cimorene: Spock with his hands on his hips, looking extremely put out (frowny face)
...I haven't hunted it down yet; I just saw the announcement on Wax's Twitter feed.

In all fairness, I have to say I didn't have high hopes for this show in advance because I've been disappointed in every new Star Trek venture in recent years. I'm glad they're making them, but they aren't leaning in the directions of what I like about Star Trek, and in addition to that they've taken a looser approach to contradicting existing canon and characterization than I can really understand and sympathize with (because you could always just NOT do that and then it would all make a lot more sense... but I'm not going to write that post because it's obviously not for me). And more importantly, perhaps, their wardrobe and makeup design have been deeply disappointing to me because for the most part, alien makeup design aside, they've been modern-day trendy/sexy/pretty in a way that not only doesn't make logical sense in the verse of the show... but also isn't hokey and silly in an entertaining and interesting way.

Anyway, though, every new show that comes along will presumably have to hire some new writers, so there's always a new chance that I'll like it. I suppose hoping for better costume design when they've got a multi-show thing going right now would have been pointless anyway: they're bound to stick to the same philosophy that's already going in Discovery.

Right. What was I saying? Oh, yeah.

Somewhat uniquely, now, we have the original Star Trek pilot "The Cage" and the later recut two-part episode "The Menagerie" in TOS canon showing flashbacks to Pike's bridge with Number One and Spock serving on it, and we see Number One (and also Yeoman Colt) wearing the exact same uniforms as Pike and Spock - knee boots, capri pants, gold velour tunic shirts with shawl collars. There aren't any skorts in the original pilot; those came later (after the studio made Roddenberry remove Majel Barrett from her position of authority and reduce the number of women on the bridge). The uniforms weren't gendered, and they looked great, so I can't help thinking it's an ominous sign that the teaser image shows Pike and Spock wearing standard TOS-era uniforms and Number One apparently in some sort of dress or tunic with princess seams and black side panels that thus outline the point of the breast on both sides. Is there even a shred of a legitimate reason for this? I cynically doubt it. Of course, it's possible that I'm just being overly suspicious, but then... it's been so disappointing before.

Honestly, I'm not sure if I have the emotional energy to try to watch this when it comes out. I wasn't emotionally prepared to attempt to watch Picard when Wax wanted to see it (with her lower emotional investment in TNG, but also she just works completely differently from me and she always wants to see something new even if she knows it's going to suck, and also she has an appetite to watch like what feels like 150 hours or so of tv per week), and I ended up seeing the second half or so over her shoulder while she watched it. I think I watched... about 30-40% of the last few eps before deciding I didn't want to see the rest.

And of course, I hated the first season of the She-Ra reboot so much it took me like a year just to calm down enough to finish watching it, and I eventually formally gave myself permission to not watch the remaining seasons. (I was more fundamentally emotionally tied to She-Ra than to Star Trek, though. She-Ra was definitional for my tiny identity and fannish life from like, age 5 to... 8 or so? While my interest in TNG was strongest, probably, as a preteen. Though I did already like it as a kid. I definitely remember that when we finally found a convention to go to in the South, age... 11 or 10?... my primary mission, apart from books, was to get a Troi action figure, followed by a Data, and then a Picard.)
cimorene: cartoony drawing of a woman's head in profile giving dubious side-eye (Default)
This is crossposted from Tumblr here for reasons of being able to find it later. Note: some images NSFW. Further note: ~3000 words, very image-heavy; they're not all loading for me rn, so maybe the Tumblr version is a better bet. I've been writing this in my head for two years and I finally told myself I can't make any new sideblogs until I post it, so here it is.


thesis

I spent way too long making this graphic because of the fonts and colors, but it’s a simple claim.

The visual design of He-Man, the show, was deliberately a combination of sci-fi (the look borrowed mostly from Star Wars, then huge in toys after 1977′s A New Hope) and fantasy (He-Man himself based on the Conan art of Frank Frazetta; the setting, “Etheria”, drawn from pop culture images of King Arthur’s Camelot). Therefore, STAR WARS + (CAMELOT/MOVIES + PRINCE VALIANT) + CONAN THE BARBARIAN = HE-MAN.

She-Ra was conceived as a spinoff of He-Man, and the visual design of the technology and medieval-inspired settings were carried over, but the character designs were created to appeal to girls based on a combination of fitness/ice skating fashion and the iconic pop cultural conception of Brunnhilde and the Valkyries from Wagner’s Ring cycle operas: HE-MAN + BRUNNHILDE + FITNESS FASHION = SHE-RA.

