For the character ask game; Anissa 4, 5, 25?
4: If you could put this character in any other media, be it a book, a movie, anything, what would you put them in?
okay i have to admit when i first saw this question i forgot that on tumblr 'media' often means 'piece of art' and following it by book, movie, anything made me think which medium could best capture them. well i think her affected air of strength and surety belying a diminished, burdensome pathos could be best captured in an expressionist painting in the style of egon schiele: the eros of her musculature, the firmity in her brow, the uncertainty that peeks through in her eyes.
but if i can answer this question as intended. idk. i think anissa would be good in literally every work of art literally ever. 'buff brown wolf cut dyke whose affected confidence and autistic dryness believing that any cause to which she assigns herself is just by virtue of its strength.' make her a lumon employee who believes that the castrated consciousnesses of its employees is necessary to maximize the productivity of workers. make her an immortal universe vampire who believes the vampire has a role to shepherd the weak mortals with the clarity and focus granted by a long life. make her a colonial marine who believes weyland-yutani and no other corporation can claim the stars and the many slimy things around them. make her a yellow lantern. make her a bounty hunter. a hitman. an android. put this dyke π in any scenario imaginable
5: What's the first song that comes to mind when you think about them?
i wasn't fucking kidding about the mon laferte la trenza sequence i have in my head for her. it's obviously a liberal interpretation of the lyrics. but, first of all, invincible is pretty generous with how faithfully it matches the lyrics to the scenario on screen, and, second of all, i think the discontinuity would say something interesting. she is, as far as we can tell, the youngest viltrumite; with conquest's death, the only with a unique uniform; she is the mouthpiece, the one sent to convince a world to flip, making up for her stature with an intense martial skill. it's easy to imagine her thinking of herself as the daughter going on to make someone proud. i think especially with invincible's dark reflections of the family (hell we even get one with anissa, with kregg being framed as to her what nolan is to mark lol) and with the show really establishing that the viltrumite coming of age ritual is bodily brutality it logically follows that the younger smaller viltrumite woman would have horrors in store for her.
25: What was your first impression of this character? How about now?
so it's actually funny that you ask because my impression of her changed a lot LMAO.
because like. i went into invincible after i had seen the tlt rape imagery light. and i saw this character that everyone was like, 'she's a rapist.' and i thought--naive as i was!--that if this character has ascribed to her sexual violation when fans are so quick to eschew these reads for other characters, surely the breadth and depth of her crimes must be terrible indeed! as you all reading this can tell that was stupid of me to think LMAO, there is a reason why people to this day post 'nightwing EPICALLY PWNS tarantula who speaks spanish as he beats her up' despite even devin fucking grayson admitting that plot was bad. people will absolve a male character of any crime by dint of their male pathos but will hold things against a female character that even their damn creators regret. especially given that at this point, next to conquest and thragg and (though fans are less willing to recognize this) nolan, anissa is by far the least violatory, and she's been given all this depth and potential, there is a world where she is not written as a rapist and fans will have been salivating about her for years for nothing!
the thing is, too, her introductory episode is very different from the comic and stands outside the visual language of coded domination that percolates every other viltrumites interaction with mark. that stood out to me on a first watch! before i read the comic i was like "wow, this feels more like a dbz fight than anything else mark has been through," and though i wasn't open in how i read nolan's brutalization of him, i still felt it (i refer to this period of my life as the survivor closet being made of glass), and i still noted that she existed so outside of it. so that just kinda let to '...she seems pretty cool and badass and hot and epic but. well. we'll see'
and THEN after s3, eager for me, i read the comic. and noted how fucking much they changed. the people who crow about 'male survivor rep' don't say anything about the coercion mark experienced at the hands of the atlanteans! or about telia's repeated abuse of allen! the latter is actually like a very real cogent example of sexual abuse that women perpetrate! allen the alien got comptopped!!! and then i got to anissa and saw that the two characters have only a name and kind of a costume in common and was like. oh! so all of the cool shit i was seeing was on purpose! especially when you notice that the men weren't nearly as violatory in the comic either! men were not straddling mark like they do in the show! they made her a fucking cool hot buff brown baddie and nobody even cares!
and at that point i realized that it was my duty to stan her. if i be her only stan.
character ask game!!! π«
