Mari Ness's Blog, page 17

A Winter's Love

In the spirit of the season, my flash fiction story, "A Winter's Love," just popped up at Goldfish Grimm.

This is a slightly unusual story for me, in that the setting was directly inspired by where I live -- it's basically a magical version of parts of Winter Garden. The attached interview, which is longer than the actual story, explains a bit more.

Enjoy!

Why you should never combine the Sound of Music with Scandal

Sometimes, you really, really can't make this stuff up.


So tonight I turned on NBC's Very Special Sound of Music live, starring Carrie Underwood. I was not impressed.

By 10 o'clock, right after Maria has come back to the house to find out Von Trapp is getting married, I had had it. "It's like getting teeth pulled," I told people, switching over to Scandal --

Where, I KID YOU NOT, Huck was torturing another character by PULLING OUT HER TEETH.

Also, whiplash. Seriously, those are not two shows that should ever be combined.

Arrow, season two, The Scientist

Arrow

Yesterday was an unexpectedly exciting day for me, not always in a good sense (a school shooting at a nearby high school which added several police cars to my little trike ride home from Target), so exciting that I pretty much missed for several hours that Nanoism had accepted and published a little untitled twitter story of mine, which you can read here. It won't take long, I promise.

And then there was Arrow, which offered another game changing episode last night, and suddenly made my life look completely dull by comparison. Clearly I need to start wearing a green hood.


The first season of Arrow avoided any hint of supernatural or super powers; villains and, er, can we really call Oliver Queen of last season a hero? Did last season have any heroes except very arguably Roy? Anyway, I digress – the point is that last season, everyone was human. The show wallowed in grit and dirt and realism. This was all great –

-- but it kept the show from going epic until the season finale, when the show dragged in a not terribly realistic device that was supposedly capable of setting off earthquakes. Let us handwave a lot. And I do mean a lot.

However unrealistic the device was, however, it did give the show the opportunity to go epic: to force Oliver Queen/The Hood to save an entire city – and fail. At least in part.

It forced Oliver to think about becoming a hero.

Meanwhile, the CW, cheerfully noting that pretty much all of its successful shows have some sort of supernatural element, decided to build on the success of Arrow by expanding into the DC universe, somewhat the way Smallville did, with the possibility of developing more shows.

Immediate problem: Batman was out of the question, partly for rights issues, partly because the Oliver Queen of last season was in some ways Batman light. Though impressively, Oliver Queen of both seasons is not nearly as good as Bruce Wayne is as the playboy billionaire and charm part, in part because although various versions of Bruce Wayne have gone through hell, they have not really gone through the hell this show decided to put Oliver Queen through – and Oliver Queen has a family. Anyway.

That meant going back to superpowers. Not Superman, cause Smallville. Aquaman had been tried and sunk. So –

Flash.

Which also had been tried, years ago, ending after one unsuccessful season, but people (me included) still had some fond memories of it and it could be argued that the show failed in part because of lousy scheduling. (It initially aired on Thursday nights, back when NBC's Must See TV Thursday nights actually meant something.) In any case it had not been a complete disaster.

So, why not launch a Flash spinoff?

Which meant that Arrow had to shift from gritty realism to superpowers.

The show has been doing this slowly throughout the season, mostly throwing in hints in the island backstory bits that Weird Science Is Going On, Dudes, and it Just Might Change the Shape of Your Skull. (Seriously for a deserted island this place has a lot of things going on.)

Last night, the first superpowered villain popped up. He is Super Strong, able to pick up large concrete objects and hurl them through metal doors without a qualm. He is also able to throw very good looking vigilantes right through windshields and doors without, remarkably, leaving a single wound on these vigilante faces. Let's give him a round of applause.

Let's also give a round of applause for the skepticism from the other characters. Diggle thinks this means vampires and is not thrilled by that thought. Possibly because he's seen The Vampire Diaries and is worried that this show could get even more love triangles. Quentin immediately points out that super powered beings don't exist and that we all need to work on another explanation. Oliver is a little less skeptical, but as it turns out, he has reasons: he knows that some super powered humans do exist, it's just that they have bleeding eyes and they die and it's very sad.

