#porluciernagas

[ladygeekgirl-and-friends]

Over our summer break, I was reading a book whose protagonists traveled to alternate universes which, frankly, I didn't like very much. But it did get me thinking about the idea of alternate universes in fiction. Not the scientific concept of alternate (parallel) universes—though that's often the subject of many sci-fi stories—I'm talking about the alternate universes that result from one thing changing in a fictional story. What if Charles Xavier died before he could found the X-Men? What if Captain America was a Nazi? Undoubtedly, a lot of things would be bad. And unfortunately, this is the kind of alternate universe that we often see in today's fictional media. However, the idea that one different thing could change everything is so broad that I don't understand why this kind of grimdark change is the most common. Fanfiction also often deals in alternate universes which diverge from canon, but the changes of fanfiction, on the whole, all tend to be more positive and more emotionally satisfying. Though many mainstream movies and TV shows disdain this sort of happy story, an alternate universe which changes originally negative canon material into positive new story fodder can bring with it a wide range of different emotions than the usual grimdark reboot is capable of. 

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[lgg-friends]

But why is it so necessary for authors to write characters that accurately represent our world? It all boils down to facts—namely, the fact that races other than Caucasian exist in the real world, and when there is a fantasy world in which no minority characters exist, it’s basically telling minority characters that they aren’t good enough to exist even in a fantasy world.

Can We Have More Minority Representation in the New Year?

[ladygeekgirl-and-friends]

From its inception, Animorphs was always a series dedicated to what we'd term social justice today. It featured five kids of various ethnicities trying to save the world from a secret alien invasion, becoming child warriors in the process. But as a product of the 90s, it didn't focus on LGBTQ+ issues very much. Sure, the protagonists were very young, and author K.A. Applegate might not have been able to get any LGBTQ+ rep through her publishers if she had had any ideas, but the fact remains that a series about kids literally changing their bodies as a weapon of war should have made trans issues front and center in Animorphs's otherwise excellent diversity.

Fortunately, in recent years the Animorphs fandom has taken steps to correct this oversight. One of my previous FFs, Bird in a Cage, was a character study of Tobias, arguably the Animorph with the most gender dysphoria. Canonically, Tobias never felt comfortable in his human body, and when he ended up trapped in his hawk morph, it wasn't his body he missed, but his humanity in general. In that fic, author etothepii explores the idea of Tobias as a trans girl coming to terms with her gender identity. Today's fanfic broadens the scope of these gender identity issues by changing the gender identity of all the Animorphs. The Word of Your Body is a series of vignettes about trans, intersex, and nonbinary Animorphs that looks at the many social and family issues that the gender-diverse Animorphs have to go through in the shadow of the war.

Trigger warning for gender dysphoria, transphobia, and internalized transphobia in the fic. As Animorphs was originally written in the 90s, this fanfic was written using LGBTQ+ terms that would have been used in the 90s, despite the fact that we no longer use some of these terms today. Please read with caution.

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[ladygeekgirl-and-friends]

Way back in my senior year of high school, my friends and I took full advantage of our senior year freedom to go see The Forbidden Kingdom in theaters several times. As far as we were concerned, The Forbidden Kingdom was the long-awaited team-up of Asian action stars Jackie Chan and Jet Li—it didn't matter to us that the plot included some white guy as the main protagonist. In fact, we were pretty happy about it—we thought the white protagonist would make the movie much more attractive to Americans and thus make more money at the box office, thereby proving that Asians could sell movies. And to be fair, The Forbidden Kingdom did rank #1 at the box office in its opening weekend. But nearly a full decade later, it's pretty apparent that The Forbidden Kingdom's flaws in 2008 are the same flaws that Hollywood still has today. 

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[ladygeekgirl-and-friends]

This weekend was the Emmys, and usually, nothing much interesting happens at the Emmys aside from the opening monologue. However, I was ecstatic to hear that one of my very favorite TV shows from this year, Master of None, won the Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series. The episode nominated, "Thanksgiving," was about the story of protagonist Dev's queer Black friend, Denise, coming out to her family through the years and was co-written by Lena Waithe, herself a queer Black woman. In Waithe's acceptance speech, she said:

I see each and every one of you. The things that make us different – those are our superpowers. Every day when you walk out the door and put on your imaginary cape and go out there and conquer the world, because the world would not be as beautiful as it is if we weren't in it.

