X Never Marks the Spot

Finished it tonight! Overall, definitely enjoyed it, am wanting more. Jessica Jones is better, but Daredevil maybe hits my fannish buttons harder...?

( Rambling )

Watched the first two eps of the Netflix Daredevil tonight with the sibs. Have covered my eyes a bit and rolled them at other bits, but overall am enjoying it, nice sense of style and a great cast - glad to see Deborah Ann Wol again, she was always one of my favorite parts of True Blood; Foggy's actor is really nailing the genuinely funny and charming sidekick, and the guy playing Matt Murdock has the right look to come across as superficially sweet and dangerous underneath.

...Though gnine and I are freaking out the brother because we keep going, "Oh, this is so much more cheerful than Jessica Jones!" (...but it is!)

gnine came up with a thought last night that I had to fic, as it fixes the biggest problem I had with Thor:TDW. This is about the closest I've come to writing MCU!Odin in character. I usually like to take a bit from Norse myth and have Odin be as conniving and clever as his second son. But really, this is even more fun, and will be my headcanon since it's unlikely it will ever actually be jossed...

The Sincerest Form (2578 words) by Xparrot
Fandom: Thor: The Dark World - Fandom
General Audiences/Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Frigga/Odin (Marvel), Frigga & Loki (Marvel)
Additional Tags: Post-Thor: The Dark World, Imprisonment, Parenthood, Fix-it

Loki is not the only trickster in the family.

--

Despite the general fandom disillusionment, the household has continued to watch Agents of SHIELD, and the last couple eps have been fun. Not sure I'd recommend it to anyone who dropped it, as it hasn't really resolved most of the problems it started off with (the cast is still too white and too young and too shallow); but it's becoming the team show I wanted it to be, and I'm hoping it will continue. If it keeps up like this, it may be able to fill the hole that Warehouse 13 is going to leave in my fangirl heart when it ends next year. The last couple eps of AoS have had team worry and lots of Fitz-Simmons and Coulson-May ambiguous co-dependency, much to enjoy...

If not as much as I'm enjoying this season of Arrow! Hands down the show I'm looking forward to the most on the weekly roster. I still need to do that pimp post. It's not a perfect show, but it is some damn fine TV, and any fan of superheroes handled dramatically ought to be watching, because they do things right that I've never seen pulled off before. And tomorrow's ep looks to feature a lot of Diggle (and I may hope, lots of Diggle/Oliver slashiness)...

Catching up on Homestuck and omg Ed Emberley! Those were the only "learn to draw" books I liked or respected as a wee thing, they were so much fun! Aww...

In other news, it's weird to be watching shows from the pilots. I never do this - I hate shows getting canceled out from under me, so generally I wait at least until the 1st season is at least half done to start watching. But now I'm watching both Sleepy Hollow and Agents of SHIELD, and it's weird to be reading episode reactions from the get-go. I'm used to taking a while to warm up to a show (if a show manages to grab my fannish heart within a single season I'm impressed; some of my favorite shows didn't really catch me until s2-3) and being really critical initially, which is why I tend to reserve judgment until I've seen at least that much. So it's odd to me on the one hand to be reading about how much people love Sleepy Hollow (I've enjoyed it, there are things about it I really like, I could definitely see myself feeling fannish about it in the future; but there's just not enough there yet for me to love...plus I haven't seen enough to trust it not to do things like kill off chars I do like...), and on the other much of my flist is really disappointed in SHIELD, while as for me what we've had of SHIELD so far reminds me of the weaker starts of a lot of shows I've later come to really enjoy (SGA, Fringe, Warehouse 13 - not to mention things like ST:TNG and Babylon 5 which had actively awful pilots!), and I'm curious to see what it's going to develop into.

(I do wonder if the slow start is why no one on my flist seems to be into Arrow, because that was a show that started out dumb but got better with every episode, until the season finale was downright AWESOME, and it's doing one of the better semi-realistic takes on superheroes I've seen, and tragically it seems that no fans I know are watching it, or (even more tragically) writing me Oliver/Diggle/Felicity OT3...)(Speaking of which, remind me to pimp Arrow before s2 premieres next week! If for no other reason than the season finale had like three different points that we were yelling at the screen "TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM, DO THIS!" and then the very next scene was the characters doing this, which was awesome...)

At least if you like adorably sweet platonic found-families. If you are allergic to adorable stay FAR FAR AWAY. W13 is one of the most consistently cute shows I have ever seen.

