The strong woman did a bunch of roundhouse flips across the bar and kicked me right in the face. “That’s what I think of you,” she said, kicking me a bunch more. “Sexually, you’re real indiscriminate, which I don’t respect, and your code of honor is just balls.”
Then she shook my hand. “I guess we have to be teammates.”
“I guess we do,” I said, then checked out her body, because even though I’m the only hope any of us have it doesn’t mean I don’t have time to enjoy a shapely set of thighs meeting up with her torso.
She roundhouse kicked me in the face again. “Let’s get one thing straight. I’m the strongest person there is, for vague and shadowy reasons, so if anyone ever beats me up, you know things are getting pretty serious, and also I’d rather do this alone, but I can’t right now. Also, we’ll never kiss, you and I.” She leaned in until we were almost kissing but we totally weren’t. “We’ll never ever even kiss one time.”
I rubbed my jaw. The bruises would look good with my stubble, on my face, for women to look at. I’ve had a lot of experience, sexually, and I don’t need friends.
Everyone was beating up the strong woman. Things must be getting pretty serious. They beat her up something awful. She looked terrible.
“I’ll join you,” said the real serious guy, “but only so I can kill for my revenge.”
“Okay,” I said. “I don’t really care. I don’t have a lot personally invested in this team so I guess anyone can join because it’s not like we’re real close.”
The strong woman roundhouse kicked me in the face. “Cut it out, I said.”
“My wife and children are dead,” he said. “They’re so dead it’s terrible. I’ve been married fourteen times and every time I have a beautiful daughter and a wonderful son and as soon as they start walking and talking my enemy shows up and he just tortures and rapes and murders the hell out of them.”
“Just the hell out of them,” he added, almost crying. “For a while I thought I should stop getting married, but I promised my wife I would keep living.”
The strong woman accidentally roundhouse kicked his son in the face.
“My son is dead,” he cried, then pulled out a notebook. “I have to make a note of who killed which son, otherwise I’ll forget.”
“For revenge,” he added, then started doing pushups.
I had to go do the Awful Thing alone now, which would definitely kill me.
“You’re not alone,” someone said behind me. I turned around, and it was that guy who never trusted anybody and was only in it for the money.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “The last time I saw you, you said I was crazy.”
“I still think you’re crazy,” he said, and my heart sank.
“Then you definitely won’t want to help me do the Awful Thing now,” I said, “if you think I’m crazy.”
“But I do,” he said, “even though it’s crazy.”
“What?!?!” I said. “That doesn’t make sense.” It didn’t. But we did the Awful Thing together, and nobody died at all.
“You can’t come in,” the nurse of frowning said. “Family only.”
All of us stepped forward and linked arms at the same time until we formed a ragtag human chain that surrounded the entire hospital and extended out even into the parking lot.
“We are family,” we said in a single voice, all at the same time even, we hadn’t even practiced that part but it just worked out that way, and so the nurse changed hospital regulations right there on the spot for us, in honor of the connection we had formed together, because we weren’t just teammates anymore, we were a family.
Even the guy who had always said he was only in it for the money came back at the last second.
“You said you were just in it for the money!” I said.
“You’re all idiots and I don’t care about you even a little bit at all,” he said, but know we all knew he was kidding and we wouldn’t believe it when he told us he only cared about the money in the future.
“You know, in a weird way, it’s almost like all of you are my family,” I said. The strong woman, who was usually very literal and also we made out that one time, didn’t understand.
“But we’re not related by blood,” she said.
“Yes,” said the revenge man, “I have no blood relatives at all. My people were all destroyed. This is why I seek revenge.”
“I know,” I said, “but it’s almost like we’re family anyway. Without the blood.”
“I just want money,” said the money guy, but everyone knew what he really meant, and we all laughed.
“You’re my boss now,” said the strong woman, who was really loyal to me now. “You’re the boss of this family.”
So Mallory and Nicole had different thoughts on the movie, then? (This is amazing!)
Mallory, I thought that entire first section was about you personally, and how you interact with strong women who kick you in the face and have shapely legs.
Other than you getting repeatedly kicked in the face, I wasn’t mad about it.
Because you’ll totally kiss her.
“I’ll join you,” said Sophia Petrillo, “but only so I can kill for my revenge.”
“Okay,” I said. “I don’t really care. I don’t have a lot personally invested in this house so I guess anyone can join because it’s not like we’re real close.”
Blanche Devereaux roundhouse kicked me in the face. “Cut it out,” I said.
