Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life (Good, Bad, and Awkward)
So the Gilmore Girls
Revival has come and gone and there’s a lot of conflicting feelings about it.
I, personally, am all over the board. There’s a lot that I liked, but the stuff
I didn’t like was completely overwhelming (ie Rory). I am going to break it
down to The Good, The Bad, and The Awkward.
I’ll have my Gilmore Girls Revival: The Good, The Bad, and the Awkward up tomorrow. I’ll probably end up doing a little something on each of the seasons, followed by a piece on each of the three main Gilmore Girls.
This is such a strange change of pace for me, but I’m really enjoying it!
I needed a break from all the things I was trying to do because I am getting so overwhelmed, but at the same time, I just keep thinking about all the things I want to write for this blog. So that break really didn’t help me with too much. But that’s okay.
Because now I can come back and write about Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life. I’m going to do an overall feeling (Good, Bad, and Horrendous) and then split it up. I want to do a separate post for each of the three Gilmore Girls, but I might also do a post on each of the four seasons. We’ll see how it all goes.
Yeah. That’s going to be my project for the rest of the year. Come January I am going to have some sort of schedule because I miss this blog so much! (Also I should be just about done with all my grad school applications and stuff, so it won’t be as stressful.)
Keep an eye out for my thoughts on the Gilmore Girls Revival. There’s a lot of them.
AESTHETIC MEME: [1/9] characters: S t e v e R o g e r s Captain Steven “Steve” Grant Rogers is a Super Soldier, World War II veteran and the world’s first superhero. After a top secret Super-Soldier program transformed the frail Steve Rogers into the powerful and heroic Captain America, his amazing World War II exploits made him a living legend. Rogers attacked multiple HYDRA quarters with his Howling Commandos, to the dismay of the Red Skull. Rogers helped the Allies win the war, but crashed into the Arctic during his final mission. Awakening in the modern day, Rogers learned that he had spent 67 years trapped in the glacial ice.
A message to the comic book ‘fans‘ who are defending Hydra Cap by saying “they’ll change it back.“
Imagine this: You go to a nice restaurant. Five stars, great reviews, lot of history, staff are friendly, an ideal place to eat. Then, one day, a new chef decides to make a change to a popular recipe. You try it, and it gives you food poisoning. As well as everyone else who eats it.
Even if the chef changes the recipe back to normal so it’s no longer bad, that doesn’t change the fact that they gave you food poisoning. You wouldn’t forget that, would you? Well, you shouldn’t. And neither should they.
im not going to talk too much about the current route that Marvel Comics have decided to go down with Cap, bc I’m not a reader of the comics and in my head MCU Steve and Comics Steve exist independently of each other. All I have to say though, is that Steve Rogers, Captain America, was created by two Jewish men in the midst of war where their people were being murdered for their faith. Steve Rogers was a symbolic “fuck you” to that cause. To have the current writers start an arc in which Steve is and has been a member of HYDRA all along, an organisation meant to represent the Nazi party responsible for the deaths of those people, is not only disgusting, it’s also disrespectful to the legacy of Jack Kirby and Joe Simon.
When I see folks didn’t like Deadpool, I’m like whatever. People like different things. I don’t even like Deadpool as a character but the movie was dope. Anyway, if you didn’t like it because it was short or it felt cheap and underdeveloped, that’s because it was. It was kinda set up to fail.
They were given the greenlight the way an impatient parent says ‘fine you can have a dog but if it pisses on the rug, I’m gonna shoot it.’ They had less than a year to complete the movie and were given a budget of 58 million when the average superhero movie budget is between $150-250 million. AND Fox had the nerve to take money out of the budget so they had to write around the money. So Deadpool only having a few bullets? Budget. Forgetting his guns in the car so he can’t use them in the final fight? Budget. Only 2 low profile X-men around, one of which had never been seen before? Budget.
And they still managed to make crazy amounts of money and break all kinds of records. I just feel like it’s worth knowing whether you like it or not because I ended up liking the movie a lot more after knowing what they were working against. Deadpool is like the indie movie of this superhero shit
Hey guys look at this damn film nerd
Look at this film nerd pointing out this massive SUCCESS STORY.