Don’t worry (you weren’t worried)! I have receipts.

in this essay

squad goals do you think this is enough leg warmth?

But actually, let’s start at the beginning: the creation of He-Man, the toy.

Read more... )
cimorene: painting of a glowering woman pouring a thin stream of glowing green liquid from an enormous bowl (misanthropy)
There are a couple of new outfits which are as cool as the old ones or cooler, a lot of Teamwork, and something something Catra gaining power within the Horde, all as expected. There's at least one shot of Frosta doing stuff onscreen, which is definitely a plus, and at least one clip suggesting Swiftwind will get a bigger role with more talking, which I was hoping for.

There's also a continuation of some genuinely funny quips, which is a good sign.

On the other hand, the trailer is also still full of dialogue that could, to put it mildly, be better. But then to be fair, it's never gonna be as bad as the original show's dialogue, haha. (I'm used to thinking it's a pretty bad sign if a trailer's got a quantity of bad lines: did they not even have enough good ones to fill the trailer?)

The edges of the art style that I was kinda hoping somebody was just in a hurry with and would smooth out when they got the chance remain looking, to my eye, pretty sloppy.

We didn't see any hints of Adora and Catra's character arcs or interpersonal development, which would have been really exciting; but I still expect to see them in the show: that's the kind of thing you'd want to keep up your sleeve.

I'm going to watch, but I didn't really feel like I had fully recovered from the first season yet before and this didn't change my mind.
cimorene: painting of a glowering woman pouring a thin stream of glowing green liquid from an enormous bowl (misanthropy)

Authority and responsibility, perfectionism and prickliness, vigilance and security, and the 'golden child'/scapegoat dynamic



I've been working on this for almost a month and I've spent so long editing that I could've written three more posts instead. Enough. It's a bit like three different posts, but I decided to keep the trauma topic together.

Adora and Catra are harmed by their shared experience in separate but related ways, and the parallels between them are used to illustrate the abuse they went through and how it affects them. ...*Most* of these are successful. )
cimorene: cartoony drawing of a woman's head in profile giving dubious side-eye (brb)
In She-Ra (1985), our heroine was always raised by Hordak and Shadow Weaver in the Fright Zone surrounded by the Horde, and this was not going to be a healthy childhood any way you look at it, but the show didn't really deal with that. Read more... )

And in a change that I'm actually very excited about, the new Reboot She-Ra has made a real effort to explore all this, showing both Adora and Catra's traumatic childhoods and also showing that those experiences are still affecting them in the show's present timeline.

So excited that I took like a month to finish this next post about it (haha...).
cimorene: cartoony drawing of a woman's head in profile giving dubious side-eye (magic)
I have strong feelings about the original She-Ra cartoon, even though it's bad in many ways. I was introduced to it when I was 3 or 4, and it played an important role in my childhood because I rewatched it on VHS frequently, for comfort or when I wanted to watch something about female characters.

Even though She-Ra always read as an adult to me, I identified with her so strongly that at 4 I reportedly held up an imaginary sword in defiance and shouted her transformation words when my mom tried to put me in timeout. At 18, shortly after I discovered slash, I wrote a couple of rather purple pieces of f/f fanfiction of my favorite characters (in spite of the fact that I wasn't aware of any fandom or potential audience for it).

The fact that I love the She-Ra world, yet find the original show only semi-watchable even with nostalgia filters engaged, means I've been wishing futilely that someone would reboot the franchise for almost 20 years. I've been on tenterhooks since the initial announcement of the reboot and I watched half of the series on the release day (13 Nov 2018).

Review: Some of the ways She-Ra and the Princesses of Power is better than its forebear and a few differences for discussion )
cimorene: painting of a glowering woman pouring a thin stream of glowing green liquid from an enormous bowl (misanthropy)
Right now while [personal profile] waxjism's & my 6 niblings are between the ages of 4 and 14, her family and their families operate on an Every Other Year Plan & this is her immediate family's year, so this year we will all celebrate Xmas Eve together (which is the main holiday in the Nordic countries). It's a Lot. ) And in addition to the things I've got to plan and prepare for all that, last year I made a Solemn Intention that this year I was going to actually learn to make the GOOD glögg (a Nordic traditional mulled wine beverage that is ubiquitous this time of year - like gingerbread and glögg is the special in every cafe all month), because the stuff you 'make' at home is actually just fruit punch concentrate with berries that you heat on the stovetop with wine or liquor in it and then top with raisins and almonds, and it doesn't really taste more than slightly like the good stuff. Of course, anyone who knows how mulling works has already realized, as I did when I tried to look it up, how ambitious that idea was. So that's not happening this year, although we may try purchasing a more expensive brand of the kind you heat up at home - maybe that will help.