The movie that launched a thousand Betty White/Rue McClanahan slashfic tumblrs.
dyingggggggg i am dead
The exception to this being STAR WARS, where it turned out most of them actually were blood relatives, after all.
“My son is dead,” he cried, then pulled out a notebook. “I have to make a note of who killed which son, otherwise I’ll forget.”
“For revenge,” he added, then started doing pushups.
Genius. I always wish someone would make a movie like this, because I am fond of films that fuck around with established stereotypes to excellent results, but alas, the same movie just keeps getting made over and over again, with only Rifftrax to keep us alive.
would it be excessive to say that Mallory Ortberg may produce some of the finest satires of pop-culture I have ever read?
I don’t think it would, because it is true.
Nope, that’s not excessive. It’s a plain statement of fact. Just re-read this:
“Just the hell out of them,” he added, almost crying. “For a while I thought I should stop getting married, but I promised my wife I would keep living.”
The strong woman accidentally roundhouse kicked his son in the face.
“My son is dead,” he cried, then pulled out a notebook. “I have to make a note of who killed which son, otherwise I’ll forget.”
can’t… breathe…
“Everyone was beating up the strong woman. Things must be getting pretty serious.” is what they’re going to write on Josh Wheaton’s tombstone.
Oh man I like a lot of his stuff, but I am absolutely referring to him as “Josh Wheaton” from now on just to piss off the fanboys.
“Josiah Wheat-Thin”
I have a feeling this could continue down a dark road like some Cockney rhyming scheme until I’m trolling Dollhouse tumblrs about how much I prefer Jonas Weedhen’s first show, “McGruffy the Crime Dog Slays a Vampire”
I have always been a big fan of Jebediah Feetman.
Jehoshephat Webbigans, director of such movies as “Serendipity”, “Marble Revengers,” and the upcoming “Marble Revengers 2: The Acts of Ulfloss”
Jesús Commonweal, impresario behind “Tollhouse,” “Angler,” and “Fur-Flea.”
Joshgroban Wheevilcock’s production of Shimmyspork’s “Such a Shoe About Nottingham” is delightful.
Xÿß Hjidnin received a creator’s credit for “Hey, Gents! A Sheila!,” but the actual showrunner is his brother, ___.
Not many people realize that Harmonious Glunderbug was one of the script writers of Plixmark’s “Soy Horsey”, though I don’t believe he worked on “Soy Horsey 2” or “Soy Horsey 3” or other Plixmark films like “A Boy’s Lark,” “The Munsters”, “The Munsters Go to College” “Flamingo Nano,” “An Inflammables”, “Ratshit”, “Big Ups,” “WALLABY” or “Brown.”
I can’t wait until he casts Bechamel Creamysauce in his next film.
proof once again that “don’t read the comments” is not a rule that applies here
That’s about the only thing that could possibly lure me to visit his (eventual) grave site.
Does this mean we can discuss Joss Whedon’s pattern of writing broken women? “Strong women! They are delicate and tiny their powers came from being broken and then they kicked ass but the ass kicking came from how deeply broken they were! Their powers came from conditioning or magic but it was never their choice it was something that was done to them.”
Buffy’s ending still fusses me!
SPOILER ALERT
“And then Willow used super girl magic to make a bunch of random girls into super girls. Not all! Just a bunch. This is a very relevant comment on feminism!”
I found the ending really moving and inspiring, but mostly because it flies directly in the face of the concept of the show itself. ONE GIRL IN ALL THE WORLD lolno actually wait a bunch of girls. Also it’s an answer to the Chosen One trope in general and a seed of something great about drawing strength from within yourself blah blah blah
This is why I, lover of Firefly and Buffy that I am, tend to stick to fanworks and meta about Whedon’s stuff rather than his work in and of itself. Because the potential, it hurts me so.
I also enjoyed the ending! I still really enjoy Buffy and Firefly, but the more of Whedon’s work I engage with, the more I see frustrating patterns emerging in his content.
Lord, sometimes meta and fancontent are the only things that save me from lighting something on fire. Otherwise I would just run around constantly yelling “WHY WAS THAT NECESSARY? WHY DID YOU DO THAT?!” and eventually I would give up and have to move to a mountaintop and relinquish all contact with society.
Fanwork saves my brain, yo. People reclaiming exclusionary spaces! People writing stories and making mixes and creating art about queer nonwhite Hogwarts students and body-dysmorphic supersoldiers in love and badass ladies of all shapes and sizes! Like, yes! ALL THE FANWORKS.
