Moved!

After a lot of thinking, I've decided to move to Wordpress and my own domain. So from now on, posting will happen at rebecca-allen.net. If you're the feedreading sort, you can find the new RSS here.

Thanks, everyone!

As Epitomized by Captain Planet, Really

Conversation from work yesterday:

Coworker: And besides, superheroes must have great carbon footprints.

Me: That's true. When Superman flies home to Kansas to visit his folks, he definitely isn't taking a plane! Not like Lex Luthor, taking a private jet all over...

Coworker: See, there's saving the world...and then there's saving the world.

New York City Deathsport

Today, I’m pretty sure, was the first day of New York’s Deathsport season. Like baseball, Deathsport has a fairly long season, though less predictable: it starts when the weather begins to consistently hit the upper 70s and above, and lasts until the weather no longer does that.

The rules are simple: catch a subway in Manhattan during rush hour. Don’t die. If you make it to your destination alive, you win.

This is not as easy as it sounds.

First, while you might think that what with the giant tunnels and all, subway platforms would get pretty good air circulation, you’d be wrong. They’re stuffy, and when you have the outdoor heat plus bodyheat (and during rush hour, platforms are elbow-to-elbow crowded in a lot of stations), you will find it sweltering. If your train doesn’t come soon (and don’t let the phrase “rush hour” fool you, it won’t), you may well overheat and keel over—and as the hospital is (presumably) not your planned destination, you lose at Deathsport.

Now let’s say that after four local trains go by in a row, your uptown express finally stops. Here is round two of Deathsport: getting on the train. Because it’s the first express to come by in twenty minutes or so, your train will doubtlessly be packed. Assume you can’t get on: repeat round one until you can, or until you die (and thus lose at Deathsport). However, if enough people disembark from the train that there’s room to get on, prepare yourself. First, you have to hold your ground against the relentless waves of people coming off, all of whom will be heading for the staircase directly behind you. If you get run over by a mom with a stroller, you lose at Deathsport. If you get pushed too far back to catch your train, go back to round one. But if you hold your ground, you can now begin to fight it out in the hand-to-hand combat portion of the game, trying to get on to the train before it is too crowded to allow any more passengers, and/or before the conductor closes the doors in your face. If you get blocked out of the train, you lose at Deathsport. If the door closes on your body and you aren’t a highly experienced player, you likely lose at Deathsport. (You also lose an arm.)

If, however, you have the cunning and fortitude to make it on to your train, proceed to round three.

Round three is the endurance round, lasting anywhere from five to seventy city blocks, or roughly between a quarter of a mile and four and a half miles. In this round, you are stuck in your car. On the plus side, many (but not all) subway cars have air conditioning. On the down side, rush hour cars are so crowded that you likely will find yourself longing for the freedom of the platform, where you could move almost six inches in any given direction. That is no longer the case: if you are claustrophobic or don’t deal well with crowds or with strangers pressing against you, you’ll likely end up sobbing or screaming, in which case you lose at Deathsport. Here, your challenge is to stand perfectly still regardless of the teenagers shoving each other next to you, the lawyer who continuously tries to shove his briefcase into your kidney, or the woman dancing to her iPod who doesn’t notice that her super-awesome kick-step involves coming down directly on your foot.* This is also a balance challenge: there are so many people between you and the nearest hand-hold that you have no way to hold yourself up. If you have inner-ear problems, you lose at Deathsport.

Round three presents an additional challenge to those of us who are less than average height: the people around you will likely be holding onto the ceiling-mounted bar, which you can’t reach. However, the bar is at the correct height to leave you nose-to-armpit with your neighbors. If you require fresh air to breathe (or indeed any air at all), you lose at Deathsport.

Round four, the final round, is a reverse round-two. You fight your way back towards a door, in an attempt to get out of the subway car before the crowd on the platform presses their way inside, sealing you in forever. Once you’ve reached the platform, you’re faced with vertical turnstiles and impatient people behind you, and if you can’t jump out of the way in time as you exit, you will be crushed against the exit itself and lose at Deathsport.

