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rjmhereunderprotest · 2 years ago

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Crossed Paths & Tangled Webs: Why I Ship SpiderCat

This is gonna be a controversial one through no fault of my own... but also it's all my own damn fault. A confusing contradicting statement to be sure, but when you're talking about Peter Parker and Felicia Hardy, that statement seems to ring the most true. Two people who are as perfect for each other as they are imperfect. In love through no fault of their own... and completely at fault for being so.

My poll for another ship to cover picked this... I'm more than happy to talk about it but we're dealing with volatile stuff right now. As I write this, Spider-Man and Black Cat actually ARE in a relationship with each other. Peter has recently stated that he no longer feels romantically for his long-time love-interest, Mary Jane, calling her more akin to a sister. MJ was apparently stuck in some post-apocalyptic Narnia situation where enough time passed for her to have kids with another guy. And if that wasn't enough... Mary Jane may be about to join Gwen Stacey in the fridge, if you get my meaning. As Zeb Wells is teasing the most shocking Spider-Man story since Gwen Stacey's death and the solicits for the story afterwards say Spider-Man is about to suffer a terrible loss. Felicia is on the covers of at least one of those issues. So unless it's a complete fake out and Wells is going to kill off a relationship he has stated he both prefers and spent a ton of time setting up at the expense of the preferred romance among fans... yeah it's not looking good for MJ. I mean he might kill off Aunt May again, but... well there's no guarantees in comics... ever.

This is a strange time period to be a long suffering SpiderCat shipper. I have held a torch for these two for such a long time it feels like almost second nature. I see Felicia, I want to see her with Peter. No one else, man or woman, will do. (Yes she's Bi, shut up, it's canon) Yet right now, a SpiderCat shipper is now writing the Spider-Man books and everyone seems to absolutely hate Zeb Wells' execution of it all. I've gotten what I wanted, at last, but fans are outright rejecting it. Not so much for Felicia and Peter being together mind you, as much as they're annoyed MJ is being thrown under the bus.

Which I get actually, I may have wanted this ship over Peter/MJ, but not at her expense. I don't want her DEAD or badly written. And given how Marvel has basically treated MJ and Peter over the years, it's hard to argue that these reactions are anything but justified. Even decades later, One More Day's shadow still looms large. Marvel has constantly teased and poked and prodded and snickered about the possibility of Mary Jane and Peter Parker becoming an item again. If not married, at the very least dating. But Marvel seems insistent on this point. "The Marriage was a mistake, we're never going back to it. And anything that is even remotely similar to that status quo is not allowed. Ever." The inability of Marvel's Spidey writers to craft a compelling happy marriage between Peter and MJ has been an albatross around the neck of the ship forever! Even when they did it in an ongoing, it had to be a different universe! One where the Civil War comics event wasn't a thing, so that was also a plus. And MJ had to get Spider Powers too in order to smooth over the whole thing for writers.

So, yeah, MJ's been blamed for making Spider-Books dull and kept at arms length from Peter as much as possible. Because if Spider-Man is EVER TOO HAPPY that can only spell DOOM for the character. His world must always revolve around misery. Linkara of AT4W has said it time and again, in the eyes of Marvel, Spider-Man can never be allowed to be happy.

And yet, despite all that, I still hold true to this maxim, Peter Parker and Felicia Hardy are made for each other. If I ever had an OTP, if I ever had a ship I'd die for, if there was ever any romance I was forever evergreen invested in... it was SpiderCat. Despite whatever the world says, that it can't work, that it's a bad idea, that they don't need each other, that it will never be the way Peter/MJ were once... I don't care. I reject all of that and state proudly, without shame, every time that Spider-Man and the Black Cat are and always shall be perfect for each other.

So Let's Talk about Why that is...

Usually I'm inclined to give brief synopsis points about both characters in separate sections. But Spider-Man is so well known and Black Cat so simply explained in their initial set ups it feels almost... pointless. When you can describe at least one half of the shipping dynamic with a theme song from a sixties cartoon it's hard to honestly come up with anything new or original.

So yeah, Peter Parker, nerdy wimp who gets bitten by a radioactive spider, doesn't get cancer from this, but super powers. Thinks about using these great powers to enrich his life, but after letting a criminal get away because it's "not his problem" he learns a harsh lesson about responsibility. His uncle dies at the hands of said criminal, it's all his fault, and Peter proclaims that as long as he has these powers he will use them to help people.

And as a result, Spider-Man is the hero that always gets up because he has to, he needs to. Because people, strangers and loved ones, depend on him. This comes at the cost of a great deal of things that would make him personally happy. Because if Spider-Man is about anything, it's about personal sacrifice and responsibility. It has been a running theme since his first comic and will continue until the heat death of the universe. If you know nothing else of Spider-Man, this is the most important fact about him going forward for the rest of this essay. Spider-Man is Responsibility and Self-Sacrifice Personified. Whenever he doesn't live up to either aspect of himself, bad things happen, to him, to the people he cares about and New York City at large.

On the other side of that coin, Felicia Hardy, aka the Black Cat. Infamous thief. While her origins are more fluid throughout her incarnations, her general story is pretty much the same. Felicia is a thrill seeking thief, who lives for the daredevil rush only a well-executed heist can accomplish. The Black Cat persona is that of a femme fatale thief of the highest order. There's no question that she shares more than a few similarities to Catwoman of Batman fame. Save for the fact she might possess a slight passive power that causes bad luck to her opponents.

Different character of course, but that's just to establish that it is a superpower. Felicia uses it mainly to steal whatever she wants and get away scot-free. She, in general, tries to avoid personal consequences for these actions. While her motives may vary from one story or universe to the next, ultimately her purpose in life is the same. To live for herself, for her needs and how she wants. The Black Cat persona is just that, a means to indulge in her wants and desires to the fullest extent. She is, inherently, self-serving and selfish whereas Spider-Man is selfless.

On the surface this presents a dynamic akin to oil and water. Spider-Man is an avatar of personal responsibility. The Black Cat is the personification of independent self-interest. They are such opposites, such contradictions, that they should just not work. They should be enemies... and that is how they started.

Amazing Spider-Man #194, Black Cat's first appearance where she and Spidey come to blows over her illicit activities. Felicia has contracted a crew for a job to spring her terminally ill father from prison. Spider-Man tries to stop her, only to end up buried under the rubble of the exploding prison wall. Black Cat flees the scene with a quip about crossing her path and Spidey with a bad arm post-fight. The next issue sees Spidey deduce Felicia's real identity and that Felicia only broke her father out so he could spend his dying hours with his wife and her mother. Spidey and Cat come to blows outside arguing over the merits of what she's done. However in the struggle Black Cat starts to fall off a roof into a surging river below. Spidey catches her with his bad arm, trying to stop her fall... but can't hold on as Felicia seemingly falls to her death. He tries to return to the Hardy residence, only to see Felicia's mother in grief over the death of her husband. Not wanting to add to it... Spidey leaves.

Of course, this isn't the end for Felicia, issue #204 sees the Black Cat return. She's actually been watching him it seems, taking photos of him swinging around town. They get reacquainted at the museum where Cat manages to slip away again after another fight with Spider-Man. Felicia is annoyed though that he keeps fighting her, not understanding why she's doing this. And by the next issue it's revealed, the art pieces Felicia stole were meant to symbolize what she thinks of Spidey. Namely, that she has developed a crush on him. No doubt because, despite trouncing him almost every time they've fought, she's clearly enjoyed all of it. And Spidey hasn't exactly helped in that regard as he has routinely flirted with her. He can't help it, she is hot. Felicia claims she wants to leave thieving behind, at the behest of her mother and she would like Spider-Man to help her reform. Seeing a similarity to a current situation with a girl he's instructing, and that Felicia might be suffering a bit of a mental break as a result of her father's death, he promises to get her help.

These introductory stories set the stage for Felicia and Peter's on again off again relationship for years to come. Felicia is self-servingly selfish, desiring things that aren't hers. Yet her motives are more complicated than pure greed, it is always based somewhat around her emotional state. Her need to give her father and mother some closure before she passes, her desire for Spider-Man to lead her out of a life of crime, as per her mother's wishes. She isn't evil, she has noble intent, she just goes about it in very self-centered ways. Spidey, in the meantime, is selfless to a fault. He'll keep chasing her down, he'll keep trying to set her straight, keep trying to stop her crime sprees. He is drawn to her by his selflessness and sense of responsibility to prevent her from just getting away with whatever she wants. But he does genuinely want to help her and he will not take advantage of her fragile emotional state, even if he himself is somewhat into her. Hell, the first thing he thinks about when he first sees her is that he hopes she isn't a criminal because he'd like to ask her out. He is clearly drawn to Felicia, even if it only starts out as pure infatuation, but he will not take advantage of her interest in him because he knows better than to try to exploit that for his own self-interest.

Of course it's a lie, well partially. Felicia faked being crazy to more easily escape a psychiatric hospital than a prison. But she is indeed in love with him. After her escape, she invites Spidey to a masquerade ball via a sky writer. Ultimately revealing that she lied to him about her mental breakdown in a selfish bid to escape consequences for her actions. But she wants to make up for it now, because this masquerade ball is being hosted by mafioso she stole from and says Spidey can now arrest them all! Crime is too easy she thinks, superheroing is her next thrill seeking adventure and she wants to do it with him. And despite being tricked and more than a little bribed into this, Spider-Man decides ultimately why not give it a try? If she really does want to go straight for him... isn't the responsible thing to do with her to help her out even if her motives are a tiny bit selfish?

This is how their romance starts and sets up the ultimate tug of war dynamic. Spider-Man does want Black Cat, but is wary of her desire to push him into a more selfish mindset. Black Cat actually desires Spider-Man, but can't get over her compulsive selfishness. In this story alone she has to sort of trick Spider-Man into coming to a date that's actually a mafioso party that he can break up. It's a highly manipulative plan that appeals to her selfish infatuation and Spider-Man's selfless heroism. It is a constant push and pull between them at multiple points. By all accounts, they should not work and a good deal of comics past this point go on and on about why they can't work.

I could cover the lengthy relationship between both characters throughout the 80s, Spidey was actually dating Felicia for a long time during the Black Suit days, even after he gave up the Symbiote. And for the most part this dynamic does not entirely change. Peter wants to help Black Cat be a better person before he can truly commit to her. Felicia wants to be a better person and make things work with Spider-Man, but she has a hard time wrapping her head around selfless action over selfish indulgence. It's the roadblock between them truly working as a couple. And there are a ton of moments during this time period I could talk about, but frankly, they are ALL before my time.

None of them really prove my point either, all I've done is just explain why their dynamic as a couple is riveting. It's not exactly like Batman and Catwoman's, but its of a similar vein. The key difference is Spider-Man, being who he is, isn't as opposed to the idea at first as Bruce is with Selina. Catwoman plays a lot harder to get for a lot longer than Black Cat, she also doesn't become Batman's superhero partner. Felicia and Peter by contrast are much younger though, so their reasoning is frankly more in line with their age demographic. They're just quicker to jump in than most people. The only thing holding them back is Black Cat and Spidey's diametrically opposed ideologies, even though we'll see those two viewpoints somewhat crisscross soon enough.

If you want to know however where I actually came in on this, we need to hop over to another universe. The one firmly positioned in the decade that defines the pop cultural wasteland... the 90s.

In an effort to compete with DC's Batman cartoon, Marvel fast tracked a Spider-Man show into production. While not on the same technical/narrative level as the landmark Batman: The Animated Series, Spider-Man: The Animated Series still did a tremendous job at capturing the essence of the character and is still a good series in its own. Even on a recent rewatch, I was surprised to see how well-thought out and true to form the series was. Yes, it's overuse of repeated animation and various other shortcuts was annoying, it certainly wasn't perfect, even by 90s standards, but it deserves recognition where it counts. Part of that was, in my opinion, the dynamic between Felicia and Peter Parker/Black Cat and Spider-Man. It certainly wasn't a slamdunk, I'm going to talk about where the writers fumbled it, but when it worked it worked and I think those parts where it worked so well were what cemented the idea in my head that this relationship, fraught as it was, COULD become something everlasting.

There's no hiding that Felicia's story is completely different from the comics. She actually knows Peter to begin with before she even becomes the Black Cat. They actually date for a while and despite the fact Peter is poorer than dirt, she is clearly interested in him and remains so for a good portion of season one. Peter's first kiss in the series is Felicia in fact. Even when MJ is in the picture, Peter is still torn between her and Felicia.

You might think we're dealing with a Betty and Veronica situation, but it never really materializes as such. Felicia and MJ never really meet this early and Felicia herself isn't really the rich girl stereotype. She's not particularly girlish or whinny. She doesn't really look down on anyone for their status. In fact she more often than not tries to rebel against the stereotype. She does a lot of charity work, she shows concern for the good of New York's citizens and she gives credit to those who deserve it, not just because they flatter her. She also gives Peter a lot of chances despite seemingly screwing up with her. She is reluctant at first to go out with him, but is not embarassed to be seen with him. The issue that arises is, from her perspective, Peter is never around when she gets in major trouble... but Spider-Man is. This become important later, but the thing to note is she is still close friends with Peter for a good amount of time and shows an interest in hm.

The only reason Felicia doesn't get with Peter is, again, Peter's terrible luck as a result of his responsibilities as Spider-Man. He accidentally stands Felicia up one too many times and she... ugh... ends up falling for Michael Morbius. Yes... that Morbius. No, we're not doing the meme. I only bring it up here because its one of the flaws in the show, Morbius as Felicia's love interest feels so incredibly out of place. It exists purely to prevent Felicia and Peter from getting together because nothing about it works. Morbius is hardly charming, he's somewhat of a creep, he's rude, abrasive and his petty rivalry with Peter just makes him unlikable. Its this petty bullshit rivalry, in fact, that causes Morbius' transformation into a Vampire monster in this continuity. Peter tries to claim responsibility for it because it was caused with his radioactive blood, but Morbius was an asshole and did it to himself. He's at fault and he sucks... pun not intended, not entirely. But because he's doing all this to stop a plague in his home country, and he saves Felicia this one time when Peter doesn't show, we're supposed to buy that she's smitten with him. And I do not buy it. In fact, I'd argue the show's writers didn't even buy it and were somewhat forced to do this so they wouldn't step on the iconic romance with Peter and MJ.

Morbius' subsequent flight into exile, as he basically becomes a mutant bat monster, starts an ongoing subplot with Felicia, the fact she has seemingly terrible luck with men. Early on, after Morbius has left her life, Felicia begins to develop a crush on Spider-Man, as at this point he's been there for her more than most other men in her life, saving her or her mother. Spider-Man, as a result, has become a very huge constant staple in her life, more so than any other man as far she can see. Peter, despite his messy love life, does care for Felicia, and is very quick to jump in to help her whenever she is in trouble. Partially because of his connection to her, partly because he still blames himself for Morbius' transformation. So Peter is spending a lot of time as Spider-Man with Felicia at this point, more so than MJ even who is dating Harry Osborn for a while. As far as Felicia is concerned, Spider-Man has become something akin to a knight in shining armor who is always there for her. She can't help but fall for him.

She reveals this by suddenly kissing him on the balcony, pulling up the mask half-way and everything. Peter, however, says he can't reciprocate, as much as he probably still has feelings for Felicia. He says he can't have a girlfriend though because it would put her in danger. It's bunk of course, he's still trying to be with MJ even though she's currently with Harry, but I imagine it plants an idea in Felicia's head. Regardless, for now she's crestfallen and this leads her into the arms of another man, Jason Phillips Macendale, a rich well to do playboy-type. Even still, she retains her feelings Spider-Man throughout their relationship. There is a scene at a carnival where Jason wins a stuffed Spider for her, which she remarks she finds spiders cute while he acts rather annoyed and jealous over it. Despite the fact she very clearly still wants Spidey to be with her, Felicia does agree to marry Jason when he proposes.

At the engagement party, which Peter attends with MJ as she has dumped Harry at this point, he changes into Spider-Man to spy on the Kingpin and Osborn over some business with the Hobgoblin. Annoyed he has to leave MJ to deal with this problem, he's interrupted by Felicia.

She asks if he's here to wish her good luck and Peter fumbles his words in saying as much. Which leads to this exchange:

Spidey: Do you really love this Jason Phillips guy?

Felicia: And why should you care about that? Unless you got a better offer?

Spidey: (Thoughts) This is crazy, I can't have one girlfriend as Peter Parker and another as Spider-Man! (Speaking) No, I don't... I just want you to be happy.

As Spidey swings away, Felicia mournfully says "So do I." It's a very clear statement, she's settling. Jason is rich and powerful and the person she's expected to marry due to who she is, but she's not really sure about it, or happy. Because the man she wants is currently swinging away. It's obvious that, in Felicia's eyes, she's missing something in her life that makes her happy and Spider-Man seems to be that something. Likewise, Peter, the paragon of self-responsibility, knows he can't abuse his secret identity to cheat on MJ, even though he seems very tempted to admit that he still has feelings for Felicia. But in the end, all he cares about is her happiness and if she can find it in this Jason dude, who is he to ruin that?

Well, he doesn't have to ruin it. Because we find out, shock of all shocks, Jason is the Hobgoblin and the revelation shakes Felicia to her core. The fact that this person she was dating, this man who she decided on because she couldn't have Spider-Man was a fraud, a criminal, a liar... it's a terrible thing to realize how poor your judgment is. Almost reaffirming that this was the wrong choice from the start.

Spidey of course once again comes swinging to her rescue and defeats the Hobgoblin. But Felicia has questions for her former fiancé. Jason relents that he used crime to create everything he is and get everything he has, including her. She's just another possession to him. What she deep down probably feared going into this, why her heart wasn't in this, why she wanted Spider-Man to give her a way out and save her again.

Felicia: I have to know, did you ever really love me?

Jason: I don't know. I love things about you. Your wealth, your beauty, your refinement.

Felicia: That's not love! I've experienced true love... and it's nothing like that.

And we don't get a flashback to Morbius, as this show constantly does because it's very not subtle, we don't see her talk about bat boy at all. She looks directly at Spider-Man as she says this and the camera zooms in on him as she speaks those words. This overtly informs the audience what love means in Felicia's mind. Love in Felicia's mind is being there for someone, who Spider-Man has been for a long time now. And more importantly, it's about wanting that person to be happy, which was all Spider-Man said he ever wanted. Spidey never asked anything of Felicia, he was just there for her and perhaps, in Felicia's mind, the reason he can't return it is because she can't be there in the same way. She is after all a damsel who he needs to keep saving and Spider-Man made it an issue that they can't be together because she'd be in danger.

In fact, this incident has given Felicia a complex that alludes to her future. "Every time I give my heart to someone, disaster strikes!" She sobs to Spider-Man. "I'm like a Black Cat spreading bad luck to everyone who crosses my path! Including my own."

By the next season things have taken a turn for the tragic, Mary Jane has vanished into realms unknown after mirroring Gwen Stacey's fall from a bridge into an interdimensional portal. As far as Peter knows though she's just gone, maybe forever. They can't say dead on this show, you know how it is.

This would probably leave the door back open for Felicia, but Peter is in no mental condition for another relationship right now and Felicia is smitten with Spider-Man, not Peter. Although he does wonder if she could help him with his grief as he swings over to her apartment. Not to say she doesn't care for Peter, but her heart belongs to his masked vigilante persona. In fact, so much so that she proclaims that Spider-Man is the only good thing in her life during that same visit. (Granted this is after an attack by Doctor Octopus, but the point stands) It's obvious that Felicia is now clinging to Spider-Man as one of the few constants in her life at this point, what with repeatedly being placed in danger by monsters and maniacs. The lack of control and helplessness is eating at her terribly.

However, this does lead into what we've all been waiting for, Felicia's transformation into the Black Cat and the start of the multi-episode season storyline, "Partners in Danger."

Felicia's father isn't just a cat burglar anymore. It turns out he got a peek at the formula for the Super Soldier serum back in WW2. He was almost tricked into giving it to the Nazis but managed to evade them. He was a kid at the time and was on the run for several decades. He's been in SHIELD custody for the past few years, until now when the Chameleon breaks him out only to hand him over to the Kingpin. Soon after, Doctor Octopus kidnaps Felicia and brings him to Fisk to reunite her with her father. And basically blackmail her into performing crimes for Fisk to test out the Super Soldier formula.

Yes, the Black Cat in the 90s Animated Series is basically a super soldier thief. It is suggested its not a complete process, but it grants Felicia more capability than she used to have. As the Black Cat she's now stronger, faster, more agile, versatile and has heightened senses. She's basically a mini-Captain America sans shield and a less patriotic aesthetic. Also, the Serum allows her to completely alter herself, her hair turns white and grows longer, while she also becomes more ripped and taller. This is so people won't really recognize her, an important detail for later.