Bonus points for Deadpool making massive amounts of money despite being released in a fucking DEADZONE and being rated R.
An R rating automatically limits the audience, so it was basically kneecapped from the get-go because fewer people would even be able to see it. Releasing the movie in fucking February was a damn near deliberate attempt on its life. February is where movies go to die, ok, even the cheesy date movies don’t always make it out alive.
They didn’t want this movie made in the first place, greenlit it to stop the nagging, gave it a ridiculously tiny budget and then CUT IT DOWN EVEN MORE later on forcing several very hurried bits of rewriting (this is where a few extra digs at the studio were added, because they fucking deserved it), tried to argue against an R rating and when that failed, they tried to kill it by dumping it in the fucking release date graveyard.
And it still made ridiculous amounts of money. That’s like winning the Kentucky Derby on a 3-legged donkey; “Massive success” is a bit of an understatement.
Turns out, I’m still bitter so I’m going to just keep going with this Marvel theme. I have a lot more to say. Every time I think I’m done, something else pops or happens and makes me even more upset.
(That includes Aou, Civil War, and the latest disaster in the comics. My bitterness knows no bounds.)
In light of the recent horrifying Cap twist, I have seen far too many “stop saying they made him a nazi, HYDRA aren’t nazis!!!11!1″ so I thought I would bring back this scene to remind everyone that yes they are
I don’t have a great sense of the ‘shipping culture. I certainly know that every time we don’t have Steve and Bucky kiss, they’re very upset, and I don’t know what to say that. I don’t discourage anything, but I also don’t want to bait anybody and promise them something that we’re not gonna give them.
—
Stephen
McFeely, writer of Captain America: Civil War [x] (via stevechoosesbucky)
hmmm I think this is a pretty simplistic way to phrase what (I think) he’s getting at. While I have stumbled across posts from a one or two fans who expected Steve and Bucky to kiss (and even in these cases, I’m pretty sure they were being hyperbolic ), almost every fan of Stucky I have spoken to or read posts from has been like “Yeah that’s not ever happening lmao” because they:
1. Have been alive on the planet ‘Earth’ for at least some duration
2. Have seen at least one or more movies and/or television shows in that span of time.
Queer people literally do not exist in the canon of the MCU in any aspect of narrative, either implicitly or otherwise. So yeah, we got it buddy. Stephen McFeely cannot be bothered to write even a single peripheral queer character, so I don’t think anyone of sound judgement was actually expecting him to make one of the most focal and iconic MCU characters queer, much less two, much less them exploring a same-sex relationship on screen.
People aren’t mad at McFeely because he “didn’t write Steve and Bucky kissing”. I think more than anything, people are frustrated with the landscape of comprehensive exclusion, not just in Marvel movies, but in almost all movies.
As for CACW specifically, the people who have been critical of the relationship between Steve and Bucky have been critical of the lack of intimacy in general, friendship or otherwise. And that’s a narrative critique. If the entire plot to your movie hinges on Steve’s total devotion to Bucky’s well-being and friendship, then perhaps they should have had… ahh… I don’t know… even one conversation together that doesn’t end after 2 minutes or less? Maybe some sort of dialogue to express the depth of that friendship instead of just having it presumed? Beating the shit out of bus loads of people for someone is nice and all, but it is not a substitute for emotional intimacy. (SPOILERS BELOW THIS POINT)
The conversations Steve and Bucky do have were incredibly shallow or rushed (ex. “Why’d you pull me out of the river?” “I don’t know” and then it jumps into a fight scene. In the vice scene, Bucky says two personal things about Steve’s past to prove he knows him, and then Steve jumps right in to interrogating him. One of their longer conversations meant to ‘explore their friendship’ actually centers around some girl we’ve never met, will never meet, and don’t care about.) And if you look at the movie as a whole, Steve has BY FAR more emotionally charged scenes with Tony than he does with Bucky. Charged with contention, instead of camaraderie, but even that does more to establish a believable and sympathetic human connection than lukewarm MASCULINE SHOULDER GRIPPING in silence.
