Paper Moon

So, flist, help me figure this one out.

( Marvel, what are you doing? )

Ryan Estrada's awesome graphic novel Aki Alliance is now complete and available for free online. The basic gist of the story is that it's about a girl, Aki, who is determined to make friends with every single girl in her all-girls school come hell or high water. Rather than using tactics such as "being nice to people" to make friends, however, Aki instead invests in a series of overly-complicated sitcom plans to win the friendship of each of her classmates. At different points in the story this ends up involving rigging a boxing match, inciting an accidental gang war in her school, and going completely mad with power during an ill-fated stint as the president of the student council. Among other things. Oh, and there's also a chapter written entirely in rhyming prose. You can read the whole book online or download it as a PDF.

Estrada is a really neat cartoonist and his other works are also available for free on his website, including a second book about Aki, so y'all should check it out.

Title: A Most Fortunate Geometry
Fandom: X-Men (Comics)
Rating: PG-13
Length: 23,715 words
Characters: Bobby Drake, Sam Guthrie, Jean-Paul Beaubier, Noriko Ashida, Cessily Kincaid, Victor Borkowski, Laura Kinney
Pairing: Bobby/Jean-Paul
A03 Link: Right here.

Notes:

1. Giftee's original request was for a fic about her favorite characters, Bobby Drake and Jean-Paul Beaubier, being competent and kind and not whiny asshole losers, with optional slashiness. She also likes "bantering and bickering and snark and snappy dialogue; sexual tension and stoic pining and desperate, breathless longing; first kisses; holding hands; [...] common sense; adventures, capers, hijinx and derring do; secrets revealed and cats out of bags; [...] ass kicking; mysteries; actions having consequences; competent people being competent; love being shown through action; ethical dilemmas; did I mention my competence kink?; rational behaviour in the face of the irrational; body switching; hopefulness, kindness, compassion, forgiveness; our heroes against the world." I tried to hit most of those buttons, but I didn't get all of them, and I'll go ahead and spoil right now that there is no body-switching.

2. The existence of Santa Claus in Earth-616 is official Marvel canon. Deal with it.

3. Ladies and gentlemen, for those of you who are unfamiliar, this is Sonny Crockett.

4. I completely rewrote this fic so many times oh my god. At one point I did try to retool the story so that an OC wouldn't be so heavily involved, but ultimately I figured that since she only exists to move the plot along and isn't really the center of the story anyway, maybe she won't be too annoying? Besides, I was trying to imitate the feel and structure of one of the old-school X-Men stories that tended to follow the formula of "team goes on mission, meets character and/or object with mysterious power, stuff happens, conflict is resolved, optional romantic epilogue, the end." So a character with a mysterious power was ultimately necessary to sort of get the plot-ball rolling. Hope y'all don't mind.

C&C either here or at A03 is very much appreciated.

No, not this picture. This picture is cute.

Here's the nightmare fuel part:

Apropros of today's [EPIC TROLL-RELATED SPOILER], I just wanted to take a moment to link to Xamag-chan's homemade animation of the first and biggest [EPIC TROLL-RELATED SPOILER], because it is - believe it or not - a thousand times more terrifying than the original text and images. I do not recommend watching this right before bedtime.

"FROM YOUR VEINS WILL DRIP MY MIRACLES" aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

I thoroughly enjoyed X-Men: First Class.

Having said that, though, this is an excellent dissection of how badly the film portrays all of its female characters. (The blogger somehow missed that "the nameless mutant woman with dragon fly wings" was Angel Salvadore, but that doesn't actually detract from any of her other arguments.) To say nothing of the racefail.

And no, the issue is not just that "women dressing sexy = bad." The issue is that out of all five major female characters, all of them were excessively sexed up. Even Moira was scantily-clad because she was undercover at the Hellfire club! Yes, Moira McTaggert! And the costumes are hardly the only thing sexist about the film, as Sherry astutely points out - even things like how the male characters were shown honing and developing their powers while the female characters just sort of had powers demonstrate how the female characters in the film were much more window-dressing and afterthoughts than the male characters. Sherry's blog post also doesn't bring up the (not gonna spoil it too much so let's be vague here!) thing about Xavier and Moira at the end of the film, but that was also super-creepy, sexist, and gross.

Also, why did the film make the only latina female character a stripper? Who turns evil. WHY. Angel was never a stripper in the comics. WTF, movie. WTF.

Speaking of X-things, I just spent the morning re-writing the opening to my now-long-overdue fic for help_japan AGAIN. Two months along now and the damn thing is still kicking my ass. (*headdesk*) NOTE TO SELF: Deus ex machina is bad. Bad Nena, bad! Fix that shit and re-work the ending and then maybe we can be happy with it?

melannen wrote an interesting post about systems of marriage/romance that only exist in science fiction. She touches on Diane Duane's Tale of the Five, Robert A. Heinlein's weird line-marriage thing, Ursula K. LeGuin's short stories, and of course, the Homestuck trolls. Among others.

Caveat: As melannen admits to not actually reading Homestuck she rather badly borks the explanation of Auspisticeship, but this comment corrects a lot of that.

And, as usual, every explanation of complicated romantic relationships in alien species can only be improved with the addition of My Little Pony.

Sooooooo Saumin Patel worked on part of the comic book adaptation for Anaganaga Oka Dheerudu (AKA "that epic Disney-produced Telugu fantasy film") and just posted an amazing collection of his comic book artwork to his blog (NSFW!!!).

ETA: For the clueless, here is Anaganaga Oka Dheerudu:

Top five throwbacks to the original MLP cartoons that Nena would love to see either referenced or just plain added to a future episode of Friendship is Magic:

5. Bushwoolies.

4. Catrina and Rex, because they were hilarious.

3. Any reference to the original 1984 MLP movie. Any at all. For those of you who have never seen it, let me just point out that the film opens with a scene in which Applejack licks applesauce off proto-Rarity's body and ends with an epic scene in which the ponies battle Satan. No, I'm serious. That is the actual plot of the movie. The ponies have to fight Satan himself.

2. Nightshade.

1. SEA PONIES.

Finally, your Moment of Zen links: One! Two! This whole freaking tag! Three!

What if we treated doctors the way that we treat teachers?

The analogy falls painfully apart in certain places, but the overall point still stands.

The comments are worth a read too, but I laughed until I cried when I read the comment from the idiot who thinks that teachers only spend 6 hours a day at school. (Hint: I usually don't leave school until after 5 pm, and guess what time I have to get there in the morning?)

In much more frivolous news, somebody actually re-created the POTATO CHIP WORM MUFFINS recipe from My Little Pony episode 3. And ate it. And ate it.

This show, you guys. This show.

ETA: OKAY FINE here is your MLP/Soul Eater crossover and your MLP/Homestuck crossover (scroll down for epic) and your lives are now complete.