Holy shitfuck am I excited about these movies...

Ten reasons The Walking Dead has restored my faith in itself (and a number of fannish panic attacks)

Wow, look how big the cast was for a minute there.

In case you've been living under a rock and haven't seen the internet in the last 24 hours, last night was the Season 4 Finale of the Walking Dead, and it was so good. It was also alarming, but at its best, this show is always alarming, so sometimes I can ignore that. Best of all, it came back around to a place where I really, really, REALLY love it again, and most of that was because of this brilliant second half of the season. Here's what I loved:

1. I absolutely LOVED the cast being broken up. I mean, I usually hate that in a show, but this one, like Lost at it's heyday beforehand, did it so right. Because they were in smaller groups, we got to have whole episodes devoted to characters, to their reactions and actions, to the meaning of what has been going on, and it was amazing.
2. Daryl and Beth were about the sweetest and most ship-inducing pairing I have seen in ages. Which is double amazing because before the Great Split Up, I don't think I even knew, really, who Beth was, and was previously invested in Daryl and Carol.
3. The whole Lizzy thing. Shit. Damn. God, it was harrowing, but it was done so well. And it shows a lot about what this world does to young people, and offers a counterpoint to Carl's development, and lays a lot of guilt on Carol who has been guilt-free for several seasons and apparently needed some.
4. The Glenn-and-Maggie storyline was amazing--so many relationships wind up being a failure or a weakness, but for those two, it's a strength, and that's a wonderful, human, living core for the show to keep having.
5. I'm glad they got out of the Prison. It was too...I don't know. It separated them from the world too much, it stopped them from wandering, it seemed safe and wasn't, it didn't manage to be a functioning society...it just wasn't what I wanted to see.
6. Michonne! Everything about her re-humanizing, her friendship with Carl, even the cute vaguely flirty interactions with Rick. Beautiful.
7. The quietness. I love this show best when it's just quiet, interspersed with horror, and the rest of the time it's people dealing with their shit and the world. Again, that episode with Daryl and Beth where they burn down the house, and Carol and Tyrese and the girls at that little homestead, with Carl and the pudding--they hark back to the first episode, which was just Rick, just wandering, taking it in, processing it, dealing with it, and they were perfect.
8. That dog. He as fab, and I really hope he comes back.
9. Judith didn't die! She's wee-tiny and helpless, but she survived everything so far!
10. Reunion! Well, mostly reunioned. We've still got Carol and Tyrese who could help from the outside if they're smart enough not to get caught, too, and then we get another reunion to look forward to. And because everyone is back together, Rick knows who and what he is, and he is a badass again.

And now, the panic attacks:

1. They said, on Talking Dead, that "next season will be really different" or something to that effect, and I'm immediately like "OH MY GOD HOW ARE YOU GOING TO KILL ME NOW???"
2. Where the fuck is Beth and is she still alive and if not will Daryl burn now the world???
3. Was Beth taken by the probably-ritualistic-cannibals, or is there a third party out there being crazy and stealing pretty girls???
4. Why do I have to wait so long for the new season????
5. How can I go so long without Chris Hardwick helping me process this show????

The Henson Company is suddenly back on my radar and I LOVE IT

You guys, I love everything that has come out of the Henson Creature Shop. Muppets and Fraggles, sure, but also Farscape (which, as we know, I adore), and all those fantastic 80s movies, and even, like, Where The Wild Things Are and the old Ninja Turtles Movies. There's all sorts of puppetry shops around, and some, like the ones in Star Wars, are great enough that you forget they're puppets, but there's something about Henson creatures. Something magical.

I think it's the combo of top-of-the-line skill with a dedication to in-camera and live effects rather than a dependence on CGI, so that there's an organic realness to the acting that comes from the puppets and goes to it. How many times have you heard people forget that Kermit was a puppet* after they started working? Or that Rigel was? Lots, that's how many.

I grew up with a head full of Henson. He basically owned the 80s fantasy genre. And I missed it when they pulled back after his death, when I outgrew Sesame Street and Muppet Show went off the air and Farscape didn't last. It was a wild puppetless tundra.