And, of course, the show introduced young Mr. Barry Allen, our potential Flash, giving him lots of Moments, including one where he is by a shelf of chemicals when suddenly, a lightning rings out behind him! I laughed. (Since he isn't in his own show yet, Barry Allen remains normal; also, given that Arrow has really not at all subtly been warning us of an upcoming dangerous explosion I'm pretty sure that the explosion will be what gives Barry his powers – assuming that happens next week. Which it might not.)

And it worked.

Except for a rather dull scene involving a party, which frankly didn't work well in the context of an episode with motorcycle chases and people bleeding out from their eyes and John Barrowman sexing out of his eyes, the show ramped up the tension and the stakes and Oliver shot Roy in the leg, yay! Ok, so that last bit has nothing to do with superpowers, and Roy is growing on me – the fact that the show has found him something to do may have something to do with it, unlike their treatment of a certain other character.

But mostly this worked because the show took the time to lay the groundwork for this. Not just in kinda endless promos reminding us that THE FLASH WAS COMING YAY and the show would be arriving IN A FLASH HA HA and Oliver might need a FLASH OF HELP ha ha, but in the little details: the mutated skulls back on the island. The discussion of creating superpowered humans. The fierce way everyone on the island this season is fighting for objects and powers that have never been completely defined.

That's how you can build up to your big reveal, and your game changing moments: hints. Words. More hints. Images. And leave your audience going, cool! Instead of, uh, how did that guy break into here again? And your moment where your camera zooms on your fallen hero, with the love interest clasping his face in her hands (sorry, show; even if I didn't know that Barry Allen is only on for a couple of episodes before heading to his pilot, I wasn't buying this) – and the syringe in his leg, suggesting that he, too, might be developing superpowers.

Also, Oliver shot Roy in the leg. That is never going to get old.

Samuel R. Delany finally receives the SFWA Grand Master Award

SFWA announced this morning that Samuel R. Delany finally received the SFWA Grand Master Award.

I say "finally" since like pretty much everyone else my response was, wait, he hasn't received it already? To be fair I don't actually keep up with the list of SFWA Grand Masters (though Wikipedia has a list.) Anyway, good if belated choice.

In the Greenwood

My story "In the Greenwood," just popped up at Tor.com. You can also get an ebook version at either Amazon or Barnes and Noble or other online bookstores.

The various people who have already read it have all agreed that telling you anything about the story will completely ruin the story, so instead I'll just throw in some stuff about the publication of the story: one, the genesis of this story goes all the way back to kindergarten and a certain game played in my back yard, which officially makes this the longest gap ever between original concept and publication for me, and two, this story has been read by more people prior to publication than any other thing I've ever written, which gives me a twitchy feeling.

Enjoy!

His Girl Friday

Last night we watched His Girl Friday, the classic film of fast banter and slimy journalism featuring Cary Grant speaking at high speed and Rosalind Russell, who really, but really knows how to wear hats. A few points that struck me while watching:

1. Everyone, but everyone, smokes like a chimney -- except for the murderer. And Ralph Bellamy, who loses the girl. Hero? Smokes. Journalists? Smoke. Evil politicians? Smoke. Cops? Smoke. Rosalind Russell? Is for all intents and purposes growing cigarettes out of her fingers.

We're so accustomed these days to the "only bad guys smoke" in films that even though I knew how the film ended I was half expecting Rosalind Russell to end up with the non-smoking murderer or Ralph Bellamy. How the hell did actors in the 1940s not all simultaneously come down with lung cancer?

2. All of the casual and not casual sexism: the reporter who is constantly looking up women's skirts and positions himself on staircases to do so; the way the journalists treat the murderer's sorta-girlfriend (she calls them on it, as does Rosalind Russell's character a few seconds later, and most of them look faintly ashamed and it ends their poker game); Walter insulting a random woman on the telephone (she hangs up on him); the way Ralph Bellamy's mother is casually picked up, tossed over a man's shoulder and carried out of the room (she's in her 60s.) Interestingly, this woman is the only woman who is actually manhandled -- and she's the only woman onscreen who doesn't have a job.