While it's obvious Felicia hates being forced to go along with this to protect her father, she doesn't hate the new powers she's been granted and seeks to use them to eventually turn the tables on Fisk and save her dad. However, for the time being she gets in more than a few scrapes with Spider-Man, one of which leaves him knocked out in front of her. She considers pulling off his mask, but decides against it, preferring him to do it for her himself. She does plant a kiss though, the first of many as the Black Cat. The sequence is clear, Felicia is no longer the damsel but Spider-Man's equal and she hopes that this means things can change.

True, Felicia still gets into trouble and Spider-Man has to save her before the episode is out, but they actually do come together as partners by the end and effectively work together to defeat Fisk and save her father. Sadly, he has to return to SHIELD custody, of his own free will, to prevent the secrets he knows from ever getting out. I'd kinda like to to think they would give him a more witness protection situation than imprisonment for the guy, even if he did become a thief. It's SHIELD though, it's kinda expected they don't always do the sensible thing.

However this sets up the dynamic for the next few episodes as Black Cat and Spider-Man work together more and more. Spider-Man is reluctant at first, still mourning Mary Jane, but Black Cat manages to shake him out of that stupor. Reminding him not to close himself off in his grief. And Spidey himself remarks, as he and Black Cat work together, that he's actually having fun for once as Spider-Man. This is something to keep in mind, Black Cat actually challenges Spider-Man more often than not throughout their time together. Pushing him to remember why he does this job, stopping his pity parties cold, reminding him to not see his power as a burden that he so often does and as a gift he uses to help people. Even if she's not the same self-serving Felicia from the comics, as the Black Cat she embraces the liberated self her persona grants her. She's finally being able to do the things that her position as a rich socialite kept from her. Her stance is that Spider-Man can afford to think about what he wants and what makes him happy as much as his own responsibilities.

Frankly, it gets through to Peter. As time goes on, Spider-Man becomes more receptive to the idea that he should move on from MJ and be with Black Cat, a fellow crime fighter, on his level who can look after herself as much as him. This has been the problem Spider-Man has faced for a while, being able to protect the people he cares about despite his powers seemingly always getting in the way. In the same vein, Felicia's newfound abilities enable her to be Spidey's equal. Allowing her the opportunity to see him as a person and not just the superhero who saves her. This gives her the ability to challenge, as well as compliment him, as pointed out.

Their dynamic frankly rings more true and honest as a relationship. Even MJ never pushed Peter in the same way Black Cat pushes Spidey to be better. That's not to say MJ was a bad girlfriend, but on the show... she frankly resembled the comics version of Gwen Stacey personality wise. Black Cat may have been in love with Spider-Man, but that never stopped her from telling him off when he got something wrong. She had her own opinions and views on how this relationship worked and despite clashing with Spidey, they always seemed to be getting closer and more intimate every time she crossed his path.

That is until the goddamn Vampire comes back and ruins it all, because Felicia still has feelings for Morbius, I guess. In fact, he comes back so soon and suddenly, just as Peter is thinking of committing to Black Cat as Spider-Man, that it again feels like a mandate from on high. They're getting too close to each other, we can't have that, break them up by making Morbius a thing again. And quite frankly it feels forced because the only thing that seemingly prevents Spidey and Cat from sealing the deal is that neither of them have guessed at who the other is.

This is despite the fact that the Black Cat is obviously Felicia, given her very close relationship with Felicia's father that she doesn't even try to hide at all during her introductory episode. But Spidey has been consistently dense when it comes to secret identities, he couldn't even figure out Matt Murdock and Daredevil were the same person under similar circumstances. Using excuses THAT HE HIMSELF USES to cover his ass as Spider-Man. For being so smart, Peter is incredibly slow on the uptake when it comes to guessing Black Cat's identity despite how damn obvious it is. Not that Felicia is honestly much better, as both before and after this there are a number of clues to Spidey's true identity. Like... she kissed Peter AS Peter, she should know that mouth!

But the fact is, and this is where the forced editorial mandate thing comes in, that if they ever found out who the other was... that would be the end for any possible Peter and MJ relationship at this point. Felicia would finally realize why Peter seemed to never be around when she was in trouble, it's because he was Spider-Man. And given that Felicia's reasoning for being in love with Spider-Man is, again, the fact she feels he's always been there for her, she'd realize her most long standing intimate REAL relationship was with Peter all along! Peter in turn would realize that Felicia, the girl he first had a crush on, the one he was most conflicted about getting with before MJ vanished, a person he still has strong feelings for, is also the person who taught him to love again after MJ vanished. A friend he cares about who is now on his level and has also been there for him! There would be no way they couldn't get together at that point, or at the very least it would be very hard for Peter to decide between her and MJ from then on.

But no, the adventure with the returned Morbius leads to Felicia deciding to go with the creep Mutant Vampire and Blade to hunt other vampires and leave Spider-Man behind, just as he was about to be with her. Of course, Peter doesn't put two and two together that Cat is leaving with Morbius because as established he's an idiot when it comes to this stuff. If he was smarter, he'd have figured it out right now and probably revealed himself to her, and that would create a conflict and probably make her question this frankly boneheaded and nonsensical decision. So no, Felicia and Peter never find out each other's secret identities and she goes off with Morbius leaving Peter alone for no really good reason other than this felt like the fastest way to break them up so MJ could slide back in.

And MJ does slide back in, not long after this episode in fact and Spider-Man quickly fast tracks to proposing to her, revealing his secret identity, the works. However, Felicia isn't out of his life as MJ still keeps getting into trouble, constantly. At the wedding, Black Cat returns to make sure Peter's big day doesn't get ruined, because she does care about Peter even if she isn't with him. She does this again when MJ is seemingly kidnapped, first comforting Peter as Felicia reassuring him during a moment of hopelessness and then becoming Black Cat again to track down MJ for Peter.

And she admits aloud that she's doing this because she doesn't think she made the right call to follow Morbius and Blade, she still has feelings for Spidey, even though he's loyal and committed to MJ. Again, Felicia does not put two and two together given how gung-ho Spidey is for finding MJ. This also marks the only time MJ and the Black Cat meet, it's very quick, Peter has to answer a few obvious questions. After all that, Felicia decides to head back to Transylvania and once again Peter doesn't put two and two together that Felicia and Black Cat are back in town right at the same time. Because he's stupid like that.

What's important to note is that Felicia will drop everything for Peter, which suggests to me, on some subconscious level, she knows who Spider-Man is. And the fact she's still playing mental support coach to Peter, even outside of their secret identities, speaks volumes for their bond and connection. Even outside of the Black Cat persona and without directly knowing it, Felicia is there for Spider-Man when he needs her, just as much as he was for her.

But of course, all of this is for naught concerning Mary Jane's fate. Because... this is not Mary Jane. This hasn't been Mary Jane since she returned at the end of last season and conclusion of "Partners in Danger." Because we've been doing a random ass Clone Saga deal this whole time! This MJ, the one Peter married, shared his secrets with, probably most likely banged... wasn't his MJ. She was a clone created by Miles Warren who can use frickin water powers like Hydro Man because Hydro Man is an asshole ex who is obsessed with MJ and wanted his own version of her. But she wandered off, blah blah blah, point is her clone stability is breaking down and she's gonna evaporate. Cue one of the most gut wrenching screams in animation history.

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So yeah, Peter never got the real Mary Jane back, only to be set up for heartache all over again. One could argue he probably loved this Mary Jane more. Sure he thought she was the original, but everything he experienced with her were steps he was unwilling to take with the real one. Similar to how Felicia has been feeling conflicted, one has to imagine Peter is even more so at this point on several other levels. Not that he has much time to mourn though. Madame Web has returned after a long absence from the series and she has war for him to fight, a Secret War.

In a very loose adaptation of the original Marvel Comics Event, Spider-Man is tasked by the Beyonder to lead a team of superheroes to liberate a planet that has fallen to villains he's plucked from Earth. This becomes a bit of a crossover between pretty much every Fox Entertainment Marvel Cartoon running at the time. From X-Men to Iron Man to the Fantastic Four, not Hulk though, Hulk rights are always a problem. But even after he's picked all the heroes he can afford to recruit, like any Gamer he can't resist modding shit to give him more stuff. And of all the heroes and allies he could pick to increase his ranks... he chooses the Black Cat.

It's a fairly odd choice honestly. Spidey has worked with a lot of heroes, maybe not as extensively as the Black Cat, but he's fought beside Doctor Strange, he knows other X-Men who are on Storm's level or at least just as capable. But he picks Black Cat. He picks her despite knowing that Madame Web knows the Real Mary Jane's location and promises it as a reward if he helps her. He picks Black Cat, despite knowing she is currently with Morbius and Blade. Makes one wonder... why?

Felicia isn't happy with this herself, because she just got pulled away in the middle of a vampire slaying fight. Don't worry, they're fine. It's Blade he'll manage without her.

...

What? Oh Morbius, yeah I guess he'll survive too just by being in close proximity to Blade. Have I mentioned I hate Morbius?

Anyway, the point is Black Cat is none too happy get pulled into Spidey's adventures against her will, like he can just do that on a whim. She's kinda right to be angry at him and she is for a good portion of the episode. When Spidey explains he picked her because he needs her support and they work good as a team, Felicia rightly says that he can't just rip her away from things because he needs to hold her hand. She'll be more than willing to do so on her own, he doesn't need to ask, he just shouldn't force her. It's a surprising role reversal, with Spider-Man being a bit more selfish than usual and Black Cat outwardly demanding to know when Spider-Man is gonna grow up. A question many comics fans wonder themselves to this day.

Spider-Man's ultimate ulterior motives are a bit more obvious though when he gets pretty jealous over Captain America and Black Cat bonding over her having the super soldier serum. And it doesn't help that Cap keeps kinda outshining him constantly when he saves Felicia a few times. But to be fair, Steve Rogers does that with everyone.

After the mission that topples the Red Skull ends, Spidey does apologize for taking Felicia against her will into this war. But she's no longer angry. Taking part in a mission bigger than even vampire slaying is important, a big deal, and if there is one thing Felicia has wanted its to not be left out of a fight for something bigger than herself. Plus, she get's to do it beside the greatest hero of all time. Spidey thinks she means Cap, but she corrects him, she's talking about the Web Head. Despite not being as perfect as Captain America, Spider-Man did prove himself out there as a leader to her and she admits she wouldn't want to miss this action with him for anything. Despite not wanting to be here initially, Felicia ultimately can't get over the fact Spider-Man wanted HER here with him. And given their last meeting had him coldly rejecting her advances, it says to Felicia that Spidey still feels for her and she clearly does too. Black Cat then kisses Spider-Man... and it's the last kiss he'll ever receive in the series. That's right, Peter's first and last kisses on this show come from Felicia. How do you not expect anyone to read into that?

No matter what lame line Morbius tries to give at the end of the episode, Felicia's heart doesn't really belong to him. It is very evident, crystal clear, painfully obvious, to anyone paying attention, that Felicia and Peter, on this series at the very least, were specially connected. Maybe not at first, but Felicia became someone who could match Spider-Man, physically and mentally, in many ways. And it's undeniable that, regardless of anything else, Peter held feelings for both Felicia and her Super Thief persona. Their banter was perfect, their partnership was top notch, the chemistry was amazing. The only thing keeping them apart was a story writing mandate from on high that they could not be endgame. Even though the writers took every chance they could nab to put them together. To shove Felicia back into Peter's life, even after she went off Slaying it up with Morbius. When I rewatched the series, it became painfully obvious who the writers seemed to prefer Peter with. None of this is to knock MJ as a character, on this show or in the comics, but it's hard for me to buy that there wasn't some kind of bias towards Felicia given everything that happens in this show.

Or maybe they just wanted an excuse to keep bringing Jennifer Hale back, I don't know! But I still choose to think that someone on that writing staff wanted a different endgame. It's been known to happen, creative teams aren't immune to shipping. Avatar the Last Airbender apparently had an ongoing tug of war between the executive producers and some of the writers over whether Katara would pick Zuko or Aang. It honestly feels like something similar happened here and as a result it comes across as the best evidence in my mind that this relationship could work. And the insane reality that less than a decade after Spider-Man TAS concluded, a show that did everything to ensure Spider-Man never got with the Black Cat because Peter/MJ were too iconic to not happen... One More Day drops and Peter has barely been with MJ for more than a single run out of several writers since. Said single writer being Nick Spencer, the Hydra Cap guy! Possibly in an effort to redeem himself from being the Hydra Cap Guy.

But I digress, as one can plainly see concerning this short retrospective of the series above, the 90s Cartoon has been over for a long time. Next year, it will be thirty years old. I can point out how it could've worked in that show, but that does nothing to prove Felicia and Peter ever have a chance now. All it shows is that I have a nostalgic attachment to this pairing because of an animated series. One with a highly different set of canonical circumstances between Spidey and the Black Cat that were crafted uniquely for this show alone. Circumstances that are worlds apart from the comics.

And that's because, as loathe as I am to admit it, Peter and Felicia's relationship has always had roadblocks in every piece of media involving them before and since. And I would be remiss if I didn't address any of those before I can start proving its viability now. If I don't I'll just have to do it later anyway. We'll look at how SpiderCat appears in other works as we go through this, but we need to head back to comic book land if we're really going to lay down what's actually keeping these two apart, and it's not the very weak contrivances preventing them from figuring out the obvious like in the 90s cartoon. No, it goes deeper than that. As you can see here.

90s Felicia wanted Spidey to unmask for her, but Comics!Felicia has had a hang up about that for a long while. This is the crux, the problem, with their relationship. The thing that always comes up when SpiderCat shippers argue for it. Comics!Black Cat loves Spider-Man... not Peter Parker. And mixing the two is too much for her to bare. This is what put strain on their relationship, Felicia didn't want her fantasy ruined by knowing the man behind the mask. Peter being an ordinary guy shatters her illusions about his prowess and ability. The phrase "Anyone can wear the mask" comes to mind and as long as Peter wears it for the Black Cat that is true. Take it off and Peter's normality leaks into things.

As a result, the main problem is Felicia can't love a man like Peter, who has a normal life outside of his superheroing. Felicia doesn't want normal, she likes what she is, who she is, doesn't want to go back to it. She wants to be the Black Cat because as the Cat she can do and get whatever she wants. Peter is, again, weighed down by responsibilities. While Felicia, once again, desires her independence from everything, including responsibility. Felicia would rather Spider-Man give up being Peter and just be the hero who swept her off her feet full time. To forever chase her across the rooftops and do what they want whenever they want. She's fine if that means fighting bad guys... so long as they're not tied down to normality. But Peter can't do that, he can never do that, not as long as he has ties to his life as Peter. And that's probably why Wells is considering severing a pretty big tie to that in order to make sure SpiderCat can't be reversed so easily. Can't really blame him for that though, given how comics are in constant flux. (Remember This)

This sort of issue is constantly reinforced. In the Spider-Man 2 video game, based off the Sam Raimi sequel, The "Spidey's loss of his powers" sub-plot is replaced by Black Cat trying to seduce him away into forever crime-fighting as his relationship with Mary Jane becomes strained due to her upcoming marriage to Jonah Jameson's son. Their dynamic matches the comics pretty well... and that means Spidey eventually breaks it off with her, saying he can't abandon his real life to forever play superhero with her. He needs a balance and that means he can't see her anymore. She leaves amicably, but it's sad to see happen.

In the Spider-Man: Web of Shadows game, Black Cat is revealed to still have feelings for Spider-Man and wants to be back together with him. This is pretty bad timing given the symbiote invasion going on. As the game is using the then popular trend of multiple choice endings there is one where you can have Black Cat be with Spider-Man at the end. It requires you basically healing her after a fight with your black suit, turning her into a Venomized version of herself. You can still pick the good ending after this where you defeat the Symbiotes, but all you know for sure is that MJ and him are on quits. You only see Felicia again if you pick the bad ending where Spider-Man breaks bad fully and decides to lead a symbiote army with Felicia by his side. Further emphasizing the idea that Peter can't pick being with Felicia without abandoning everything that makes him who he is.

There's also Spectacular Spider-Man, the other beloved Spider-Man animated series. Shorter-lived, but just as impactful. Where Spidey and Black Cat seem to hit it off during the start of Peter's whole symbiote storyline. Their banter is great, the chemistry fits, Felicia and Pete seem destined to be star-crossed opposite sides of the law lovers. However, when they meet up again Felicia is breaking her father out as she usually does... but the twist this time is Felicia's father is the one who shot Uncle Ben.

Naturally this completely wrecks any goodwill concerning Black Cat and Spidey's second meeting. As from here on out he's adamant Felicia's dad is not getting out. While it turns out Dad doesn't want to leave either and he decides to sacrifice his chance at freedom to stop a mass jailbreak of supervillains, that changes little. Spider-Man does not forgive Felicia's father and Felicia blames Spider-Man for infecting her dad with sentimentality. Even knowing he took an innocent life, all Felicia sees is her dad rotting away in jail. She declares she'll never forgive Spider-Man for this and rushes off in anger. The series ended shortly thereafter and this was never resolved. Greg Weisman, the show's creator, says if it had continued the relationship would've been "fraught." And once again this is the typical line concerning the fact Felicia's selfish desires run up against Spider-Man's heroic responsibility. And letting a criminal get away, especially one that killed his Uncle, is just something he can't do.

And I could go on, there are a ton of examples of this very problematic element of the relationship. It's the thing Marvel has consistently used to explain why Peter and Felicia aren't the right fit. Any romance would require either character to make sacrifices they are incapable of. Namely Felicia's independence and Peter's Responsibilities. Marvel itself decided to set this in stone to a degree with the usual question they ask... "What If?"

"What if... Spider-Man Married the Black Cat?" is the second part of a longer What If storyline answering what would happen if Peter and MJ did not get married. (HA! After OMD, one cannot help but laugh!) And as much as that cover paints wedded bliss... it's anything but. Felicia and Peter come to blows repeatedly, unable to reconcile their differences. Their goals are far too distant from each other overall and they just can't find common ground. By the end of the issue, Felicia lies dead, Spider-Man heart broken and the grim reality that this romance could never work is cemented in stone it seems. "What Ifs" aren't definitive statements about the only possible outcomes for the Marvel universe. But they are definitive statements from Marvel itself, a decree from on high that the current continuity, for all its faults, could be so much worse and we should be happy for what we have. And while the issue is loaded with nice panels that any SpiderCat fan would adore, the end result is still plain as day. Felicia and Peter are too oil and water to ever mix. And the end result would be the destruction of one or both.

How do you overcome the dreadful reality that your ship is declared doomed forever by the very company that in some sense set it in motion? Not just because Spider-Man can never be happy, but because the Black Cat is just too toxic a girlfriend to ever truly make him happy. Everyone argued that MJ and Peter's marriage was boring but they didn't want him to get with the next best option either because they think it's non-compatible, that they're just too different and of opposing thoughts to ever reach common ground.

And Marvel has tried to permanently set that in stone in canon once. To forever place SpiderCat as beyond possible, to sever their connection as decades long allies... and all because of an octopus in the brain.

The image above is not that of Peter Parker fighting the Black Cat. This is Doctor Otto Octavius, piloting Peter's body after jacking his mind. This is the Superior Spider-Man, and he does not care about Peter's past infatuations. He's here to prove he's the better Spider-Man and that means apprehending all criminals. In an otherwise re-affirming storyline that proves Peter Parker is the true Superior Spider-Man, Otto failing to live up to his lofty ambitious boasts, this scene... this one bloody scene, leads to the absolute low point period for all SpiderCat Fans. I call it the "Bitch Be Crazy" Era, an offensive title for a frankly offensively disgusting sub-plot in the Spider Run post-Superior.

Peter Parker informs all his Superhero buddies that Doc Ock had taken over his body for a long time, explaining his shitty behavior for the past year or so. Most everyone's response is "Oh, yeah, that's obvious in hindsight." Not Felicia.

The tables have turned, now Felicia has broke bad, but for real. And there is no way to describe what she becomes but extremely out of character. She doesn't accept Spider-Man's explanation, she doesn't even care. She is now obsessed with becoming the next Kingpin of Crime, a murderous, merciless mob boss who pulls the strings of supervillains, all in a bid to destroy Spider-Man and all he holds dear and it's absolutely, completely, stupidly, idiotically terrible. No matter how selfish Felicia can be, this is NOT her. Felicia has never shown any desire to be a crime boss, to be feared. Her desires have always been thrill seeking, shiny things and not being told what she can and can't do. She might be violent, but she is not a cold-blooded killer. She might be cynical, but she is not this petty. Every element of this terrible subplot makes no sense unless she's absolutely lost her mind or been replaced by a Skrull.

The only fun thing in this whole mess, was that Gwenpool's first in-universe story took place during this sub-plot and she crossed paths with her. And then did this.

I guess that justifies putting a Gwenpool tag below somewhere. Win for me!

