TV
🔖📺 Listen, as a 90s babybat I welcome the new Anne Rice television universe. 🦇
The layers of references in this poster are delightful: cats as Data and Geordi as Holmes and Watson chef kiss 🖖📺🖼️
💬📺 “No one likes having a curse, but if you take the right steps, it’s manageable.” - Eda the Owl Lady, The Owl House Season 1 Episode 4, “The Intruder”
Part of me is always working on a taxonomy and ontology of #StarTrekTNG episodes. (Currently: only Data can safely go down to the planet. A girl or woman befriends him.) 🖖📺
📺 watched Loki Season 1, Episode 1, “Glorious Purpose.”
Took me a little while to get into but I’m looking forward to seeing where the show goes. I love the TVA’s retro aesthetic and of course Tom Hiddleston is always excellent.
🍿📺🗯️ I just watched the two pre-Loki episodes of Marvel Studios LEGENDS and y’all the MCU gets more obtuse all the time. In comics they do periodic resets that make it easy for new people to jump in. The MCU is labyrinthine enough that I think it’s time it had one.
For #TrekTuesday, I’ll share that I spend a LOT of time wondering why we don’t see social scientists as key crew members on the Enterprise-D and the ethics of Deanna Troi’s talking to people about their feelings in front of other crew members. #StarTrek 🖖📺
📺 I’ve got 2 episodes left of SHRILL. It’s so weird being right in the middle of Annie and Gabe’s ages, too old to be an up-and-coming earnest millennial, too young to be a punk Gen Xer who had to negotiate growing up while staying cool.
📺 Fran is always my favorite on SHRILL. Today it’s because she says, “I just don’t think I can work somewhere where I’m not universally admired and beloved.” 💓
Me, watching STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS: Battle, battle, battle. When are we going to get another DIPLOMACY episode? (Padme is my prequel era fave, OF COURSE.) 📺
🔖 I’ve started calling my kid Little One & after reading Meg Elison’s How Lwaxana Troi Became Our Space Aunt I couldn’t be happier to be aging into my natural camp grand dame-ness. 🖖🏻📺
You should probably look at Laz Marquez’s #StarTrekGala art project because it’s AWESOME. 🖖🏻🎨📺
🔖📺🖖 Read The Measure of a Man Demonstrates the Many Forms of Love by Anna E. Gant
🔖📺🖖 Hrisoula Gatzogiannis’s The Only Work Ethic I Care About Is the One on Star Trek details what Picard explains in the TNG episode “The Neutral Zone.” A 20th century man asks “What’s the challenge?” & Picard says “To improve yourself… enrich yourself.”
🔖📺 Read
On Disliking Mad Men justtv.wordpress.comRead: justtv.wordpress.com
Frank Oz, on Miss Piggy:
She has a lot of vulnerability, which she has to hide, because of her need to be a superstar.
Quoted in Of Muppets and Men by Christopher Finch 💬📚📺🐸
Kermit, while he is no saint, has achieved a wonderful equilibrium in which a common sense and a hunger for the absurd are nicely balanced. Were he to represent common sense only, he would be a prig; if he represented only hunger for the absurd, he would just be another of the show’s eccentrics. It is the fact that he has managed to embrace both extremes that enables him to function as he does.
Christopher Finch, Of Muppets and Men 💬📚📺🐸
What we do is chatacter comedy.
Jerry Juhl, head writer of The Muppet Show, quoted in Of Muppets and Men: The Making of the Muppet Show by Christopher Finch 💬📚📺🐸
Biggest takeaway from the first 5 episodes of SHADOW & BONE is that I want to get really good at embroidery & goldwork and make all the keftas. Gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous. 📺
Hello I have watched the first episode of SHADOW & BONE and Jesper has now replaced Kaz as my Ketterdam favorite. (I don’t think my Ravka fave will appear this season.) Also yes I want to see #Legendborn get this treatment. 📺📚
🔖🍿📺 Read
Marvel movies have a weird relationship with kissing and romance - Polygon polygon.com(via baldur on micro.blog)Read: www.polygon.com
Exhausted from defense & migrainey because PCOS, so it’s time to settle in with some #StarTrekTNG. I’m doing a very slow rewatch. Today: “Samaritan Snare.” 🖖🏻📺
Me, when Wesley Crusher tells Guinan he always gets As:
Really? We’re still grading things in the 24th century?