Today (or rather, this week) I'm still knitting kind of furiously because I decided I wanted to give a hand-knitted sweater to the 11 9(?)-year-old, and I (OF COURSE) made a significant error at the beginning and it was the ONE part I didn't painstakingly check three times as I went, and then my brain did that helpful thing where I count the stitches and my brain decides to tell me it was the number I expected even when it wasn't, so I was almost completely finished with this sweater and had to unravel both sleeves and the top half and do them over again. (Fortunately, this is a much smaller sweater than any of the adult ones I've made. But it's still taken about a day per sleeve TWICE, and redoing the top half will probably take another day or two.)

After the knitting of the sweater* there's

  • one remaining child to knit for or if I run out of time, to buy something for

  • A bunch of cards to make - i.e. calligraphy with metallic ink, not TOO time-consuming, but it will take a few hours (I bought a ton of black card blanks and envelopes last year thinking it was universal, but now I really want to do them on red or green)

  • Fudge to make & cookies to bake for the Xmas Eve feast: sugar cookies at minimum, but I like to make brown sugar nut kiss meringues (meringues in general are Wax's favorite and these have always been a specialty of my mom's) too, and a third kind - maybe peanut butter oatmeal or green tea sugar cookies - last year's mocha espresso shortbreads were surprisingly a failure! - or maybe something with peppermint candy crush? I've got a bunch of it in the cupboard that I never got around to using.

    (I'm thinking of mail ordering red and green glitter sugar from a party shop because nobody ever has it locally and I'm tired of traditional frosting and even more tired of painting with colored egg yolks)



Anyway, only after I'm confident that I will finish all of THAT on time can I dive into trying to install and test out all this new federated fandom stuff - Beaker and Rotonde and Hubzilla and Mastodon etc (I've been getting links via [personal profile] cesperanza and the last was a long detailed post by [personal profile] impertinence).

And I've also got a review post of s1 of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power only halfway finished, because after about 12 hours of writing I realized I couldn't dedicate myself to it until the knitting was done.


*I've already knitted presents for my parents - last month, because the mail to North America takes a few weeks this time of year.
cimorene: cartoony drawing of a woman's head in profile giving dubious side-eye (Default)
Well. The new She-Ra trailer looks…

  • The new voice actor for Adora and She-Ra sounds younger. This is good, or even essential, because she always seemed like a totally mature adult - from the perspective of my fanatic six-year-old self’s memories: mom-aged, not babysitter-aged. (And some of my babysitters were grad students, so she gave me an impression of being in her thirties minimum.) On the other hand, Melendy Britt has a beautiful, mellifluous voice that I always loved, and thinking about it now I’m getting all nostalgic… but the new one seems like a more appropriate character choice. ➕!


  • Adding a whole childhood friends plot to Adora and Catra to create their later rivalry makes perfect sense, and feels like it was missing from the original. On the other hand, some of the clips in the trailer made the dialogue there sound on the bad side of cheesy and melodramatic, even for kids’ writing, so I’ll just cross my fingers for that. ➕/❓


  • There’s a visibly great variety of phenotype (racial? But they’re aliens on an alien world, & race is a social construct, so maybe not racial) and body type diversity, plus less stereotypical hyperfemininity, in the secondary female characters. HUGE ➕


  • Angella and Hordak both look significantly cooler, but Shadow Weaver looks and sounds significantly less cool, and she was always my favorite villain. (At least on the show: I don’t know if they even made a Weaver toy? She wouldn’t’ve worked very well given her garb. When playing with the toys, I usually didn’t make Catra or the pink cat steed a villain.) (I’m still mad that the toy cat was pink back then. Even madder than about Swift Wind) ➕➕➖


  • I love everything about Adora’s new outfit - her hotpants+turtleneck always bothered me, even at age 6 (if your legs are comfortable your arms are hot and if your arms are comfortable your legs are cold!!!) - but I HATE Adora’s AND She-Ra’s boots. It’s not the design - the height and lines and colors: a million times better than the heeled ones, obviously, and that part looks cool - it’s the TOE SHAPE. Why are they like clown shoes, or like… those upturned bubble-toed steel-toed rave boots??? 👌👌70% 😍, 30%👎😐


