Warrior Princess Exchange!
3 June 2014 01:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
frayadjacentchaila and I recently did a Warrior Princess Exchange: she gave me some Wonder Woman comics to read and I suggested some Xena episodes for her to watch! My Xena suggestions were "One Against an Army" -- an obvious choice, IMO, for the the competence porn and the Xena and Gab being awesome and having an amazing relationship -- and "When Fates Collide". The second one seemed a little counter-intuitive but I still think it was a good choice for chaila, and for showcasing how awesome the characters can be. Also I re-watched the episode for Research and OMG so much fanservice. It was delightfulChaila gave me The Hiketeia, which I devoured pretty quickly (well, after I figured out how to get Simple Comic to work right). It was a great story with some awesome Wonder Woman action and two great women characters.
I was surprised a little by how Diana claimed she didn't care what Danielle had done, to the point of kinda cutting off the conversation. It was an interesting ethical dilemma where I didn't really agree with anyone. I mean, I am fine with what Danielle did, but only because of the reason why she did it, which Diana claimed to not care about. (Though it seemed like she did care about it, since she was contemplating how she'd have felt if it were her sisters.) But honoring the Hiketeia was the major motivator for her, which I obviously don't identify with but it was pretty interesting nonetheless.
It definitely made me want to read more, and I imagine that if/when I do read more WW, I'll go back to the story and read it with a new level of emotional/intellectual engagement with the characters and stories.
I also thought the art was quite pretty, though I do predictably dislike the way women are drawn. It's not as bad as many comics but the contorted-torso-butt-and-boob poses were definitely there. But I liked how it conveyed the action.
The only thing I really wished was different was that it had spent more time on Diana and Danielle's relationship. I wish I had gotten to see them spending time together, to see how Danielle got good at her job instead of just having Diana tell me. But I wouldn't have wanted that at the expense of anything else, so I'd have wanted the book to be longer. :)
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on 7/6/14 01:52 pm (UTC)(I had all sorts of thinky thoughts, and then that was completely derailed by CHAILA HAS AN INVISIBLE PLANE.)
What indicates its invisibility? Does it fly??
*wrenches myself back to the topic*
:: Oh I definitely didn't mean that the Amazons are generally *not* coded as indigenous in Wonder Woman? ::
...and I think I mean to say that in WW, they don't code indigenous for me at all. (Which is why I was so flabbergast about the natural history museum exhibit.) If I squint I can kind of see it, especially if I bring in other places where they are coded as indigenous, but...
They have an embassy. They're not considered to be childlike not-really-nations under the "protective" guardianship of "real" nations. They have an embassy. That's pretty much the place that I keep getting stuck. Well, that and all the marble and statuary and Greek gods and other symbolic cultural shorthands for "civilization."
But then, I know that's more in Rucka than Simone, and I haven't read Perez yet. (I blew through Simon's run last weekend. Sat in the backyard in the sun with the collected trades. It was a nice way to spend the weekend.) So maybe after I read Perez, I'll see it better.
I find the Xena Amazons as problematic as all hell, because of the way the show misappropriates actual ethnic identities for them, and then goes on to use a lot of the icky narrative tropes about indigenous peoples. There are some storylines involving them that I'm fond of, but as a group of characters... Well, I mostly want to go in there and rewrite them from the ground up. :-/
Except for maybe their thing with the Centaurs. That I just find gloriously weird.
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on 7/6/14 07:04 pm (UTC)...and I think I mean to say that in WW, they don't code indigenous for me at all. (Which is why I was so flabbergast about the natural history museum exhibit.) If I squint I can kind of see it, especially if I bring in other places where they are coded as indigenous, but...
Lulz reading comprehension and words, why can't I do them?! I don't think anything in the other runs (that I've read so far) will change your view in any significant way, but you might have to squint less to see it? But always a lot of the things that I've been talking about that call up some indigenous coding to me are backstory, and not the focus of the actual stories in the comics. But Rucka's is the only one that has Diana as an official ambassador with an embassy and all those trappings. Like "ambassador of Themyscira and its people and culture" is always part of what Diana is and does, and occasionally in other comics there will be a throwaway line about her having a role at the UN or something, but nobody else gives her an ongoing formal ambassadorship the way Rucka does (much to my ongoing disappointment).
YAY you read Simone! You should tell me what you thought sometime. :)
Before you read Perez, I feel I ought to alert you that, well, everyone has A LOT of love for Perez, but this is heavily, heavily colored by nostalgia. His run was the beginning of a lot of elements in Diana's stories that recur and that are great (the mythology elements in particular, and removing Steve Trevor as a love interest earns him my undying gratitude), so he does deserve a lot of the credit for establishing her in a new way. But even apart from its general dated-ness, it has A LOT of stuff that made me side-eye really, really hard, particularly around the Amazons and Diana's origin. I can be spoilery in email if you want, but let's just say, other stories have kept the good parts of his run and built on them, but there's plenty that I'm happy to leave in the 80s where it belongs. It's worth it for Julia Kapatelis alone, but it'd probably be good not to go in expecting Rucka-level greatness!