And yet, against this, the film also insists that the main character, Hildy, played by Rosalind Russell, doesn't really want a traditional marriage and children and to be taken care of and romance. Instead, the film says, what she really wants is a career. To the point where despite her protests, despite her valid irritation that her first honeymoon was interrupted by work, pretty much every character, including Ralph Bellamy who is offering the alternative, assumes that she will want to continue working. The film completely approves of Walter's various manipulations to get Rosalind back on the job and away from a traditional, normal role. The journalists are all betting that this will succeed -- and even has to succeed; they accept Hildy as a full time professional journalist and their equal, and immediately guess that she's hiding a major story from them (she is) and that she's capable of doing so (she is.) One of the journalist's gives Hildy's planned marriage about three to six months, noting that she can't be happy away from the job. As it turns out, he's dead on.

Which in turn is undercut by the film's gleeful insistence that Walter is absolutely within his rights to con and emotionally manipulate his ex-wife into doing something that she insists she doesn't want to do because, well, he knows what she really wants. As it turns out, he's right; she is mostly happy at the end of the film, if frustrated at getting cheated out of a honeymoon again, and the journalists are right too: Hildy is a great writer, and that's what she's meant to do.

3. Technically, this is a point that struck my brother, not me, but wow some voices are extremely distinctive: he recognized Ralph Bellamy as the same guy from Trading Places on voice alone. Granted Ralph Bellamy appeared in about a hundred movies, more or less, so generally speaking if you're trying to figure out if Bellamy was in anything prior to 1990 the answer is probably yes, but still.

Cousin Kate

Yes, the low point of the Georgette Heyer reread has arrived. Here, everyone, have the torture that is Cousin Kate. Getting through it required a total digression into Oz stuff, which I should apologize for but I'm not really sorry.

Lucuma

My poem Lucuma just went up at Polu Texni. Enjoy!

Lacuma

My poem Lucuma just went up at Polu Texni. Enjoy!

Arrow, season two

Quiet, please! I'm threatening!

- my new favorite line from Arrow.

Ok, so the trial part of this week's episode of Arrow frankly sucked even by the standards of Law As It Is Practiced, Or Not, on TV. I finished the episode convinced that every attorney in Starling City needed to be disbarred, like, now. But APART from that, this week's episode did something interesting that most genre shows don't do, so probably overly lengthy discussion of this under major spoiler cuts.


So, for those who have missed Arrow so far, the show's basic premise is this: billionaire and complete jerk Oliver Queen is shipwrecked on a supposedly secret island that turns out to be the convention center for all of the planet's Bad Guys and finds himself tortured, hit, tortured, hit, tortued, hit, betrayed, tortured, captured and so on, until finally he decides he has had enough and heads back to his hometown where, severely traumatized from all of the torturing, he resumes his role as Oliver Queen, billionaire playboy, attempting to re-establish his relationships with best friend Tommy, sister Thea and ex-girlfriend Laurel Lance while running around shooting at bad guys at night. All great fun, if not quite great television, except for one big problem: the co-lead and love interest, Laurel Lance.

Jennifer Crusie did an excellent job of discussing the problem here.

To sum up: on screen, this version of Laurel Lance didn't work.

At Worldcon no less than 11 people (I started to count) told me that they had stopped watching the show solely because Laurel was in it. The reasons slightly varied – some people, major Black Canary fans, were annoyed to offended to see their independent kickass martial arts heroine turned into an angsty lawyer. Pretty much every attorney was annoyed at the show's "legal" scenes (courtroom drama is not a strength of the show). Some people just said the love triangle set up between Oliver/Laurel/Tommy was so excruciatingly boring that they just stopped watching. A few people here and there defended Laurel, but for the most part, fandom hated her. People paying no attention to online fandom hated her.

The show runners paid attention.

And this season, they are doing something that few shows outside of the soap operas do: they are changing the love interest.

Can I just say, Amen, along with a bit of wow.

Shows rarely change the main love interest or even the main non-romantic pairing without good outside reasons, and by outside reasons I mean "reasons that require one person to leave the show." In general, this is a good thing: it allows relationships to develop, it allows writers to fall back on established situations when they need to fill a few moments (the writers for Friends blatantly stated that when stuck for a joke or needing to fill a plot bit, Ross and Rachel were always available). In some cases, it allows shows to proceed at a slow burn, increasing viewer investment in the relationship – assuming this does not reach annoying levels. (I am looking at you, the last few seasons of X-Files. GEESH.)

