beehammer

New fic up on AO3!

Wed, 03 Apr 2019 00:45:12 GMT

"Overclocked"

Bruce Wayne/Hal Jordan enemies-to-lovers fic; 14k & rated M.

There were worse things in the world than spending three days working through the lingering effects of Scarecrow’s latest rampage, Hal was sure. For instance, having to ask Bruce for help. Also on the list? Having to deal with his feelings.

Hal looked at the contraption in his hand. It reminded him of nothing so much as an epi-pen, which he also had no idea how to use. “So you just… have this. On hand. Ready to go.”

“One doesn’t earn the coveted title of Mr. Contingency Plan by being unprepared,” Bruce told him, and Hal winced. He hadn’t meant for Bruce to overhear that, had he? Then again, he’d said it loud enough that any Martians left kicking it in their ruins had probably heard him, over Barry’s strenuous and utterly futile attempts to get him to pipe down, so he hadn’t exactly not meant for Bruce to hear it, either. “Instructions are on the package, and there’s a bathroom just down the hall to your left if you’d prefer to administer it in private.”

If Hal wanted someplace to get his shit together for a few seconds, Bruce meant.

comments

Gotham's just a state of mind

Sat, 02 Feb 2019 01:13:49 GMT

(archived from tumblr)

I know everybody in the DC fandom likes to bag on Gotham like “Why would anyone still live in a town that gets gassed by a clown once a month and has to dodge an entire colony of man-bats and probably has to measure crime rates in terms of how many people made it home from the office without getting mugged or stabbed this week?”

And this is a completely valid question, because like this is a city that thought stuffing their aged police commissioner in a robot and saying “This is the Batman now” was a reasonable response to losing their normal unlicensed vigilante.

But then we live in America and have like

Donald Trump legitimately running for president
clowns hiding in the shrubs is a nationwide thing and the police would like to remind you that it’s probably not legal to shoot them
Flint is probably a month away from having a cholera outbreak
Florida’s being overrun by giant pythons, and someone's actual-facts solution was to put a bound on dead pythons, at which point a state herpetologist had to explain why it was a bad idea to encourage random citizens to go fight massive apex predators in the swamp.
the justice department is trying to figure out how many people the police face-shoot to death every year and it turns out that’s not something anyone keeps records on
every big city has that one hospital where you don’t go if you can help it because you could legit die in the ER waiting room and the janitor will just mop around your corpse
California’s always both on fire and under water, somehow
the news is like “hurricanes as a zika-fighting strategy: what could go wrong?”
Georgia has an entire police department that doesn’t seem to do anything but have cybersex with pedophiles
civil forfeiture is a thing
the number of times people get shot with arrows in this country every year is genuinely astonishing
Texas just blows the fuck up every so often because EPA and OSHA regs are for commies
Worse Virginia’s been on fire for a century in some places because samesies
like six people got shot (with guns) in one day in Minneapolis and their unanimous response to police was “fuck off I’m not a snitch”

and everybody’s still like “lol love it or leave it buddy."

comments

I mean, Bat-Cow is a thing

Sat, 02 Feb 2019 01:09:08 GMT

(archived from tumblr)

Given that Bat-Cow is a real legitimate thing that actually happened, I feel like Red Hood needs a goat. Like, a foul-tempered, vaguely sinister, apparently-completely-normal goat that Damien runs across on some mission, and everybody else calls “Not it” before Jason even knows what’s going on, and suddenly he’s got a goat.

And he tries to leave the goat at the manor, but he gets home and finds the goat in his walk-up, somehow. All the doors and windows are still locked, security system hasn’t been tripped, nobody will admit to having put it there.

“You’re telling me that not one of you is responsible for this. That a goat somehow got itself down ten miles of subway, navigated a switchover to the el-train, climbed six flights of stairs, let itself in, and then locked back up afterwards.”

“Goats are very nimble, Jason.”

And he keeps trying to leave it with petting zoos, but it’s the same thing every time, it always winds up back at his place. Maybe he eventually grudgingly accepts it because it is kind of nice to come home to someone, even if it is just a goat, and it is kind of helpful. He’s lost count of the number of times he’s come home to find that somebody’s clearly broken in--maybe just a thief, maybe someone after him specifically, but whoever they were they got headbutted right back out a window for their trouble.

The goat’s never the worse for wear.

Then he winds up in serious trouble, and in swoops the whole rest of the family at the last second, and he’s like “How’d you find me?” because he’s an independent vigilante who is not wearing a bat-tracker, dad. And Bruce just looks pained and says it doesn’t matter, and Dick does his best to be very serious and tells him that Hood-Goat told them Jason was in trouble, and Barbara’s just like “We’re not calling it that.”

(They are totally calling it that. Turns out it’s really hard to come up with good nicknames based off “Red Hood,” and neither Bruce nor Jason will accept Bat-Goat.)

Jason doesn’t believe them. Tim and Steph immediately whip out their phones and show him videographic evidence, which in this case amounts to the goat jumping around the cave and waving his favorite leather jacket--now half-eaten--around like a flag. Which, okay, is one of the weirdest things he’s seen in a month, and doesn’t explain how the fucking goat got from his apartment to the batcave, but he’s like “Okay, sure, but how’d you find me?”.