Suffice to say, no one liked this change. Everyone hated it, even more than Superior Spider-Man. People came around on that, no one liked Felicia the Big Black Cat of Crime. Dan Slott could never justify it because it made no sense that Felicia would care this much about street cred because Spider-Man beat her up. As if there isn't a single crook in New York at this point who can claim Spider-Man hasn't knocked out one of their teeth. Others tried to explain it, to give it a more sensible face. There was an explanation in the Silk comic, but it didn't really stick as something that would drive her to this extreme. Regardless, it was a dark time for SpiderCat Shipping Fandom. And it took way longer than it should've to fix it all.

But it did get fixed and that brings me the counter to ALL of this stuff that stands in Peter and Felicia's way. And that is that no matter how much things stay the same, comics always inevitably change and so do the characters in them. We like to pretend that the way we see a lot of the characters in comics now has just always been them. But no, they're not. Batman used to carry a gun in his early days, Superman didn't always fly, Captain America, a WW2 Veteran, claimed he never killed anyone for a short time, Deadpool didn't always break the 4th Wall and Starlord used to be a lot more of a straight edged serious space hero and not a rock music lovin' dancin' fool of a rogue Han Solo. Tastes change, writers change, people change... and so has Felicia.

Felicia hasn't always been honest with Peter, she's tricked him into chasing her, played him to get away with a score, gotten superpowers from Kingpin in an effort to keep up with him which led to their first break up, she even dated Flash Thompson trying to make him jealous. But if one thing has been consistent, it's that Felicia can't help but cross back into Peter's life. And in the process, because she cares, even loves him, there are things she's had to accept, to admit to. And chief among them is Peter Parker is Spider-Man and Peter Parker's life is as if not more important to him than just being Spider-Man. She hasn't only loved Spider-Man for years at this point, for a long time. She loves both. and she is willing to accept both. If there is any problem, it's Peter accepting Felicia for who she is... which is a better person than even she gives herself credit for.

Spider-Man wouldn't be partnering up with Felicia so often if he didn't believe there was more to her than just a shallow thief. And the influence has affected Felicia, she's admitted as much. Maybe her shift to doing good was set off by a crush, but she owned that change and she kept pushing herself. She'll never have a strict moral compass, but she does know what the right choice is at the end of the day, what feels right. And when Spider-Man needs an ally, he can call on her as much as anyone. Spider-Man being in her life has only been a net positive for Felicia, Peter being with her has only been a net positive. And that brings us back to her time as a lame crime boss and how they fixed her. Because there's a better, deeper, actually meaningful reason for their schism besides Felicia's loss of street cred.

She forgot the man she loved and changed for.

Yep, we're factoring One More Day into this thing proper like. After an adventure with Venom and Spidey, dealing with some symbiote nonsense, Felicia is convinced to hash it out with the Wall Crawler. And she admits to him that she lost something, his face. When Spider-Man made the world forget who he was under the mask it affected Felicia too. All her memories, all the time spent with Peter post reveal, everything that she knew about the man behind the mask... it was either gone or in a fog. She can't remember all those times that Peter trusted her with who he was and it has been eating her up inside for years! And Spider-Man never thought about how that would affect her, a person he's loved, been intimate with, and at least now cares about. That was an important time in her life and it's just gone now. And it may be selfish to want all of it back and even demand it back... but she's right. Those memories were hers and Spidey took them away. And Spider-Man, being selfless as he is, can't just let that stand anymore.

Everyone says Felicia only loves Spider-Man, but that's not true. She may love the Spider... but she changed for the Man. She cherishes that time she had with that Man. And it's hard to believe that she doesn't love the Man as much as the Spider because, ultimately, they are the same person. That's the other difference between this and Bruce/Selina. Bruce Wayne is the mask for the boy who died in that alleyway, Batman is who he's been since that day. Peter and Spider-Man are the same person, it's why he can't leave either persona behind. And Felicia has long since accepted that, and that has never changed how she feels about him until she lost who he was beneath the mask. Now it's all back, the highs and lows of that tumultuous time in her life when she fell for a Spider and came to love the Man. It doesn't heal everything, but it repairs the bond that was broken so long ago and so unintentionally.

There is, however, another argument being floated around these days I have to address. That even if Felicia can accept the man beneath the mask, do either really NEED each other? I'd point to all the stuff above that shows how that's simply not true, but there's more to it than that. Love isn't always about what you need, it's just as much about what you want. And I'm not talking about a person or thing, not something material. What does Felicia want? What does Peter want?

Felicia wants to be more than what she is, always has been. She wants thrills, she wants to be her true self and I feel Spider-Man brings out those qualities more than any of her other boy or girlfriends, especially since he started her path to change and growth. She stops being selfish and reacts more selfless. His influence on her is undeniable and she knows as much as anyone. She'll never be a good girl, but she'll at least be a better one than she is without him in her life.

Peter wants to be at peace, to be happy with who he is, to not always feel burdened. Felicia has always been one of the ways he's released that burden, he's been happy with her. Sure he's been happy with others, but Felicia has met him on a level that none of them could, she's been able to be in the thick of it with him. She's been able to share the burden. She's been able to be an active participant. With her around, Peter's world as a superhero doesn't feel so lonely. And maybe, if Felicia could accept the man as much as it seems she has, so too could she accept Peter's regular life.

In Taylor Swift's song, Anti-Hero, she reflects on how exhausting for her it's been that she hasn't seemed to learn anything and keeps making the same mistakes over and over. And if you pay attention to the lyics enough, they start describing Felicia Hardy pretty well.

I should not be left to my own devices They come with prices and vices I end up in crisis (tale as old as time) I wake up screaming from dreaming One day I'll watch as you're leaving 'Cause you got tired of my scheming (For the last time)

However, just as much of it can sorta apply to Spider-Man as well. His heroic selflessness is frankly a very long depressing slog of him being unable to forgive himself for letting down Uncle Ben, placing all the blame on his shoulders and then repeating that process whenever his great power can never live up to his great responsibility.

Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism Like some kind of congressman? (Tale as old as time) I wake up screaming from dreaming One day I'll watch as you're leaving And life will lose all its meaning (For the last time)

When it comes to Spider-Man and the Black Cat, a lot of the things that make them unhappy are self-inflicted. Lewis Lovhaug of "Atop the Fourth Wall" Fame has argued that the problem with Spider-Man in a lot of modern stories is that he never learns from anything. He hasn't done enough to improve himself as Spider-Man or as Peter Parker, he just keeps feeling sorry for himself that one gets in the way of the other. And frankly, the same curse has affected Felicia. Because a lot of what has prevented her from being with Spider-Man has been herself. Ultimately both will, as the song says, always look towards the bright sun of what they think they want, but never in the mirror. They'll hurt themselves, never realizing that they're the source of their own dissatisfaction with how their lives are. It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero, especially when its yourself.

Maybe Peter and Felicia don't need each other, but they do need someone to set them straight and get them to stop believing their own bullshit. To make them stare away from the sun and into the mirror. Because they are each exactly the kind of person who would do that for the other, in fact they've been doing it for as long as they've been together. Their bond is stronger than people give it credit for.

Early on in their relationship, Black Cat was badly injured and has to be rushed to a hospital. Helpless to really do anything, Peter could only stand by her bedside and hope she'd be okay again. For all his power, once more, he can't do anything but just stay with her. And actually, that's enough.

But come now, would Felicia ever do the same for Peter you ask? Well... during a recent story event, Spider-Man was badly injured and slips into a coma. But there was one person constantly by his side throughout it.

This isn't derogatory, Felicia is clearly lamenting the fact that someone so good who does everything so selflessly despite no thanks or praise, is so constantly placed into situations like this. It's unfair to her. It's why she's here now, like he was for her. And just like before...

It's Felicia who gets the first response out of him. Claim all you want that Felicia doesn't need Peter, that she's moved past him, that Peter and MJ are too perfect for each other, that the Black Cat can't ever settle down like Peter probably wants or that Peter can never really be there for Felicia in the way she wants. But I don't buy it. And stuff like this is why.

No matter how much bad luck she is, Spider-Man wants and in some ways needs the Black Cat is in his life. And no matter how much she can try and say she's over it, The Black Cat will always find a way to cross paths with her Spider.

In the recent PS4 Spider-Man game, Felicia came back after a stint of going straight to prepare for a major strike back against Hammerhead and the Maggia families. She coerces Spider-Man into another of her games where she steals $50 Million worth of stuff and forces him to chase her around the city to find it all. She leaves the loot behind though, because it was all trick to break into the police evidence lockup and snag her old gear. But she did leave Peter a cool new suit, a reference to the time when Felicia made a new black suit for Peter after giving up his symbiote. You know, so they match.

Felicia's little game comes to fruition when "The Heist" DLC comes out. Felicia strings Spidey along, pretending Hammerhead has her son, strongly implying its his. Ultimately this is revealed to have been a lie of course, another game. Because this, to Felicia, is basically the perfect date night. Spider-Man chases her, they team up, she gets what she wants and runs off into the night. In this case the entire wealth of the Maggia after double crossing Hammerhead. This gets a target on her back instantly. Spider calls her to warn her, leaving Felicia more than a little surprised.

Felicia: I just conned you and here you are trying to save me. How can you be so damn nice all the time?

Spidey: It's not about being nice, it's about doing the right thing! You have so many talents, I wish you'd use them to help someone other than yourself.

Felicia: Yeah well, you should know by now that's not how I roll.

Spidey: People can change, Felicia.

Felicia: Love you, Spider. I'll miss you.

Felicia's penthouse explodes and she appears to die. But eagle eyed players would notice the puff smoke just before the bomb goes off. The Black Cat fakes her death more than Doctor Doom uses robots. Felicia got away, scot-free, with all the money she could ever need or want. She conned Spider-Man, Hammerhead and everyone. She won hands down and can do whatever she wants from now on. No one will be looking for her. Hammerhead's plans to utilize weapons of war to take over the city isn't her problem.

And yet...

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Felicia comes back to help Spider-Man, knowing it will basically put her on the radar again given everything she's stolen. She doesn't stay, but she saves him and gives him the means to take Hammerhead down. No matter what anyone thinks of Felicia, especially herself, she is not nearly as incapable of being selfless as one thinks. And this is true of most of her incarnations. Perhaps because the Black Cat will do anything to get what she wants, even if it means turning over a new leaf for her Spider. It's how this all started after all. Selfish Selflessness, it's probably the best middle ground Peter can hope for. But at least it means he can count on her, to be selfish. And that's why she'll always be there for him. Felicia doesn't like to lose the things she has.

I think it also says a lot that many players felt that Peter and Felicia's chemistry was loads more interesting and compelling than his relationship with the estranged version of MJ Spidey has to deal with. And frankly, Felicia being in those stealth sequences would've made a million times more sense. There are some who have even speculated, with no real proof mind you, that Felicia was lying about lying about having a son. That she DOES have one, he just wasn't in danger. But of course, that's unlikely. For the same reason Peter remains hung up on Mary Jane in this game despite the fact most players seem apathetic to them getting back together. Spider-Man being a father out of wedlock is something that Marvel is not really prepared to sign off on. Just as much as they resist him being with someone other than MJ in other media, despite not wanting him to be with her in the comics.

It all seems so arbitrary to me, that they just can't be together because of the iconography of Peter and MJ. Or because she can't love the man the Spider is, which isn't true. Or Spider-Man can't change her or trust her, which also isn't true. If there has ever been a more consistent, sustainable, supportive and bonded character to Peter Parker it has been Felicia Hardy. Romantically or platonically, Felicia has dropped things to be there for Peter. And the idea that they are toxic for each other has never rung true. People can change, and this romance proves it. They just need to be given the chance to do so, and have the right person along for the ride. And the forced separation feels more arbitrary when you take into consideration, that Marvel has kept MJ and Peter apart for over a decades worth of comics and has never bit the bullet on simply just letting Felicia and Peter be together until now.

Some have claimed the new romance is out of the blue, that Spencer was setting things up to undo OMD, and that Wells just pulled this off out of nowhere. Well... no. Because those scenes where Felicia brought Peter out of his coma, the re-unmasking, the re-entry into his life through a number of adventures... Spencer either wrote those himself or they were written in conjunction with his run. People have confirmation bias, I'm no different, I don't claim to be. However, everyone has wanted OMD to be undone since the storyline first concluded. Marvel has played with fans' heartstrings that it will do so and it has prevented Peter from moving on because if he's not in a committed sustainable relationship, there's always hope that Mephisto's deal will be undone! And it has not helped anyone in the slightest to keep buying that horse crap.

The fact is I'm honestly sick of this "will they won't they" garbage from Marvel on undoing One More Day and I think more people should be by this point. Let me make this perfectly clear, even if they undo the deal... they're not getting remarried. Marvel simply is not interested in going down that road for Spider-Man again. Even with the new Spider-Verse movie showing Peter B. with a kid. Because the problem has never been they won't let Peter be married to MJ. The problem is they won't let Peter grow. The problem is they won't let him move on and change. They stick him in a misery spin cycle and just never let him out.

Why not just end the charade? Let Peter grow. Let Felicia grow. They both already want to. They both already desire to. And they both have already done so for the other. Felicia has been there to challenge and push him, while also protecting and supporting him. And Peter has undeniably changed Felicia as a person. She may never have the same moral compass, but she's no longer as lost as she once was. Her selfish cynicism is kept in check when it comes to Peter. And his selfless self-destruction is held back thanks to Felicia. Why deny them the chance to both be truly happy? Especially when they make each other better people. Why deny chemistry that is so perfectly balanced in its contradiction?

I don't begrudge people for preferring Mary Jane being with Spider-Man. I'm more or less at peace with the reality that some pairings are just thought of as the default and nothing is really gonna change that. I prefer Rogue with Deadpool, that doesn't change the fact she'll always be with Gambit. What I wanted to stress with this isn't so much an argument to ship it so much as the ultimate reason I simply can't let these two go.

For me, SpiderCat speaks on some primal level, more than wish fulfillment, but the idea of growth. That love can hold you up in your worst moments, or change you for the better. That it can make you look in the mirror and ask, who do you want to be? What do you want? What is worth changing for? Felicia found her answer, a nerdy, selfless, eternally tormented wall-crawler, who should know better than to go chasing her trying to save her from herself... but does it anyway. How could she not return the favor and be there for him? It's hard to say whether he caught her in his web, or if she just loves walking across his path. What is certain is they are bonded to each other, in one way or another. And that's the only thing about either character that I don't think can ever truly change.

Well this was a long one, and probably a lot more introspective and personally relatable than I thought. I think now have a better understanding of what has always drawn me to these two. And also now think I have discovered the song that describes them both so... thanks Taylor Swift! Whatever future this rekindled romance holds in the comics, we'll see how it shakes out. But I can enjoy the ride even if some of it has been rocky. Not the first time I've had to deal with that.

If you're still here, congrats, you've made it to the end. And I hope I didn't completely bore you all with this fairly overly comprehensive look at a pairing spanning various mediums and continuities. But I like to be thorough. So I hope you can appreciate the amount of work I put into this whole thing for you all. If I ever do this again I can only hope it won't be so... all encompassing. But I make no promises.

One thing I know though, I'm probably gonna be riding and dying these two forever. The Cat and her Spider, the Self and Selfless. Beautiful in the mess they are apart and the whole they are together.

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maxwell-grant · 4 years ago

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Excuse Me what is pulp and why is it importan?

Good question! And probably one I should have answered sooner. Time to put on the historian hat for this one.

"Pulp" is a term used mainly to describe forms of storytelling that sprang out or were dominant in 20th century cheap all-fiction American magazines from the 1900s to the 1950s. The pulp magazine began in 1896, when Frank Munsey's Argosy magazine, in order to cut costs, dropped the non-fiction articles and photographs and switched from glossy paper to the much less expensive wood pulp paper, hence the name. The pulp magazines would mainly take off as a distinct market and format in 1904, when Street & Smith learned that Popular Magazine, despite being marketed towards boys, was being consumed by men of all ages, so they increased page count and started putting popular authors on the issues.

It was specifically the 1905 reprint of H.Rider Haggard's Ayesha that not only put Street & Smith on the map as rivals to Argosy, but also inspired other companies to start publishing in the pulp format. Pulps encompassed literally everything that the authors felt like publishing. Westerns, romance, horror, sci-fi, railroad stories, war stories, war aviation stories. Zeppelins had a short-lived subgenre. Celebrities got their own magazines, it was really any genre or format they could pull off, anything they could get away with.

Nowadays, although they came quite late in it's history, the American pulps are most famous for it's "hero pulps", characters like The Shadow and Doc Savage that are viewed as a formative influence on comic book superheroes. The pulp magazines in America lasted until the 1950s, when cumulative factors such as paper shortages, diminishing audience returns and the closing of it's biggest publishers led to it dying off, although in the decades since there's always been publishers calling their magazines pulp. That's the American pulp history.

But pulps are a phenomenon that spans the entire world and has a much bigger history to it, because pulps have become synonymous with cheap fiction magazines and those have a much bigger history. In America, before the pulps, you had the dime novels, the direct predecessors of the pulps, as well as the novelettes. England had it's penny dreadfuls and story papers, and continued publishing pulp-format magazines past the American 1950s, and that's how we got Elric of Melniboné. France and Russia arguably got to it first with it's 1800s coulporters, chapbooks and particularly the feuilletons which lasted all the way to the 20th century and created characters such as Arsene Lupin, Fantomas and The Phantom of the Opera. The Germans published pulp under the name hefteromane. Japan also published pulp magazines both original as well as imported, and the current "light-novel" phenomenon started off as an equivalent of pulp magazines (it's even on the Wikipedia page). China has wuxia, Brazil has cordel, Italy has gialli. There were Indian, Persian, Ethiopian, Canadian, Australian pulps and much more. Look anywhere in the world and you'll find examples of "pulp" happening again and again, under different circumstances and time periods.

Even if we stick to American fiction, it's impossible to state that all pulp heroes must come from the 1900s-1950s pulp magazines, because that forces us to exclude some of the most popular pulp heroes like Indiana Jones, Green Hornet, Rocketeer and The Phantom. Pulp may have once been a term meant to refer to pulp magazines exclusively, but it's morphed and lost structure and it's become the closest thing we have to a general umbrella term that allows us to try and consolidate these under a shared history. It's a lot, as you can see, and it's why several pulp historians that broaden their scope outside of 1930s American fiction have adopted Roland Barthes's definition of pulp as "A Metaphor With No Brakes In It", which is still the closest thing to a true working definition we have.

Why is it important? You tell me. I don't like to stake claims about stuff being "important", everyone's got their own priorities in life. Surely a lot of people would scoff at the idea of old populist fiction published in what was functionally equivalent to toilet paper having any sort of "importance". On the other hand, some people definitely want to talk big about the pulps as a cultural bedrock of fiction, something that's baked into the lifeblood of all fiction as we currently know it. Which it is, mind you, but I don't like to talk about pulp fiction's value being derived mainly from merely the things it inspired.

There is definitely a historical importance to be had in cataloguing them. According to the US's foremost pulp researcher Jess Nevins, 38% of all American pulps no longer exist, and 14% of all American pulps survive in less than five copies. Many libraries have very scant, if any, records on them, many collectors are hard to locate and are uncooperative when it comes to sharing information and letting outsiders view their collections. A lot of them are bound up in legal complications that prevents them from taking off in the public domain, and a lot of them ARE public domain but are completely inacessible as research material. And that's the American pulps, foreign pulps have fared far worse in posterity, with records inaccessible to people unfamiliar with the language or locations, many existing merely in mentions on decades-old records, and hundreds if not thousands of them being completely gone beyond recovery or recall.

Gone, dead, wasted, destroyed. They can't be found in barbershops or warehouse or bookstores, not even in antique stores. Hundreds, thousands of characters, stories and creators, gone. Time and posterity have crushed them to dust, forgotten and ignored by their successors. Unfettered by pretenses of respectability that repressed their glossier counterparts, in packages meant to be destroyed after reading, proudly announcing itself as trash. Things that should have never even lasted as long as they did have died many times now. It's heroes peripherical shapeshifters, nearly all of whom seem dead, quite dead, as dead as fictional characters can possibly be.

But they do not die forever. Many of them have, maybe most of them have, but many of them linger on.

"The strange red flickering of 1930’s fiction seems distant now. You hold in your hand the product of a time too remote to recall, and feel a slow stir of wonder. The smell of pulp pages, an illustration, an advertisement, these fragile things mark the slow hammering of time and display what it has done. About you are today’s machines, today’s shadows.

Outside the window, leaves hang against the sky, as did leaves during the 1930’s. The sound of voices are no different then than now. You hold the magazine and feel something quite delicate slipping past. These solid forms surrounding you are all insubstantial. Time’s hammer will also pass across them, leaving little enough behind." - Spider, by Robert Sampson

Many of the things people call dead are just things that have been sleeping for a while or haven't had the chance to be born. Pulp fiction is dead on the page, inert, unless your imagination breathes live to it, and every now and then, one way or another, these characters dig themselves out of dustbins. Maybe it's a brief revival, maybe it's a successful reboot. Maybe they find publishers, or maybe the public domain allows them to find new life. Maybe new creators do interesting things with them, and maybe, just maybe, they live again because some won't shut up about them online. Some curious impulse led you to me, did it not?