I know what the point was, but it honestly felt like it’d just create a privileged class among women.
“Only these special ‘strong women’ are cool!”
I mean, I agree with your assertion, and it’s why it has its good points, but considering season seven was when Buffy went full girl power allegory it kinda fell flat after a little thought.
The second most maddening thing about Josh Wheaton is that he never grows as a writer. Delicate tiny strong broken women (if you read his preface to Astonishing X-Men Vol. 1, it apparently all stems from a childhood crush on Kitty Pryde), ~shocking~ surprise deaths, racial stereotypes, and not being able to keep himself from reusing these tropes even with other people’s characters: Chase in his issues of Runaways sounded an awful lot like Xander and his interpretation of Loki in Avengers is suspiciously Spike-esque.
The first most maddening thing about Josh Wheaton is that he fired Charisma Carpenter from Angel for getting pregnant without asking him first, and he still thinks of himself as some great feminist hero.
UGH RUNAWAYS I would talk about how I feel about Whedon’s time writing Runaways but then it would end in me crying and throwing things so let’s talk about what happened to Charisma Carpenter instead. Cause that is relaxing and fun and won’t make me want to light something on fire! Ahahaaa…
I mean do you want to talk about the time he literally said he didn’t like the term feminism? DO YOU? Ugh.
(I made an account for this comment thread! It’s still diana.)
I will hold myself to one Runaways related comment and one promise: Victor Mancha was the first superhero I ever loved when I started getting into comics in high school, and I will never ever forgive Josh Wheaton for his crimes against Victor Mancha.
His bullshit equalism speech was on the tip of my tongue but I was trying to stick to the writing-related crimes. Another road we could go down is how his original pitch for Firefly was for Inara to be sexually assaulted so that Mal would respect her, or that time he explained on a DVD commentary that the reason he wanted to write Gunn with magical lawyer knowledge was because J. August Richards is “so articulate,” or how the Tams were not supposed to be white but it’s fine because Summer Glau looks like she could maybe be Asian…
“And fem sounds so round and pretty and sexually appealing, but then I remember that this is about a group that doesn’t include me, and I remember that men who are not as enlightened and amazing as I am might feel alienated by not being included in this movement. Ladies, you’d better change the name, because it sounds so much less sexy than I want it to.”
“A strong woman has to get punched in the face a lot, like just so much. And then she gets mad, and everybody sees what happens when you make a strong woman mad. And then she has really beautiful bruises, they just look so artistic next to her delicate, porcelain skin.”
I am currently having very similar feelings about women and martial arts, especially regarding why they must always be marketed to women as self defense. I didn’t start judo because I wanted to learn how to defend myself, I started judo because I wanted to learn how to throw people. Yet every time I suggest to my coach that we run some women-only seminars, they always turn (hypothetically, we have not executed yet) into self-defense seminars, not judo seminars. I am tired of fear-based marketing of martial arts to women. Some of us just want to beat people up for fun, okay?
I realize this is basically orthogonal to the discussion, but the feels are very similar for me.
Your superpower is sucking the fun out of things only to simultaneously marinate them in a new and entirely different kind of fun that is not entirely familiar yet delicious.
for the record, I really did love Guardians
“You’re my boss now,” said the strong woman, who was really loyal to me now. “You’re the boss of this family.”
I was so down with this movie, right up until the moment where the above ACTUALLY HAPPENED EXACTLY AS YOU JUST WROTE IT.
Anybody else want to talk forever about how hard it is to love everything Marvel does and also feel so sad about how much they mess up? Anybody?
I don’t think I have the emotional fortitude to talk about it, but I will commiserate with you, silently, and over drinks.
Get a couple of drinks in me and my ability to discuss this coherently and maturely will collapse and I’ll just start yelling “WHERE IS MY BLACK WIDOW MOVIE. WHERE IS IT.”
Incoherent yelling works for me, too.
KATEE SACKHOFF AS CAPTAIN MARVEL OR BUST
HOLY CRAP YES
I mean, as boss of the family he is the one who has to deal with that smart-assed space raccoon…maybe it was strategic on her part.
I opted to focus more on the fact that they all got a team at the end rather than having to understand the movie was over because HERO GETS GIRL.
I also love Marvel so much, but I am the most critical person re: their stuff and so I spend half my time getting really excited about Marvel and then I spend two hours being really angry about how they are WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING.