Where’s the emotionally charged dialogue between them? Where are Steve’s concerted efforts to re-establish his personal closeness with Bucky? What’s Bucky’s reason for not wanting to have anything to do with Steve for 2 years? By all means, clue me the fuck in. Steve honestly has no qualms with Bucky refusing to seek help or counseling, instead signing off on Bucky re-embracing one of the cruelest abuses Hydra leveled at him?? This does not seem like a healthy or particularly intense friendship here.
CAtWS wasn’t any ‘gayer’ than Civil War, but it doesn’t have loads of criticism leveled at it concerning Steve and Bucky’s supposed relationship, despite the fact Steve and Bucky don’t kiss or hug in that one either. And the reason for that is because it made a concerted effort to explore the depth of their friendship and included tons of poignant, heart-felt scenes between them and a style of cinematography that emphasized them, something that CACW lacked and desperately needed.
I’m not critical of Steve and Bucky’s interactions in CACW “because they didn’t kiss”. I’m critical of their relationship because their friendship wasn’t half as convincing to me as it was in tWS, and it was at least twice as crucial to Steve’s motivations and to the plot.
Having just re-watched Winter Solider, I agree with pretty much all of this.
As a writer, when you make the whole movie about Cap “saving” Bucky but you don’t actually have them acting…like they have any relationship at all or are trying to patch up an old one after years of separation and trauma…well, it’s kind of a big red flag.
The audience is going “Wow, there’s something significant here that’s being left out, and it must be for a really good reason besides shitty writing.” And China apparently assumes it’s because they’re gay for each other and many slashers gleefully assume that gaping hole in your plot is the censorship of a homosexual relationship that confirms fan theory when that’s most likely not the impression you wanted to leave at all, but see…
By not giving them a relationship at ALL or making them humanly relateable to one another in these stressful circumstances what you HAVE done, Sir.
Is you’ve re-written the plot of Donkey Kong and every other fucking Mario Bros. game except in THIS story Steve Rogers is Mario and Bucky is Princess Peach. “I’ve got to save him at all costs because of reasons!”
I mean, if you don’t fill in those blanks, you can’t get offended when the audience and logic in general, be it gaming, comic-verse or the sci-fi/fantasy genre as a whole does it for you.
In short, do your fucking job. Write. Create fully-developed characters. Don’t make me come over there and do it for you, because I would do it for far less money, and the relationship will be QUITE different.
Lastly, I need to add–after reading the “use your imagination and you’ll see it” post by @acrownofbloodandroses–I give ALL of the credit for what’s actually there on screen to Seb and Chris for working their asses off at their own character development and their craft as actors because in the script itself? I really don’t think it’s there. I call bullshit on the writing. Hardcore. And give mad props to actors as storytellers.
I went to see Captain America: There’s Even More Punching This Time with @rostheriveter today and it was lovely, but also this thought occurred to me:
Why make a big deal out of Tony’s turn-your-memories-into-cinema tech in the beginning of the film and then never mention it again? I get that the purpose of that scene is to remind us all that Tony is still fucked up about his parents. But why not make it serve two purposes?
We all know there shouldn’t be a video of the Winter Soldier killing Howard and Maria Stark. There’s no reason for there to be a security camera in the middle of the woods. And even if there were a security camera there, the singularly highly trained so-legendary-he’s-somehow-also-a-ghost best-ever HYDRA assassin who was specifically instructed not to be seen is not going to do a double murder on camera, then flounce right up to the camera like Beyoncé in Lemonade so that it gets a perfect shot of his face, and then destroy it.
Like. Wouldn’t he case the joint first? Or whatever it’s called, don’t look at me, I don’t do crimes. I’m just saying, the fucking Winter Soldier would probably have the powers of observation to be like “Oh, a camera. In the woods for some reason. I’ma shoot it to preserve my status as the world’s best super-secret ghost-slash-legend, and also so that HYDRA tortures me slightly less when I return to them. Bang. A-murderin’ we go!”
BUT I DIGRESS.
Wouldn’t it be super cool if Zemo stole Tony’s memory-projection machine, and then somehow forced Bucky to use the tech to project his memory of 1991, and that was how Zemo tore the Avengers apart?
