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The 13th Doctor: It shouldn’t matter, but it does.
Carrie Fisher. Robin Wright. Gal Gadot. Daisy Ridley. Melissa McCarthy & Leslie Jones & Kate McKinnon & Kristen Wigg.
Jodie Whittaker.
It shouldn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter, but it goddamn well does.
You know why I chose the women I did, up above? You know why I didn’t include Weaver & Hamilton & Theron on that list?
Because Ripley and Connor and Furiosa were given to us. They were put on the table by filmmakers who said either “it doesn’t matter if this character’s a woman or a man,” or who specifically chose a woman as the vehicle for the main story. Alien & Terminator were always ours. We didn’t have to ask, much less plead and beg, for Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor. We weren’t looking for Furiosa, and Theron came out of nowhere the same way Weaver & Hamilton did.
But Carrie Fisher? Robin Wright? Yeah, Princess Leia & the Princess Bride were integral to their stories, but Buttercup was a pretty passive observer in her own story and Leia wasn’t there FOR GIRLS. She was there as the token female. The fact that she had an important role & agency is almost beside the point. I read something recently–maybe in Empire Magazine–where someone said something like “If you think about it, Star Wars is really Leia’s story,” and all I could think was WOULDN’T IT HAVE BEEN AMAZING IF IT HAD BEEN FILMED THAT WAY?
So General Antiope? General Organa? I feel like we *fought* for them. Diana? Rey? I feel like they’re from us saying “we want this so much, we deserve this, we hold up half the fucking sky, people.” An all-women Ghostbusters team? We kept saying “oh god please we want this this would be so awesome.” And so now, a female Doctor? It feels like another one we fought for.
And it shouldn’t have to. We shouldn’t have to be pleading for 1/13th of the pie (or less). We shouldn’t have to be THIS HAPPY to get it. And yet I am.
And I’m also SO ANGRY that it takes so little, such a crumb, to make me THIS HAPPY, when it shouldn’t even be a conversation.
And none of that even STARTS to touch on how 8 of the 9 (or 11/12, depending on how you wanna count it) women I’ve talked about are white ladies.
I don’t want white women to be the only ones gaining ground here. I don’t want increments. We don’t NEED increments. The actors are there. Storm Reid proves it. Zendaya proves it. Hannah John-Kamen & Frankie Adams prove it. And I want to see women of color in all these big amazing roles and films too. I don’t want this to just be a moment for white girls and indistinguishable blondes.
I want more, god damn it. I want it all, for all of us. #GirlPower
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Shamrokon!
Shamrokon was a lovely, fun, totally exhausted weekend. Not so much exhaust*ing* as exhaust*ed*; for some of the attendees it was the 3rd con weekend in a row, and for lots of them it was the 2nd. It turns out that’s a lot. :)
I myself was on three panels (all of which went pretty well), helped judge the Golden Blasters, which are one of my very favourite parts of the current Irish fandom scene, and threw a Let Them Eat Cake party on Friday night.
The biggest mistake of the cake party was not limiting people to only two slices before they had to go to the back of the line, because although we started with this:
(From bottom to top, left to right: vegan/gluten-free peanut butter brownies & carrot cake; gluten-free chocolate hazelnut cake with chocolate ganache & lemon polenta cake (compliments of Susan Connolly); plates (the round white thing mid-table :)), diabetic-safe chocolate cake; Welsh cakes (compliments of Catherine Sharp), lemon cake; red devil’s food cake & more plates; baklava (compliments of Ted), German chocolate cupcakes & pecan sour cream cake.)then this happened:
and then there was this:
while the line was, I’m afraid, still out the door. So I learned something, not, I said, that I was going to do this again, a statement which was not helped by Ted making lists about things he’d do differently next time and ultimately, as it turned out, not helped by people having met me and therefore apparently totally not believing that I would not do this again. :)
Despite running out of cake–oh, and there was fudge:
–anyway, despite running out of cake (and fudge), it went well and was a lot of fun and watching people swoon was pretty great. :)
I also got Lawrence Watt-Evans to sign both THE MISENCHANTED SWORD and his latest book, A YOUNG MAN WITHOUT MAGIC, and got to hang out and talk with him (& he wants one of the cake recipes :)) and with Laura Anne Gilman, who was, most splendidly, over for the weekend and the source of a wonderful lunchtime conversation on Saturday (I still owe you five quid, Suri). I caught up with a few other people, but–in true con fashion–TOTALLY FAILED to catch up with many others, including Charlie Stross, for whom I had specifically made one of the cakes. I believe his slice of it was delivered this afternoon by Kate, though, so whew. :)
I also managed to catch–or more likely, finally succumb to–some degree of con crud. After a month of travel and conventions I thought maybe I was going to get away scot free, but it seems not. Late Saturday afternoon my throat began hurting badly, so instead of staying to watch Doctor Who with 300 of my closest friends, I cut out a little early and stopped for the god-awful Chinese herbal tea I usually take when I’ve got a cold coming on. A few cups of that seems to have wreaked havoc on the cold, and we watched Doctor Who at home, and enjoyed it quite considerably.