  • Glimmer’s and Bow’s lines! The dialogue was not great in the original. In fact, it’s tough to even rewatch as an adult, it’s so painful. Even as an older child rewatching until my VHS wore out, I started to get really sick of how stupid they often got. They were intended as comedic and often wise-cracking sidekicks obviously, but they mostly failed to achieve that effect. A HUGE part of that was the stupid Superman & Wonder Woman-esque ‘secret identity’ plot. At least she didn’t LOOK the same when she switched, but their failure to figure it out made them look terrible after all the near misses and convenient appearances. Dispensing with that entirely is a good move. 😍


  • I’m not into Frosta’s outfit redesign, although I give them points for including a vague nod to the idea that it’s cold around her. Maybe when we see more I’ll come around. (Frosta was my favorite side character.) ➖❓
cimorene: painting of a glowering woman pouring a thin stream of glowing green liquid from an enormous bowl (misanthropy)
When I was four I went to a preschool where there were exactly three tricycles, which were free for everyone's use when we went to the playground on a first-come-first-served basis, and which everyone always wanted. There was also a girl my age who was noisy and about half again as big as me, who in my estimation might have been a nice person on the inside and seemed to want to be friends with everybody, only this was not to be, because more than she wanted to be friends she wanted to pinch everyone else. Nobody likes being pinched. And you can't really trust a pincher: you never know when she'll strike again.

On a rare occasion when I managed to reach a tricycle first (because I'm usually not very fast at anything) and took it for a spin around the playground, Pinching Girl (I've forgotten her name) begged me to let her have my turn instead but I refused. She subsequently ran after me, chasing me in rings around the playground importuning in every way she knew how. Our conversaton went like this:

PINCHER: I'll be your friend!
ME, apologetically: Um, no...
PINCHER: I'll buy you Barbie! Can I if I buy you Barbie?
ME: No...
PINCHER: Do you like Barbies?
ME: No...
PINCHER: I'll buy your favorite!
ME: No.
PINCHER: What's your favorite? [With the air of producing a clincher:] I'LL BUY YOU SHE-RA!
[I'd never heard of She-Ra. I wondered what she was saying and whether I'd heard correctly.]
PINCHER, sensing a hesitation: I'll buy you She-Ra! I'll buy you BIG, BIG She-Ra!


She continued to run after me, stretching her arms out to their fullest extent to indicate the size of the She-Ra she would buy me, and repeating herself until I was completely sure of the pronunciation. I asked someone what She-Ra was when we came inside, wondering what could be so terribly wonderful.

And that's how I found out about She-Ra.


Cim's Lifelong Idol


I often lamented that they didn't make BIG, BIG ones, though. A life-size She-Ra would have been awesome.
cimorene: cartoony drawing of a woman's head in profile giving dubious side-eye (mischief)
It's sparklingly sunny today. Beautiful!

Tatu's new Russian album Весёлые улыбки (Vesyolye Ulybki) came today. Nice! It turned out to be less trouble (and almost as cheap) to import a hard copy via a marketplace seller than to figure out the Amazon digital download system. (Marketing fail there, Amazon.)

I actually got a Flickr due to Coraline.




I started crocheting a sweater for her out of embroidery floss last night, until I ran out of embroidery floss, that is. I'll have to see if I have any appropriately thin yarn to work with. The body's 100% bendy Gumby stuff with wires threaded through, and the hands and feet pop on and off. The faces come off too which is really cool, but less necessary. Here's a great Flickr group with lots of pictures of the dolls, like some awesome photoshoots (Hogwarts Coraline, Corambo, the view), and some people who have made clothes for her (this tiny sweater and this one).


My old Canon Powershot wasn't that great, and used batteries at a fantastic rate, but at least it ran on rechargeable AAs: my new Nikon Coolpix is very nice, but after six months its battery is already no longer reliably holding a charge, and apparently the industry has moved on to running all point-and-shoot digicams of its type off of specialised batteries that they discontinue regularly. Which kind of pisses me off since you could buy a new digital camera (though not as nice as this one) for the ridiculous cost of the battery.

