(no subject)

So, Kim Possible is supposed to be a show about a super cool teenaged female spy with superpowers or somesuch, right?

Well, this seems pretty true in the bits I've watched, but why is it that every time I watch, the episode seems to be about Kim learning to appreciate her brothers or dorky (male) partner, or about letting them shine, instead of about Kim being cool?

If it were called "Ron Stoppable," I'd be perfectly fine with the super cool girl spy being secondary, but the title is "Kim Possible," so I expect the focus to be on her, not her learning to better appreciate boys.

It's fun, but have I just caught the wrong episodes?

At least I don't have to worry about that with Malina and London.

ETA:  Fixed his name.  Now that I know it.

Farscape: Season 2, eps 7-22

The beginning of the catchup blogging spam.


I meant to post more as I was watching, but I ended up not caring for a chunk of the middle of the season, and didn’t want to make any posts consisting mostly of “I didn’t like these episodes because of x, y, and z.” I save those posts for shows I don’t like.

( spoilers )

Robin Hood: Season 1, eps 1-5 (current BBC series)

Robin, Earl of Huntington, returns home after 5 years in the crusades to find the evil Sheriff of Nottingham overtaxing his people. Robin becomes the leader of a band of outlaws and tries to woo his childhood love, Marian with his new outlaw status. Or something.

You know the drill.

I’ll state this up front: I don’t like Robin. I think he’s a smug gloryhound and don’t like the way he talks down to Marian. He’s also supposed to be smart, but it comes across as utterly ridiculous when they do that. There’s also his whole “no killing ever” policy. Now, sometimes I like it when characters take that stance. It can be very interesting and provide for good character studies but here it’s ridiculous. I could understand it at first, but by the time the sheriff was cutting off tongues, he should have realized that that stance wouldn’t work. It’s supposed to make him seem noble and heroic, but makes him seem like an idiot.

Let me put this in superhero terms. Between Robin’s acrobatics and the flashes of light to let us know how awesome an archer he is, they’re pretty much writing Robin as a superhero anyway. Robin is Captain America. The Sheriff is his archenemy, Red Skull. Guisbourne is Red Skull’s henchman, Crossbones. When Captain America catches Crossbones robbing a bank and shooting everyone inside, he takes him down and turns him over to the police. It isn’t a permanent solution, but it’s a justice system he has faith in, and he knows there will be legal consequences for Crossbones. In Robin Hood’s case, however, Captain America is giving Crossbones back to Red Skull, knowing perfectly well that there will be no punishment and that Red Skull will send Crossbones to rob another bank the next day. It would be different if Robin didn’t have the opportunity to take care of them permanently, but he does. Constantly. And it’s regularly brought up that he doesn’t to make sure we realize how he’s so noble, and emotionally scarred from the crusades, because doesn’t it make him so much more interesting that way?

I think the actor could be charming and likable, but the script makes Robin act superior, and be way too eager for attention for his likability to really come through for me.

However, I like Robin’s men. Much is an idiot, but supposed to be one. I like the quiet Will (though I keep forgetting that he actually can talk) and how Alan is pretty much a conman, and John as the gruff father figure. I absolutely adore the sheriff as a villain. He’s an absurd scenery-chewer and the actor knows it. I am firmly convinced that the only reason Robin has lasted five minutes again him is because if that happens, the show will end. I love Richard Armitage and think the black leather is quite fetching, but Guisbourne isn’t doing a lot for me. I think some spoilers I know for season 2 are a part of that, though.

( comments on Marian include spoilers )

The show is enjoyable in a campy way, though you really have to ignore most of the costumes and attitudes. Really, I kind of wish it’d stop trying to be serious, and just be fun. I don’t think it’ll ever be a favorite, but I find it entertaining.

manhwa: 9 Faces of Love (complete)

This is a collection of short stories by Wann, all focusing on love. Most focused on romantic love, rather one-sided or unrequited, though there was also a cute story about a teenaged noblewoman who becomes the “mother” of a winged boy she finds.

The stories are pretty diverse, ranging a wizard blamed for a plague to the curse of a witch in the early Protestant era to a Casanova figure to whom women are invisible who loves a woman to whom he’s invisible. My personal favorite involves futuristic robot pseudo-lesbians. That description is more out there than the actual story. I’m not sure any two stories actually fell into the same category.

I enjoyed it, despite hints in a couple of stories that longer works may include melodrama tropes that don’t work well for me. I’m disappointed that the other two licensed books by the manhwaga-100% Perfect Girl and Can’t Lose You-sound guaranteed to irritate me.

And I’m sad that none of the stories seem to be for the gorgeous cover illustration.

Seimaden Vol 4

Like with Angel Sanctuary, 99% of my opinions could never be as entertaining as recounting what happens.