Waithe's words are both true and a rarity in today's world, which generally pays lip service to LGBTQ+ solidarity but hardly ever celebrates the stories of actual (non-white and non-male) queer people. The idea of LGBTQ+ people being superheroes in their own right, not in spite of but because of the parts of themselves that mainstream society often doesn't accept, is something that many queer youth need to hear and which many superhero stories need to understand.

Many superhero stories will rely on faulty allegories for the LGBTQ+ experience, like the X-Men hiding their abilities from their parents, despite the fact that queer people are not inherently dangerous. These stories often have little to no actual representation, and they almost never show the LGBTQ+ experience in an authentic, realistic light. Fortunately, the world of publishing is slowly pushing itself towards diversity, and one of the fruits of this labor is the 2017 novel Dreadnought by April Daniels. As a superhero story about a transgender protagonist written by a transgender author, it's every bit as real as Master of None’s "Thanksgiving" and is a beautifully written novel that shows how a superhero story can be more than just another coming-of-age tale.

Minor spoilers for Dreadnought and trigger warning for transphobia/internalized transphobia after the jump.

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[ladygeekgirl-and-friends]

(via White Noise)

I've been on quite the webcomics binge lately (reccing another webcomic for this column, you say? Shocking), but I can't help it that the internet is so good at recommending well-written, diverse webcomics to me through Tumblr! Today's web crush is White Noise, a complex fantastical webcomic about families and found families, the aftermath of tragedy, and prejudice. 

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[ladygeekgirl-and-friends]

For the past few years, Netflix has been on a roll with the original content. Though at first Netflix was only known as a DVD rental site and then a TV streaming site, its forays into original content are now probably what it's most known for. Shows like Voltron: Legendary Defender, Sense8, and the various Marvel Defenders series have all garnered (mostly) high praise, and with them to jump off of, it's no surprise that Netflix quickly went from original TV shows to original movies as well. At the end of this year, Netflix is releasing Bright, a fantasy cop drama with A-list actors that looks to be Netflix's bid at its next famous property. The trailer looks good, but I'm afraid it may raise more questions than it answers. 

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[ladygeekgirl-and-friends]

It's been a summer of endings for my favorite series. Always Human wrapped up its wlw slice-of-life cuteness in early June, Orphan Black finished in early August, and finally The Adventure Zone, whose humor got me through much of last year and this one, came to a close this past week. Though The Adventure Zone will continue, this particular adventure about Merle, Magnus, Taako, and a world of delightful NPCs is now over. Fittingly enough for this comedic fantasy-ish podcast, it ended with a finale which would, in other series, be considered extremely cliché. As other people on this blog know very well, I balk at the slightest hint of anything cheesy, but when I finished listening to this finale, I wasn't rolling my eyes -- I was happy. Somehow, through its 69 episodes (yes, 69, the sex number), The Adventure Zone boys had managed to construct a story in which a loving ending wasn't only enjoyable, it was also practically required by the preceding narrative.

Massive spoilers for the entirety of The Adventure Zone below.

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[ladygeekgirl-and-friends]

(picture from Always Human)

Back at the start of 2016, I spotlighted a little webcomic called Always Human as my web crush of the week because it featured a lovely queer romance and some fantastic art and music. Since then, it's become one of my favorite web crushes (next to The Adventure Zone and They Call Us Bruce) not only because of the relationship between Austen and Sunati, but also because of the way that diversity of all sorts is seamlessly blended into the story. Always Human is set in a future version of our Australia, and while future Australia of course has various technological advances, it's also filled with racial diversity, different sexual orientations and gender identities, and both polyamorous and monogamous relationships. I'm always excited to read more of Austen and Sunati's slice-of-life adventures, but perhaps my favorite thing about the series is author Ari's depiction of disability in a fantastical world.

Spoilers for Always Human below, as well as a trigger warning for discussions of ableism and fatphobia.