The last episode especially - has one of the characters worrying about his romantic prospects, since no one in their little found family team has actually found their "one" yet, and he's the shyest of all of them. And then the person he's talking to, rather than reassure him that he's a catch who is sure to find true love someday if he keeps looking (even though it's true) - instead points out that he's settled into their family group, and he's happy being settled, and that maybe, at least for now, his "one" is his four friends. To have a show say outright that romance is not the be-all and end-all to happiness or human contact - that even for adults, love and family is not always dependent on romance - <3333

(The character in question is also party to possibly the best reaction of a straight man to a male colleague coming out ever put on TV:

http://xparrot.tumblr.com/post/53554749726/xohbee-myka-yes-we-were-talking-and-he-just

(the showrunner (gay himself) has admitted that he wrote it as his ideal straight-guy reaction...))

(okay, now off to watch Starsky & Hutch with visiting fangirl derry667!)

So right now is a great time for platonic m/f friendship on TV, much to my joy!

In the last couple weeks we watched all that's out of Elementary - highly recommended! It does a lot of remarkable things effortlessly and unselfconsciously. Lucy Liu's Joan Watson is amazing and awesome, not the least of which for being a relatable, recognizable human being who also happens to be an Asian-American woman. While when the show was first announced I was disappointed by the changes they'd made to Watson's character (ex-doctor and not ex-military), in the context of the show and the version of Sherlock Holmes they're telling, it makes sense. And she is still absolutely Watson, long-suffering and loyal, if a bit snarkier about it than some.

But then that's par for the course - one of the things that makes Elementary's Sherlock so great is because everyone actually calls him on his shit. And he actually listens (sometimes, to some people), and he tries (even if he doesn't always succeed). ( More squee, no spoilers to speak of )

We've also started watching SyFy's Warehouse 13, and while that isn't what I'd call good TV - oh my god it is so frigging cute it's almost painful. It's not for everyone - it's corny and shallow and obvious, but if you like cute made-family teams being cute together while dealing with unabashedly implausible scifi artifacts, you owe it to yourself to watch this show.

It does have a couple other points to recommend it. Not only does it have more major female characters than male for a good part of the show, but the central partnership is a male and a female agent, both young and white and attractive, who bicker but love working together and love each other and have ABSOLUTELY ZERO UST. Their relationship is sibling-esque all the way without any hint of romance; they're genuinely happy and supportive for their partner whenever they find romance elsewhere. Meanwhile to make up for the lack of sexual chemistry there, it is positively bubbling between the female agent and H.G. Wells. Who is a (canonically bi) woman. Played by the preternaturally gorgeous Jaime Murray of Hustle. (She's also kind of an arch-villain, sometimes, depending, which tension only ups the femslashiness (very deliberate femslash; at her introduction she was briefly paired with Pete, but since then it's Myka who she has all the intense interactions with.))(And while I don't think that 'ship has actually gone canon, H.G./Myka is the most popular pairing in the fandom by an order of magnitude...)

But mostly it's just adorable action-comedy with lots of hugs and goofy scifi peril to the characters in every episode (I swear, every single ep has at least a moment of h/c or worry with someone). It reminds me more of SFC's old Invisible Man than perhaps any other show I can think of; it's a show that knows exactly what it is, and is very happy to be that, with no ambitions to take itself more seriously. And since I adored I-man, and am a sucker for cute teamy h/c, yeah, am enjoying the heck out of W13!

Just started watching Person of Interest because everyone else is doing it!

( Have watched through 2x03 - potential spoilers, though nothing major )

I also am wondering where the POI/White Collar/Burn Notice crossover is - you know, the one where Peter Burke's number comes up, and then Reese discovers that Burke's partner Neal Caffrey is also aware of the trouble and is calling in a favor from an old Agency acquaintance of his down in Miami...(Michael Weston and Reese both served in Eastern Europe, and by my calculation had at least an overlapping year before Michael got burned...)

That, and the Sentinel AU (The show reminds me quite a bit of The Sentinel, between the comic-book cops-and-robbers and the bugfuck ex-Ranger hero + weird nerdy sidekick, and having diamonds of pure fanbait squee buried amidst lots of urgent and somewhat nonsensical action...)

(Also, if there's any good Finch h/c out there, I, uh, wouldn't mind being hooked up...)

So we are on the last dozen eps of FMA: Brotherhood and omg sooooo gooooooood *_* LING LING LING LING (not to mention, Greedling!!! <33333) and of course must love Roy Mustang. To say nothing of the awesomeness of the ladies (Hawkeye! Izumi! Olivier omg omg Olivier~~~~!) and of course Ed & Al still hit all my devoted sibs buttons and just, everyone, all of it, eeeeeee! (FMA poses a difficulty because I often tend to pick favorite characters - have favorite characters picked for me - based on who is the most badass, only in FMA that is EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER EVER. It makes it haaaaaard~~!)

