BLACK WIDOW: U r 2 pure to understand my dark edgy ways.
CAPTAIN AMERICA: No I believe in u!
BLACK WIDOW: Imagine that you are the damsel in distress—
CAPTAIN AMERICA: I can TOTALLY imagine that.
BLACK WIDOW: Could I be your TRUE KNIGHT?
CAPTAIN AMERICA: Yes absolutely ten four A plus would damsel again. I realise my misgivings based on your roguish spy ways were ill-founded and that you are a truly honourable lady.
I thought Captain America 2 was awesome because it gave this fun arc to Natasha (morally ambiguous super-competent character, searching for redemption, despairing of own darkness) and also depicted this comradeship, of two people who are very different learning to trust each other absolutely and fight together against evil, which is most often given to two guys. (Indeed, it happened between Captain America and Iron Man in Avengers. I liked it more here though, because there was no dismissal and no annoyance, but serious concerns about morality and real efforts to connect plus extensive sassing.)
I liked Natasha in Iron Man 2 but really loved her in Avengers and now loved her even more in Captain America 2 (which I largely saw for her) which I feel proves there should be a Black Widow movie. Also it proves something I strongly believe in generally, in media, which is that no representation is the great evil. Imperfect representation leads to improving representation, while no representation just leads to miles and miles of nothing.
I had a desire after Avengers to see Captain America buy that dame a milkshake, which none of my friends understood, but I feel that now it was clearly a foreseeing on my part that these two characters would work excellently together. I am a prophet.
And it was nice that it was explicitly a relationship of comrades. Steve doesn’t trust Natasha because she’s super sexy (though she is—her dark past is never treated as a sexy time either) or because he lurves her (he’s the one who, when she says ‘Who do you want me to be?’ asks ‘How about a friend?’) He trusts her because he already knows that she’s smart and capable and he sees now that she cares. And their very different perspectives end up not being so incompatible after all.
… given all that, I still wanted them to make out for real, because I am a monster.
Here’s some phrases I notice adult media likes to use when they’re taking about YA fiction:
“the teen experience”
“the teen voice”
“the teen mind”
They use it like so:
”_______ writes so well about the teen experience.”
”_______ easily recalls the teen voice.”
”_______ has a good understanding of the teen mind.”
As if there is something homogenous about teens. As if the introduction of hormones somehow levels the playing field and erases every social, personality, and experiential difference lived between the ages of 13-19.
There is no “teen experience.” Or if there is, it’s about as homogenous as the “adult experience.”
Grown-ups, can we kindly stop being condescending to the nascent grown-ups?
vegan-yums’ blog makes me angry. (I’m not actually angry.) Also, I usually don’t even understand the things she posts. I feel like I have to help these little turtles find their way safely back to the ocean. It seems that real to me.
I have found the best coffeeshop. There is a delorean and Han Solo and ET and a triforce on the coffee grinder and Hobbes and a MLP and a cute little ewok and old school Nintendo games you can play and a huge cross-stitched video game thing on the wall. I will never leave here, okay bye.
I could learn to drink coffee under these arrangements. (Actually, I couldn’t. But I would try so hard.)
You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it’s hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it’s better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can’t write anybody’s book but your own.
Yes! This is up there with the Amy Poehler thing about doing things right now, before you’re ready, because great people do things before they are ready.
This is the hardest blog I’ve ever attempted to write. For the better part of eight months, I have been struggling under the thumb of a rather intense depression. This is a monster I’ve battled many…
I dislike the phrase ‘Internet friends,’ because it implies that people you know online aren’t really your friends, that somehow the friendship is less real or meaningful to you because it happens through Skype or text messages. The measure of a friendship is not its physicality but its significance. Good friendships, online or off, urge us toward empathy; they give us comfort and also pull us out of the prisons of our selves
John Green - (from the introduction of “This Star Won’t Go Out” by Esther Earl)