At the closing ceremonies, as co-chair Brian Nisbet said, “We’ve done Europe, next, THE WORLD!” Dublin 2019 rah rah rah!
(pictures mostly nabbed from my friend Shelly, but i don’t remember who took the fudge pic!)
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a TBRS year
I think I’m declaring 2014 as a To-Be-Read-Shelf year. I can read or re-read anything I own, but no buying new books until I’ve cleared out most of what I’ve collected. (EasterCon and World Fantasy added an awful lot to the TBR shelf.) Possibly I’ll go so far as to go around and make a list of what’s *on* the shelf, to keep a sort of focused order to things. Or not.
I’m still going to do the GGK re-read, starting in January with the Fionavar Tapestry, and think it would be swell if people did that read-along with me. :)
*laughs* A spirited discussion about some Guardian list of the 1000 novels you should read came up with a more honest “Here’s a list of 20 books I wish everybody would read so I could talk with them about them” suggestion. The above paragraph reminded me of that. :)
I’m wibbling ferociously about the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun party. On one hand I really want to do it. On the other, weekends are as close as I’ve got to dedicated writing time, and Fred is going to fly to Ireland and kill me if I don’t have STONE’S THROE done by Jan 15. As well he should. :/
Wholock: fan made Sherlock meets the Doctor video. Pretty sure I want to watch this, but not right now.
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Day of the Doctor
The more I think about it, the more I like it.
Behind the cut it is rife with spoilers.
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four things make a performance post
I admit I’m taking a certain amount of glee from watching the horror of the Red Wedding unfold across my Facebook page (mostly Facebook; in other places the geek quotient is higher and more people knew what was coming). Bahahaha. :)
Oh, I forgot to mention the ridiculously cool birthday present I got. One of my friends is a performance artist, and was wracking his brain to come up with a gift for me, and suddenly thought, “I could do an in-home 5 minute performance!” And he did, much to my delight, since as it turns out his June performance piece is, um, the same day as the Bon Jovi concert that I bought tickets for months before Fergus’s performance was announced (“I knew Jon was going to interfere with this somehow,” he muttered).
Matt Smith is stepping down as the Doctor in the Christmas Special. That’s fine; whomever is the Doctor next will at least be fine, as Smith was, and will perhaps be wonderful, as Ecclestone and Tennant were. I’m much more interested in whether Moffat is also stepping down, because if he doesn’t, the new Doctor is going to be saddled with the same storytelling problems Matt’s run has had.
The Irish Film Institute is screening Before Sunrise and Before Sunset over the next several days, in lead-up to Before Midnight‘s opening in a couple of weeks. The Lighthouse Cinema said they might do a marathon, and I’d *rather* see the marathon, all 3 movies right smack in a row on the big screen, but they haven’t mentioned whether they’re really doing it or not (I’ve asked!), and I don’t want to miss the first two on the big screen if they’re NOT, but I don’t really want to watch them both twice in two weeks if they DO, so woe! Woe is me! Whatever shall I do!
I guess this is four things make a performance post, since I can’t think of anything else to add in under the heading right now. :)
