#canbemagic

So the other day at work, before the film’s release, my boss of sorts (who has more interest in and connection to Hollywood than your average bear) conspiratorially said to me that The Marvels wasn’t getting good reviews and it really seemed like Disney wasn’t getting there lately. I shrugged and replied that I really wanted to like it and hoped that I would, and that was basically the end of the conversation – but it seems really representative of the general coverage of (recent Marvel movies in general, but especially) this movie.

There are a few reasons for this. People like to watch things fall apart, for sure; the success or failure of Disney in particular is juicy gossip. Normies and even some nerds love to talk about “Marvel/superhero fatigue” and I’m sure some of them feel it, too. Anything involving the Captain Marvel character (or any other female protagonist in superhero media) is likely to be subject to more criticism and mean-spirited downvoting than films of similar quality starring male characters – and The Marvels not only stars Captain Marvel [Brie Larson, but two other female protagonists of color, plus a female villain of color, which is likely to stir up more outrage.

But… we really did want to like the movie. It’s fun to like movies and we love these girls a lot. (You’ll remember that WandaVision, featuring Monica [Teyonah Parris], and Ms. Marvel, starring Kamala [Iman Vellani], were some of our highest-rated Marvel projects of 2021 and 2022 respectively.) Luckily, I saw as many positive headlines as negative in the days leading up to watching the film, and most importantly, Kelly Sue DeConnick, the genius comics author responsible for revitalizing the Carol Danvers character, posted approval of the film. If Kelly Sue approves, we figured that we probably would as well.

Then one of our friends, our group’s resident Captain Marvel aficionado, saw the film the night before we did, and she was very complimentary too. That told me all I really needed to know.

So is The Marvels perfect? No. Is it a movie we very much enjoyed? Yes! Is that really what matters? Absolutely.

In no particular order, then. Spoilers.

You interpreted that title correctly. I mean all three of them.

I think I'm in the minority in that I genuinely enjoyed the 2019 Charlie's Angels film. I've talked about this before, specifically the inherent queerness of it, but another really important thing to mention is that (probably accidentally) it managed to star three autistic women.

Yes. Your faves Sabina Wilson (Kristen Stewart), Jane Kano (Ella Balinska), and Elena Houghlin (Naomi Scott) are all autistic.

Is this the first post I’ve posted all year? Yes, and I’m not apologizing. I’ve been working on another Marvel names analysis, but it’s not done yet; I’ve been working on the costumes I’m going to show you below. I’ve also been dealing with some… things going on in the workplace that have taken a toll on my mental health, admittedly. I don’t really want to get into those at the moment, but it has been going on and I’m trying to be okay with admitting that yes, that kind of thing can affect my energy to create. Sometimes when my brain is already at a disadvantage, all I want to do in my spare time is watch things I’ve seen before and color and cuddle my wife.

(I also parted ways with CBR, largely because the job that’s actually taking up my day and paying me a living wage made it difficult to find the spoons, but also I reflected on that here on tumblr.)

Anyway, though.

We did Saturday/Sunday this year; we genuinely just don’t have the stamina for four days of con anymore. It’s so much fun, but it’s also exhausting. They moved the convention into the new convention center building this year, and everything was in the same building, but we legitimately didn’t explore past the second floor. Artist’s Alley and autographs were both there, and that’s mostly what we go for; maybe next year we’ll get around to the exhibitor hall or panels too, but that wasn’t in the cards this year.

As long-term aficionados of The Phantom of the Opera in its many forms, when we encountered RoseBlood by A.G. Howard, a young adult novel clearly inspired by Gaston Leroux’s novel (see the cover above), we needed to experience this story for ourselves. To quote Dhar Mann, what happens next will shock you.

We will give a summary of RoseBlood first, before expounding upon its many qualities.

Rune Germain, a Texan teenage girl with a peculiar aptitude for opera, is invited to a prestigious French conservatory called RoseBlood. She hopes to learn how to control her gift but is haunted by tragedies from her past…and a mysterious boy wearing a mask.