Steph fast-fowards to the part where the goat headbutts a map case open and stamps its hoof on the warehouse they’re all standing in right now, and Jason’s just looking at the goat, who is of course now loitering in the background like there’s nothing unusual about this at all, and going “You guys didn’t bring it with you, did you?”

And then Jason’s looking at Bruce, because of course they didn’t bring the goat with them, and going “Do you think maybe Zatanna could...?”

And Bruce is like “It’s your goat, Jason. Part of being a responsible adult is arranging for its exorcisms yourself.”

Meanwhile Damien’s assuring the goat that it’s just perfect the way it is and probably doesn’t need the devil cast out of it.

Then the outlaws phase hits, and Roy is just so unbelievably stoked about the goat, and Jason realizes that he's stuck in a live-action reenactment of Goat Simulator. And he is so 1000% done with life. Every time one of the other Robins or Bruce asks him for help, he just texts a picture of the goat in yet another Arsenal-provided get-up and tells them that they did this to him and he's never helping them again.

comments

On the many permutations of female characters

Sun, 09 Dec 2018 21:17:57 GMT

I think one of the biggest problems I have when it comes to writing about female characters is the difference between the character herself and the handling of the character by the (usually male) writer/director/etc.*

You criticize a particular writer or director's handling of the character, and it very easily gets read as a critique of the character herself. (Which may or may not be warranted, but it's a little besides the point in that particular moment.) I mean, I've actually seen a few essays now that complain about the fact that a director's paid a fair amount of attention to making a female character a meaty character instead of a literal prop (yay, right?), but then hasn't bothered to actually do anything character-y with her. Like, "Yeah! You've got a complicated backstory and a morally ambiguous motivation and relationships that don't involve the hero! Why don't you go stand in a corner until the action is over and you can kiss somebody?"

It's an improvement, but it kind of misses the point of asking for female characters that work as characters instead of just some sort of weird ambulatory reward system for the male protagonists.

I think one of the most recent examples is Gamora, who's a fantastic character. I mean, the script literally gives her a hero's journey. She is unambiguously the moral center of the film. She's the most selfless and noble character in the entire movie. Like, the Novas? At least are defending their home planet. She's just out to save billions of strangers at great personal cost because fuck letting the genocidal maniacs win. She's getting her crew together and going to save the goddamned galaxy, in the face of her entire (death-cult) adopted family. Everyone she actually knows and cares for personally is lined up against her. Or at least, that's what's going on with the script.

The director somehow seems to find it way more interesting to focus on whether or not a space-age dude-bro gets to kiss her.** We're stuck watching "I May Not Have Explained The Consequences of Failure to This Primate Well Enough, As He Keeps Being Distracted by the Possibility of Mating with Me: The Gamora Story."

And none of that is actually an indictment of the character! The treatment of the character is another story. Which, honestly? I get it. This can be a weird conversation to have. Most of us are used to dealing with a sort of closed system, where the person writing the character and the person who created the character are the same person.

But once you're talking about corporate-owned characters, the bets are kind of off. If JK Rowling or JRR Tolkien or Anne Rice fucks up their characters, there's not a lot of daylight between authorial intent and what's on the page. But with television and movies and comics, you're dealing not just with authors and artists and producers and directors, and all of them having something to say about how a character is presented. The studios and networks are throwing their weight around, too.

You get a dyed-in-the-wool misogynist running DC, Lois Lane's going to act very differently than she did before he took over. You get a writer who's into women's lib doing storylines for Fantastic Four, Susan Storm's going to be a lot less interested in cleaning up after the boys and giggling ineffectually when Reed forgets they have kids because Science!.

One executive can be the force behind a show having this Amanda Waller:

instead of this one:

(Apologies for not being able to find a screenshot of her personally ordering that President Luthor be arrested for treason immediately after he tries to make out with her/recruit her to his evil plan for post-apocalypse world domination. Because that happened.)

The original creators for both characters can start spinning in their graves for all DC or Marvel care; they're the ones running the show currently. Hell, look at Gene Rodenberry's treatment of Kirk and Uhura compared to Abrams's.

And it is difficult not to hear "This character sucks" when someone says "This director's portrayal of this character sucks." We're primed to hear that. Female characters get bagged on all the time, for pretty much every reason under the sun. Too feminine/not feminine enough? The same character can be both! Did the exact same thing an immediately-forgiven male character did? What an irredeemable bitch! Sexy-lady mouthpiece for the dude-writers' anti-femme misogyny? Ugh, Strong Female Characters are awful. Everyone's a Mary Sue!

But it's not especially difficult to write a script that avoids lazy misogyny or being super-shitty to your female characters, so I'm probably going to keep complaining about directors and writers who pull some bullshit at female characters' expense for no real reason.

*Which isn't to say that this is a problem unique to female characters. I mean, god knows how many pixels I've spent over the years talking about this effect with pretty much any long-standing character. I think my personal favorite that this shows up with most frequently is Batman, for fuck's sake.

**Yes, Peter Quill. I've also written an embarrassing amount about Peter Quill. But that doesn't alter the fact that the movie shortchanges Gamora's character to focus on his arguably less interesting character for no apparent reason.

comments