( spoilers )

manga: V.B. Rose Vol 1-2

Ageha has always idolized her older sister, Hibari, and has never thought much of Hibari’s boyfriend, who Ageha thinks is boring and nothing special. So naturally, she’s utterly aghast when Hibari announces that she’ll be getting married soon due to an unexpected pregnancy. Ageha tries to have nothing to do with the wedding, but can’t resist the lure of the world of sparkles when Hibari invites her to come with her when she selects her wedding dress. Ageha, it seems, is utterly in love with weddings and everything associated with them. Really, with anything pretty and frilly.

The shop, Velvet Blue Rose (V.B.R.), is run by two young men, Yukari and Mitsuya. When he hears Ageha’s tirade about her sister’s marriage, Yukari kicks her out (literally) and tells her to never come back. This, of course, means that she snuck back as quickly as she could. During her second visit, Mitsuya ends up with a cut hand that won’t let him work as fast, so Ageha, who designs and sews handbags as a hobby, volunteers to help finish Hibari’s wedding gown, and works to come to terms with Hibari’s wedding. Later, she gets hired on as a regular part time assistant.

The series is amazingly shoujo-y. Not only is there a near-lethal amount of flowers and sparkles, but Ageha even comments on the flowers at one point, and other characters seem to take how many sparkles and flowers surrounding her as a sign of how much of her own happiness she’s creating. Thankfully, this manages to be charming instead of cavity-inducing. Ageha has a bit much of the normal shoujo airheadedness and “I must help others regardless of any consequences to myself” going at times, but not enough to be irritating, and she’s pretty adorable overall. Yukari sometimes threatens to be an alpha shoujo bastard hero (but he really isn’t, he’s just irritable, and rather obsessed with his shop and what it represents), and Mitsuya a perv (well, he might be, at that…), but scratch the surface and they’re both pretty sweet.

The manga is obviously headed towards a romance between Ageha and Yukari, but so far there doesn’t seem to be an uncomfortable lack of a balance of power between them. It helps that he wasn’t immediately romantically interesting in a teenager, much less aggressively pursuing her like the hero in I Hate You More Than Anyone. In addition to lead pairings with significant age differences, the mangaka seems to like writing about positive family relationships, and friendships between female friends. Actually, I adore Ageha’s best friend, Mamoru, who is rather stoic and deadpan. She also has a line that rings sadly true of a lot of fiction. “Friendships between girls are ground to dust underfoot when guys are involved.” Actually, given some of Mamoru’s comments and the fangirls in I Hate You More Than Anyone, I wonder if the mangaka is a fan of shoujo-ai, though there isn’t (in what I’ve read) any actual shoujo-ai in the series.

While I’m not quite sure about the pairing yet (but leaning on the positive side), I like the overall setup and character relationships, and I like how the mangaka has her heroines deal with learning that their ideas and how they deal with things might not be the best, and may be hurting themselves and others.

Kaze Hikaru Vol 4

I have to say, as fond as I am of the manga itself, my favorite part of each volume is getting to the “Kaze Hikaru” diary at the back, where the mangaka talks about research and how hard she tries to get the historical stuff as right as is humanly possible, only to always learn that she had something off.

( spoilers )

manhwa: Angel Diary Vol 1-2

Dong-Young is a princess of Heaven who has been betrothed to the King of Hell. Not wanting to marry him, she flees to Earth. Several years later, she’s living disguised as a boy and attending high school, her biggest concern Bi-Wal, a classmate who is always hitting on her, but who also seems to repel the ghosts who always try to possess Dong-Young. Tired of waiting for her to turn up, Heaven orders the four guardians of heaven to find her and bring her home. Two guardians-Ah-Hin, the White Tiger, and her brother, Ee-Jung, the Red Phoenix-are actually her friends, and helping her hide. The other two-Woo-Hyun, the Blue Dragon, and Doh-Hyun, the Black Turtle-attend the same school, but don’t know Dong-Young’s secret.

Bi-Wal obviously knows that Dong-Young is actually a girl from the start, but would rather have her freak out thinking that he thinks he’s hitting on a boy than let her know that he knows. He also knows a lot more about what’s going on than he lets on, including who Dong-Young is, and is probably either the King of Hell himself, or is sent by him. Like most Mysterious Supernatural Shoujo Heroes, he likes to secretly rescue Dong-Young from supernatural forces, sometimes with a sword, and lurk staring in shadows and from nearby rooftops.

The manhwa isn’t amazingly original, but it’s very cute, and I’m curious to see where it goes. I’m especially fond of a scene where Dong-Young tries to explain her situation away as her father only had daughters, so he raised her as a boy, and it shows an image of Rose of Versailles, which I’ve been watching the last few days. I also suspect the genderbending is going to go a step or two beyond crossdressing, given a flashback sequence where two of the characters appear to be of opposite genders as children as they are as “teenagers.” (Dong-Young and the four guardians are in their 170s, which seems to equate to 16-17.)