“Your reasons for not announcing Black Widow and Black Panther movies are stupid and sexist and racist and YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD ABOUT YOUR LIFE CHOICES. Now excuse me, I have to go rewatch Winter Solider again and think about my intense feelings about Sam Wilson.”
HNNNNG WINTER SOLDIER. It’s the besssssst thiiiiiing everrrrrrrrrrrrr.
SARA I THINK WE ARE NOW FRIENDS BECAUSE YESSSS oh lord it is my favorite thing.
YUSSSSSS
Okay not to piggyback on this wonderful best friendship, but: WINTER SOLDIER DO NOT EVEN LET ME GET STARTED I WILL TALK TO YOU ABOUT IT FOR LONGER THAN THE RUN TIME OF THE ACTUAL MOVIE. There was like, my life before WS (“I, too, enjoyed Iron Man and The Avengers!”) and my life after WS (“ASDHFAHSFASHJF”) and they do not even resemble each other.
THE WINTER SOLDIER HAS ROOM FOR US ALL IN HIS HALF-CYBORG EMBRACE AND HIS WAR-TORN SAD TRASH KING HEART.
Ugh I know I just
Like
Words
WORRRRDDDDSSSS. WORDS.
*cough* definitely not working on post-WS fic now. Nope. Me? Never.
SHHHHH I AM WORKING ON MY…IDK. THIRD? WINTER SOLDIER? FIC? and it’s so long (heh), it’s like 10K+ and I just. words. uuuuuggggghhhhhh
The strong woman was always the first to stand up for my schemes, and only modified my plans when her area of expertise would allow them to succeed more successfully.
She stood beside me. Or sometimes just behind my shoulder, at that angle, you know the one? Like, a little protected by my forthright rebel strength but also ready to draw her own weapon and fire a clean shot in case someone tried to attack my flank?
She didn’t stand in front of me, though, unless we were going up a ladder and she was in a skirt. (Usually she was in a skirt, though depending on how many roundhouse flips she had to do in any given encounter she might wear skintight pants instead.)
Things were looking serious, and we were probably all going to die. Good thing comic relief guy was there, or it would have been really depressing.
OK, but seriously, Rocket saying “Now we’re ALL standing!” with such disdain in his voice when they decided to Be Together As A Team was the fucking best.
A raccoon and a tree causing fucking appalling traffic problems for, like, two hours, how is this not a travelogue of Toronto commuting. TEAM DVP ALL THE WAY.
(i thought Guardians was dully predictable, though the VFX squad did a brilliant job of realizing various images from Space Opera book covers of my childhood, and I want them to just take the same damn cast and do Nextwave instead, and I have Opinions, and my Opinion is that Glenn Close is an excellent candidate for Dirk Anger. Done.)
I enjoyed Guardians but you’re right all I want in my life is real Nextwave
Okay but here’s the thing the comic Guardians is so much more inventive than the movie and they normalized all that stuff out. I don’t want anybody touching Nextwave because I don’t want them tarnishing it!
I did like the movie. But I’m kind of skeptical about Marvel making movies about the stuff that’s actually close to my heart at this point, essentially for the reasons lampooned in this article. Their doing a surprisingly good job on properties that I haven’t thought about for decades is great. But Nextwave should be considered “OFF LIMITS.” As a “FAVOR TO ME.”
I’m not kidding: we are going to be a real family. As soon as you sign these forms, I will become your legal parent.
No, I wouldn’t expect you’d be able to read them: they’re in Japanese kanji. The Japanese enjoy an eight century tradition of adult adoption, and they have the robust case law to match.
Sure, I could have gone through the Laotian social registry, it would have been mucho cheaper, but then your adoption wouldn’t necessarily hold up in the Western Hemisphere. And I want us to be a family everywhere.
Literally the only reason I saw GotG this weekend was so I would understand things like this.
Mallory can you please do recaps/reviews/snark/academic essays on Outlander pleaaaaaaaase.
SHHHHH I AM WORKING ON MY…IDK. THIRD? WINTER SOLDIER? FIC? and it's so long (heh), it's like 10K+ and I just. words. uuuuuggggghhhhhh
This is about ten times the amount of roundhouse-kicking that Gamora ACTUALLY does in the movie.
This is about ten times the amount of roundhouse-kicking that Gamora ACTUALLY does in the movie.
This is the most perfect thing I’ve ever read. I think I must have been back to re-read it 5 times already.