We all have our Frankensteins to obsess over, and these are some of mine. As someone who's lived a life perpetually restless over pursuit of knowledge, pulp has lured me like a moth to flame, because I literally never run out of things to discover within it, I never run out of possibilities. As the years pass and the public domain starts being more and more open to the public, more and more narrative real state is brought forth for writers and artists and creators to play around.

Pulp is the dark matter of fiction, the uncatalogued depths of the ocean, the darkest recesses of space. It's the box of your grandfather's belongings, the treasure you find in an attic, a body part sticking out from an old playground. It's the things that don't work, don't succeed, the things that don't fit, that are out of place. That shouldn't live and succeed, and did so anyway. The things that slither in the cracks, the shadows behind the curtain.

Aren't you interested in peering on what's behind the curtain?

The exquisite workmanship of the head, of a pre-pyramidal age, and the hieroglyphics, symbols of a language that was forgotten when Rome was young–these, Kane sensed, were additions as modern to the antiquity of the staff itself as would be English words carved on the stone monoliths of Stonehenge.

As for the cat-head–looking at it sometimes Kane had a peculiar feeling of alteration; a faint sensing that once the pommel of the staff was carved with a different design. The dust-ancient Egyptian who had carved the head of Bast had merely altered the original figure, and what that figure had been, Kane had never tried to guess.

A close scrutiny of the staff always aroused a disquieting and almost dizzy suggestion of abysses of eons, unprovocative to further speculation. - The Footfalls Within, by Robert E Howard, quoted by Stuart Hopen’s The Mythic American Culture

#replies tag #pulp heroes #pulp fiction #argosy #h rider haggard #ayesha #robert e howard #solomon kane

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blurglesmurfklaine · 2 years ago

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fic writer asks: 💞 🕯️🍭

Hiiiii Jenna!!! :D I already answered the lollipop one earlier 💞

💞what's the most important part of a story for you? the plot, the characters, the worldbuilding, the technical stuff (grammar etc), the figurative language

Not to be a fucking gleek on main but for me, I think it’s just making sure that the characters love each other and the audience knows why they do. Like yeah it’s Kurt and Blaine and they are going to be together but I love exploring the why of it all, and getting to show that love is a conscious choice

🕯️was there a fic that was really hard on you to write, or took you to a place you didn't think it would take you?

(((TW for mentions of school shootings and overdose below so if that bothers you I’d scroll past the rest of this post))) ((edit I’m so sorry this is a lot and will be under the personal tag for anyone who doesn’t wanna see it lmao))

It’s definitely Sing To Me. So I signed up for the prompt reverse bang a while ago and I was SO SO SOOOOO excited to do it bc I got assigned a Zoe’s Extraordinary playlist AU and I absolutely adore that show and I had really big ideas for it and I was just so hyped to explore the idea of living grief and letting go and dealing with stuff like that

And then spring rolled around and I was coming out of seasonal depression, having to had missed Christmas for the second year in a row because of covid just a bunch of bullshit because life is fucking hard??? And literally on the day I decided to start taking antidepressants my mom called me and said that a childhood friend had overdosed and passed away.

I still get choked up thinking about it sometimes but like. It was really hard on our family because we’d known him basically our entire lives, and he was my brothers best friend for almost a decade and we’re still really close with his mom who I adore and it’s been so hard on her like I can’t even imagine

And then about a month later, the Uvalde shooting happened. For those who don’t know, I live in San Antonio Texas and Uvalde is probably about 60 miles from where I work so when that happened it hit me hard. I was fine for a few days and then I suddenly really, really wasn’t. My school district shut down two weeks early, we had to take trainings on how to stuff bullet wounds and it was all so terrible and dystopian

Sorry, I know this it like. A lot of context and feels unrelated but what I’m getting at I guess is that every time I open up Sing To Me to write, i feel myself getting pulled back into the headspace I was a year ago?? And I don’t know why. I wish I could make more headway on it, because it’s such a great prompt and my artist made an AMAZING playlist to go with it, but I think my views on grief have changed over the last year and it’s difficult to paint it in the light I originally planned to for that fic?? I’m not even sure if this is what the question was asking but it’s so hard for me to separate this fic from the shit that happened when I was deepest into the writing process for it. I really do hope to finish it, even if it turns out to be a slightly different story than I originally planned

SORRY FOR THE WHOLE ASS NOVEL??? But thanks for the ask!! 💞💞

#ask #asks #thelegendofjenna #thnxforknowingme #personal

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blind-rats · 4 years ago

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The Rise & Fall of Joss Whedon; the Myth of the Hollywood Feminist Hero

By Kelly Faircloth

“I hate ‘feminist.’ Is this a good time to bring that up?” Joss Whedon asked. He paused knowingly, waiting for the laughs he knew would come at the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer making such a statement.

It was 2013, and Whedon was onstage at a fundraiser for Equality Now, a human rights organization dedicated to legal equality for women. Though Buffy had been off the air for more than a decade, its legacy still loomed large; Whedon was widely respected as a man with a predilection for making science fiction with strong women for protagonists. Whedon went on to outline why, precisely, he hated the term: “You can’t be born an ‘ist,’” he argued, therefore, “‘feminist’ includes the idea that believing men and women to be equal, believing all people to be people, is not a natural state, that we don’t emerge assuming that everybody in the human race is a human, that the idea of equality is just an idea that’s imposed on us.”

The speech was widely praised and helped cement his pop-cultural reputation as a feminist, in an era that was very keen on celebrity feminists. But it was also, in retrospect, perhaps the high water mark for Whedon’s ability to claim the title, and now, almost a decade later, that reputation is finally in tatters, prompting a reevaluation of not just Whedon’s work, but the narrative he sold about himself.

In July 2020, actor Ray Fisher accused Whedon of being “gross, abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable” on the Justice League set when Whedon took over for Zach Synder as director to finish the project. Charisma Carpenter then described her own experiences with Whedon in a long post to Twitter, hashtagged #IStandWithRayFisher.

On Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, Carpenter played Cordelia, a popular character who morphed from snob to hero—one of those strong female characters that made Whedon’s feminist reputation—before being unceremoniously written off the show in a plot that saw her thrust into a coma after getting pregnant with a demon. For years, fans have suspected that her disappearance was related to her real-life pregnancy. In her statement, Carpenter appeared to confirm the rumors. “Joss Whedon abused his power on numerous occasions while working on the sets of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and ‘Angel,’” she wrote, describing Fisher’s firing as the last straw that inspired her to go public.

Buffy was a landmark of late 1990s popular culture, beloved by many a burgeoning feminist, grad student, gender studies professor, and television critic for the heroine at the heart of the show, the beautiful blonde girl who balanced monster-killing with high school homework alongside ancillary characters like the shy, geeky Willow. Buffy was very nearly one of a kind, an icon of her era who spawned a generation of leather-pants-wearing urban fantasy badasses and women action heroes.

Buffy was so beloved, in fact, that she earned Whedon a similarly privileged place in fans’ hearts and a broader reputation as a man who championed empowered women characters. In the desert of late ’90s and early 2000s popular culture, Whedon was heralded as that rarest of birds—the feminist Hollywood man. For many, he was an example of what more equitable storytelling might look like, a model for how to create compelling women protagonists who were also very, very fun to watch. But Carpenter’s accusations appear to have finally imploded that particular bit of branding, revealing a different reality behind the scenes and prompting a reevaluation of the entire arc of Whedon’s career: who he was and what he was selling all along.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered March 1997, midseason, on The WB, a two-year-old network targeting teens with shows like 7th Heaven. Its beginnings were not necessarily auspicious; it was a reboot of a not-particularly-blockbuster 1992 movie written by third-generation screenwriter Joss Whedon. (His grandfather wrote for The Donna Reed Show; his father wrote for Golden Girls.) The show followed the trials of a stereotypical teenage California girl who moved to a new town and a new school after her parents’ divorce—only, in a deliberate inversion of horror tropes, the entire town sat on top of the entrance to Hell and hence was overrun with demons. Buffy was a slayer, a young woman with the power and immense responsibility to fight them. After the movie turned out very differently than Whedon had originally envisioned, the show was a chance for a do-over, more of a Valley girl comedy than serious horror.

It was layered, it was campy, it was ironic and self-aware. It looked like it belonged on the WB rather than one of the bigger broadcast networks, unlike the slickly produced prestige TV that would follow a few years later. Buffy didn’t fixate on the gory glory of killing vampires—really, the monsters were metaphors for the entire experience of adolescence, in all its complicated misery. Almost immediately, a broad cross-section of viewers responded enthusiastically. Critics loved it, and it would be hugely influential on Whedon’s colleagues in television; many argue that it broke ground in terms of what you could do with a television show in terms of serialized storytelling, setting the stage for the modern TV era. Academics took it up, with the show attracting a tremendous amount of attention and discussion.

In 2002, the New York Times covered the first academic conference dedicated to the show. The organizer called Buffy “a tremendously rich text,” hence the flood of papers with titles like “Pain as Bright as Steel: The Monomyth and Light in ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer,’” which only gathered speed as the years passed. And while it was never the highest-rated show on television, it attracted an ardent core of fans.

But what stood out the most was the show’s protagonist: a young woman who stereotypically would have been a monster movie victim, with the script flipped: instead of screaming and swooning, she staked the vampires. This was deliberate, the core conceit of the concept, as Whedon said in many, many interviews. The helpless horror movie girl killed in the dark alley instead walks out victorious. He told Time in 1997 that the concept was born from the thought, “I would love to see a movie in which a blond wanders into a dark alley, takes care of herself and deploys her powers.” In Whedon’s framing, it was particularly important that it was a woman who walked out of that alley. He told another publication in 2002 that “the very first mission statement of the show” was “the joy of female power: having it, using it, sharing it.”

In 2021, when seemingly every new streaming property with a woman as its central character makes some half-baked claim to feminism, it’s easy to forget just how much Buffy stood out among its against its contemporaries. Action movies—with exceptions like Alien’s Ripley and Terminator 2's Sarah Conner—were ruled by hulking tough guys with macho swagger. When women appeared on screen opposite vampires, their primary job was to expose long, lovely, vulnerable necks. Stories and characters that bucked these larger currents inspired intense devotion, from Angela Chase of My So-Called Life to Dana Scully of The X-Files.

The broader landscape, too, was dismal. It was the conflicted era of girl power, a concept that sprang up in the wake of the successes of the second-wave feminist movement and the backlash that followed. Young women were constantly exposed to you-can-do-it messaging that juxtaposed uneasily with the reality of the world around them. This was the era of shitty, sexist jokes about every woman who came into Bill Clinton’s orbit and the leering response to the arrival of Britney Spears; Rush Limbaugh was a fairly mainstream figure.

At one point, Buffy competed against Ally McBeal, a show that dedicated an entire episode to a dancing computer-generated baby following around its lawyer main character, her biological clock made zanily literal. Consider this line from a New York Times review of the Buffy’s 1997 premiere: “Given to hot pants and boots that should guarantee the close attention of Humbert Humberts all over America, Buffy is just your average teen-ager, poutily obsessed with clothes and boys.”

Against that background, Buffy was a landmark. Besides the simple fact of its woman protagonist, there were unique plots, like the coming-out story for her friend Willow. An ambivalent 1999 piece in Bitch magazine, even as it explored the show’s tank-top heavy marketing, ultimately concluded, “In the end, it’s precisely this contextual conflict that sets Buffy apart from the rest and makes her an appealing icon. Frustrating as her contradictions may be, annoying as her babe quotient may be, Buffy still offers up a prime-time heroine like no other.”

A 2016 Atlantic piece, adapted from a book excerpt, makes the case that Buffy is perhaps best understood as an icon of third-wave feminism: “In its examination of individual and collective empowerment, its ambiguous politics of racial representation and its willing embrace of contradiction, Buffy is a quintessentially third-wave cultural production.” The show was vested with all the era’s longing for something better than what was available, something different, a champion for a conflicted “post-feminist” era—even if she was an imperfect or somewhat incongruous vessel. It wasn’t just Sunnydale that needed a chosen Slayer, it was an entire generation of women. That fact became intricately intertwined with Whedon himself.

Seemingly every interview involved a discussion of his fondness for stories about strong women. “I’ve always found strong women interesting, because they are not overly represented in the cinema,” he told New York for a 1997 piece that notes he studied both film and “gender and feminist issues” at Wesleyan; “I seem to be the guy for strong action women,’’ he told the New York Times in 1997 with an aw-shucks sort of shrug. ‘’A lot of writers are just terrible when it comes to writing female characters. They forget that they are people.’’ He often cited the influence of his strong, “hardcore feminist” mother, and even suggested that his protagonists served feminist ends in and of themselves: “If I can make teenage boys comfortable with a girl who takes charge of a situation without their knowing that’s what’s happening, it’s better than sitting down and selling them on feminism,” he told Time in 1997.

When he was honored by the organization Equality Now in 2006 for his “outstanding contribution to equality in film and television,” Whedon made his speech an extended riff on the fact that people just kept asking him about it, concluding with the ultimate answer: “Because you’re still asking me that question.” He presented strong women as a simple no-brainer, and he was seemingly always happy to say so, at a time when the entertainment business still seemed ruled by unapologetic misogynists. The internet of the mid-2010s only intensified Whedon’s anointment as a prototypical Hollywood ally, with reporters asking him things like how men could best support the feminist movement.

Whedon’s response: “A guy who goes around saying ‘I’m a feminist’ usually has an agenda that is not feminist. A guy who behaves like one, who actually becomes involved in the movement, generally speaking, you can trust that. And it doesn’t just apply to the action that is activist. It applies to the way they treat the women they work with and they live with and they see on the street.” This remark takes on a great deal of irony in light of Carpenter’s statement.

In recent years, Whedon’s reputation as an ally began to wane. Partly, it was because of the work itself, which revealed more and more cracks as Buffy receded in the rearview mirror. Maybe it all started to sour with Dollhouse, a TV show that imagined Eliza Dushku as a young woman rented out to the rich and powerful, her mind wiped after every assignment, a concept that sat poorly with fans. (Though Whedon, while he was publicly unhappy with how the show had turned out after much push-and-pull with the corporate bosses at Fox, still argued the conceit was “the most pure feminist and empowering statement I’d ever made—somebody building themselves from nothing,” in a 2012 interview with Wired.)

After years of loud disappointment with the TV bosses at Fox on Firefly and Dollhouse, Whedon moved into big-budget Hollywood blockbusters. He helped birth the Marvel-dominated era of movies with his work as director of The Avengers. But his second Avengers movie, Age of Ultron, was heavily criticized for a moment in which Black Widow laid out her personal reproductive history for the Hulk, suggesting her sterilization somehow made her a “monster.” In June 2017, his un-filmed script for a Wonder Woman adaptation leaked, to widespread mockery. The script’s introduction of Diana was almost leering: “To say she is beautiful is almost to miss the point. She is elemental, as natural and wild as the luminous flora surrounding. Her dark hair waterfalls to her shoulders in soft arcs and curls. Her body is curvaceous, but taut as a drawn bow.”

But Whedon’s real fall from grace began in 2017, right before MeToo spurred a cultural reckoning. His ex-wife, Kai Cole, published a piece in The Wrap accusing him of cheating off and on throughout their relationship and calling him a hypocrite:

“Despite understanding, on some level, that what he was doing was wrong, he never conceded the hypocrisy of being out in the world preaching feminist ideals, while at the same time, taking away my right to make choices for my life and my body based on the truth. He deceived me for 15 years, so he could have everything he wanted. I believed, everyone believed, that he was one of the good guys, committed to fighting for women’s rights, committed to our marriage, and to the women he worked with. But I now see how he used his relationship with me as a shield, both during and after our marriage, so no one would question his relationships with other women or scrutinize his writing as anything other than feminist.”

But his reputation was just too strong; the accusation that he didn’t practice what he preached didn’t quite stick. A spokesperson for Whedon told the Wrap: “While this account includes inaccuracies and misrepresentations which can be harmful to their family, Joss is not commenting, out of concern for his children and out of respect for his ex-wife. Many minimized the essay on the basis that adultery doesn’t necessarily make you a bad feminist or erase a legacy. Whedon similarly seemed to shrug off Ray Fisher’s accusations of creating a toxic workplace; instead, Warner Media fired Fisher.

But Carpenter’s statement—which struck right at the heart of his Buffy-based legacy for progressivism—may finally change things. Even at the time, the plotline in which Charisma Carpenter was written off Angel—carrying a demon child that turned her into “Evil Cordelia,” ending the season in a coma, and quite simply never reappearing—was unpopular. Asked about what had happened in a 2009 panel at DragonCon, she said that “my relationship with Joss became strained,” continuing: “We all go through our stuff in general [behind the scenes], and I was going through my stuff, and then I became pregnant. And I guess in his mind, he had a different way of seeing the season go… in the fourth season.”

“I think Joss was, honestly, mad. I think he was mad at me and I say that in a loving way, which is—it’s a very complicated dynamic working for somebody for so many years, and expectations, and also being on a show for eight years, you gotta live your life. And sometimes living your life gets in the way of maybe the creator’s vision for the future. And that becomes conflict, and that was my experience.”

In her statement on Twitter, Carpenter alleged that after Whedon was informed of her pregnancy, he called her into a closed-door meeting and “asked me if I was ‘going to keep it,’ and manipulatively weaponized my womanhood and faith against me.” She added that “he proceeded to attack my character, mock my religious beliefs, accuse me of sabotaging the show, and then unceremoniously fired me following the season once I gave birth.” Carpenter said that he called her fat while she was four months pregnant and scheduled her to work at 1 a.m. while six months pregnant after her doctor had recommended shortening her hours, a move she describes as retaliatory. What Carpenter describes, in other words, is an absolutely textbook case of pregnancy discrimination in the workplace, the type of bullshit the feminist movement exists to fight—at the hands of the man who was for years lauded as a Hollywood feminist for his work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.

Many of Carpenter’s colleagues from Buffy and Angel spoke out in support, including Buffy herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar. “While I am proud to have my name associated with Buffy Summers, I don’t want to be forever associated with the name Joss Whedon,” she said in a statement. Just shy of a decade after that 2013 speech, many of the cast members on the show that put him on that stage are cutting ties.

Whedon garnered a reputation as pop culture’s ultimate feminist man because Buffy did stand out so much, an oasis in a wasteland. But in 2021, the idea of a lone man being responsible for creating women’s stories—one who told the New York Times, “I seem to be the guy for strong action women”—seems like a relic. It’s depressing to consider how many years Hollywood’s first instinct for “strong action women” wasn’t a woman, and to think about what other people could have done with those resources. When Wonder Woman finally reached the screen, to great acclaim, it was with a woman as director.

Besides, Whedon didn’t make Buffy all by himself—many, many women contributed, from the actresses to the writers to the stunt workers, and his reputation grew so large it eclipsed their part in the show’s creation. Even as he preached feminism, Whedon benefitted from one of the oldest, most sexist stereotypes: the man who’s a benevolent, creative genius. And Buffy, too, overshadowed all the other contributors who redefined who could be a hero on television and in speculative fiction, from individual actors like Gillian Anderson to the determined, creative women who wrote science fiction and fantasy over the last several decades to—perhaps most of all—the fans who craved different, better stories. Buffy helped change what you could put on TV, but it didn’t create the desire to see a character like her. It was that desire, as much as Whedon himself, that gave Buffy the Vampire Slayer her power.

#Joss Whedon #Buffy The Vampire Slayer #Ray Fisher #Charisma Carpenter #Feminist

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kiingocreative · 4 years ago

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The Structure of Story is now available! Check it out on Amazon, via the link in our bio, or at https://kiingo.co/book

I often feel that it took me thirty years to write my first book, No Pain, No Game. Not because I was physically writing it for that long, but because finally publishing my first novel felt like the culmination of three decades of bad writing, half-finished novels, random short-stories and a million mundane diary entries. It took that long to experiment with my craft, hone my skills, and master the fear of putting my work out there for all to see.

Exaggerations aside, it actually took me three years to write No Pain, No Game, from typing the first word on an otherwise blank page to having a fully-fledged, ready-to-publish novel. Those three years consisted of mostly undisciplined writing, sitting down to work on the story as and when the urge arose, sometimes not looking at it for weeks on end, and only getting back to it when inspiration hit. Only when I got serious about publishing did I put in the hours consistently, whether or not I was in the mood for it. The whole experience felt like not so much like long distance running, but more like a slow, often sluggish stop-start stroll, with a heart-pumping sprint at the very end.

I came out of having published the book revved up from adrenaline, soaking in the momentum, fretting for more and ready to do it all again. Out came the laptop again, the rush to get the first draft over and done with and the mad rush into editing-land.

It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint (and not interval running, and not a slow leisurely walk)

The thing with sprinting, however, is that if you do it for too long, you quickly run out of breath and I soon learnt that maintaining that level of effort over time was unsustainable. Somewhere in the middle of editing my first draft, I hit a wall.

