unfridged

Hey kids, it’s been a while so there’s lots of good reading here for you:

• Queer comic heroes! The movie version of Deadpool will be pansexual (like he is in the comics), and Iceman, in a move that surprised (probably) no one, came out as gay! [The Mary Sue, The Advocate]
• Neko Atsume, the kitten collecting game I am obsessed with, is about the most wholesome thing imaginable, but “The Economics of Neko Atsume” makes it, amazingly, into a cat-controlled dystopia from which there is no escape. [The Billfold]
• “James Bond movies never deserved their Bond girls.” [Buzzfeed]
• Here’s the first episode of a web musical called Muzzled. It’s about princesses who have enslaved their defeated foes and keep them from singing, and has some great talent from the likes of The Guild, The Lizzie Bennett Diaries, and, you know, Buffy.
• “Elves fuck, and dress better than you: what I learned in elf school in Reykjavik.” I’ll be leaving for Iceland shortly. [Jezebel’s Flygirl]
• Fantasy archers are often portrayed in silly and inaccurate ways, and there is a whole tumblr devoted to that. [badarcherart.tumblr.com]
• Many people took part in a project to get every line from The Handmaid’s Tale tattooed, and Margaret Atwood went to see the exhibit. [Tor]
• Tor also explores the nuances between horror and grimdark, a fantasy subgenre that focuses on violence and dystopian grittiness.
• Tor’s usually great at media analysis, and this piece on Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is no exception, not least because of the way it looks at the film’s female characters (and okay I might be feeling a bit guilty about objectifying Jessica Rabbit so hard in my last post).
• There’s now a playable female version of Zelda‘s Link. Her name is Linkle but we’ll forgive her that. [Kotaku]
• “The complete history of transgender characters in American comic books.” This is part one of what will hopefully be a longer series. [Autostraddle]
• Watch the Girl Gamer Series by Fusion! So far they’ve tackled “who are girl gamers,” “why do women make games,” and “where are all the female heroines.”
• Another good web series, Digging Deeper, has some great film analysis. They’ve got a video on the genre blending of Serenity, how It Follows is a typically American nightmare, and cars as metaphors of masculinity in Mad Max (I’m taking a literature and car culture class right now there is a lot to talk about).
• There’s a Harry Potter-themed podcast called Witch, Please! It’s done by Marcelle Kosman and Hannah McGregor and it’s great.
• And and and before I leave you Jessica Jones is out and is fantastic! Seriously it does the film noir tortured gumshoe so well, and the writers deal with trauma and consent and the terrible horror of mind control so well, and Krysten Ritter does the anti-hero so well. Autostraddle called it an “awesomely, aggressively feminist superhero series” and Feministing was also very impressed with how the show dealt with trauma and recovery. Pretty much everyone is praising the show, in fact, including Jezebel and the Mary Sue.