If, however, you have successfully navigated your way this far, congratulations! You win at Deathsport! Your prize is fresh city air, which smells rather like rotting garbage and dogshit. Ah, summer in New York.

Other fun New York games: Dodge the Gawking Tourist, Don’t Get Lost in Central Park**, and Wait Three Hours for Dinner in the East Village, among many others.

* Unless, like me, you are that girl. Sorry.
** I lose at this one a lot. I can enter the park on the East side, walk westward in a straight line, and somehow exit the park on the East side again. Seriously.

The Bad, The Good, and The Shiny: Iron Man

Summer blockbuster season is upon us. And here’s my confession: I love ridiculous action movies. I love movies where the premise is “stuff blows up” and plot and character are entirely secondary. I don’t watch them without criticism; there’s a reason big-budget action movies have a terrible reputation when it comes to race and gender. So while I love the genre, I still watch it critically, and would be exceptionally pleased if filmmakers would shape up and start making ridiculous action movies about stuff blowing up, without resorting to alternately ignoring and stereotyping anyone who isn’t a straight, white, male character.

With that said, I’ve been to see Iron Man twice. I obviously enjoyed it; there were a bunch of aspects about it that made me decide it was worth spending money to see again. But it isn’t without its problems, and I’ve found the critiques of the movie to be fascinating. (Spoilers follow through the rest of the article.) By far the most on-the-nose critical review of the movie I’ve found is this one, by WOC PhD. She writes with far more eloquence than I could about a lot of the movie’s issues, particularly with regards to race and jingoism.

I’d like to expand on some thoughts I had while watching the movie, and again when reading her article. WOC PhD* addresses the wasted opportunities the movie had with Yinsen, the doctor who is held hostage along with the movie’s protagonist Tony Stark. He saves Tony’s life and then sacrifices himself so Tony can escape their captors. WOC PhD points out not only that the movie could have used Yinsen as a way of showing the actual effects of the war on people in Afghanistan, but also the potential problems if he returns from the dead as a villain for the sequel, which has been hinted at.

I had two further problems with his portrayal. First, I was not sold at all on his decision to sacrifice himself for Tony. As he dies, he tells Tony it’s what he wants, and that his family is dead—but that seems odd in and of itself, since when he discussed his family with Tony earlier, he did not mention that they were dead. It’s implied he’s decided Tony’s life is more important than his own because Tony has a much larger influence and can right some of the wrongs of the world in a way that Yinsen can not—but Yinsen tells him that, “this was always his plan.” Yet Tony had designed the suit with the goal of getting them both out, so why Yinsen had always planned to die when it wasn’t necessary is unclear. His death actually resembles a typical comic book fridging in some ways, except that instead of a girlfriend being murdered to give the hero motivation (or angst), a character of color is murdered to give the hero motivation (and angst—implied angst, anyway, since Tony never actually mentions him again, though I think we’re supposed to realize he was moved by the death). I’ve been told by Iron Man comics-knowledgeable friends that in every version of the origin story, Yinsen dies, so the movie writers probably never felt the freedom to have him survive…but as a movie watcher, I wasn’t convinced. I was disappointed.

Second, Yinsen never got to be a character in his own right. The other two major supporting characters, Pepper and Rhodey, are shown to have lives outside of Tony Stark’s existence. While they both center around Tony, they do at least do things on their own. In her introduction, Pepper alludes to evening plans outside of work, and she also attends a fancy event not only without Tony, but without a date at all. Rhodey, meanwhile, we see at work. He’s kept busy there even when Tony is not watching him, which we know from scenes where Tony walks in and Rhodey doesn’t expect to see him. Now, we see them both from Tony’s POV so we only get hints about these lives, but they do exist.