A big, fat, hundred feet high brick and mortar monster of a wall. I never saw it coming, and I face-planted right into it. For weeks after that I couldn’t look at my manuscript or social media, and I had to take a proper break from it all to restore.

The break gave me a chance to introspect and take stock of what had happened. It felt to me that, if I wanted to keep on writing more books (which I did) I had to pivot from my disorganised style of writing to a more committed endeavour. There’s nothing wrong with a leisurely walk, or random bouts of interval running, but I realised it wouldn’t give me the kind of results I was truly after. I had to look at writing as a marathon, and build the sort of stamina and endurance I needed to do this many times over without burning out.

From Dilettante to Disciplined Writer

When I think back to writing my first book, I wonder if there’s some truth in the saying that ignorance is bliss. Because I was less focused on the outcome at the time, I was better able to enjoy the ups and downs of the process, especially because I only sat to work at it when I felt like it. I was also mostly unaware of the mountain of logistics that come with writing and publishing a book, so I’d be able to see the distance I’d covered, without worrying about the miles that still stretched ahead of me. Yes, ignorance was, most definitely, a little bit like bliss.

Reminiscing on her own experience, author Shamika Lindsay says that, with her first book, ‘the process felt so different and [she] almost felt the pen gliding across the paper but with [the sequel], it was like pulling teeth’. In fact, she adds, starting to write her second book from scratch felt like ‘such a chore and [she] was just so eager to complete it because [she] felt like it took so much from [her] to write than the first book’.

For R. G. Tully, author of the Ardamin series, who put greater emphasis on the editing stage when working on his second book, the process also took longer and wasn’t always enjoyable. ‘The editing grind was exactly that, a grind’, he confesses.

But you have to do it whether you like it or not, because the only way out is through. There are, fortunately or unfortunately, no shortcuts. Fortunately, because it’s the very act of going through that arduous journey that makes you a better writer in the end. And unfortunately, because there can be times it’s just not all that pleasant.

You’ll be surprised the amount of distractions that manifest themselves when you desperately need a reason not to work on your manuscript — it’s actually quite spooky. Treating writing with discipline, organisation and professionalism is exactly what will prevent you falling off tracks, and what ultimately gets the work done. And that’s the difference between a published book and one that’ll sit indeterminately unfinished somewhere in your archives.

A Tough Act to Follow

Unfortunately, there’s still a little bit more to writing your second book than just great discipline. Even when you’re able to get yourself to follow through and show up for your craft, giving your first book a literary sibling can come with its own challenges, especially because you have something to compare it to.

And it’s not only you, but your readers too, who will be expecting certain standards from your writing, especially if it’s a series. Though it shouldn’t come in the way of writing the book you want to write, the relationship of trust you’ve built with your readership through your first book still needs to be honoured, and this can cause certain amounts of pressure.

‘I felt a little pressure to keep the same feel about the story’, R. G. Tully says, ‘and to include more from my secondary characters, give them a little more depth’.

Stormi Lewis, author of the Sophie Lee trilogy, puts it simply: ‘It was a little hard to decide how to exactly start [with the second book]. At first I was worried and became overwhelmed because so many loved the first one. I didn’t want to let anyone down. I had to step back and come to terms that they loved it for being unique. And the only way I could stay true to the story and give them what they really wanted was to focus on the story and not so much about what I thought they wanted for the second.’

For others, the comparison can be more inward-facing, like author Tara Lake, who admits that writing the second book in her series has been a challenge, because she’s ‘struggled with comparison of the self: past Tara had a lot more time to devote to writing, present Tara has much less time with [her] kids being home full time from school during much of the pandemic’.

For others still, some of that pressure can be self-imposed. When writing her second book, Freya McMillan shares that ‘[she] put a huge amount of pressure on [herself] as [she] wanted it to be meaningful in a particular way to honour [her] dad, who died a few years ago. Once [she] stopped doing that, it was much less challenging to write’.

It Ain’t All Bad.

I do want to pause here and add that not everyone faces such challenges. There are authors out there who launched into writing their second book with more ease than the first.

Sabrina Voerman tells me that ‘[her] second book came a lot easier to [her] than [her] first book. The idea hit [her] so hard and fast that it took [her] aback, and [she] could do nothing but write it’, and the entire novel was written in a matter of weeks, whilst her first book took years to finish.

Same for Trevor Wiltzen, who says that writing the sequel to his first book went smoothly, greatly helped by the fact that ‘[he] wrote the second book immediately after the first, [so he] knew the characters really well’. He admits he ‘found it very freeing and really enjoyed the process’.

Even Stormi Lewis, who struggled at first, adds that ‘once [she] got started, [she] was fine’ and that ‘[she] felt the writing was solid and [her] best book yet, simply because [she] really got to develop more of the characters and the story’.

As with everything, we must then conclude, there will be as many types of experiences as there are writers out there. So how can we best prepare for what’s to come?

A Chance to Grow

Performance coach Tony Robbins says that the quality of our lives is intricately linked to the quality of the questions we ask ourselves on a daily basis. So if we need to face something that’s outside our comfort zone — starting again from scratch on your second book for instance — is it a punishment or is it a gift? Is it a curse or an opportunity?

I’m tempted to think that the level of discomfort that can come with writing your second book is a gift, because it gives us a chance to grow.

It’s a chance to take everything we’ve learnt from doing it the first time around and take our learnings for a spin to see if it makes the process easier. It’s an opportunity to improve, to work at our craft in new and wonderful ways.

It’s both daunting and incredibly exciting to face a brand new story — or a different side to the same story for those writing series — and to dare to plunge into the unknown of where it’s fated to take you. It’ll see you grow and evolve as a writer and, in turn, you’ll get to watch your writing morph into something more mature than it was before.

I say look at your writing like you do the passing of seasons: different times will have different qualities, different characteristics, different feels to them. You live and learn through each of them, and gather a wealth of experiences that eventually inform who you become. Maintaining the discipline to write through every single one of them is what will ultimately give your work all its depth and substance.

All it takes is that first word on the page.

And the second.

And the third.

And all the words beyond that.

#writingtips #screenwriting #creative writing #writers on tumblr #writers #writing #writerblr #writing advice #writing community #writing resources

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calzona-ga · 4 years ago

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Since 2005, Shondaland has produced groundbreaking television. And over the course of 17 seasons, Grey’s Anatomy has made more than its fair share of bold choices. From the killing off of Patrick Dempsey’s beloved McDreamy to the still-controversial ghost-sex story line, the ABC series has seen, and done, it all. But perhaps no episode was riskier than turning the popular medical drama into a musical for “Song Beneath the Song,” the infamous season-7 hour in which a pregnant Callie (Sara Ramirez) gets badly injured in a car accident and, while her fellow doctors work to save her life, sees her hallucinatory self burst into song — with the rest of the characters quickly following suit.

Coming from the mind of series creator Shonda Rhimes, a vocal fan of both Broadway shows and TV musicals like Buffy’s “Once More, With Feeling,” the Grey’s musical episode was a monumental moment for the show and for television. Many viewers praised its audacity and swooned over the vocal chops of stars like Ramirez and Chandra Wilson.

“Song Beneath the Song” made for one of the most memorable hours of television, earning strong ratings and leading the soundtrack, particularly Ramirez’s show-stopping rendition of Brandi Carlile’s “The Story,” to Billboard success. A decade later, its impact is still growing, thanks in part to the countless teenage Grey’s fans who’ve only recently discovered the series via Netflix. Like the show itself, the musical has become an indelible part of TV history — and so, 10 years after its premiere in March 2011, we spoke to the episode’s cast and crew to get the story of how it came to be.

Featuring thoughts from Rhimes; writers, producers, and co-showrunners Tony Phelan and Joan Rater; and actors Wilson, Kevin McKidd, Jessica Capshaw, Kim Raver, and Eric Dane, this is the oral history of “Song Beneath the Song.”

Finding the Inspiration

Inspired by a 2008 benefit concert in which several stars of Grey’s and its spinoff show Private Practice performed songs to support out-of-work Hollywood workers during the 2007-2008 writers’ strike, Rhimes decided to turn her long-held desire to make a Grey’s musical episode into a reality.

Rhimes (series creator and writer): I remember thinking to myself at a certain point, I have this sort of murderers’ row of Broadway people. Like, Chandra had been on Broadway and singing; obviously, Sara Ramirez had won a Tony on Broadway [for Best Featured Actress in a Musical, in 2005], which is how I first met her; and then I knew that Kevin could sing. There were so many people in the show with beautiful voices. ... It felt like it was leaning in that direction in a good way.

Rater (writer, producer, and co-showrunner): The first iteration for, like, two days when we first started batting around the idea was that we would write original music. It was all gonna be original music. And then we quickly realized that a) who’s gonna write that music?, and b) no, it doesn’t feel like the right thing. And then Shonda, I think a day or two later, came in with the idea that we would use these iconic songs.

Wilson (Dr. Miranda Bailey): But the studio wasn’t quite on board with this whole idea.

Convincing a Skeptical Network

After coming up with the episode’s plot and deciding that the characters would sing classic songs from the Grey’s soundtrack, like Snow Patrol’s “Chasing Cars” and the Fray’s “How to Save a Life,” Rhimes pitched the idea to the network — but, in a surprising first, she was told that they were going to pass.

Rhimes: By that point, I wasn’t getting notes on anything; nobody was saying no to me about anything. So it was really bizarre to me that there was all this resistance to doing a musical episode. And I remember somebody at the network saying, “Can’t you just do one of your love-triangle thingies again?” And I thought, my head’s gonna explode, because the show is not a bunch of “love-triangle thingies.” You guys have missed the point entirely. I felt like, no, every year of the show is a completely different show, and this year the show has a musical episode. And that’s the story.

McKidd (Dr. Owen Hunt): Tony, Joan, and Shonda basically said to us, “We are trying to convince Disney to give us actual money to do this musical episode, and we feel like we want to do a show-and-tell to show them what this musical episode could be. Are you guys willing to give your time to help us create this show-and-tell?” And we were like, “Yeah, of course.”

Wilson: So we gave them a concert. Sara, Kevin McKidd, and I, along with musicians, got together, and we performed this script that Shonda and Tony Phelan put together. Shonda did the narrating. And we went through what the entire episode would be, based on those iconic songs.

McKidd: I remember Sandra Oh came to the concert for the execs just to be moral support for us. And she became like our groupie — she would stand and cheer and whoop and holler in between all the songs.

Phelan (writer, producer, director, and co-showrunner): Once [the executives] saw it, and saw it could work, then they gave us the okay to do it.

Rhimes: I still feel like they thought we were crazy. But you couldn’t deny the talent in the room.

Getting the Cast on Board

Once the episode was greenlit, the team began the task of persuading a cast full of non-singers to simultaneously sing, act, and — in some cases — dance on screen.

Wilson: The offer was put out on the table from the beginning from Shonda — anybody that’s not interested in singing, you’re not required; you don’t have to do it.

Rater: I think Sandra from the beginning was like, nope.

Rhimes: She looked at me — it was her very deadpan face — and she was like, “I’m not singing.” And I was like, okay! If that’s not your thing, that is not your thing — that’s completely okay. And it didn’t feel like she was afraid to sing or push past this barrier. It felt like Cristina Yang doesn’t sing. And that made sense to me.

Rater: Ellen [Pompeo] has a great voice. She could’ve done more. ... Ellen was very gracious about, like, “I’ll doo-wop in the back; don’t worry about me. Let’s hear Chandra, let’s hear Sara, this is theirs.”

Capshaw (Dr. Arizona Robbins): In addition to Sara having this powerhouse voice, she was always very generous about others and never made anyone feel smaller because of her giant power. But singing with her was like, “Aw, man [laughs], how about you get this one? You got this leg of the race.”

Wilson: Probably the most frightened person was Kim Raver, bless her heart.

Raver (Dr. Teddy Altman): It was super-exciting and terrifying at the same time. We all love singing, but unless you’re Sara Ramirez or Chandra Wilson.

Dane (Dr. Mark Sloan): I don’t fancy myself a singer, so I said, “Shonda, in this particular episode, I want the least amount of lines.”

Rhimes: Eric Dane surprised me, because his voice had this lovely quality to it that was really nice.

Dane: I set her up for a catastrophe, so she had very low expectations.

Starting Rehearsals

For months leading up to the episode, the cast embarked on a grueling series of rehearsals and voice lessons, adding hours onto their already long daily schedules.

Capshaw: I had just had a baby, and I was really taking my life one day at a time. I knew it was going to be a big episode, but, timeliness-wise, it was a tough time. I think I was still breast-feeding.

Phelan: Usually in the writers’ room, you’ve got maybe six-to-eight weeks from the time you come up with an idea to the time that it’s shot. This we needed almost the entire season to plan for.

Raver: It was like riding a bike but then adding, like, six more wheels to it, and you had to kind of figure it out.

Capshaw: We were all bringing our A games. In normal days, it feels like there’s a familiarity, you can feel a little more casual, a little more off-the-cuff, but there was nothing off-the-cuff about this. It was all very high stakes because it was life or death, literally.

There were some silver linings, though.

Dane: We had these little earbuds in our ears, I guess like how you film musicals, so you can sync what you’re mouthing with the music in your ear. And so I went to the sound operator and said, “I can buy one of these earbuds, right? And I can create a content-receiver pack and connect it to an iPod and pipe music into this too theoretically, yes?” And he said, “Yeah, you could do that if you want to.” So I said, “So when I’m performing surgery in later episodes on this show, and I don’t have very many lines, theoretically I could be listening to music, and nobody would know?” And he said, “Yeah, theoretically, that would work.” So I had one made, and I shot many episodes in the surgical theater, sometimes with lines, listening to music, many times.

Filming the Episode

“Song Beneath the Song” revolved largely around the seriousness of Callie’s condition, but there were also some light moments, including a sexy, dance-filled take on “Running on Sunshine” featuring several of the show’s couples.

Capshaw: When Sara and I are in the car in the clouds — oh my god, I’ve never felt so goofy in my life [laughs].

Raver: Scott Foley [who played Teddy’s love interest Henry] and I had so much fun working together. He’s so funny, and so choreographing that dance singing number was really fun.

Wilson: Debbie Allen sent in Eartha Robinson, one of her choreographers from the Debbie Allen Dance Academy, who I knew from Fame, the television series. So this is who was coming in, teaching us how to twirl. And I was like, oh my god, I’m on Fame!

Early in the episode, McKidd’s Owen sing-shouts at his crew of doctors to “calm down” — a moment that, years later, became a widely shared meme for its over-the-top nature.

McKidd: In the scene, I think it was Kate Walsh — she’s brilliant; she’s a prankster — and Patrick and Eric Dane. And they were all arguing. And I’m sitting there and [the cameras] push in on me and I go, “Calm down.” And they couldn’t keep a straight face. Every time we did a take, they just would fall over laughing. And they were on camera giving me the eye line, and I had to sing this song seriously with those two actors just doubled over, like sidesplitting. It just tickled their funny bones so much. That was one of the hardest acting days of my life [laughs].

Capshaw: For sure, many, many, many shots were taken at Kevin McKidd for his “calm down” [laughs]. ... He really took on the rock-&-roll part of it.

McKidd: My daughter, who’s big on Twitter, she said that “calm down” thing’s like a serious meme thing now, which I guess is an honor. I don’t know.

The biggest moment of the hour came at the end, when Ramirez, a Tony winner for Spamalot, sang “The Story” as Callie fought for her life.

Phelan: When Sara came to Grey’s, she had this idea that she absolutely wanted to be known as an actress not a singer. And so for her first couple seasons on the show, she kind of left that side of her behind. Then, here was Shonda and I coming to her and saying, “No, we want to re-engage that part of you and put it on the show.” And so I think that she got nervous about that ... but to hear that amazing, magical voice come out of her ... that was the moment that was going to be able to sustain the music [of the whole episode].

Rhimes: When she sings “The Story,” I mean — I wrote the episode; I know what’s gonna happen. I’ve seen it a thousand times. It has nothing to do with me. But I always tear up a little bit because of her extraordinary voice and extraordinary performance.

Wilson: What a showcase it was for Sara Ramirez. I’m so glad that she got to share that part of herself with our audiences.

Reading Those Reviews

On March 31, 2011, the episode aired. While it garnered strong ratings, viewers’ reactions to “Song Beneath the Song” were mixed.

McKidd: I think we all went into it with our eyes open, and we knew there was gonna be mixed reviews. Because some people are gonna love it, and some people aren’t. But that shouldn’t stop people from taking a few risks in what we do, you know?

Rater: I remember being shocked that there were people who didn’t like it. I was like, come on!

Capshaw: It didn’t feel like [the reviews] were gonna affect anything either way. It wasn’t gonna be like, “Oh my gosh, that was too silly, and I’m never watching Grey’s again.” It had already found its place in people’s hearts.

Rhimes: I learned very quickly [on Grey’s] that if you’re gonna believe the good things people say about you, you have to believe the bad things people say. So there’s no point in paying attention to any of it. ... Nobody’s gonna like everything that you do.

Phelan: I know there are a lot of people who don’t like it, who felt like it bent the show too much, but it’s season 7 of a show, and if you’re not taking big swings when you’re on season 7 on a show, something’s wrong.

Creating a Legacy

Despite the critical reactions, the episode has developed something of a cult following over the years, thanks to live benefits and TikTok memes. A decade later, its creators all look back fondly on the hour and its impact.

Wilson: [The cast] watched it together, and I remember feeling like, wow, look at what we did!

Capshaw: When we showed up to do that benefit concert, I remember coming out onstage ... and being completely, completely overwhelmed with the people that responded to Arizona in that episode, and to the love story between Callie and Arizona.

Phelan: As a director, it was the biggest challenge of my career to do that, and it’s one of the things that I’m most proud of.

Raver: I’ll be in my car singing along, or at work if we’re in the hair-and-makeup trailer and we’re listening to [the soundtrack], it’s just an immediate flashback. It kind of feels like yesterday.

Wilson: The soundtrack is on my playlist on my phone [laughs]. So I will pop that thing out in a minute, because it’s just absolute happy memories.

Rater: If I’m cooking, that is what I put on. That’s what I tell Alexa to play for me.

Rhimes: I feel like that episode just always reminds me of having so much fun. That was what was really great. We had so much fun. And how much do you get to say that about just being at work?

Dane: As a cast, contrary to what some of the entertainment media might have speculated, we were all very close. We all spent a lot of time together, and a lot of that stuff felt really real to us. It was easy to access because of how we felt about each other off screen.

Raver: I just remember it being such an incredible experience, being able to work with all these incredibly talented actors and creators.

Rhimes: It’s right in my top 10 of episodes we’ve ever done.

Dane: I don’t particularly want to do it again, but I’m glad I did it.

#grey's anatomy #7x18 #jessica capshaw #eric dane #chandra wilson #shonda rhimes #kevin mckidd #kim raver #tony phelan #Joan Rater

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popculturebuffet · 4 years ago

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Static Shock: Shock to the System and Aftershock Review

“You know what? 13 years ago, me and some friends sat in a restaurant all night and daydreamed about the kinds of stories we would tell if we had the chance. We wanted to expand the concept of superhero to include characters that kind of looked like us, who had some of the same background, experiences and dreams as we did. We wanted to create something fun that a new generation would respond to the same way we responded to our childhood heroes -and damn if we didn't succeed beyond my wildest dreams. Today, Static Shock is a household name with millions of fans of all ages (Is there stuff I'd do differently? Yeah, almost all of season four but why nitpick?) Static is the most successful thing I've ever helped create and I'm both proud and gratified that people have taken it into their hearts. “

Dwayne McDuffie, Co-Creator of Static and Writer for Static Shock

This review is dedicated to Dwayne McDuffie and Robert L. Washington III. Rest In Power Static Shock is awesome. I grew up with the show watching it both first run on the WB and second run on Cartoon Network and loved it as much as I did other large parts of my childhood courtsey of DC like Batman the Animated Series, Teen Titans and both Justice League Shows. What makes this unique among the DC Properties is that Static wasn’t really a big name when he got a show. He wasn’t even part of the DC Universe.

See as I had no idea for probably a good decade, Static actually came from Milestone Comics, a company ran by and focused on african americans. The goal was understandable: While black heroes existed at the time, and there were some fantastic ones like Storm, Jim Rhodes and Steel... these guys weren’t the center of their universes. The big faces of the big companies, Spider-Man, Wolverine, Hulk, Iron Man, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash.. were white. So milestone was a shakeup of that with the main teams and heroes all being black, from Icon, an alien who’d lived among man but rather than end up in kansas like say superman ended up imprinting on a slave woman centuries ago and has been with us since, who was encouraged by an energetic teenager named Rocket to put on a costume and do something with his powers and his community, Hardware, a tech genius who had his work stolen by a white asshole and wanted to fight back and BLood Syndicate, a group of gang members all caught in the “The Big Bang”, a huge fight between all of Dakota, the midwest city where the comics take place, that ended when the police released a bunch of experimental gas that gave them all super powers.