But now! Now, they're putting out these fancy new editions of novelizations of Labyrinth, Dark Crystal and Storyteller! They aren't out yet, but I'm already itching to get my grubby fannish hands on them. I have the old novelization of Dark Crystal, and I read it so much when I was a kid that it has to be held together with a rubberhand now, because the pages are all falling out. It has stuff that isn't in the movie, internal dialog and backstory and a few other scenes. I can't even tell you what it means to me that I can hold these movies in my hands in book form--well, that I will be able to, once they're published.**

And on top of that, we've got the next new Muppet Movie, AND we've got the Jim Henson's Creature Shop Challenge on SyFy! I'm a little wary of SyFy all the time***, but the one episode I've seen of this one so far seems to be right--the people really look like they care about the brand and know what it looks like and how it works, and the camera and editing work lingers just enough that we get that connection to what the shop has done before. The host, Gigi Edgeley was on Farscape and so she really understands the working side of these creations, and seems to have a real connection with the company, too. Sure, there's a few bitchy people, but creatives tend to get that way under stress, and it didn't seem like too much in the pilot--annoying, but not so much as to ruin enjoyment of the show, and less than there usually is on, say, Face Off or something.

So basically, I'm just SO GLAD that they're back in the fandomverse. I'm looking forward to this show launching new projects--wouldn't it be amazing if they did it that way? Use these people trying to get a job with them to work on new, big, ambitious projects like they used to do back in the day? It'd be a nice change from a world increasingly full of CGI slickness, it'd tie into the current nostalgia boom, and it'd push the limits of what pupeteered acting can do again--and that would be amazing. Scifi shows could use more actual physical aliens, and fantasy shows could use more weird little creatures.

I could most definitely use both!

Notes:

*Most recently, I've heard it from Tom Hiddleston, making him even more adorable than ever before. Which I didn't think was possible.

**I've requested them for review, but who knows if I'll get them...

***They canceled Farscape! They made Stargate into something too close to Battlestar Galactica! They didn't pick up Firefly! They have so many bad competition shows ::coughDifferentWorldscough::!

Five 80s shows I would love to see a reboot of

1. Remington Steele
2. Simon and Simon
3. Jem
4. Jace and the Wheeled Warriors
5. Storyteller
6. 
   

The Farscape movie and why I desperately need it

There have been rumors around lately, and without any research to see how real they are, I would like to just react right here in my own space.

My first reaction is: eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And then after that, I start thinking about it, and come up with actual reasons.

If you haven't seen Farscape, go watch it right now. I'll wait. It's only four seasons and a TV wrap up, and sure those are US seasons, but I promise you'll feel just as deprived as you ever felt with a limited episode Brit or Premium show--it's that good. It started off with a total inversion of the classic sf-idea that the human hero-astronaut knows all and automatically becomes the savior of everyone in the galaxy. Which is brilliant. John basically knows nothing and is near-entirely unprepared for each and every aspect of life in a populated alien milieu and it is heartbreaking and frustrating as hilarious.

From there, it goes on to switch up gender roles, tell an epic love story while still remaining very scifi, develop actual characters that change and evolve and deal with the actual physical and often drastic consequences of their actions, and challenge standard views not only on society and politics, but also on plot and just how you're supposed to make a show.

There's strangeness everywhere, and almost all of it makes perfect sense later. There's death and birth and cosmic stories and very personal struggles. And it's amazing.

And it was also cut off after being told it had a whole other season and so needed a very fast and frenetic tv special that did pretty much everything they should have had another season to express and didn't. It was more than we expected, but it wasn't satisfying as they wanted it to be--or that we-the-fans wanted it to be.

My number one reason why it needs to happen is that the story is unfinished.

They carried on a whole in the comics, but a lot of people, I'd bet, haven't read those--I had trouble finding them in my local comics shops and have only read some of them.

And enough time has passed that special effects have caught up with the ambitions of the show, giving them more to work with as well as new limits to push as they create it, and I really want to see that.

The Jim Henson Creature Shop made all the physical aliens, and they were brilliant, unlike anything on TV or in movies, as well as being wildly different than the things the Creature Shop usually made. Now, with that new competition show to find new talent for the Shop starting up on SyFy, it'll be visible again soon, and this is the perfect time to relaunch the Shop's flagship of creativity, Farscape!

Plus, we're in a time when our scifi is split between near-future or present-time barely-scifi on TV and a few high-concept scifi movies (Oblivion-like) on big screens, but mostly on the side of superhero stuff, which I love, but which leaves the niche of Space Opera wide open for Faracape. We haven't had a good space opera in ages, and the last round was very dark and humorless because of the brilliant but heavy and often depressing Battlestar Galactica. I feel like it's time we got some humor back in the genre as well as the huge importance of the plots.