Yinsen, on the other hand, does not. We meet him when Tony is captured, and he dies when Tony escapes. He references having a family, but not that they’re dead until he himself is dying; and he doesn’t do it in the context of letting us know him better, but rather as a way to show that Tony is isolated and sad without having a family of his own.** We know he speaks many languages, but we don’t know if he learned them in school, or as a traveler, or what. We don’t know if he’s a surgeon, an engineer, a professor, or something else entirely. (He does save Tony’s life medically; but he also assists him as an engineer or builder, and he’s been to see Tony give a lecture—where? When? Who knows?) We don’t know how he was captured or how long he’s been held there. Yinsen exists only while Tony is with him; when Tony is gone, he vanishes. That was hugely disappointing to me.

One place where I disagree with WOC PhD is with regards to Pepper Potts. I do agree with just about everything else she writes with regards to gender in the film, particularly about the female reporter and Pepper’s “take out the trash” line. Ught. But about Pepper and Tony’s relationship, she writes:

“Granted, Stark does make some attempt to express feelings for her in the later half of the film, but she quickly shuts him down. While the scene is meant to show Potts’ ever critical eye toward her role as super hero hag, it reads as the masochism of a woman who does not think she deserves love. Hence she falls in love with a man who won’t give her any and yet demands so much of her time that she “has no one else.” - yes that is a real quote. Or the intelligence of a woman who knows she is not, ultimately, going to get love but hangs on.”

This is in reference to the end of the film, where Tony lets Pepper know he is romantically interested in her, after she has hinted that she feels the same towards him through the whole film. However, she rejects him, referencing an earlier scene in which they had danced awkwardly and started to have a discussion of how they feel—only for him to run off in the middle to deal with a major plot revelation. Now, as a watcher of the movie, I hadn’t even thought about Pepper being left without explanation at that point, because it is a major plot revelation and Tony reacts quite understandably. The narrative follows him and not Pepper, and no further thought was really given towards what she thought or felt at that moment, until she brings it up in her rejection of him.

I did not see that as her a woman who feels she does not deserve love, or that rejection as masochism on her part. On the contrary, I thought it was a great move on the filmmaker’s parts to further her character. Pepper actually had an emotional reaction to being left there, even though we didn’t see it, since the movie wasn’t about Pepper. She was a fully-realized character, who reacted understandably. Being left without explanation or apology was enough to make her realize that, while she may have feelings for Tony, he is selfish and even if he reciprocates those feelings, that selfishness will leave him unable to give her what she wants and deserves from a relationship. Rather than settling for that, even though she cares for Tony, she rejects him. I was impressed and pleased by that choice.

One further gender-based criticism of the film. We know a lot about Tony Stark’s father: he was one of the developers of the atomic bomb; he founded a major arms company that Tony inherited; he died when Tony was relatively young; there’s a lot of controversy about whether he was a patriot or simply war profiteering; people generally feel Tony has a lot to live up to with regards to his dad. How would his dad feel about the direction Tony took the company in? How would he feel about the weapons Tony has helped create? Or the under-the-table deals to give those weapons to bad people? Tony struggles with those ideas throughout the film.

Tony’s mother is never mentioned verbally. The only actual reference to her at all is in a montage of newspaper headlines about the Stark family, which provides us with Tony’s history. The headline reads, “Husband and Wife Perish,” or something very similar. She has no name, and she has no impact on Tony or his story, whatsoever. I am realize this is a fairly common problem, but it still annoys me greatly, since you’d think that even if he had no relationship with his mother, that would still affect his character. Grumble.

Okay. All that said? I really enjoyed the movie. It was fun, it didn’t take itself super-seriously. It was phenomenally well acted, and in many respects well written. Though never confirmed by Tony himself, it’s clear he suffers from PTSD after his time as a prisoner. It’s referenced by other characters, one a gossip show host and one the villain trying to cut him out of his own company. Tony himself is not written as a character who would acknowledge that he needs to attend to his mental health, but it was also clear to me as a watcher that his decision to build a new version of the Iron Man suit and use it as a hero was all driven by PTSD, in large part. His decision to try and do the right thing may have been driven by having seen the consequences of his actions first-hand, but the obsessive way he goes about it is indicative of greater problems. I loved the way the movie illustrated that without beating the viewer over the head with it.