As most of you who have watched the show already know, this is where Static comes from. Static was the company making their own Spider-Man, i.e. a nerdy teenager who suddenly gets super powers, in this case Virgil Hawkins who at the prodding of a friend took a gun to The Big Bang to get revenge on a bully. .but ultimately couldn’t go through with it, decided it wasn’t him and got rid of the gun and ran.. and still ended up in it, becoming Static, a young hero dedicated to using his powers to fight other “Bang Babies”.. a term that dosen’t really sound that great and they really should’ve thought through. But Phrasing aside the character was great and I look forward to reading more and only haven’t because I have to buy the issues gradually, but DC is currently re-releasing the individual issues of Static, Icon, and Hardware weekly in anticipation of a reboot of Milestone Coming in May digitally on Comixology at only 2 bucks a pop, and rereleased the original print collections that were long out of print for 10 bucks each, though i’m getting static on it’s own since i’ts really not that much less expensive as it only collects four issues while Icon and Hardware both collect 8, so I can wait a bit there on Hardware and already own Icon: A Hero’s Welcome.. and really need to review it at some point.

While Milestone’s output was good, at least from the two books i’ve read, with Robert Washinton III, who sadly not only ahs also passed but was fucking homeless for a while in the 2000′s.. what the actual hell, writing Static alongside Dwayne McDuffie, whose later moved onto animation writing tons of Static episodes all of them classics including the school shooting episode, the first three rubberbandman episodes and both Anasazi episodes. Point is it had good writers and artists and even had a distrbution deal with DC, so they had a leg up on the glut of other comic book companies.. but happened to start at the start of the comic book crash, a huge downturn in sales in the 90′s as the speculator boom, i.e. a bunch of people assuming every number one would be worth golden and silver age money, forgetting a character has to BUILD INTREST and this stuff takes time, and whose attempts to sell fast flooded the market with comics no one wanted,, caused the roof to cave in and with a bunch of assholes pegging milestone as a “Company for black people” rather than you know, a company trying to add fucking diversity and represntation to the comics industry, and that simply wanted a unvierse that was centered around people of color instead of white guys. The company eventually had to shut down, and was left to lisencing. This is where the show comes in. Producers HAD been trying to make shows based on Milestone for a while, as far back as the mid-90s and the company was was all for it but the closest it got was an x-men style team series using various characters whose first draft was terrible and whose second draft by Alan Burnett, a producer on various DC Animated shows who’d go on to produce Static Shock, that McDuffie and others really liked but sadly did not get picked up. eventually though with presistance Static ended up getting a series and as I said McDuffie went on to write for it though he did not develop it. Some changes went into place naturally to make it work for an early 2000′s kids show and while i’ll probably miss so since again, only read one issue as we go. But due to Milestone coming back my intrest was peaking, hence finally reading the copy of Icon I had to buy from the library years ago due to keeping it overdue but am now EXTREMLEY glad I own as i’ts incredibly rare and really damn good, and wanting to read static, doing so lately since it’s finally on digtiial and again not too expensive. So join me as I give you a shock to the system and revisit this hell of a series to see if it holds up.. which just to cut that short it does and i’m only holding off binging MORE because I want the first two eps to be fresh enough in my head to review properly.. and also go over the various voice actors because that’s a thing with me now and charcter co-creator dwayne mcduffie because he’s awesome.

As I like to do when covering a series first episodes, let’s run down the voice cast.

First up is an UTTER LEGEND, and I use the term voice acting legend a lot, and mean it every time and have good reason to use it when I say it, and Phil LaMarr is a GOD in the buisness, having done a metric ton of voice acting roles, and being easily the most proflific black voice actor in animation. He’s also done some acting work, mostly in pulp fiction which I have not seen, but his true staying power and talent is in animation so here’s just the roles I feel are most notable or may not be very notable but i’m bringing up anyway because it’s my list.

His roles besides Virgil include Lester Payton the Texas Ranger who showed up for one very good episode of king of the hill to be badass and show up the hickish, stupid and very punchable local Sheriff, Gearld’s obnoxious older brother Jamie O on Hey Arnold, Hermes Conrad from futurama, Carver from the Weekenders (PUT IT ON PLUS DISNEY), Axel Foley for exactly one bit in Clerks the Animated Series, but anyone whose seen it will know exactly which one, Micheal on the Proud Family, Black Vulcan on Harvey Birdman (In His Pants), Hector Con Carne and Dracula on Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy and Evil Con Carne, Jack on Samurai Jack something I didn’t know for decades (and I didn’t know about the carver thing till today though i’ts obvious in hindsight), John Motherfucking Stewart on Justice League and later Steel and Adult Static in the Unlimited seasons, Osmosis Jones on Ozzy and Drix, Bolbi Strogofski on Jimmy Neutron (And yes i’m just as shocked as you are.), Wilt on Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, Marcus on Life and Times of Juniper Lee, Bull Sharkowski on My Gym Partner is A Monkey and Also a Sociopath Please Help God My Life is a waking nightmare..... okay the rest of that title is implied but we all watched the same show, we all know in our hearts that was the title

Moving on, he was also, and yes there’s MORE: Maxie Zeus on The Batman, Philly Phil on Class of 3000, Both Robertsons AND Fancy Dan on the Spectacular Spider-Man, Jazz on Transformers Animated, Kit Fisto and Bail Organa on Star Wars the Clone Wars, Gambit and Bolivar Trask on Wolverine and the X-Men, Aquaman I, L-Ron and Green Beetle on Young Justice, J.A.R.V.I.S. and Wonder Man (Simon Williams) In Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, Gabe and Carny on Kaijudo: Rise of the Duel Masters (Really miss that game and have been snapping up what cards I can get lately), Baxter Stockman in the 2012 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (And there’s also an awesome photo of him with 2003 Baxter... the two best together in one place. I got chills), Dormammu (I’ve come to bargin) in various Marvel Shows, Noville in Mighty Magiswords, Zach’s dad Marcus in Milo Muprhy’s Law, Craig’s Douchey Brother Benard on Craig of the Creek, showing he’s clearly come full circle, And Mr. Scully on the Casagrndes. And given It took about two paragraphs to cover all of this, yeah, I MEANT legend.

Next we have Kevin Micheal Richardson as Virgil’s Dad Robert, and it’s the first time since I started introducing Voice Actors on a show that i’ve overlapped. I already covered him during the second episode of legend of the three caballeros, but for the short version he’s also very acomplished, very damn good and I somehow missed he played the old blind guy in hey arnold> Needless to say the dude is awesome.

Virgil’s Sister Sharon is played by Michele Morgan who was in the rap group BWP and did some smaller roles outside of this the one exception being Juicy on the PJ’s, which I have not watched much of but REALLY do not like, though i’ll at least give it credit for being a decently long lasted black claymation sitcom at at time when there were, and hoenstly still aren’t, many black animated shows.

Back to long casting sheets, next up is Jason Marsden, who is one of my faviorites as i’ve realized recently as Ritchie. As I also found out only recently he started on the Sitcom Step By Step and while that show is .. ehhhhhhhhh, he is great in it because he’s great in everything. He also apparently has his own internet variety show which I have to watch now. His roles include Max Goof, ironically given I was just talking about that role a few days ago, Haku in the english dub of Spirted Away, Micheal, the kid being yelled at by a bunch of 80′s cartoons characters not to take drugs in Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue!, Nermal in the DTV Garfield movies and The Garfield Show, Tino on the Weekenders (SERIOUSLY DISNEY), Snapper Carr on Justice League, Rikochet on Mucha Lucha! for the last season (Why I do not knkow and while I love the guy he was not the right choice), Felix on Kim Possible, Chase Young on Xiaolin Showdown (WHich I did not realize was him and now I do easily his best role and I REALLY should’ve), Red Star and Billy Numerous on Teen Titans, Speedy on Batman Brave and the Bold, Impulse/Kid Flash II on Young Justice, and Fingers on Kaijudo. He hasn’t done as much lately which is a shame but hopefully i’tll pick up again.

Next up is Hotstreak, Virgil’s brutal bully turned unhinted pyromancer played by DANIEL COOKSY, another actor i’m happy to talk about and another faviorite I haven’t seen much of lately. Daniel was an actor from childhood, playing Budnick on Salute Your Shorts, but he quickly gained a long and storied catalogue of VA Work: His first big roll was as Montana Max on Tiny Toon Adventures and if there is a god he’ll be back for the reboot, Stoop Kid on Hey Arnold, the incomprable Jack Spicer on Xiaolin Showdown, far and away his best role and part of why Chronicles sucked so bad was he was he didn’t get to reprise the role, The titular Dave the Barbarian, Django of the Dead on El Tigre (Had no idea), Kicks utterly insufferable big Brother Brad on Kick Buttowski and apparently he’s back at it again after laying low for a bit as he’s voicing Snag in Long Gone Gultch.. which I already really needed to watch but hot damn, I missed him. Sign me up.

Frieda, Virgil’s crush and close friend who in the comics was his main confidante and love intrest but here is eventually pushed aside, is voiced by Danica Mckeller whose work didn’t seem all that familiar.. until I found out she was Ms. Martian on Young Justice. Hello, Megan. Very talented and she did get a major role in a dc show eventually so good for her. Can’t wait for season 4.

So with our major players out of the way, let’s talk about Dwayne. McDuffie is an AWESOME man and my respect has grown for him more and more with time. A writer and editor at Marvel, McDuffie has a decent resume doing smaller but awesome books, which I got most of for free last year when Marvel was giving out free digital collections due to the lock down, like Damage Control, a sitcom set in the marvel universe about the company that picks up after superhero battles and the logistics and antics that insue and Dethlok, about a pacfist trapped inside a cyborg zombie. He was as mentioned one of Milestone’s founders, and wrote Icon, Hardware and co-wrote the first few issues of Static. He’d go on to a pretty stacked career in animation, writing on this show and Justice League before becoming story editor and show runner for Unlimited , even making a return to comics as a result writing the Marvel miniseries beyond and an arc of Fantastic Four in which Black Panther and Storm filled in for Reed and Sue while the two of them worked on their marriage after Reed did.. pretty much everything he did in Civil War. He also became head writer and show runner for Ben 10: Alien Force and Ultimate Alien, revamping the franchise a bit, and Alien Force, at least the first two seasons are awesome and I feel people overreacted on the changes. Ultimate Alien is okay, but has it’s problems but the finale was awesome and left the man’s legacy on a high note.. as he sadly passed in 2011 due to heart complications. He is truly missed and produced some utterly amazing stuff whlie he was alive. So on that melacholy note let’s see what happens when his creation hits the tv screen shall we?

Shock to the System:

This episode is written by Christopher Simmons, who is apparently a huge art designer guy.. but i’m not sure that’s the same chirsptoher simmons. Much more notable is the writer of the episode after this Stan Berkowitz, who was showrunner for season 1 and has done a LOT of DCAU work and is suprising talent, having written a lot of awesome Justice League episodes including Secret Society and The Royal Flush One. Point is we’re in first class hands. Before the episode itself I want to talk about the intro and how it’s unique among DCAU shows. Like most Western Animation the intros for DCAU shows didn’t change much over the seasons with the most I can see is JLU changing up the footage to preview the current episode and later adding Hawkgirl to the intro after her return to the team. I THINK superman the animated series changed some of it’s footage too, but I can’t confrim it and may of just been imagining it. As i’ve talked about on my blog it’s normally a pet peeve of mine, mostly because shows you know, change after season 1, characters get added some one shot characters used for the intro never return, and after a while it can feel dated especially in more recent shows where the status quo is not at all set in stone and things change quite a bit. But sometimes it can be good enough that either the dated elements don’t matter or general enough that you don’t need to change it and i’ts just that good.. and given Batman the Animated Series has both in spades, you can see why i’ts probably my golden standard for intros and after superman the animated series DC mostly followed suit. But being part of the teen superhero boom of the 2000′s Static is unique in that it splits the diffrence: It’s intro gets the character across perfectly like a good intro should starting with Virgil getting out of bed and running a comb across his head before showing off to his sister to bug her and literally running into his dad who hand shim his bag and smiles, silently showing off his family. He then runs to school and runs into some trouble.. and said trouble changes for each intro, with Rubberband Man for season 1, Kanga (Whose name I only know because I happened to run across it) for season 2 and your guess is as good as mine for seasons 3 and 4, though Hotstreak is a constant. They still save some money for seasons 1 and 2 by recycling some animation.. but that’s alright with mea s it was good animation, and the improtant thing is cycling out old villians for new ones, while Season 3 is the only out and out redo to show off Richie taking on the Gear identity, adding about 10 seconds of intro to let him show off. Seriously it’s an utterly great intro and like the other DCAU intros outside of superman, stuck in my brain.

The other change that’s ENTIRELY diffrent from the rest of htem is that the music changes each time. The first two have the same formula just with a difrent vocalist and backing track: a superhero theme but with some hip hop beat boxing over it. The first intro is fine enough, not specattcular but stilll god. The second song.. is eh. Not really great and feels like a marked downgrade from season 1 and just dosen’t blend an ocrehstiral superhero theme with the beatbox elements NEARLY as well. The third song though is my faviorite.. even if I HATED Little Romeo as a kid because I really did not like his nick show, it’s more a straight up rap song, but it has a faster beat that fits the intro better, and Romeo’s bragging fits Virgil’s character and penchant for Spidey quips perfectly. I also find it ironic that the theme that blends in with the dcau the most, the first season’s, is the one from BEFORE they decided to put it in the same universe. Still this season’s intro slaps, I just like the LIttle Romeo one a bit more. The opening scene is picture perfect. Some masked crooks looting a warehouse are loading some stolen TV’s into a van when suddenly the lights come on one by one above one of the crooks before his tv switches to various channels before going haywire. Cue our heroes’ entrance. Let’s tak ea good look at him

Static’s Costume is awesome. While I prefer the season 3 redesign, and clearly DC agrees as the redeisgn was used for both pre and post new-52 when they used him, and while he’s getting a fresh design for the reboot, said design takes a lot of cures from said outfit. As for how the outfit differs from the comics itself this is the design he had in the comics

It didn’t change much from the first issue, with the exception of his now iconic big puffy jacket which was added pretty early into the character’s history but I was unaware of that and just assumed he had the bodysuit the whole time. The more you know. But as you can see outside of the cool puffy jacket over a costume the two couldn’t be more diffrent. While the Dakotaverse outfit is more a standard superhero outfit, with some regular clothes touches on top the first cartoon outfit comes off more realistic, looking fantastic, but still coming off as something two teenagers could realistically have thrown together with what clothes they could buy, while still looking awesomely superheroy. IN short it’s perfect and only topped by the season 3 onward look...

But the slicker look, with an even cooler jakcet and the new colors all fitting the lighting ascetic better, but fits: not only has Virgil come along farther since he started, but with Richie now having a genius brain as Gear, he can provide a far slicker, far more professional superhero outfit on the budget the two have. This show is just great at costume design.

So getting back to the episode at hand, Static puts up a huge sign in elecrticy saying “Bad guys here”, PFFFT, and then hides away and narrates that a few days ago he’d be the last person anyone would’ve expected to be a hero. Cue Flashback.

We meet Virgil Hawkins on an average day: rapping into his razor, getting into a petty argument with his older sister Sharon, as a younger brother myself I relate to this, and talking to his dad who tries to get them to cut that out. We find out his mom has passed via his sister making really terrible eggs and saying that’s how mom made them. Exposition! Though we do get a great bit through this as when his sister gets distracted by her boyfriend calling, he uses the opportunity of her leaving the room to dump the eggs.. after having earlier jokingly prayed to his mom for a way out of breakfast. “Thanks for looking out for me mom” That’s both very sweet and very hilarious.

This is a change from the comics it turns out as I was utterly flored to find Virgil’s mom alive and well when reading the first issue of Static. Turns out this was a change made during development and one Dwane McDuffie admitted in the interview I got the tribute quote from to not liking as he had a good reason for having Virgil have a nuclear family, as most black families in media at the time were just one single parent and a kid or two with the other having either left or died. He wasn’t too bothered by it as while he preferred what he came up with in the first place, the show DID get some really good stories out of her being gone and didn’t just have her be absent because shut up. Virgil is still working over her death and the way HOW she died ends up playing an important role in this episode and gives Virgil a dislike of guns, as she died to gang violence. So the change wasn’t for stupid or racist reasons, but likely both to keep the character count down while giving them something to work with for storylines. Or it could’ve been for stupid reasons and the writers simpily made lemonade out of that very dumb lemon, either way it ended up working. Virgil also plans to ask his friend Frieda out. Frieda was a bigger deal in the comics, being Virgil’s friend and confidante as well as his ocasional love intrest, but here while she was inteded to at least be his love intrest here, that sorta fizzled out. As for the best friend role we meet her replacement in Richie, which McDuffie conceded was the kind of change a studio would make swapping out a female character for a male one. That being said the crew made the best of it and Richie is awesome, a bit of an overcompensating dipstick at times, but a good sounding board and pal for virgil and funny as hell too. He was also gay, something only revealed post series by McDuffie.. but unlike say Dumbledore, it’s a bit easier to swallow here: The early 2000′s were an even worse time for gay characters in tv let alone cartoons, and if they couldn’t kiss or have sex scenes on regular tv, there was no way we were getting any representation in a children’s show. So it was largely just hinted at by Richie overcompensating in how “into girls” he was and i’m once again fine with this being word of god as it was literally the best they could do and his counterpart in the comics was also gay, if not as relevant. Ritch encourages Virgil to work on his opening to ask her out as it’s awkward as heck, hits a bit close to home.. but I do appricate the show just .. having him try and ask her out from the first episode. They likely would’ve drug thigns out a bit granted had they used Frieda more, i’m not blind to the convetions of the time. .but as someone who got the very wrong idea from tv that just waiting around meant a girl would like you eventually, when no you need to actually try even if rejection happens, I honestly wish we had more of this in media than the other garbage morals at the time.

So he prepares to , not helped by her mentioning guy after guy is asking her out.... but before he can F-Stop, the future hotstreak, shows up. F-STOP

That being said...... it’s not as bad as the original gangster name for the comic’s version, Biz Money B. Yes BIZ MONEY B

So yeah while F-Stop is no more intimidating, it at least means I can stop laughing. Francis, because I can’t type F-Stop without laughing and this review is already behind, shoves Virgil out of the way and agressively hits on Frieda, even saying “you smell good”, the international sign your a douchebag and also to call the police. Virgil steps up to the guy and gets PAINFULLY slammed into the lockers, something I give the animation team a lot of credit for, as you can FEEL how fucking painful that was. Virgil is saved by Wade, another local gangbanger who in the comics was a close friend of Virgils but here saves him seemingly just because.. seemingly.

On the way home though Virg’s problems don’t end as naturally, the giant sized asshole with nothing better to do has his goons corner virgil before VIOLENTLY beating him.. off screen but the noises, and the clear brusies including a black eye, on virgil afterwords.. just holy damn i’m suprsied they got away with this but it shows just how horrifing it was and that this is a step above regular bullying, which make no mistake is absoluttley terrible and the series would later do an episode on it and school shootings, into straight up gang violence. Wade shows up again and gets the bastards to flee.. but also makes it clear he can’t keep doing this.. and forces Virgil to meet him at his base under the bridge. And it’s a tense sequence, with Virgil KNOWING this is a bad idea but having no real choice and Wade making it abundantly clear that he wants Virgil to join his crew, and makes a chilling point: while Virgils dad RIGHTFULLY dosen’t want his son to join a gang as Virgil points out.. he can’t be there for him all the time and eventually one of those times, Francis will be around. And he may not surivive that. Virgil nods noncomittaly. At home it gets even more grim as he dosen’t open up to his family, understandably as his dad would jsut say to call the police and well.. we’ve seen how the police treat black people. At best they’d just try and use Virgil as an informant and that likely wouldn’t end fucking well for Virgil. Ritchie points out he can’t join a gang, virgil’s mom died that way.. see told you it’d be important to the plot.. but I like how the story dosen’t offer an easy answer.. well okay he gets electric powers soon enough but without the fantastic element this is just an innocent kid caught between either joining the very thing his mom hated or hoping a system not built to protect him will keep him alive. It’s utterly saddening and chilling and holy shit is it amazing a cartoon in the early 2000′s was able to get away with.. ANY OF THIS, and they handle it great, paired down a bit from the comics but even then it’s still incredibly balsy they got THIS much in.

Naturally Wade calls in his favor and our hero is forced to come running.. and soon finds out Wade’s brought him in for a massive gang war. Welcome to the big bang, baby. He hands Virgil a gun as things get started and Virgil.. drops the thing and tries to escape, in a harrowing sequence.. and runs into Francis because god apparently REALLY hates this kid today. As if to prove that the police show up and while that prevents a beating, they demand they disassemble. then release untested gas on them because of course they do.

As a result the big bang truly begins, with the various gang members getting mutated.. and naturally so does virgil. Though he wakes up the next day seemingly fine. How’d he get home? Does his dad know where he was?