Advantages:
Gets rid of the ridiculous “security camera in the woods” thing.
The memory would be from the Winter Soldier’s perspective, which provides a cool visual opportunity to explore both how the Winter Soldier saw the world and how Bucky remembers it–is it perfectly clear? Is it choppy? Is it vivid? Is it extra super horrifying? (Yes, probably.)
Tony’s tech would come back! I’m really interested in the intersection of memory and technology and these movies are always teasing me with little bits and then never following through.
Everything about it is way more painful, and I’m into that.
she hit me with this right as we were walking out of the theater and then was like ‘so do you want to get coffee?’ and so i was trying to process this idea that both made TOTAL FUCKING SENSE but also was EXTRA HORRIFYING as we tried to figure out if there was anywhere nearby we could get a drink and talk.
(there is Not Much in Sturbridge, y’all, except a movie theater that is halfway between the two of us)
(well, there is Old Sturbridge Village but that’s not really the kind of place you go to have Serious Superhero Emotional Overloads)
Some people take their coffee with cream or sugar. I take mine with HORRIFYING EMOTIONAL PAIN.
[SPOILERS FOR CAPTAIN AMERICA: STEVE ROGERS #1 BELOW]
Yesterday, Marvel released the first issue of Captain America: Steve Rogers by Nick Spencer, Jesus Saiz, and Joe Caramagna. It’s a pretty boilerplate (albeit beautifully depicted) story of a rejuvenated Steve Rogers back in the field…right up until he tosses an ally to his death and declares “Hail Hydra” in a final page splash. The whole thing is intercut with flashbacks to his childhood of a neighbor inviting Steve’s mother to a Hydra meeting, thus implying that Steve was indoctrinated as a child and has been a sleeper agent of Hydra all along.
This is comics, right? Unleash a shocking twist to get readers to pick up the next issue! Make everything All-New All-Different for a few months until things settle back into the status quo! Have a character behave so incongruously that fans just have to know why!
Except.
Except this is different than having Superman be a jackass to Lois and Jimmy on the cover of some Silver Age issue of Action. This is different than a kiss or a death or a resurrection. This is even different than the usual “wildly out of character” stunts that would normally have readers up in arms, like Batman using a gun.
Quick comics history lesson: Captain America was created in 1941 by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby as a superpowered, super-patriotic soldier fighting the Axis forces. He was famously depicted punching out Adolf Hitler on the cover of his first appearance, inCaptain America Comics #1—which hit stands in December 1940, a full year before Pearl Harbor and before the United States joined World War II, making that cover a bold political statement.
You probably already knew that, but I’d invite you to think about it for a minute. In early 1941, a significant percentage of the American population was still staunchly isolationist. Yet more Americans were pro-Axis. The Nazi Party was not the unquestionably evil cartoon villains we’re familiar with today; coming out in strong opposition to them was not a given. It was a risky choice.
And Simon and Kirby—born Hymie Simon and Jacob Kurtzberg—were not making it lightly. Like most of the biggest names in the Golden Age of comics, they were Jewish. They had family and friends back in Europe who were losing their homes, their freedom, and eventually their lives to the Holocaust. The creation of Captain America was deeply personal and deeply political.
Ever since, Steve Rogers has stood in opposition to tyranny, prejudice, and genocide. While other characters have their backstories rolled up behind them as the decades march on to keep them young and relevant, Cap is never removed from his original context. He can’t be. To do so would empty the character of all meaning.
But yesterday, that’s what Marvel did.
Look, this isn’t my first rodeo. I know how comics work. He’s a Skrull, or a triple agent, or these are implanted memories, or it’s a time travel switcheroo, or, or, or. There’s a thousand ways Marvel can undo this reveal—and they will, of course, because they’re not about to just throw away a multi-billion dollar piece of IP. Steve Rogers is not going to stay Hydra any more than Superman stayed dead.
But Nazis (yes, yes, I know 616 Hydra doesn’t have the same 1:1 relationship with Nazism that MCU Hydra does) are not a wacky pretend bad guy, something I think geek media and pop culture too often forgets. They were a very real threat that existed in living memory. They are the reason I can’t go back to the villages my great-grandparents are from, because those communities were murdered. They are the reason I find my family name on Holocaust memorials. They are the perpetrators of unspeakable, uncountable, very real atrocities.