You may be thinking that this sounds like a bog-standard retelling of The Phantom of the Opera. You would be incorrect. This way madness lies.

Let’s elaborate.

Full text here.

After all, today is April 25th. It’s an international (tumblr) holiday.

Real talk: Miss Congeniality was my favorite movie from the time I saw it (in theaters — it was my first PG-13, it was very significant) till the time I fell in love with Patrick Fugit in Almost Famous, so for about three years in my pre/adolescence. It’s another of those movies that I’ve seen so many times that every line feels like a familiar blanket. It was a significant influence on my never-filmed junior high movie-parody movie Alabama Girl. I owned the soundtrack on CD. When my friends and I held a “kid Oscars,” wherein we celebrated movies that we liked instead of movies that grown-ups liked, I represented Sandra Bullock in the “ceremony.” (Yes, this event was my idea.)

I still really love it, for the most part, and I was delighted to realize that it actually does have a cult following among people that didn’t grow up in my immediate friendgroup. (See above, April 25th the tumblr holiday.)

But in recent years, I’ve realized something very important about the movie. I didn’t just love it because it was mostly a movie about girls and I thought Sandra Bullock was cool (I didn’t have a baby crush on her, surprisingly, but I really admired her) and there were pretty dresses and wacky comedy beats. No, I loved it because I unconsciously saw something very familiar in the characters.

Your faves Grace Hart (Bullock) and Cheryl Frasier (Heather Burns) are autistic.

Spoilers, obviously.

So we didn’t get to see Thor: Love and Thunder opening weekend, since we were sick, but drift partner found out about the end and we weren’t thrilled. There was some comics-canonical basis for what goes down, but it didn’t strike our fancy. We are Jane Foster defenders (and adamant Jane/Thor shippers) for life.

(We also weren’t pleased that the “Valkyrie finds a queen” subplot disappeared, but that’s not what this is about.)

We enjoyed Love and Thunder, though, and actually found the Jane stuff remarkably respectful and positive. It inspired this list: a categorical discussion, in tier list form, of the various deaths of women in the MCU (including the pre-Disney+ shows, of course).

Here we go.

So Ophelia, Shakespeare’s Ophelia, is a pet character of mine. I love her and I want to protect her, and this has always been the case. In my freshman year of college, I painstakingly taped a collection of printed-out pictures to my wall, and more than one Ophelia painting (as above) was among them. She wasn’t my first tragic girl (honestly, that honor probably goes to Sailor Saturn) but she is spiritually the predecessor of many of them.

Ophelia is also misused and underwritten. She’s famous, but she’s not exactly in the pantheon of Strong Female Shakespeare Characters; instead, she’s a poster girl for the Tragic Femmes club.

While I’m drawn to that type, a lot of people just shrug them off. They’re not good feminist role models (which — I’d argue that her portrayal in the original play, and before that as I’ll get into in a minute, isn’t feminist per se but there are feminist ways to interpret her) and/or they’re not good characters (either to engage with or to play, which — that’s in the eye of the beholder, baby). Ophelia in particular has been maligned and/or ignored.

Marvel Comics burst onto the scene in 1939, and since then, they’ve been recycling names. Originally I was going to look at the howevermany most popular names of 1970 (since that’s a nice distance between 1939 and 2022, I figured) but then I thought… maybe I’d look at the most popular names in the US of every year between 1939 and now.

And list how many Marvel characters (comics or cinematic; characters with cinematic incarnations are italicized) have those names, or variants of those names, or names that could have the same nicknames, or etc. etc. Or, well, how many Marvel characters have those names that show up in the first page of a search on the Marvel wiki, because I’m not going to go through 20+ pages of links when I’m already going through 83 years of names. Occasionally I remember another character who fits but isn’t on the first page of results, and they’re in there too.

I’m probably going to look into more of these, it’s very interesting to me even though it’s largely just lists.