I don’t know and we’re not getting any answers, but Virgil soon finds weird stuff happening like his clock shorting out, change being attracted to him and his razor going wild. It’s only once he get sback to his room he gets an inkling of what’s going on and calls Ritchie to meet him at the Junk yard.. though it is a bit of a dick move as he dosen’t you know, tell him anything about Wade or Francis right away. He does at the yard though.. and that he has powers, having finally figured out how to use them to a point. And the series does provide a decent justification later as to why he’d get this so quickly: Virgil is a smart kid, gets great grades at school and apparnetly there’s even an episode later where he gets a scholarship to a fancy genius school. So him getting how elctromagntisim works or being a quick study on it makes perfect sense.

Richie suggest the obvious.. to become a superhero. And the thought.. hadn’t occured to Virgil. It’s honestly a nice twist on the old trope. That he hadn’t thought of it, not because he’s selfish or any of that or needs to learn a hard lesson, those have been done.. simply because the rush of getting his powers, and implicitly of having a way out of his current predciament, a way to keep Francis off his back and keep Wade from pulling him in further. His own path. But once i’ts brought up.. he jumps on it. Part of it is being a nerd like you or I, of course he wants to.. and being a good intetioned one, he knows this is the right thing to do. It’s waht makes a superhero a hero: Anyone can get powers in a universe like this, esepcailly the dcau, but it takes true courage and heart to use them selflessly and knowing you’ll be in danger. It’s why I love surperheroes: they often didn’t ask for this but they do it anyway because somebody’s gotta. We also get an intresting wrinkle is superman is, at least I think in this episode I could’ve missed it or misremembered things, mentioned as a fictional character. That’s because originally like the comics this wasn’t part of the DCAU.. but eventually the crew decided it shared staff from it, shared a network, both first run and on reruns, why not just make it part of the DCAU proper. I fully support this decisionf: While i’m midly annoyed unlimited never really used anything from static shock outside of Static himself in the time travel episode, despite you know Static and Gear having BEEN to the tower and not being much younger than Kara and defintely older than Courtney, I chalk it up to weird rights issues or something like that. But having Batman, Batman Beyond, Superman, Green Lantern and the Justice League itself all guest star was a good idea, and expanded both static’s universe and gave the DCAU something differnt as most heroes in it were older and more experinced in contrast to the up and coming virgil. Again really would’ve been nice if he and gear could’ve been a part of the expanded league but production might of just been too far ahead or, given he had his own series, they might just have wanted to stick to toher characters. Also begs the question why Icon or Hardware wasn’t adapted for the expanded League but hey, questions for later and the tricky logisitics of the milestone rights might’ve been the issue. I don’t know I wasn’t in the room.

So we get a costume montage, including Black Vulcan from Superfriends, who again ironically would be voiced by Lamarr not too long after this, though weirdly they DON’T use his outfit from the comics for this montage. I mean why not? It fits the gag and would’ve been a good second to last choice.But what could’ve been aside we get our winner and cut back to present day...

Thanks boys. Static finds out one of the things in the warehouse is a shipment of computers for the school and can’t help but show off, showing up to the school, where Frieda and Richie are setting up for the dance, and dropping off the computers, and even saying his catchphrase for the first time “I’ll put a shock to your system” (Which Richie chimes in with awesome line and I agree, great catcphrase), before helping set up and flirting with frieda.

Though as Richtie says he’s a natural. He’s not wrong as he can work a crowd. .but back it up too as his first run out had him easily taking out the crooks, and as many teen superheros and fans of heroes of hte type, myself included will tell you, getting it right in one is not easy. Not even Miles MOrales was immune. All Static needs now is a villian.

And the end of the episode provides one as we see, in horrifc and once again damn suprising detail most of hte new metas aren’t doing so good and are melting and other stuff and we catch up with Francis whose burning up.. and naturally given that hair, though given he named himself F-Stop it’s the least of his problems, he’s got fire powers and escapes to “Have me some fun”

So with that we end episode 1. And it’s excellent, a great way to introduce the hero and while the warehouse opening is a bit superflous, it is a decent addition, showing our heroes first outing in costume and giving us a bit of an action scene to get us through the very heavy rest of the episode. But the rest of the episode is no less grippping, telling the tale of a teen caught in an unwinnable scenario who suddenly finds a way out. And speaking of which waht of Wade? Will we see him again? Is he perhaps Ebon, the series big bad as I thought when I was a kid? What comes of the man who directly caused static’s origin?

Yeahhh that’s the one mistep I think the pilot makes. Frieda is understandable as that was likely a simple change in creative direction. This though? Why build this guy up if your not going to bring him back. I mean where he went was probably the grave, as he probably did due to his mutation, but it’s still VERY weird to spend a whole episode focusing on this guy, building him up as a big personal threat to our hero.. and NOT have him become the series big bad. And maybe he WAS supposed to be ebon and they just changed their mind. I don’t know but it bothers me it bothers me a lot. Otherwise though flawless. ONe more to go.

Aftershock: We open outside an electronics store, as our heroes watch the news reacap what happened in the first episode, with the media dubbing it the Big Bang and revealing their could be hundreds of “Metahumans”, as Virgil dubs after deciding the media’s term “Mutant” dosen’t fit, a nice wink to the fact that that’s the term used in dc comics and I believe milestone but could be wrong there. Me I like the term, has a nice ring to it.

At the store while Richie mulls over waht this means Static finds out he’s a human CD player.... this was before mp3 players and streaming on your phone made them horribly obsolete mind you and if you don’t know what one is congradualtions you live in some sort of bubble and you made me feel really old junior.

Frieda happens to be there and Virgil quips “What’s the matter they run out of britney cds”. Dude she’s not bad. Also be careful what you wish for man. Nickeback returned the year after this. You have not truly suffered through bad music yet my young friend. They spot a kid looking feverish, and he soon turns into a purple werewolf, as you do. It’s a bang baby.. those are richie’s exact word and you may not want to start a panic there bud. Just saying your best friend is one. THeir not all like this. Our heroes book it only to run into Francis who naturally refuses to let them leave and only doesn’t try to beat up Virgil because Virgil points otu the werewolf and nonplussed, he goes to fight it, scarring it off by revealing his own powers. He’s now dubbed himself Hotstreak which points for getting an actually good name kid. No points for what happens next as unsuprisingly getting powers did NOT mak ehim a better person and he attacks Virgil who blocks with a garbage can lid and thankfully is blasted into an ally. Richie tries to guard frieda for damn obvious reasons but gets hsi shirt burnt up because shut up Thankfully Static shows up, and we get our firsdt full on superhuman fight as both fight each other with aplomb, and it’s a damn good fight.. and one that goes pear shaped for Virg as he’s caught off guard when he finds out Hotstreak can use his powers to fly, and tackles him and his previous trauma causes him to freeze up. Thankfully , as Frieda put in a call earlier, the fire department arrive and HOt streak has to retreat, though Virgil is bummed that he “Choked”. And I love this as it not only shows Virgil’s inepxerince, as this is his first time fighting a bad guy but that just because he HAS power now dosen’t mean trauma and his previous fear of Hotstreak goes away or you won’t freeze up from time to time. It dosen’t make him weak or anything like some assholes would call it .. it makes him human. Humans make mistakes, and it makes him all the more relatable that he’s not pefect and that he did freeze up as I know I certainly would at last once in the circumstances.

Things don’t get better at dinner as Sharon and Pops argue over the bang babies with Pops calling them a meance and Sharon pointing out Static exists so they can’t all be bad. See assuming a group of superhumans are bad because a handful of them ar edick sis why the x-men had to get their own island nation. You can only save an ungreatful populous so many times before you say “fuck it i’m getting my own island, pay me for life saving drugs, save your damn selves and stop doing genocides on us. Kay thanks”. But he does bring up a valid point that rattles his son: We don’t know anything about the Bang Babies or their biological structures and it’s likely they might further mutate into monsters, Static included.

Virgil, understandably, wants to check this and thus he and richie compare blood samples in science, to no real conclusion. She he checks out with his doctor who assumes he’s sexually active in a great getting crap past the radar bit and a bit of realisim, but he agrees to the test though if something came up he would have to tell Virgil’s dsad and is up front about this. Nice dose of realisim.

That night City Council has a meeting and the Mayor TRIES to deflect Papa Hawkins questions about the bang babies which again, while being a judgmental ass as not every person hit was a gang member (Virgil, and as we discover later some others), and not every gang member is there by choice, some by circumstnace some, like virgil almost was, because they HAD no other option. Again years of reading x-men may of just made me a bit touchy on assholes admitely assuming superpower people bad. But it’s clear the public is upset and while she says an investigation is underway... Virgil and Richie are not only not convinced, but figure she’s actively covering it up. And unlike everyone else there who probably suspects the same, they can do something about it and tail her. It’s during this, and cleverly as I didn’t realie till writing this using similar skills to his human cd player act, Virgil listens in and discovers whose behind it: Edwin Alva, whose apparently richer than bill gates and a beloved phinarophist Alva, as it turns out, was actually the arch enemy of Hardware in the comics, taking advantage of the guy in his civiliian idtentiy and thus casuing him to launch a war on the asshole. He does transition into this series well though, being the one behind the gas that caused it and with the mayor agreeing to back off, planning to simply dump the info about the big bang on a disc then destroy everything for now till the heat dies down. Yup sounds like a corprate douchebag.

Static tails him, finds the lab and infiltrates it, stealing the disc.. but getting caught by Alva’s goon, and trapped in a glass prison, forced to use ALL his power to escape and barely getting out alive, but not before bouncing off alva’s car. Still he now has the proof.. and meanwhile Hotstreak, who I was wrong did get captured, is forced to take pill sbut spits them out once the orderly is gone. Dude.. WHY DIDN’T YOU WATCH HIM. Make sure he swallows that shit especially since, as he has no powers right now and can’t harm you.

Hotstreak escapes off screen and our heroes discuss the disc before he shows up, and we get a REALLY fucking amazing scene: Virgil ducks into an Alleway and ritchie is worried.. and Virgil disarms him with just one word responses Ritchie: Virg you can’t take him. Virgil: Gotta. Ritchie: Well at least wait for the fire department Virgil: Can’t. It’s simpile but it gets the point across: This is his fight, he can’t wait for help, and people need him. And this is what makes a true hero: It’s easy to be a hero when everythings going well.. but it’s the true ones who stick it out against the odds and fight anyway. And he’s going to. So we get one hell of a fight, though naturally Hotstreak burns up the disc. And I do like this as it dosen’t feel contrived.. yes Static could’ve left it with ritchie.. but he wasn’t thinking in the moment and dind’t really have time to think abotu the disc, only that people were being hurt and he was all they had between them and Hotstreak. It was no choice at all. Still that pisses Virgil off that the last night’s work is now worthless, and he fully charges up and curbstomps francis who retreats into a clearing. Hostreak brags when static follows, as even he’s figured out Static needs to be around metal, as he’s usually on his disc or the street, and in the park there suppodsidly isn’t any. But he’s not THAT smart as Virgil points out two things: one, he hoped to do this on PURPOSE so they wouldn’t be around people and no on e would get hurt and 2).. this is a city, there’s metal everywhere.. and he awesomely and cleverly proves it by unlodging a sewage pipe with his powers and dousing his foe, winning and proving his stuff. I love this solution, it’s a clever spider-man type way to disarm him, using smarts and the einvroment instead of just brute forcing it. Though the sewage part wasn’t intetional our hero still won and gets praise from the people dumb enough to follow the fight.

However at home Virgil points out it was Pyrrhic Victory and shows off his smarts by telling the tale behind it, which I didn’t know,because tv tropes didn’t exist yet: king pyrhus fought the romans and WON.. but had so little armies left that he still lost overall. That’s what this feels like to Virgil: he beat hotstreak but any chance at a cure for Bang Babies and Alva going to jail for causing them is gone. His mood does get a boost though as the doctor calls and reveals he’s fine, he just has a bit too much elctrolytes and just needs to lay off teh salt. He celebrates, we get a quick gag and the episode ends

Aftershock is another stellar episoe, giving us Virgil’s first super foe and a personal one at that, while showing some growth. As richie tells him he’s not virgil anymore he’s static and he can’t let his past get to him.. and he does’nt going from cowering in fear to easily beating his foe with simple logic. It’s a good followup that answers questions you may have from the first ep, like what does this do to virgil’s body, who supplied the gas, and why has no one done anything about this, and sets up another villian for Static in Alva. Great stuff. I highly recommend these episodes and the show as a whole: it’s fast paced, grounded and enjoyable, having just enough levity to not be too dour but just enough tension and stakes to be intresting. A throughly fantastic superhero show and one that i’d certainly love to revisit on this blog If you have an episode of static or the dcau in general you’d want me to cover, my comissions are open and details are on a tab on my blog or can be gotten simply by asking me via ask or dm. Tommorow we’re going deeper underground, there’s too much damage in this town as the Lena Retrospective continues. So expect gay ducks, straight ducks and some terrfirmains. See you next rainbow.

#static shock #static #virgil hawkins #richie foley #robert hawkins #sharon hawkins #hotstreak #milestone comics #dc comics #dc animated universe #dcau #dwayne mcduffie #robert l washington IIII #kids wb #hbo max #2000s #animation #black lives matter #black history month

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punwolf · 3 years ago

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I’ve forgotten what a strange experience writing fan fiction can be. Something about video game characters made it easier, and that’s what I’ve written for years. Maybe it’s the interactions you get with Bioware characters and the immersion where “I” can be closer to the action and people. It felt easier to slide into the actual thoughts of the majority of them. Going back to writing for a television series (and an old one) is almost jarring. It’s not unknown to me. I wrote a bunch of original Dark Shadows fiction back in the day. Not to be confused with the Johnny Depp movie from this decade. The original series ran in the late 1960′s and early 70′s. The era wasn’t the only thing which made them as different as apples and the Empire State Building. I wrote point of view from a lot of those characters back when I was into the reruns of the series. I wasn’t born when it originally aired so the atmosphere presented certain challenges as well. Society and the people’s viewpoints alter radically as time passes. We age, yes, but we also grow and our ideas alter as the world around us changes. The 60′s are alien to me because I wasn’t actually there. Then there’s the characters. Writing an OC in another fictional world isn’t as difficult. You’re dealing with the point of view of someone you, the author, created. The OC is a blank slate to think, feel and react in any way you see fit. You have to get the dialog and actions of canon characters to stay believable and in character unless you’re deliberately breaking the mold for fun. That can be a good time, too, but I’m trying to stay mostly true to the original content. So I’m trying to step into the shoes of a character who multiple people wrote in a series and an actor brought to life. What’s going on in his head? How does he see the world? I don’t actually know these things the way I do with my OCs. I have to rebuild him from what I’ve seen on screen - how he reacts, the things he says, and every scrap of information I have to work with. It doesn’t help that his personality and mine are mostly as different as night and day. Which isn’t totally uncommon. I’ve written a lot of characters over the years from the truly, deeply, horrifyingly evil, the character with a utter lack of civility and conscious, the wish fulfillment OC who is brave, outgoing and beautiful, inhuman creatures who don’t think like human beings at all... The list goes on. It’s part of what passes for normal for writers. But this is a challenge. I’ve forgotten how interesting it is to try and put on the shoes of a pre-existing character from a television series. A good challenge, however. A fun one.

#whuffie writes

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bigskydreaming · 4 years ago

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am I the only one who's a little uncomfortable with the way they brought back dickbabs after all the Ric bullshit and the shit they made her say after? like...I know we didn't get a lot of dickkory interaction in reference to the shooting, but the one panel where he mentions it in passing to kory and they show her getting angry/protective of him in an instant speaks volumes to me over the repeated uh..."you can't be happy if you're not the Real You/it's Your Fault for not remembering me/how dare YOU leave us behind on PURPOSE when we NEEDED you" stuff they made barbara say which is a weird choice for someone with her characterization and history, but also if you're going to give her that kind of a role in the story, isn't it gross to push dick and babs together afterward like nothing happened? but then again maybe I'm just being unfairly hard on babs, because I haven't seen anyone else of the same opinion - maybe I'm missing some information? thoughts?

Mmm, I get what you're saying but I don't think that's really a Babs thing or a Dickbabs thing in specific. I mean, I had a similar reaction to Tim's part of the story as well, and I think its kinda just an overall annoyance with DC's approach to moving past the Ric Grayson arc while coupled with dissatisfaction in regards to how shit their approach to the arc was in the first place.

Like yeah, I had a lot of gripes with how they had Babs acting throughout that arc, particularly the end, but it was the exact same gripes I had with every single member of Dick's family. And I had the same reaction to Bruce after the arc trying to be like, oh I was there watching the whole time (cough bullshit) and hurriedly trying to move them past talking about all that, and its like I said here with Tim, I mean.

Its a little tricky with Tim because he's Dick's younger brother and who the fuck even KNOWS what age he's supposed to be, but I have a hard time picturing him as much younger than eighteen at this point with as long as he's been around and its like.....I kinda expect the same thing to happen when Jason shows up and even Damian if they bring him in. Like I mean, its that thing where it seems like Taylor and other writers feel they're bridging this gap of how long its been since Dick did stuff like this with Tim and the others, and that they feel like they have the characters all being 'gracious' in like, moving past that quickly and dwelling on how that went down as little as possible?

And I'm just like....no! Stop acting like its for Dick's sake that none of you want to talk about that time or that its his fault that its been so long since there were these close moments. YOU guys were the ones who dropped the ball! Its everyone ELSE who was shit at handling how Dick losing his memories affected HIS life, and even before that, there was a huge chasm between him and the others, and once again, it was because it was every one else who was shit at handling how Dick being kidnapped, tortured, killed, and then shoved off on some secret mission before he even had a full week long to process the trauma of all that and get even close to back to thinking things through rationally, like....affected their lives instead of his.

*Shrugs* Its not a single character or ship, honestly, its just DC. Its just them being shit at judging what kinds of storylines people want for Dick's character, and then when it all blows up in their face, they backpedal furiously and pin it all on Dick's character because he's the one who is most comfortable with accepting blame, which lets everyone 'get past everything' and 'back to normal' quicker than if DC tried to pin the responsibility (and thus the acknowledgment of accountability) on any other character.

I mean, sadly, I can't say that DC has learned nothing over the decades, because they DID learn this move from how Dick and Bruce were written during their estranged years back in the eighties, and how fandom reacted to that. At the time, it was CLEARLY, DEFINITIVELY, WITHOUT A DOUBT....Bruce's fault. It was his responsibility. He was the one who over and over KEPT telling Dick to leave every single time Dick was written sucking up his pride or hurt over what Bruce had said or done initially and going back to the Manor to talk it over with Bruce....and it was always Bruce who KEPT the estrangement going. Just like it was Dick who tried consoling Bruce about Jason's death and Bruce who responded to that by kicking Dick out of his house for good, which in turn meant Dick was the one who had to once again get past all that to even come back and try and help keep Bruce from trying to get himself killed after having just been basically disowned by the guy.

Rinse and repeat, over and over and over. It was always one way. It was always Dick reaching out, it was never Bruce going after Dick to ask him to come home, or to apologize, or to say that things were his fault or that he could have done things differently or that he should have been more mindful of Dick's feelings or not taken him for granted, etc, etc.

And yet, over and over and over....people kept describing that as two-sided. Every single fight between them during that period was one that Bruce unequivocally instigated, that his actions WERE the thing that Dick was REACTING to and which led to these confrontations, and again, it was never once Bruce taking the initiative in repairing their relationship or moving past a confrontation. And yet again....people described this as both of them being at fault.

And the takeaway DC got from all of that was like.....they can always count on it being in character for Dick to just...take it, while people are willing to let it slide or be like "well the characters are just like that" as long as its Bruce, or well, any one that Dick's fighting with basically, who refuses to ever take accountability and be the one trying to rebuild a bridge THEY burnt.

Its a huge problem, a massive gripe for me, but honestly, I really don't think it has anything to do with Babs specifically, or something that's fair to put ON her even if it does bug when she's the one in the picture at the moment. I think if it seems more of a Babs specific thing just now, that has more to do with her being the one who is most frequently sharing this title with Dick at the moment, while everyone else like Tim seems more slated as guest stars, but yeah.

Its a massive, wide-spreading problem, but it really is less about any other character in specific and more about how DC regards Dick's character as being 'useful' in that he can solve almost any family dispute by throwing himself under the bus or give them a common grievance in the form of well, himself.

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nntssy-old · 4 years ago

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Time Heals

Written for Writer's Month 2021, Day 12 - Time.

Fandom: Gintama Characters/ships: Hijikata/Mitsuba, Hijikata/Tae, Hijikata&Gintoki, Kondou&Sachan Word count: 4396 Rating: T? Also on AO3

They say time heals all wounds. If they haven't healed, there hasn't been enough time.