But writer Nick Spencer and editor Tom Brevoort are more concerned with making this “something new and unexpected”; with having “fun” and getting readers “invested in Hydra characters.” Because what’s more fun than downplaying genocide?
I’m not going to pretend to be cool here. I’m emotional. This is emotional. Captain America isn’t even my usual guy to get incandescently angry over the erasure of his coded Jewish history— that’s Kal-El, the Moses of Krypton—but reading this comic made me feel sick to my stomach. Reading the flippant responses of many non-Jewish readers—including friends—has brought me to tears. Somehow a community that gets up in arms about whether or not Batman has a yellow circle behind his logo seems to think that being angry about this is stupid, or indicative of a lack of experience with comics.
So let me be very clear: I don’t care if this gets undone next year, next month, next week. I know it’s clickbait disguised as storytelling. I am not angry because omg how dare you ruin Steve Rogers forever.
I am angry because how dare you use eleven million deaths as clickbait.
I am angry because Steve Rogers’s Jewish creators literally fought in a war against the organization Marvel has made him a part of to grab headlines.
I am angry because the very real pain of the Jewish community has been dismissed since this news leaked on Tuesday night as “Twitter outrage.”
If this story doesn’t hurt you? Good. I’m genuinely glad. I don’t want anyone else to have the gorge rise in their throat when they read the entertainment news. I love comics. I don’t want them to make people feel angry and betrayed. But understand that not feeling that way comes from a place of privilege, and don’t dismiss the concerns of those of us who are upset just because you have the luxury not to be.
I’ve been trying to think of how to finish this post, but I don’t think I can say it better than my friend and fellow Panelteer Sigrid Ellis did here:
And knowing that this wound is temporary, that it’s for the sake of sales and money and a story beat, that just makes it hurt more, not less. How little we must matter, the people who needed Steve to be the defender of the underdog and the weak, how little we must matter if betraying us for a story beat is so easy.
How little must we matter. The people who created Captain America, and Superman, and countless other heroes like them. The people who need him. The people whose history and suffering and hope, as we stood on the brink of annihilation, gave you your weekly entertainment and your fun thought experiment, 75 years later.
That said, I’m still bitter and I want to hit Marvel where it hurts. So, for my few followers/people who read these posts, (Hey. Thanks.) I propose that we start buying the latest DC comic “Rebirth” and tweeting/blogging about it. If Marvel only understands money, than lets really show them we mean business with this.
I would say like to use a hashtag campaign of sorts, but I’m not very clear at coming up with something like that. The only thing I can think of is taking pictures of the DC comic and tweet #SayNoToHYDRACap. (I’m not very clever when it comes to hashtags. I rarely use twitter.)
But I figured, I would see if anyone else would be interested in joining me/figuring out some sort of campaing tagline?
It’s a hell of a clever idea,” he said. “I don’t know that I would ever have thought of it for him to be a double agent, but it’s going to make you curious, it’s going to make you want to read the books, they’ll probably do a movie based on it.”
Oh Stan…I think the article misspelled furious! I’m not curious about this “plot twist.” I don’t want to read these comics at all.
I honestly don’t get it. They are all so smug and, even if you take everything that’s offensive away, it’s not even good writing.
I think of this post (from Bob’s Burgers.) Briefly, Linda claims that’s she’s the murder after explicitly saying that she wasn’t. She claims it’s a twist.
It’s not. It’s a lie.
That’s exactly what this is. It’s not a “twist;” it’s a lie. You washed away over 70 years of backstory and history to create this “twist” and claim to be a good writer?
A twist would have been showing Steve teaming up with HYDRA (Nazis) in secret. A twist would have been showing Steve deliberately lying to his teammates. A twist would have been having Steve beginning to compromise on his ideals. A twist would be having Steve say he’s working for/with HYDRA for now or recently started.
A twist isn’t retconning an entire character’s backstory and then saying that it’s always been that way.
I just… don’t get why Spencer is so proud of this.