The movie was clever. The action sequences engaging. The special effects managed to be brilliant and not cheesy. Tony’s character and Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of him were fantastic. I can’t say I recommend this as an action movie with no faults—they’re there and disappointing. But what it gets right, it gets right much better than other movies in its genre, and it is certainly a cut above standard action movie fare.



* I’m not quite sure how to address her or what name she generally goes by – the blog is on hiatus so it seems that a lot of the usual informational pages are missing, and I’ve only started reading recently. If anyone knows of a more accurate name/handle, please don’t hesitate to let me know!

** I do think it’s interesting to have that trope, that while a character appears to have everything, the character actually has nothing without a family, applied to a man instead of a career woman as a way of showing that she should get back in the kitchen, but that’s neither here nor there.

Article of Interest

My friend Jen passed this along to me, and as it's about feminism and speculative fiction criticism, I pass it along to you: When Harry Met Sexism.

A not-fully-yet-formed-thought: It does occur to me that Scott Westerfeld (about whom I've written twice) is possibly the most influential science fiction writer at the moment. I can certainly believe that (and hooray for YA!). And I love that his Uglies series centers around a dynamic female character and, if not female-centric, then certainly female-relevant issues. But I also wonder if the fact that he's a man may help with his critical acclaim. Which is hard to say, because I think his work deserves recognition; but would anyone have paid as much attention if he were female -- or would it have been written off as a series by a girl for girls? Impossible to say, but unfortunately, it's not out of the realm of possibility...

A Princess Peach Post

Hi. Guess why I haven’t written anything in so long? Go on…guess! I mean, other than being lazy and unmotivated and busy (somehow all at once). Give up? Okay.

I got a Wii.

Well, technically my sister (also roommate) got a Wii. Same difference. Now, this is actually big news for me: gaming is one of the few aspects of nerdiness that has totally and completely passed me by. I’ve never had much of an interest in it, and Macs are not (to the best of my knowledge, anyway) well known for games anyway. I’ve never had anything other than a computer on which a game might be played. Growing up, my mom thought Nintendos (and the like) were evil, so we were never allowed to have one; none of my close friends did, either.

So you’re reading a blog by someone who, until the age of 24, had never even played a Mario game.

Naturally, being vaguely intimidated by the whole prospect of video games – and boy, that’s a blog entry waiting for a rainy day, right there – we grabbed the one that looked like it was the most similar to those of the mid 80s, which have now seeped so far into the pop culture subconscious that even I was not totally intimidated by the prospect of trying it out. The game turned out to be Super Paper Mario which (as close as I can tell) does indeed basically resemble a typical Mario game (you run around, jump on things’ heads to kill them, and explore different levels until the “plot,” such as it is, ends), with the added bonus of being able to flip into 3D and solve puzzles thataway. It was fairly simple, and I’d guess aimed at, oh, middle schoolers. (That’s a guess, though; I clearly have nothing else to judge by.)

So anyway, yeah, I finally won it.

Now, I can’t really write up a full game review, because I haven’t got more than a vague sense of cultural context, and I really can’t contextualize anything about the gameplay itself. (Um. Except to say the Wii is super fun.) But being me, of course I paid pretty close attention to the treatment of female characters, and I have very happy things to say about that.

Though the gender balance isn’t equal, it isn’t too bad: among the protagonists, there is Princess Peach (who will be my main focus, in just a bit); there’s also Tippi, a “pixl” character, who flits around after Mario and helps him. (The rest of the pixls are gender neutral, as far as I recall.) Among the villains, you’ve got Mimi (one of the bosses) and Nastasia, the super villain’s executive assistant (evidently in charge of scheduling, organization, and mind control, but who you never play against). All in all, of the main group of heroes (assuming you count Tippi—I do, because she’s a plot point) you’ve got two female (one playable) and three male characters; among villains, you’ve got two female (one who you play against) and three male. Though it is worth nothing that both female villains are in support positions to a male character; and, though that isn’t exactly true of Peach and Tippi, it’s still very much Mario’s game and story, in which they play supporting roles.