Carmela was here yesterday and stared raptly at She-Ra while fondling my She-Ra doll, which I took out of the box when I suddenly realised I was being oppressed by the inability to pose her. It's not a very friendly doll, though - it barely moves. More of a sculpture. Which just annoys me because the ones I played with as a kid weren't much better. They should have been more Barbie-ish - more poseable. And with better clothes. I want to make her one, but have a feeling that making dolls is more complex than it looks...
cimorene: cartoony drawing of a woman's head in profile giving dubious side-eye (Default)
She really knows how to make an entrance
She really knows how to make an entrance.
cimorene: cartoony drawing of a woman's head in profile giving dubious side-eye (determined)
funny pictures
moar funny pictures


Can She-Ra beat all four levels of the Video Game Dimension? (Yes. Although she uses a cheat to get out...)
cimorene: cartoony drawing of a woman's head in profile giving dubious side-eye (bend it like beckham)
Also he's bantering about dancing the whole time and then the trooper's like
cimorene: cartoony drawing of a woman's head in profile giving dubious side-eye (Default)


I was listening to the commentary on the first Sea Hawk episode and J. Michael Stracyznski related how they originally brought in consultants to develop a concept for a He-Man spinoff aimed at girls.

"You can't hit anything and you can't kick anything," said the consultants, "for girls. You can pirouette gracefully, but you can't kick."

"What did you say?" asked the host of the commentary track.

"As soon as the consultants were gone I turned to someone or other," said JMS, "and said, 'You know, I think we should bring in some girls... to kick the consultants.'"

Amen.

I noticed in an early episode Frosta spent the night in Adora's tent - surprise support for my crack otp, yay! But I had forgotten the Sea Hawk episodes. And srsly... him? He's so lame. And what's with the stupid hair and mustache? >|

brb

22 Jan 2008 09:32 pm
cimorene: cartoony drawing of a woman's head in profile giving dubious side-eye (fallen)
funny pictures
moar funny pictures
cimorene: cartoony drawing of a woman's head in profile giving dubious side-eye (Default)
funny pictures
moar funny pictures


I had to make at least one lolCatra. I promise, no more of that joke unless the caps are really funny.
cimorene: cartoony drawing of a woman's head in profile giving dubious side-eye (stfu)
So the other day I went to see a psychologist and on the way there, I discovered my bus card was out of money. I can't speak Finnish well enough to talk to a bus driver (they rarely speak English), and for the record, I never want to repeat the long conversation that I didn't understand again. >.< So after the session (I enjoy speaking to psychologists, but it leaves me emotionally exhausted) I went into town and walked around with the [insert ominous music] BIG CROWDS OF PEOPLE for a couple of hours.

Then, of course, when I came home I was emotionally exhausted even more because of the Crowds of People Panic I'd been holding back, but I was too keyed up to sleep right away. I stayed up till the usual time, but then when I fell asleep, I slept for almost sixteen hours and woke up at 5 pm. I wanted to fix my sleep schedule, so I stayed up all night and took a brief nap yesterday morning before we watched Torchwood (thumbs-up) and then I went to bed early, at about seven pm. Perfect! Right? Wrong.

Because even though I woke up when daylight first came through the curtains, probably at around 9 am which was when I planned, the Crazy was lying on top of me, and I fell asleep petting her and woke up again at 1 pm. So I've slept this time for even longer and am groggier than ever, because the pressure changed while I was asleep and it's raining with a dense, foggy mist that fills the whole sky with pearl-grey so I can hardly see the buildings across the street through it. That sort of weather always makes me fuzzy-headed.

Here, have some She-Ra.

She-Ra turns Hordak's laser-bubble blaster on him!


The weapon that produced that bubble is Hordak's diabolical "Laser-Bubble Blaster". Horrible! Absolutely horrible! And no doubt after he caught people in his clear floating bubbles, he was planning to put them in uncomfortable cells, or even give them as slaves to his eeeeeevil allies, who would make them sit on the floor all day without a bath like the Queen of Harpies did to Queen Angella.
cimorene: cartoony drawing of a woman's head in profile giving dubious side-eye (lesbian)


The best part of watching She-Ra yesterday was when some troopers asked Hordak if they should take the prisoners to a cell, and he snarled, "Yeeeeeeeeeeees! An uncomfortable one!"

That is true evil, dudes.
cimorene: cartoony drawing of a woman's head in profile giving dubious side-eye (love)
A box of She-Ra DVDs came in the mail today. ♥ My hero!

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