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Monday, December 1, 2014

Thanksgeeking Pt. 2

It's that time of the year again. The time when I have so much to be grateful for, but instead choose to write about arbitrary geek things because real emotion makes me uncomfortable.

So without further ado, here are 5 more geeky things I'm grateful for this year.

1. Natalie Dormer



I know I've already gushed about her when listing my picks for Captain Marvel, but this is about more than just the character I want her to portray. Natalie Dormer is perfection. First of all, she pulls off this hair wonderfully. I'm super jealous. If I could grow long, beautiful hair, I'd totally shave half of it off.

Second, she's a queen of positive body image. "The focus seems to be on [looks] for women and it's not fair and...you're watching us, and you don't realize how much makeup and how much lightning is involved when we look good. We've got a lot of help going on. I often think that it's not health for young girls to be flipping through these magazines and looking at films and TV, seeing these shows." I was in the (very large) room when she said this, and it gave me the chills.

Third, she's a queen of feminism. "Women are over 50 percent of the population. [Mockingjay is] one of the few films that actually represents us. What we’re aiming for in the industry is not to go, “Girl power! Wave the flag!” We want to get to a place where the gender is irrelevant, because then it’s about the personality, and about the story. What I love about Mockingjay–Part 1 is that President Coin or Cressida could have easily been played by a man, and if you look at Interstellar, the Anne Hathaway or Jessica Chastain roles would have been men years ago. I’m glad that cinema is catching up to what television has known for a while: that three-dimensional, complex women get an audience engaged as much as the men. I’m a feminist in the true sense of the word. It’s about equality... It really is crazy that the word “feminist” can have negative connotations in 2014. It upsets me that the younger generation of women think it’s a dirty word, and associate it with a kind of militantism or a sense of female superiority. It’s not. It just means liberation, and equality."

In conclusion, I want to have her babies.

2. The Mary Sue


There are a small handful of websites that I frequent, but none more than The Mary Sue. It's a geek website through a feminist lens, and it's awesome. With article titles like, "The Full Jurassic World Trailer Debuts and Suddenly I'm 11 Years Old Again" and "I'm Sorry, Did You Just Call Agent Carter a Secretary?", how could it not be? It also has the best comments section of any website ever. The moderators are like hawks when it comes to deleting comments that go against their comment policy, and pretty much everything that is left is awesome.

3. Minority Superhero Movies



There have been a ridiculous number of superhero movies and I can count on one hand the number of minority superhero movies. Supergirl, Catwoman, Elektra, Hancock, and Blade. I cold be missing some, but that's it. There are more movies about Batman than there are about superheros who are not white men. And sure, there are minorities in superhero teams, but the vast majority of those teams are almost exclusively made up of white men, apart from the one person (usually a white woman) who isn't.

I've said this before, but I'm tired of watching white men on screen. Not tired enough to stop, but tired enough to roll my eyes every time I see yet another trailer with the majority of actors being white men.

Not that we're even close to reaching any kind of parity, but there are 5 superhero movies coming out in the next 5 years that are not about white men. Two women, two black men, and a pacific islander. Five compared to the ridiculous number that is white male superheros is pretty pathetic, but I'm still excited.

4. Snowpiercer



This is probably the best movie I saw in theaters this year, and I will never stop gushing about it. It's on Netflix right now and I would very highly recommend it if you haven't seen it yet. Chris Evans delivers an amazing performance and Tilda Swinton is, as always, one of the best things about this movie. It's a fantastic post-apocalyptic story and you all should watch it. It should be required watching like 1984 should be required reading.

5. Ships



I don't do ships. I don't do fan fiction. I don't do slash art. I have nothing against any of those things, but they just generally don't interest me.

Until I found out that the Korra/Asami ship was a thing.

I still don't do fan fiction and I still don't do slash art. But I love the idea of Korra and Asami as a couple. I don't know why I can't just love them for being awesome friends and leave it at that. Cause they really do make a fantastic female friendship duo. They're the Super Best Friends Forever of the Avatar universe. But I still just want them both to embrace their bisexuality and love each other. The two of them make way more sense than any of the other relationships on Korra. Korra/Mako was a disaster, Asami/Mako was boring, Bolin/Korra have all sorts of chemistry, none of it romantic, and Bolin/Opal just doesn't make sense to me. But Korra/Asami? It works beautifully.

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