something, you should take the opportunity to do it better, and showrunner Noelle Stevenson does.

Adora has been thoroughly brainwashed since she was a baby, with friends, ambitions and a general sense of satisfaction amongst the Horde, which she believes is protecting the planet against violent insurgents. But she's also not an idiot, and when fate leads her to a magical sword that transforms her into She-Ra, she gets the opportunity to discover what the Horde has really been up to.

So the show also owes something to Avatar: The Last Airbender, as Adora gets a very truncated version of Zuko's arc; though in her case, the real interest lies in her newfound conflict between old friends and new. Though Glimmer and Bow are delightful, Adora also has a strong bond with Catra, who chooses to stay with the Horde of her own free will.

The writing takes this internal conflict extremely seriously, making Adora a character that struggles with her past and is largely uncomfortable in her new role as champion. But the show is also ready to have fun with its premise, embracing the gloopy pastel-and-love-hearts aesthetic of the original show in a way that manages to poke fun at it ("best friend squad!") and yet remain totally sincere. Who'd have thought they'd pull it off?

Along with everything else, the show also has to give some credit to Sailor Moon (and other anime magical girls) for She-Ra's transformation sequences, but hey – Diana, Xena, Usagi, Leia, and Adora all belong to the kick-ass princess club, and long may the tradition continue.

So I started this year with a princess, and I'm ending it with a show full of them. What great times we live in.

Meta: Contrasting/Comparing Three Halloween Films

I realize Halloween was a few weeks ago now, but it was as good a reason as any to watch three of my favourite spooky movies and contrast/compare them. Because why not?

It's actually rather fascinating to see how scary movies for young audiences have deeply rooted similarities in their structure, characterization and moral framework. The earliest, Hocus Pocus, came out in 1994, followed by Monster House in 2004 and Coraline in 2009, giving us a trio of horror stories aimed at children in which young protagonists battle malevolent forces that are rooted in folklore and legend (urban or otherwise): one in live-action, one in CG animation, and one in stop-motion animation.

Although Coraline is not strictly speaking a Halloween movie (it's the only one of the three not set on October 31st) all of them feature young people on the verge of adolescence in considerable danger from the supernatural.

Doctor Who: Kablam!

This was a solid episode, one that was clearly inspired by the controversies regarding Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com (which fits into the ongoing political commentary of this season), but also one that was thankfully more story than agenda (not that there's anything wrong with having a message in your story, but I still haven't gotten over that Trump stand-in).

That said, it took an unexpected turn towards the end that reminded me of The Unquiet Dead. In that case, the pro-migrant message was turned on its head by revealing the alien asylum seekers were in fact evil. In this case, the individual behind the sabotage of an exploitative, manipulative, back-breaking system is actually the bad guy. It's...a bit strange.

Doctor Who: Demons of the Punjab

This was the long-awaited Yaz episode, and perhaps my favourite of the season so far – though that's acknowledging that these episodes still lack the emotional ommph of seasons past.

I suspect that Chris Chibnall is trying to recreate the style of Old School Who in which every story is largely standalone (granted, they were also serialized, but in themselves were still also one-shots), and can even see the modus operandi of the show's original concept: to teach the audience something about history.

I'm low-key enjoying it, and appreciated the trip to a time and place I know next to nothing about.

Doctor Who: The Tsuranga Conundrum

This was our first hard sci-fi (relatively speaking) episode of the Thirteenth Doctor's run, at roughly the halfway point of the season, and so felt significant in how it signalled the tone and themes of Chibnall's take on the show. You could almost say it was Chibnall's signature offering.

So how did it go?

Links and Updates

I was out of commission for a while, and when I get back all sorts of exciting announcements have been made!

Doctor Who: Arachnids in the UK

Hey guys, I know I've been behind these past few weeks. There have been some real-life issues to work through, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel in that regard, so hopefully I'll be back to regular blogging soon. Until then, I can only offer a brisk commentary on this episode, so here we go...

Woman of the Month: Jessica Huang

Jessica Huang from Fresh Off the Boat

With the release of Crazy Rich Asians, there was one name on everybody's lips: Constance Wu. And that was as good a reason as any for me to seek out Fresh Off the Boat, the sitcom that was her first big break.

I remember the show making quite a splash on Tumblr when it premiered in 2015, and it was the family's matriarch Jessica Wu who dominated the GIF sets that were circling at the time. Despite this show ostensibly centring on her son Eddie, she was clearly the star.

Aside from the fact that Asian-American women don't get much attention on television (the show itself points out that this is the first American sitcom to feature an Asian family since Margaret Cho's All American Girl in 1994) Jessica is also a unique sitcom mum.

Strict and overbearing – sure, we've seen that before. But Jessica's desire for her children to be successful and to remain in touch their Taiwanese heritage are presented as intrinsically Asian qualities that provide much of the familial conflict (and sitcom fodder).

After the Huang family move from Chinatown in Washington DC to Florida, she struggles more than anyone (except her eldest son Eddie) to assimilate herself within her new community. Yet though I'm a sucker for women who are tough on the outside, vulnerable on the inside, Jessica doesn't have time to feel sorry for herself or get insecure about what the neighbours think.

She knows who she is and what she wants – it's just a matter of making sure the rest of the world isn't going to get in her way.

It makes a nice change from the usual brash battle-axe or mousey housewife that usually dominates American family sitcoms. Jessica is a grown woman who can handle a career in real estate and raise three children, and if other people find her too domineering... well, that's definitely their problem.