...Of course getting down to the end wire here (just saw Roy take out Envy and am starting to get REALLY REALLY STRESSED about who actually makes it and how it's going to end for everyone, because at this point I love everyone enough that losing any of them will hurt (including certain minor characters who initially seemed to be introduced as minor villains to test the good guy's no-killing resolve, and then just seemed to be there as canon fodder, and now I don't even know but yeah, I love them too, ahhhh!)

Looking forward to reading the manga after this, too. (Normally I would wait a bit, so all the plot is not so fresh in my mind, but I'm sort of already getting an urge to rewatch the series, so yeah, manga...)

In fanning from the other side of the globe, we've started watching Fringe - only about halfway through first season and, hmmm. It would be better if the show didn't think it was ~so very clever~ and unique (uhhh guys X-files already did this over a decade ago, on the same network even, you're not exactly breaking new ground!) - especially since the pseudoscience routinely threatens to MAKE MY HEAD EXPLODE (JUST LIKE RADIATION APPARENTLY DOES IN THEIR UNIVERSE.) Listen, I grew up on Star Trek, I love me my technobabble; and I'm all over comic books and their wacky amazing magic SCIENCE. And sometimes Fringe goes far enough that I can enjoy it but sometimes it tries to give 'clever'-sounding explanations that anyone who took high school physics (i.e. me) clearly can tell are wrong and also insane. Which they don't need to do! It's simple enough to handwave these things - just call on a MacGuffin! Ancient technology! Nanites*! Dark matter! Anything! Just doesn't say it's electromagnetism when clearly NO NO IT IS NOT!

OTOH this does have the effect of making me rather fond of Peter Bishop, since about 50% of his dialogue is saying aloud whatever I was just shouting at the screen. And so far I'm liking both his relationship with Walter (estranged parent-child relationships ftw) and with Olivia (their UST has been nicely and maturely underplayed thus far, to the point where I might be brought around to shipping them, if that's where it's going?)

...And then the brother has pointed out that the show is actually an AU Futurama - Walter is straight-out Prof. Farnsworth! Olivia is two-eyed less-tempermental Leela! Peter is pretty much exactly Fry + a brain! Astrid is Amy! Broyles is, uh, Hermes? Leaving only the question of who is Bender...

* ETA: Me, I just think Cesar Salazar should show up sometime. He and Walter are so on the same wavelength (Generator Rex's end was actually pretty decent, resolved enough to be satisfying but maintained enough status quo to easily continue it later, if they get the chance. Also I love Cesar for always; he is such an oddly special take on the comic book mad scientist...)

Or rather, how come the best scifi I can find on Western TV these days is in kids' cartoons? This isn't a total problem for me, because as you know I have an undeniable adoration for silly kids' superhero cartoons (my brother and I are possibly the only people over 30 in the world who get excited about new eps of Ben 10. But it's so much fun!) But it gets frustrating because there are no fandoms for these to speak of. The cartoons based on existing properties like Marvel and DCU have followings, but not the original stuff.

Which is a shame because I just got into Generator Rex and want fic for it and there is none to speak of, because it is a silly kids superhero cartoon. (But it is a silly kids superhero cartoon with Agent Six and César!! Sigh...) It's also got some of the better scifi I've seen on TV in a while - super-mad-science technobabble-laden scifi, little to do with realism (except when it has a space elevator, which was pretty much spot-on, down to the mobile base station) but everything to do with the intriguing possibilities of humans intersecting with technology (it's set in the near-future, five years after the nanite-pocalypse, in which every living thing on the planet was infected with nanites that usually are dormant but occasionally get activated and mutate their hosts into nightmarish monsters. Yes, it's very anime, down to the hero's pre-canon amnesia, though the characters and general sensibilities are much more American superhero.) It makes me miss scifi shows - especially space shows; with BSG and SGU off the air, as far as I know there are no TV shows currently set in space, no Star Trek, no Farscape or Firefly. (Doctor Who only halfway counts, because it's not always in space and not always in the future.) I like fantasy too, don't get me wrong, but I miss my space future shows something fierce.