🖖🏻📺
THE NEVERS as Disability Metaphor ♿ 📺
This post contains slight spoilers for The Nevers.
I just watched the first episode of The Nevers. Yes, it was created, written, and directed by Joss Whedon. Yes, I am appalled and heartbroken by the way he treated his colleagues on Buffy, Angel, and Justice League. That’s about all I have the heart to say about it. I’d like to talk about The Nevers now which, of course, can’t be completely separated from him, but also kind of is its own thing. As Austin Kleon says, “Art Monsters are not necessary or glamorous and they are not to be condoned, pardoned, or emulated” (Keep Going, p. 124) but also “bad people can make good art.” I haven’t decided if The Nevers seems like good art to me, but I can’t deny that a lot of JW’s other art has been central to my life for the past almost 22 years. So. I want to talk about this art, acknowledging the bad behavior of its creator.
I’m going to talk about The Nevers now, like I said.
Over at The Ringer, Alison Herman describes the protagonists of The Nevers as “Victorian Lady X-Men,” and this is not wrong.
Specifically, you’ve got a bunch of persecuted superpowered people living in a facility sponsored by a rich person who used a wheelchair.
Let’s talk for a minute about Lavinia Bidlow (played by “I am very British. I don’t say Hard Rs” Olivia Williams). Lavinia Bidlow uses a wheelchair. As far as I can tell, she herself is not one of The Touched (aka superpowered people) and has no turn (aka superpower). But she is extremely devoted to making sure that The Touched have a home and are safe and thus she sponsors the “orphanage” where many of them live and work. (There are rogue Touched and unaffiliated Touched, too. Like… Like mutants. In X-Men.)
So. Lavinia Bidlow, using a wheelchair presumably due to a disability, feels a great deal of sympathy and/or empathy for The Touched.
People often refer to The Touched as “afflicted.”
Mrs. Amalia True, head rounder-upper of Touched-who-need-protection, precog lady (not to be confused with Doyle/Cordelia’s power on Angel, which IIRC was more clairvoyance than precognition but usually conveniently early clairvoyance that often allowed time to save the person they saw) and skilled fighter, responds to Ominous Fancyman Lord Massen in this conversation:
Massen: I take it then that you are yourselves among the afflicted.
True: Touched, yes. We don’t consider ourselves afflicted.
Massen: Perhaps some women are more fortunate in the nature of their ailment than others.
True: That’s true, but more suffer from society’s perception than their own debilitation.
This set off little bells in my head, as it sounds very much to me like a TV superhero’s quick explanation of the social model of disability. From that moment I started watching this as if it were a supremely unsubtle metaphor for disability. I’m not sure if it works, but I do find it an interesting lens.
There’s also Maladie, who is the most prominent rogue Touched, is a serial killer, and certainly appears to live with a mental illness. (It is a perfectly valid criticism when Natalie Zutter at Tor.com says her dialogue “feels like it was collected from Drusilla’s cutting-room-floor musings.") We see Maladie about to be carted off to an asylum in the flashbacks to the day when the Touched got their powers. And of course, “touched” has been used as a rather unkind euphemism for having mental illness.
I have invisible disabilities including autoimmune disease that is sometimes debilitating, migraines, depression, and anxiety. Lord Massen would call me more fortunate and there are certainly many forms of ableism I don’t face. But when I struggle to work through a migraine or have trouble going downstairs to the kitchen from my bedroom because all of my joints hurt, I wonder if there is a place in this world for me. So near the end of the episode, when strawberry-blonde Irish science nerd Penance Adair (your Willow/Kaylee stand-in and thus my fave) describes a feeling “that I’m here. I belong here… all of us that’s Touched, we’re woven into the fabric of the world and we’re meant to be as we are," my heart swells and I think, “YES, I want to feel that way!” (I do, sometimes, but I want to feel it more.)
Does this all add up to a solid disability metaphor? Not yet, and it’s very possible what we’ll see here is a kind of “fantastic ableism” akin to the fantastic racism X-Men and other stories are critiqued for. But I’m watching with this lens now and I’m interested to see what I find.
I haven’t found anybody else approaching The Nevers this way, but if you have, I’d love to hear about it! I’d especially love a perspective from someone with more visible disabilities.
🔖Also, the Sesame Street Tiny Desk Concert made me tear up. 📺🎵