He already left her behind once. But this time was different. There will be no spicy crackers sent to their headquarters every month. There will be no peeking over Sougo's shoulder while he's reading the letter that came with them. There will be no hope that she'll be able to find her happiness one day despite everything. There will be no chance for him to atone for ruining the only chance at happiness she had got.

Every once in a while Hijikata goes to the stash of crackers she had been sending them and takes a pack. The pile is gradually decreasing — he suspects Sougo is eating them too, although he has never seen him do it.

He bites on one of those crackers and thinks about what he could have done differently. About her spending the decade alone in her house, after everyone she knew and cared about left her behind. He could have stayed with her. They could have taken her with them to Edo. They could have found some way to get her a proper medical treatment…

His vision gets blurry, but he blames it on the damn spice. Because he has no right to cry after everything he had or hadn't done.

He finishes the pack by adding some mayonnaise occasionally. Both his eyes and taste buds burn by that time, but he feels a little bit better. For the time being.

***

It is the middle of the day, and the chief of the Shinsengumi is nowhere to be seen, but there's some minor thing the vice-chief can't do without him. Knowing Kondou's habits, Hijikata goes straight to the Koudoukan doujo. Next stop would be Snack Smile.

There is always a ladder or something else left near the enclosure wall — usually from the back side of the doujo — that Kondou probably used to get in. This time it's a few crates stacked upon each other. He jumps on them and over the wall easily, and, indeed, here he is — the commander of the Shinsengumi, lying unconscious on the grass, no doubt after being discovered hiding under kotatsu or something. The vice-chief doesn't feel sorry for him one bit — his stalker of a superior had it coming.

After a sigh, Hijikata just grabs at the back of Kondou's jacket and drags him towards the exit.

He has done it a few times before — before Mitsuba's death, that is. But now, for some reason, the situation brings the memories of a more distant past — how he dragged Sougo to the doujo practice back in Bushuu.

Passing by the front side of the doujo, he glances at the porch, and for a moment he sees her — Mitsuba — again. Seeing him away, as she used to back then, and smiling. Startled, he even drops the cigarette out from his mouth.

But as sudden as it appeared, the vision goes away, and it's Otae who is sitting on the porch.

"Good afternoon, Hijikata-san," she says to him with a smile. "Good work, as always." But then her face and tone change to concerned as she adds, "Are you alright? You look pale… like you've seen a ghost."

He might as well has seen it.

Hijikata tries to compose himself again, but all he can muster is a nod in response, not even the usual apology for his superior's behavior. He proceeds with dragging Kondou-san away in silence.

For the next two months, he sends Yamazaki on the dragging-Kondou-back duty.

***

He hasn't been to Mitsuba's grave since the funeral. A good chunk of the Shinsengumi was present then, with Kondo and Sougo doing all the speeches, so he just mixed in with the crowd and didn't stand out much.

He brings her a bunch of her favorite flowers. He didn't do anything like this in her life even once. In retrospect, he probably should have. The flowers are of the wild kind, and while in abundance in the countryside, it's not so easy to find them in a big city. But there aren't many impossible things for Hijikata once he sets his mind on something.

He sets them near the gravestone and looks at her name etched on it. Looks at the dates. Thinks how in between those numbers there is an entirety of human life — her life — even if it was a rather short one. Thinks how one day he too will be reduced to just a name and numbers on a stone — and that's a best-case scenario. Thinks that, if he ever gets a proper burial, he would like for it to be here, next to her.

Hijikata barely suppresses the urge to touch the stone. His throat feels strained.

In a hindsight, he should have probably brought the spicy crackers with him. But there are many things he should have done.

Hijikata leaves without saying a word. But his imagination decides to play tricks on him. Because turning away, he catches a glimpse of Mitsuba in the corner of his eye. She looks saddened.

***

It's late autumn, and they are still a bit shorthanded after the Itou incident, and there's no one brave enough and available to get the chief back, so Hijikata goes himself for once.

He hesitates a little bit before getting over the wall. Like a damn thief. Or worse — stalker.

From here it's the usual routine: locate Kondou-san, grab him, pay respects to the hostess, leave.

Otae is sweeping fallen leaves with a broom near the entrance. He raises his hand in a silent greeting.

"Haven't seen you in a while, Hijikata-san," she says with a smile. But there's something else to it. Hesitance? Concern? Sadness? "I'm sorry… Gin-san told me about what happened… I'm sorry for your loss." She bows her head.

Someone has his tongue a bit too loose.

"There's no need…" he starts, but he's unsure of what to say.

"He also told me that I might have reminded you of her. I'm sorry."

That damn Yorozuya!

It is true that the first time — the very first time — he saw Otae, she reminded him faintly of Mitsuba. But he has given it a thorough thought recently and came to a conclusion that the similarities were rather superficial. Both were in charge of their younger brothers after being orphaned, which made them mature faster. There are also devotion to a proper lady image and a slight similarity in the hairstyles. Also the smile, the kind of which makes your heart skip a beat — although he is pretty sure that with Otae it's because of fear half the time. That's about it. Mitsuba was a delicate and humble woman. Meanwhile, Yorozuya calls the Shimura girl a gorilla woman, and he's… not entirely wrong, as much as Hijikata hates to agree with him.

Kondou lets out some grunting noise breaking a rather awkward silence. Talk about gorillas. He seems to be coming about though, so it is time to leave.

"Apologies for the disturbance," Hijikata says as he turns towards the exit.

"Take care," he hears her voice in response, slightly muted.

***

Next time is less awkward. Or so he thinks at first.

"Hijikata-san, you're dropping the ash all over the place," she reprimands him.

It startles him a little bit. But luckily, there's no threat in her voice. He's not quite sure what he can do about it though — it's not like there's a—

"Here." She holds out an ashtray towards him. "I keep it for when someone like Otose-san visits."

Hijikata stands there for a moment, holding Kondou by the back of his collar and looking uncertainly at the object, but then taps the cigarette on the edge of the ashtray, while Otae is still holding it.

Somehow, the gesture feels way too intimate.

***

There are usually several bottles of sake stored under a certain loose piece of flooring back at his quarters. They are there in case he needs some time alone to unwind after an especially stressful day. Or to drown away his sorrow and guilt — like in today's case.

Recently he has relied on his stash perhaps way too often. The amount that usually lasted him for months he now drinks up in a matter of two or three weeks. He has forgotten to restock, so right now there is only one half-empty bottle. Not enough to calm all the intrusive thoughts.

But it's too late into the night, and Hijikata isn't in the mood to go anywhere or deal with anyone, so he will need to make do with what he has. He hopes that it at least will dull the anguish inside of him.

He doesn't even bother with getting a cup, just uncorks the bottle and drinks straight from it.

From the corner of his eye, he can almost see Mitsuba again. She looks concerned. With a hint of disapproval.

***

This time it is tea.

"Oi, Hijikata-san, would you mind joining me for some tea? I prepared too much because I thought Shin-chan and others were coming, but it seems they're running late. We wouldn't want it all go to waste, would we?" Her voice sounds way too innocent. "Please, I insist."

Otae isn't a woman who will take no for an answer, and he isn't feeling very adventurous today, so he props unconscious Kondou's back against the wall of the doujo, and reluctantly joins her at the porch. The ashtray is already waiting at his side as he sits down.

They do some small talk — well, mostly her — about the weather and the sorts of tea — but otherwise sit in silence, sipping on the hot liquid, watching the clouds pass by.

It's not uncomfortable. Rather soothing actually.

Perhaps having a calm moment like this wouldn't hurt every once in a while.

***

Next time when Kondou is missing from the Shinsengumi compound, it is right on time for the quarterly reports, and Hijikata is drowning in the paperwork. Reading a particularly lengthy account of accomplishments, complaints, and suggestions from the 1st Division — Sougo apparently does it on purpose — he finally snaps and goes looking for his chief who is supposed to do at least part of this.

But Kondou is nowhere to be seen at the doujo either. Hijikata has done two circles around the building, checked all the pits, but the usual perpetrator is nowhere to be seen. But Otae is clearly at home today, so her devoted stalker is probably somewhere inside as well. He is starting to lose his patience.

Hijikata cautiously knocks at the main door.

"Excuse me," he starts, trying to suppress the irritation in his tone, but the door slides away too quickly for him to finish, and now he is standing face-to-face with Otae. At a rather close distance. Perhaps too close. He even forgets about being annoyed.

She smiles at him in a greeting, without saying a word, and puts a finger to her lips as in saying "be quiet". The smile on her face is a mischievous one. She gestures for him to go towards the west side of the building. It almost feels like they're accomplices of some sort. But he just wants his chief to get back to work — there's nothing wrong about that.

As Hijikata follows her directions and goes around the building, she slides the door open there and points under the floor. He squats down and looks under it. It's pretty dark out there, and it takes time for his eyes to adapt.

Once they do, he is able to discern two silhouettes lying on the ground facing each other. Now that he listens carefully, he can even hear some muffled sounds and their muted voices. There's also a faint smell of natto and potato chips.

One of the people hiding under the floor is unmistakably Kondou-san. Another seems to be the Glasses Ninja girl who usually follows Yorozuya around. And they're playing Uno of all things. While Hijikata has been buried in paperwork in a stuffy room back at the headquarters. His blood is about to boil.

"Sarutobi-san..." Otae meanwhile has bent over the wooden flooring to peek under it, her body half-suspended upside down.

The two stalker buddies turn right away. Their faces are pale like they've seen a ghost.

"I wondered why we had problems with rats recently," Otae continues, "but perhaps it is because of all the food crumbs the two of you are leaving around."

"Kondou-san," Hijikata says in turn, trying to sound polite despite the anger, "if you're feeling bored, there's plenty of reports for you to read back at the Shinsengumi compound." He is grabbing at the hilt of his katana. Otae has already jumped to the ground next to him — he doesn't even ponder on when she has managed to get her naginata.

But the ninja is fast. She grabs Kondou by the collar and swiftly crawls away in a perpendicular direction. By the time he and Otae catch up to them near the other side of the building, the so-called Sarutobi-san is already jumping over the wall carrying the chief of the Shinsengumi with her arms under his knees and back.

Hijikata lets out a sigh.

"Any idea where they might have headed?"

~~ Intermission 1 - Sachan ~~

She was hoping to find Gin-san at the doujo today, especially after he loudly proclaimed such an intention yesterday.

But it seems there's only Otae-san now, doing the chores in the yard, not even her brother or Kagura-chan are hanging around. And Sachan doesn't even have any work today to busy herself with.

While thinking of what to do, hanging on the ceiling, she hears a rustling sound from somewhere under the floor. Perhaps Otae isn't completely alone after all.

Avoiding being noticed by the hostess, Sachan crawls under the floor, and indeed, Kondo-san is also on duty today — well, not on his proper duty duty — snacking on some potato chips and watching Otae's feet from afar. She decides to sneak up on him. It is so easy to startle him that she has to forcefully cover his mouth so as to not betray their presence.

"Ah, it's you, Assassin girl," he says in a muffled voice.

"You seem to be bored."

"I'm not bored, just taking a break!"

"Do you want to play some Uno?"

They start playing, but the chief of the Shinsengumi seems to be as unlucky in games as he is in love. Which, of course, gets him frustrated. She occasionally forcibly covers his mouth again to prevent him from getting too loud.

Suddenly, while they are still engrossed in another round of the game, her instincts kick in, and Sachan feels some sort of dangerous presence. Perhaps, even a killing intent.

"Sarutobi-san..." she hears a very familiar voice, as if right on cue.

Sachan turns to the voice — Otae's head is upside down as she is looking at their hideout under the floor — menacing aura and all. But she's not alone. There is also the Demonic Vice-Chief of the Shinsengumi right beside her, looking angry and just as his nickname suggests. Each of them alone would look like pretty bad news right now, but together... they are like a match made in Hell.

Sachan doesn't even hear what they have to say, her self-preservation instincts taking over, and all her senses telling her to run. She grabs Kondou-san by the collar of his jacket — in an act of solidarity, or perhaps she has already grown rather fond of him to just leave him behind in the imminent danger — and retreats.

Jumping from roof to roof, with protesting Kondou in her arms, she thinks that her love rival and the vice-chief actually look rather good together. She wonders what is the relationship between the two.

Sachan drops the chief of the Shinsengumi off at his headquarters. Literally. Through the roof.

~~ Intermission ends ~~

Next time Hijikata is unlucky enough to come just before lunch.

She sees him from the east side of the building even before he's able to find Kondou-san. Out of courtesy, he comes closer to ask her. But his stomach betrays him in a rather loud voice.

"Oh my, Hijikata-san, you must be hungry. We are actually about to have some tamagoyaki. Why don't you join us?"

Oh, shit, the infamous abused eggs. They are slowly becoming a local legend. Of the horror kind.

"No, I'm in a hurry actually…"

"Oh… But you can't work on an empty stomach, can you? Wait here, I will bring you some." And she rushes back inside before he even has a chance to stop her.

Hijikata ponders on how rude it would be to refuse now. And what body part he should protect from the punch. But before he comes to any conclusion, she's already back with a small plate and a radiant smile on her face.

Otae doesn't take no for an answer. But he isn't even capable of saying no to such an enthusiastic face. Perhaps because he just has difficulties saying no to women in general. Yes, that must be it.

It's just burnt eggs, how bad could it be? Not to mention he has his emergency bottle of mayonnaise with him.

~~ Intermission 2 - Gintoki ~~

"Look, he's about to put mayonnaise on it!" Kagura lets out a loud whisper, peeking through a slightly open sliding door. "Ew!"

"Shh, maybe it will cancel out somehow. The more he eats the less we will need to. Until Shinpachi makes some normal food." Gintoki's head is just above hers, as he's peeping in the next room as well. He is expecting Otae to stop Hijikata from desecrating already desecrated eggs any moment now.

But it never comes.

"He's eating it!" Kagura exclaims.

Hijikata is sitting with his back towards them, so they can't see his face. But lately, the vice-chief of the Shinsengumi has been looking… not his best. He has reasons for moping around, but it has already been like half a year since the death of Okita's sister.

Like you're the one to talk when it comes to coping.

They keep watching as Hijikata finishes his plate, without either choking or puking. He is about to return the plate and doesn't even look like he's in a dire need of a bathroom.

"Hijikata-san, you need to take better care of yourself. If not for yourself, then for people who care about you," Gintoki hears Otae's quiet voice suddenly.

Says the woman who is about to give him a food poisoning.

"There are fewer and fewer people like that lately," Hijikata responds in a bit of a grave voice after some pause.

As he returns the plate, their hands — Otae's and Hijikata's — touch. The man freezes.

"You're… mistaken," she responds. There's seemingly an eye contact, and the vice-chief looks somewhat surprised.

Gintoki hears Kagura hold her breath and lean in a bit closer. Like she's sometimes doing when watching a romance drama.

Coming to his senses, Hijikata is visibly flustered and suddenly in a rush to leave. So much that he almost drops the plate. But still, it doesn't look like diarrhea is the cause.

"It seems Kondou-san is not here today… So I'll be on my way… Thank you for the meal." The vice-chief bows exaggeratedly and turns away to leave.

"Here goes our hope of salvation," says Gintoki after Hijikata isn't in sight anymore, but the possibility of food poisoning isn't what occupies his mind at the moment.

Otae hasn't moved from her place yet.

Kagura turns away from the door. She seems to be contemplating something. Perhaps processing what she has just seen. Gintoki follows and can't help but plunge into thinking as well.

Meanwhile, Kondou slides from under the kotatsu, looking rather sleepy.

"Has someone called me?"

~~ Intermission ends ~~

It is late into the night, and the silence seems too loud again. Hijikata is thinking about opening up his stash — he has restocked recently after all.

He gets one bottle out and is looking at the label, contemplating.

People that care about me, huh?

Kondou's concerned face comes to his mind. Sougo hasn't tried to kill him as much lately either. He remembers Yamazaki and his other subordinates exchanging glances when he was shouting at them while still being hungover. Even Yorozuya hasn't been as cocky when they happen to cross paths lately.

You're… mistaken.

Eventually, he decides to put the bottle back.

Perhaps a cup of tea might be better.

As he's about to head towards the kitchen, Hijikata catches a glimpse of Mitsuba in the corner of his eye again, but the vision disappears as soon as he turns his head.

He's pretty sure there has been a trace of a smile on her face this time.

***

It's early spring and another drag-Kondou-back-to-work day.

Hijikata is making a circle around the Koudoukan doujo in search of his superior. He's about to pass by the main entrance, expecting to see the irresistible — as in you have no chance of resistance — owner and her charming smile.

But it's Yorozuya's uncouth mug instead.

"Yo," he says simply.

Hijikata gets startled.

"What are you doing here?"

"Were you expecting to see someone else, eh, Hijikata-kun?" says the silver-haired samurai in his insufferable tone. "Someone prettier maybe? With a ponytail maybe? Am I not enough for you, Hijikata-kun?" He pauses but then adds with an even more shit-eating grin than before, "How were the tamagoyaki last time?"

Hijikata is reminded of accidentally touching Otae's hand instead.

You're… mistaken.

"I… You…" He is considerably flustered — there's no way around that — but for what reason?

"She went out to buy some groceries. Must be back soon," Yorozuya adds simply, picking at his nose, not even looking at him.

Hijikata calms down — more or less — and just goes past the other man, intending to proceed with his search.

"You know… if there's such thing as Heaven" — there's seriousness in Gintoki's voice that makes Hijikata stop in his tracks — "she probably just wants for you to be happy. Just as you did for her."

He remembers Mitsuba's concerned face conjured by his imagination.

"I know," he responds out loud without facing the other. But in actuality, it is a rather fresh thought in his mind.

"You wouldn't want to disappoint her, would you?"

He didn't think of it like that before. Not explicitly, at least.

"Anyway, the Gorilla should be just around this corner. Otae has knocked him out just before leaving," Yorozuya says in a more casual tone.

Hijikata finds Kondou-san just where he was told. He grabs his superior by the collar and proceeds to the exit, raising a hand in goodbye to Yorozuya, still without facing him. The vice-chief's mind is deep in thought.

As he's turning out of the gate, Hijikata comes face-to-face with Otae. Again.

She's smiling radiantly. While he feels like he's getting flustered for the second time today.

"Good afternoon, Hijikata-san. Are you leaving already?"

He only manages to say something barely intelligible in response. He can almost hear Yorozuya laughing.

"Too bad… Thank you for your hard work anyway."

He nods and proceeds with dragging Kondou-san away past her. There are a lot of things on his mind.

***

He comes to visit Mitsuba again.

He brings her a bunch of her favorite flowers. He always forgets their name, so there are certain difficulties when talking to the florists, but he is persistent in trying to describe them to the best of his ability. There aren't many impossible things for Hijikata once he sets his mind on something after all.

The grave is well tended to — Sougo must be visiting much more often than he is. And he better be.

He sets the flowers near the gravestone and looks at her name etched on it.

"Long time no see."

That's not exactly true. She has come to him — to his mind — quite often, almost every time he was left alone.

Hijikata sits down in front of the grave and starts talking.

He starts with little things: the stuff that has happened recently, how is Sougo doing, how are Kondou and the others.

He talks, and talks, and talks.

He bows his head and apologizes for not visiting sooner, and more often in general. He voices all of his regrets. The things he should have done. Apologizes for both the things he had done and the things he hadn't.

He promises to take good care of Sougo.

He tells her of all the connections they have made since coming to Edo. Yamazaki. Matsudaira and his daughter. Yorozuya. The Shimura siblings. Tells her of the weird rivalry Sougo has with the China Amanto girl. How their days are almost never dull.

He tells her all this so she doesn't have to worry. So she can rest in peace.

In the end, he asks her permission for him to move on. Not to forget — because her image will forever be ingrained in his heart. But he also feels that there is still some place for others too. To move on, for the sake of the people who depend on him. Who — just so happened — care about him, as hard as it is for him to acknowledge this.

Then Hijikata sits in silence, with his head down, for a long, long time, as if indeed waiting for someone to answer.

When, in the end, he stands up, he feels lighter. Like the cage around his chest has finally broken.

"I will bring the crackers next time," he says with a smile before turning away to leave. After a few paces, he stops and slightly turns back to look at the grave.

He sees Mitsuba in the corner of his eye again. She is holding the flowers and smiling. He intends to keep it that way.

***

The spring is in full force now, and the trees are blooming.

He doesn't remember when he stopped even thinking of sending someone else to retrieve the chief of the Shinsengumi from the Koudoukan doujo.

For once, he decides to enter through the front entrance.

It doesn't take long for Otae to notice him. She's already waving at him. And, of course, smiling. And he cannot but smile — just a little bit — back.

They say time heals all wounds. If they haven't healed, there hasn't been enough time. Or the right words haven't been said yet. Or, more importantly, heard.

#writersmonth2021 #me writes #Gintama #Toshirou Hijikata #Mitsuba Okita #Tae Shimura #Gintoki Sakata #Isao Kondou #Ayame Sarutobi (Sachan)#HijiMitsu #HijiTae #HijiGin #longest fic i finished to date

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