The brother hypothesizes that procedural dramas have primed audiences to expect "realism" in their TV - the sort of plausible semi-pseudo-science that sounds convincing, that can be hard to write. Scifi shows couldn't get away with just crying "tachyons!" and having time-travel, in the current TV environment. gnine suggests that it's due to reality outpacing the past's vision of the future. We don't have a moonbase or FTL, but a lot of the trappings of classic space opera, the giant computers and video phones and such, have become ordinary or even quaint in this age of ever-advancing electronics. So a modern space opera would have to reinvent the old tropes, and maybe no one's figured out a good way how yet, or no one's dared to take a risk on a show that might have. Except on kids' shows where realism isn't considered a concern - and cartoons can more easily present futures anyway, when all sets and such are drawn from scratch anyway.

Personally I really want the USA network to do a sci-fi show - I doubt they'd have a budget for space opera, but maybe a smaller show, set it on a colony world - Mars? - in the nearish future (say a century ahead?) - and in keeping with their other shows, character-focused rather than f/x, mostly small enclosed sets. Make it a crossover-genre, perhaps, cops, or doctors, or whatever - but show me the future, show me where we could be going, the endless possibilities humanity has to look forward to.

Meanwhile, at least I've got my silly kids' cartoons! (I could also ask why American kids' cartoons are doing better than most TV on the race front - the eponymous hero Rex is a fairly obviously non-white Latino, though I'm pretty sure the toys are marketed to any kids that'll buy 'em - can't figure out if that's because it's a kid's show and they think kids won't care, or because it's a cartoon so they they think no one will notice, or something else, but kids cartoons are still some of the only non-specific-racial-demographic-targeted American TV in which the lead character isn't always white?)

So gnine has been here for a month, a stopover before she heads out of the country again, this time to the wilds of Middle Earth Ancient Greece New Zealand. Naturally, in between hosting friends & family come to see her off, we have partaken in much television.

Supernatural's premiere was epic! One of my favorite eps of the show, honestly...Which isn't to say it was good by any means, but it was awfully entertaining, between ( spoilers! for 7x01-02 )

Also have been keeping up with Doctor Who - enjoyed the second half of the season overall, didn't especially love it but I think that's more me than the show. It's a different show than it was before; while it's funny and cute and clever, it doesn't touch me in the way it used to, and I can't even say exactly why. I feel like if this had been the show it was from the start, that I very well might have loved it for what it is; as it is, I still haven't quite gotten over expecting something that it's not. Which isn't to say I wanted either RTD or David Tennant to stick around; RTD had overstayed by at least a season, and I quite like Eleven and Matt Smith's take on the Doctor. But I need to put myself into a different mindset when I watch it now - like when I'm watching other kids' shows, don't think about it and just enjoy the nifty adventures. (And Rory. Much <3 for Rory and his amazing go-with-the-flow-even-if-it's-off-the-edge-of-a-cliff-and-plunging-into-a-bottomless-abyss practicality. And he and Amy are adorable. Though I'm hoping for new Companions next year - maybe someone not from Earth? - and give the Pond-Williams their happily-ever-after...)

(Speaking of kids' shows and adorable couples, Ben 10 has started again, and aww I love my mindbogglingly silly superhero cartoon, and Kevin/Gwen is still one of my favorite het couples ever. <333)

Then after we watched the Who finale gnine wanted to see the Merlin premiere, which I watched with her despite having quit the show early last series - said watching proved a mistake, because the ep ended in a spectacularly teasing place and now I badly want to see next week's - even though it's Merlin and with SPN in the regular watching roster, my stupid TV meter is already hitting critical...but maybe it'll be worth it? The premiere had some cute character moments, Arthur seems to have grown up, and he and Merlin are inching closer to actual friendship (in that it's a satisfyingly reversed Smallville, the chars destined to become great friends and allies, rather than nemeses). And with Morgana gone all supervillain, I can accept the Morgana/Gwen as entirely ended, mourn it and stop hoping for more tantalizing moments that the show cruelly refused to deliver on (not that I'm bitter or nothin' :P) And of course I am and always will be incredibly weak to h/c, so...

Also gnine has showed me all 4 seasons of In Plain Sight (Mary is an awesome char, Marshall is nearly as awesome, I still love Paul Ben-Victor and miss I-man, and the show desperately needs more h/c), and last night we saw the first couple eps of Suits (cute, now where's the crossover fic with Harvey Specter going up against Barney Stinson in a business deal?)

Now I'm just mopey about the lack of space opera. As far as I'm aware there aren't any shows currently on the air that are set in outer space/other planets - Who is the closest, but that's still on Earth more often than not. Recently happened to rewatch a few eps of Firefly and Farscape, and yeah - along with Star Trek and B5 those are still some of my favorite TV ever, and I want more. Gimme my spaceships, dang it!