There's also the rumor that the new story would be about John and Aeryn's kid, which I'm divided on. On the one hand, I really want the old show back, but I know that's unreasonable. On the other hand, starting with the kid could very easily be like a Next Generation thing--literally--and would be enough of a restart that they could capture the old fans AND a whole new batch of fans who are versed in the ways of super-support fandom the way Doctor Who did.

And it would just be amazing. If one beloved niche show can revive, maybe others can. Maybe we-the-fans can save all our favorite shows that ended too early!

Note:

This post was originally posted on my other blog accidentally, but is now here where it belongs!

Geekery World Tour 1

Water is found on a planet outside our solar system.

3D printed nails, anyone?

Hugh Jackman talks about how Wolvie won't always be his.

You've seen the pics of all 7k characters from X-Men: Days of Future Past, right?

Channing Tatum to play Gambit in a standalone movie? On the one hand, OGMGambit! I've been wanting him to be on my screen for decades. On the other hand, I don't see it with CT; that'll have to wait to be weighed when I get some footage.

How Days of Future Past could lead to Apocalypse.

You can now write and actually SELL Veronica Mars fanfic officially, though Kindle Worlds.

Forgotten Fandoms - Seven Days

You know how there's shows that you totally love that no one ever talks about? Shows you wish there was more of an active, visible fandom for? Yeah, this is one of those, and here I am forcing it upon you in the grand tradition of fans who like things and get other people to like them.

Premise:

From the Wikipedia article on it:

The plot follows a secret branch of the United States' National Security Agency which has developed a time travelling device based upon alien technology found at Roswell. As the opening of the show says, the Chronosphere, or Backstep Sphere, sends "one human being back in time seven days" to avert disasters. The show's name refers to the fact that the Backstep Project can only backstep seven days because of limitations imposed by the fuel source and its reactor. As the fuel source is limited, there is a strict mandate that they only Backstep for events relating to "National Security". The backstep team and the equipment are stationed in a base called Never Never Land, which is in a secret location somewhere in the desert of Nevada.

This doesn't mention that it also has the limitation that it has to be flown by someone who is half-crazy, that the lead scientist is from Russia and is barely trusted, that there's all sorts of meddling, and that things are often bonkers because they can back up and fix them.

Stats:

• Ran from 1998-2001, at the height of the SG1-is-popular-let's-do-that-but-cheaper boom in SF TV
• Three seasons / 66 episodes
• Aired on UPN before it morphed into CW; has some of that feel, but is aimed at adults

Reasons to like it:

• Main character is crazy, dude. Again from the Wiki: "U.S. Navy Lieutenant Francis "Frank" Bartholomew Parker (Jonathan LaPaglia), a former Navy SEAL and ex-CIA operative who was brought out of a secret CIA mental institution – due to a mental breakdown he had suffered as a result of being tortured while being a prisoner in Somalia – to be the project's chrononaut." He's very good at his job, but he's erratic, sometimes has freakouts, reacts to things strongly or oddly, and is still charming and irreverent. And it's nice that the ex-SEAL is actually cracked, because that's how it'd be; if you crack a guy trained that well, he stays cracked.
• Lead Boy and Lead Girl basically fall in love right away, but because of how he has to keep going back in time to fix things, it's almost always undone, which means he remembers their constantly-restarted love affair and she doesn't. It's a nice switch up of the-network-won't-let-us-be-together and it adds a lot of melodrama that only a time-travel story can have.
• The time travel ship is a giant polygon, it hurts to pilot it, and Frank is the only one who does it well, because he's crazy.
• Never too serious, but walks that line where they can get emotionally and character-serious when they need to, and it's effective.
• Russian counter-agents! Roswell is a definite, and it might still be aliens! Time loops and paradoxes being worked out! A lot of scientists coming up against a lot of military dudes!

Stuff to be aware of:

• It's not available on DVD, which is a constant pain in my heart, but sometimes you can find it around.
• As far as I know, no one is rerunning it, and it's not on Netflix, more pains in my heart.
• It's a little cheesy the way all 90s SF is, but it generally gets past that anyway, mostly because the characters are fun and likable enough to get around the limitations.

If you find it somewhere, let us know in the comments!

Have you seen 7 Days? What did you think of it?

Wild speculation after Agents of SHIELD's latest episode!