So, of these various characters, Peach is by far and away the one you spend the most time with. (People interested in learning a lot more about her should check out the Princes Power issue of Cerise.) And, after winning the game, I’m actually quite, quite pleased with her treatment. First off, the fact that she’s rather the epitome of femininity (wearing a frilly pink dress with matching shoes and parasol) doesn’t bother me a bit—I think it’s important that people who choose femininity also get to see that choice validated and represented in a character who is an equal to the men around her, and in SPM, Peach is that. All of the playable characters have special skills: Mario can flip to 3D, Luigi can super-jump, Bowser can breathe fire, and Peach actually has two—using her parasol, she can glide and change direction in mid-air, and she can duck under the parasol to protect herself from nearly any enemy or attack. Her skills are quite useful, and in fact, the game requires you to play as Peach in several circumstances: there are puzzles that can not be solved or bypassed as any other character. (All character skills have corresponding puzzles.) Even better, while there are places where, while you are not forced to play as Peach, she is the best choice… And as close as I can tell, both of the climactic boss battles are such situations. (You’re fighting a much-larger villain and need to get up high and be able to carefully control where you’re jumping; the villains shoot various attacks at you and only Peach can defend against them instead of just dodging.) I think that’s pretty great.

I also think it’s very cool that the creators, while making Peach a playable character the equal of the other three in the game, also clearly kept in mind that she is female. There are two major points where this has a direct impact on the plot. In level three, Tippi is kidnapped by the level’s boss, Francis. Francis is an uber-nerd stereotype (which I found much more annoying than anything relating to feminism in this game, frankly): he’s never talked to a girl (and is only interested in “hot babes,” though it seems clear he’s never spoken to one); he’s only interested in computers, science fiction, and anime; he has no offline friends. At the end of the level, Mario can’t get in to his fortress to fight him, but Peach (as a hot babe) can. Of course Francis doesn’t take her seriously when she requests Tippi back, and immediately tries to romance her. The player can choose several responses to this, ranging from awkwardly flattered to outright pissed, but regardless of which responses are chosen, Peach eventually gets irritated and puts a stop to it…with a bomb. This initiates the boss battle, in which Tippi is recovered.

The meaning is pretty clear: when Peach has a choice between using her femininity to try and manipulate someone to get what she wants, and being directly assertive (dare I even say aggressive?), she picks assertive and will fight when needed. This point is underscored in the final level, when Mimi calls her out as a damsel in distress who needs her boyfriend to save her. Angry that her honor as a princess has been besmirched, Peach challenges Mimi and you enter a boss fight in which you can only play Peach. (Two notes here: one, this was the boss fight I had the most trouble with—that is, because I couldn’t defeat Mimi easily any of the times she appeared, not because I was playing as Peach; two, I do not, however, think it’s coincidence that the female hero fought the female villain, though I think it would have been awesome to see Peach take down the bigger, physically tougher villain.)

Let’s see… Final notes. At the end of the game, the power of True Love saves everyone, a power Tippi seems to have more access to throughout the game than any other characters. Similarly, Nastasia—who is, incidentally, shown as being quite capable, though she also has a crush on her boss—sacrifices herself out of love. But they both get happy endings: Tippi ends up with her true love, where Nastasia learns to live without hers and be happy anyway. (That’s a very minor point, but an interesting one, I think.) Overall, I very much enjoyed the game—obviously I can’t compare it to others or tell you if it fits into general trends, but I generally had a good time playing it, and I think it was quite successful with regards to female characters. I would definitely recommend it to other folks who are, like me, complete and total beginners, looking for somewhere easy and fun to start.

Let's Hope They're Fake...

Via awesome new blog io9, alleged Dark Knight spoilers. Hrmph.

Is it me, or does the death of Rachel Dawes smack of fridging? Oh, but her death might serve two purposes--not only does it drive Dent over the edge and into a killing spree, but I'm sure Bruce will angst about how he tried his hardest, but just couldn't save her!

Good thing I'm an optimistic person, because it takes optimism to hope that none of that will happen.