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[ladygeekgirl-and-friends]

A lot of popular fictional stories have, as their primary premise, their protagonists traveling from one world (typically our world) into another, far different, world. Whether this is something like The Forbidden Kingdom (a movie about a white savior transported to ancient China which I nevertheless loved as a child) or the much better Spirited Away (a movie about a young girl who falls into the spirit world and grows up along the way), traveling to new and fantastical worlds is such a part of our fictional tradition that it's seen dozens of times in new stories every year. But very few of these stories really explore the emotional cost of traveling to these new worlds. That's where today's fic comes in. Through the use of an unusually real medium, This American Life, today's story This American Life episode 141: A Whole New World. (Transcript) discusses the pros and cons of traveling to new worlds. 

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[ladygeekgirl-and-friends]

Welcome back to the blog, all! I hope you had a fun two weeks while we were on our summer vacation; I spent the days doing Pokémon raids and surfing random webcomics online, trying to find a replacement for my dearly departed Always Human. There's a lot of stuff out there, much of it diverse and much of it superbly creative. The one I found myself most interested in is called The Substitutes, a reality-bending fantasy by games artist Myisha Haynes. 

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[ladygeekgirl-and-friends]

We've recommended a lot of online web series in this column through the years, but not all of them have been fully accessible to people with disabilities. For example, audio description of what's happening on the screen is important for blind or low vision people, while captions are important for the d/Deaf or hard of hearing. Yet neither of those things are often found on independent web series (ie, series which aren't made by big companies like Netflix or Hulu). While a lot of the things we've recced here do have captions, a lot more of them don't have any. Many online creators either don't think they're necessary, don't know how to add them, or just don't think about them at all, leaving their fans to subtitle things for them or even put together their own collection of transcripts for other fans. Today's web crush focuses specifically on captions for web series. Captioned Web TV spotlights web series and YouTubers who feature closed captions on all their videos. 

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[ladygeekgirl-and-friends]

There's been a spate of whitewashed and appropriated Asian roles in American-made movies recently, but there have been very few geeky movies which actually star Asian actors (to my knowledge, at least). Since this is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, though, I wanted to watch some geeky Asian films. To do so, I had to go through our archives before finally landing on Little Door Gods, a film I found out about in late 2015. Though it never got an American release, I did find it on the internet (just, you know, around).

Little Door Gods (小門神) is the first feature-length film from Light Chaser Animation, a Chinese animation studio which launched because of what founder Gary Wang saw as the lack of movies featuring Chinese mythology. (Probably a good call; it doesn't look like Hollywood is going to get to Asian inclusivity anytime soon.) Wang has said that he wants to create "the Pixar of China," and he's even hired some animators who used to work for Pixar and DreamWorks in pursuit of his goal. His first movie is... definitely good, but not Pixar-worthy yet.

Spoilers for Little Door Gods below!

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[ladygeekgirl-and-friends]

I've been a fan of Garth Nix for a long time, as you may know if you've followed my Old Kingdom ramblings on this blog for a while. However, I was a little disappointed by one of his more recent children's offerings, Newt's Emerald, and only picked up his latest, Frogkisser!, with some trepidation. I needn't have worried. Frogkisser! ended up being a humorous, sometimes-satirical take on The Frog Prince, and had all of my favorite things -- badass women of color, a rambunctious talking puppy, and absolutely zero romance for the fairy tale princess. But surprisingly, unlike other revisionist fairy tales, it reclaims some of the spirit of the original fairy tale, while subverting some, though not all, of what we believe The Frog Prince to be about today.

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[ladygeekgirl-and-friends]

One of my favorite movies when I was a kid was the 2003 Dreamworks movie Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas. It didn't get great reviews and its plot was nothing to write home about, but I loved all the characters, the adventure, and the romance, and I wore out our little VHS tape and annoyed all my family members by watching it over and over. I even bought the video game (side note: wasn't great, do not recommend). Then I went on to other movies and mostly forgot about Sinbad until I caught a glimpse of it while channel-flipping last month. Fascinated, I watched it all again from the beginning, and then did what I didn't think about in 2003: I went to research it online. What I found was that Sinbad could have potentially been far more creative and representative than the version that we got.

Spoilers for Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas below.

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[ladygeekgirl-and-friends]

I'm always on the lookout for queer YA, so I jumped at the chance to read Timekeeper, a novel set in a steampunk-esque Victorian London that stars two queer male leads. Timekeeper starts in media res and launches you right into the story, and I quickly fell in love with its concept of mechanics who can control time. However, as the book continued, I became disappointed with said concept just as quickly.

Spoilers for all of Timekeeper below!

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