But it's only a good thing when the pairing works, romantically or otherwise. When it doesn't, it can cause major problems. In most cases, shows just end up getting cancelled early or falling into obscurity. In a few cases they end up on NBC which is desperate enough to keep them (hi, Grimm) especially if they have other things going on (again, hi, Grimm). In the worst case scenarios, they turn into Smallville.

Smallville very much haunts this show. A lot. Like Arrow, it's set in the DC universe. Also like Arrow, the main original love interest – Lana – did not work for the show. It was partly the actress, although she later turned out to be one of the few decent things on the otherwise absolutely terrible Beauty and the Beast, partly the setup, partly the relationship between the two actors which never quite jelled – and the presence of a rival relationship which did work, and moreover, contained a geeky character easy for the generally geeky audience to relate to.

But Smallville had one advantage: they could easily say, sure, this relationship doesn't work, but then again, it's not supposed to. For one thing, Clara, Lana and Chloe were all in high school, and breaking up high school romances for later real, adult relationships is easy enough. For a more important thing, everyone knew, from day one, that Clark would end up with Lois even if she was not in the first few seasons of the show. Clark and Lana don't work out? Not an issue. We haven't put together Clark and Chloe? We can't, because, Lois, and who wants Chloe hurt like that?

Arrow lacks this advantage. As various people kept noting last season, and even much of this season, ad nauseum, Laurel is meant to be the Black Canary, Oliver Queen's crime fighting partner and eventual marriage partner, with a decades old history. It was canon. It couldn't be broken.

So, good on Arrow for realizing that in this case, for whatever reason, canon wasn't working -- and breaking it.

But now, let's talk about a couple of things resulting from that break, shall we?

First the entirely good: bringing in Laurel's supposedly dead sister Sara as not really dead yet Black Canary. This character, unlike Laurel, does genuinely Cool Stuff. She has an electronic transmitter than emits some sort of sound thingy that conveniently knocks out all the bad guys while leaving Oliver upright. (Sometimes, you have to handwave.) She swings on ropes and swirls up poles and saves women and has taken in a street kid to mentor AND is still incredibly worried that her family will hate her because she's been forced to kill people. (Last night's episode also suggested that she's incredibly worried that her family will hate her because she's been resurrected from the dead.) She has a powerful backstory: after cheating on her own sister (bad!) with Oliver for, um, no apparent reason except Oliver's hot and rich and she's 19, so, well, ok, she nearly drowns, watches her boat sink down down down into the sea, and gets picked up by a group of insane people who are trying to create a new race of Super Powered Humans because Science, Man, and are experimenting on the Russian mob and THEN she's ended up getting trained by freaky assassins who love her so much they are willing to kill her and her entire family and Arrow which is kinda sweet. Ok, so when I type it out like that maybe "whacked" is a better word than "powerful," but this is a comic book show, so it's working.

In one particularly awesome scene she and Arrow exchanged weapons as they fought the bad guys after Arrow shot a grenade out of the sky (handwave! handwave!) and then tossed their weapons right back at each other. It was cool; it was competent; it showed that this Black Canary can both fight next to Arrow and do her own stuff when needed.

The actress playing this Black Canary is, in my opinion, mostly eh, but she does have amazing legs (given her costume, I'm positive this played part of the casting) and the storyline is compelling enough and gives her enough to do that she's been able to sell it.

That took care of the Black Canary issue.

Second, the also entirely good: keeping up the banter. The now increasingly charged moments. This is all very fun to watch.

And now, the potentially more serious negative for this season: all the damselling in distress.

Specifically:

Episode one: Oliver has to rescue a kidnapped Thea, who was at her job at the club; also, Oliver has to swing on a rope to rescue Felicity from a land mine.

Episode two: No damsels in distress; oddly, the weakest episode of the season.

Episode three: Oliver and Sara have to rescue a kidnapped Laurel, who was kidnapped because she's the daughter of the cop who arrested the bad guy years back.