I find the Xena Amazons as problematic as all hell, because of the way the show misappropriates actual ethnic identities for them, and then goes on to use a lot of the icky narrative tropes about indigenous peoples. There are some storylines involving them that I'm fond of, but as a group of characters... Well, I mostly want to go in there and rewrite them from the ground up.
This makes me sad but not surprised. :( And is part of the reason why I'm perpetually glad that the established characteristic of the WW Amazons is that they are more advanced than pretty much the whole rest of the world. So at least sometimes they get to subvert all these myths and stuff. But now I do sort of want to see what this thing with the Centaurs is!
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on 7/6/14 08:10 pm (UTC)But! All Centaurs are male, and they live across the river from the Amazons (this was established before the show decided there was more than one Amazon tribe). And early on in the show, the Centaurs were pretty squarely positioned as the answer to any "but what about the menz??" (How do you procreate? What do you do with male babies?) question one might have about the Amazons.
That, and the Centaur-suits are hilariously bad. Around the time the barn episode that you watched, the show's budget expanded enormously, and they actually started using special effects and depicting "armies" as more than six people. (One of my clearest memories of the barn episode was goggling that they must have hired every stunt actor in New Zealand for that ep.) But somehow, the hilariously-bad Centaur-suits never got updated when the show's budget expanded.
Basically, I look at the Amazons, I look at the Centaur suits, I listen to characters seriously intoning another installment of the epic Amazon/Centaur backstory of war and alliance and betrayal, and I collapse into a fit of giggles. Because I DON'T EVEN.
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on 8/6/14 11:07 pm (UTC)no subject
on 8/6/14 11:25 pm (UTC)But I think embracing the camp might be easier via an episode whose strength is camp? One is perhaps less likely to view camp as a nuisance in the serious eps, if one has an independent love for some of the campy eps?
...but maybe we should just keep the camp as far as way from you as possible, for as long as possible, until you are capable of shrugging "because Xena" about bewildering-wtf-was-that things, the same way you've learned to shrug and say "because comics."
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on 8/6/14 11:43 pm (UTC)no subject
on 8/6/14 11:51 pm (UTC)In the meanwhile, maybe Fray will drop the Caesar plotline on you or something.
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on 9/6/14 12:38 am (UTC)(Actually I think that might be in "Many Happy Returns", which is coming up for you, sanguinity!)
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on 9/6/14 01:36 am (UTC)no subject
on 9/6/14 12:44 am (UTC)Well, the centaurs are only in a few episodes. Aaaaand I'm not a good candidate for nominating a centaur episode, as I don't really like them either, for the same reason!
(I don't think Centaurs are really the show's answer to WHAT ABOUT THE MENZ because when an Amazon and a Centaur hook up it's always super controversial. But I do think it's pretty weird that all the Centaurs are men, apparently. Still, in general I feel like the show doesn't make very much effort to explain how the Amazons reproduce. I think at one point they might mention shipping off their boy babies, but I could be confusing it with descriptions I've read of Amazons in other stories.)
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on 9/6/14 01:33 am (UTC)I liked the front half of the Hope arc, and I'm pretty sure there were some Centaurs in there along the way. But I can't think of anything else with Centaurs in that I'd recommend.
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on 9/6/14 02:05 am (UTC)They very well might have been. I'm with you RE: hunting, so we might never find out. :D
That's true, Centaurs are important in Maternal Instincts, which is a good episode. I also like that part of Xena's backstory is betraying Borias right when he was redeeming himself (by negotiating a truce with the Centaurs) because then she gets to have manpain. But the Centaurs are pretty incidental to what's good about both those stories.
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on 9/6/14 01:32 am (UTC)Word. And I seem to have lost track of the comments, but somewhere in here you mentioned the These People Need a Honky trope with Gabrielle, and that's a really good point that I hadn't noticed before.
And then there is the Horde, and their casting choices for Maori actors*, and the Let's Genocide the Cannibals episode (and the fact that there are some gorgeous Xena/Gab scenes in that one just kills me).
*On one hand, the fact that the show doesn't try to be "realistic" by only casting white actors as Greeks/Romans/Gauls is a step above many fantasy-type movies and shows. But they still tend to cast Maori actors as dumb villains and give most of the interesting villains, as well as the heros, to white-looking actors.
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on 9/6/14 01:43 am (UTC)And yes, the Horde. I skipped those eps outright, because there's shit I don't need on my TV. When you hit that many OH NO YOU DIDN'TS in a row before you even get to the credits, I decide that I don't need to see wherever it is you think you're going with this.
Yeah, there's stuff that I DEF wish they had done better. Or, in some cases, not at all. :-/
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on 9/6/14 02:09 am (UTC)(Do you remember if you skipped the episode "Destiny", the one that shows Xena and Caesar's backstory? Because the pre-credits stuff is basically made of OH NO YOU DIDN'T, and then it is completely different for the rest of the episode.) Like, the teaser could be completely skipped on rewatch and the episode is only better for it.
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on 9/6/14 03:24 am (UTC)no subject
on 9/6/14 03:42 am (UTC)