Episode four: Roy has to rescue Sin from a hail of bullets; Sara does fight beside Oliver but there's suggestions of past trauma.

Episode five: Oliver and Quentin rush to Sara's rescue and end up fighting beside her. In flashbacks Sara is kidnapped and Oliver wants to rescue her; damsel reversing since the kidnapping is not a rescue but the start to brainwashing and Oliver's rescue is a trap.

Episode six: This one is a bit tricky. Ostensibly Diggle has to go rescue Lila, who is all chained up and cold in a very mean Russian jail, classic damsel in distress. However, given Lila's position as an agent for a mysterious government agency and what else Diggle finds in the prison and Isobel's insistence on going along and her sudden, um, distraction of Oliver just as Oliver's ready to head to the rescue...Anyway, let's just say that portions of this episode smack of Setup, and by Setup, I mean, Lila setting up the entire scene. So...maybe damsel.

Episode seven: Felicity heads off to investigate Count Vertigo and gets kidnapped. Classic damsel in distress, right down to Felicity shaking and crying (the episode suggests but does not show that she has been injected with the Vertigo drug) and needing Oliver to get her out, and also in the process revealing Oliver's secret identity to the bad guy not that this was difficult like Oliver DO SOMETHING MORE THAN EYESHADOW already (and yes, I know the mask is coming in future episodes.)

So...at least four, arguably five, depending upon how you read episode six, arguably six depending on how you read episode five, classic damsel in distress moments.

This is definitely a problem, especially since all of these moments are generally meant to develop the character of Oliver; about half also develop the character of Sara. It touches dangerously close to the "Women in Refrigerators" trope, where a woman is injured/maimed/killed solely to give the male hero Feels and an Inspiration to Change His Life and Chase Down the Bad Guys.

Sure, it's mitigated by multiple factors, including:

1. The actual fridged character on the show was a guy at the end of last season.

2. The hero has been repeatedly tortured, both physically and psychologically, by other men and, this season, by at least one woman.

3. The "sweeping through on a rope and pulling Felicity off a land mine" was considerably less of a "damsel in a distress" and considerably more of "how can we get Felicity underneath a shirtless Oliver" scene.

4. At least one of the damsel in distress rescues is portrayed as bad for both the rescuer and the damsel.

5. Two rescues happened because the women were choosing to do heroic things, putting themselves in danger either to find assassins in Russia (Lila) or more about a drug that was making hundreds of people in the city seriously ill (Felicity). Felicity later apologizes to Oliver for putting him in a position where he needed to rescue her, and arguably some of her tears may have come from knowing that she was putting Oliver in danger and knowing that because she tried to do something without backup, she had just revealed Oliver's secret identity, though to be fair, she had no real reason to suspect that Count Vertigo would be hanging out in a flu vaccine van. (However, seriously, Felicity, REMOVE YOUR WORK BADGE if you are not coming into the office. Secret identities! Secret identities!)

5. This last rescue was played not so much to develop Oliver as hero but to develop the Oliver/Felicity romance, and develop both characters. In fact, arguably, the whole scene played as a step BACKWARDS for Oliver's Development as Hero, given that he had to retreat from his more heroic "I won't kill, just disarm and save" to "sure, I'll send this guy flying through an office high rise and incidentally give the police MORE reason to figure out that I'm actually Arrow." But it also allowed the show to establish that Oliver can and will do anything to protect Felicity. Notably, in an earlier episode, Oliver refused to cross that same moral line against the guy threatening Laurel. Don't think that wasn't noticed on Twitter and elsewhere, show. But I digress.

Also, it occurs to me as I type that Felicity arguably got herself into such a dangerous situation because she was still recovering from Oliver's "I can't be with someone I could care about" line from the previous episode – and because she is still trying to prove herself to Oliver. The "what it is going to take to impress you guys" line sorta reinforced that.

Still, this show is edging very close to a fairly dangerous line of propelling the plot forward by having the love interest – or women in general – in constant danger to give Oliver Manpain and allow her to become more angsty (it's the CW. Angst! Angst!) or heroic.

Unless, of course, we get a scene where Felicity saves Arrow.

I can hope.