Okay, I'd decided that I wasn't going to do episode-by-episode posts because that's too much stress when I'm supposed to be writing one novel and revising another and selling a first one...but guys? I want to talk about this episode. We waited a full freaking month from the last episode, which was already a month after the previous one, and when we finally get back to it, it's the show we've been wanting all along. It was tense, it was intense, everyone was showing emotion and reacting to things, there was a goal that they had to accomplish that required them to work together, and it was done right.

AND THEN! And then at the end it tied directly into the larger Marvel universe in a way that looked awesome, set up the next part of the arc for the rest of the season, hinted about what all this stuff means up until now, AND broadened the MCU before the movies! It was GREAT! And it gives me stuff to mull over, so without further ado:

TAHITI and the Mystery Blue Torso

• My favorite theories that I've seen on Tumblr and FB are: 1) He's a Kree, ancient mortal enemy of the Skrulls, which are basically what the Chitauri are, but from an alternate / ultimates universe. 2) He's Mahr Vehl, an alien super-hero, who could fit right into the future space-ness of the MCU about to start with Guardians of the Galaxy. 3) He's a frost giant, which would maybe account for Coulson's weird emotional state at the end of the ep (though not for his flip-flopping without actually explaining to anyone why...unless that's part of the Tahiti memory block...). 
• Either way, he looks bigger than a regular human dude (and has spike-fingers and no nipples and blue skin), exists as literally half a person, and I have this super-creepy feeling that he's not dead--that he's being kept alive. We're meant to believe that the drug they gave Skye (and, previously Coulson) was FROM this dude, but what if it's actually being fed INTO him, keeping him just alive enough to get information or to dissect him over and over, or to regenerate a whole alien from, like, a scrap that was recovered from a crash or something somewhere?
• This base is not SHIELD. So either Fury strongarmed some secret other group he knows about into helping him save Coulson*, or SHIELD has a lot more layers of secretiveness than any of them previously thought, a whole shadow arm that looks an awful lot like the Hatches on Lost and so I'm basically interpreting on those terms. If it's really not at all SHIELD, who is it? Hydra? Centipede? Some other government's answer to SHIELD? Whatever the bad-guy equivalent would be? OOOH, or the good-guy equivalent, and SHIELD is the badguy??
• Whatever he is, I'm pretty sure Mystery Blue Torso isn't human, which means: What else, that we haven't discovered yet, did the blue stuff do to Coulson? And if Skye really is the possibly non-human Object of Unknown Origin they think she is, what will it do to her? Will it trigger secret powers? Will it turn her into She Hulk or something? Will it make her a Lady Captain America? Will she be some other awesome thing that's waiting in the comics but that hasn't happened yet in the MCU? Will she be something new?
• And does the green light that keeps shining only on Coulson and Skye mean that they're the same and that they're both different?

Lorelei

• Lorelei is one of the great Thor villains! How exciting is that? She's sister of an even greater villain, Amora the Enchantress, which means they now can bring her in, too, and she's super-tangled up with Sif (coming next ep!!!) and with Loki, who we know is now secretly Lord of Asgard, which brings up all sorts of questions for me:
• Did she help Loki and has she been helping him all along?
• Did she manipulate him the way she manipulated that dude in the desert, and if so, what does that mean for our Loki, who has always been the manipulator, not the manipulated, as far as we could tell?
• Did she find out what happened with Loki after the end of Thor 2 and then flee Asgard? Because she looks really recent to the world of man, still wearing her Asgardian clothes and speaking all semi-Shakespearean and all...
• Do we get to have a Loki guest-appearance next season???????
• Is she totally a free agent and has entirely her own plans, complicated up the storyline more?
• Does she have allies on Earth that she's going to meet? If so, are they Asgardian or Frost Giant or some other awesome comic-or-mythology thing?
• Sif is coming after her! Which means people from the movies can now start showing up in the show, FINALLY pulling in those characters and their resources the way they should have been able to all along!
• Sif gets to be the first person who knows that Coulson is still alive, and she probably won't even really realize what it means since I'm pretty sure she didn't know him before he died, unless Thor told her about him.

Simmons and Skye and Fitz and Trip!

• Chloe Bennet has said she wants to see Skye with Simmons, and this Skye-in-a-coma thing gave us a scene where someone who doesn't know anything about them basically observes that Simmons is in love with her, and Simmons basically agreed, and the world imploded on Tumblr for a minute. 
• This episode also gave us more of Fitz's adoration of both Simmons AND Skye, as well as a new emotional level of guilt toward what happened to Skye that could blossom into protectiveness nicely, if it wants to. And more of Action!Fitz, which I always love seeing.
• And it gave us two new characters who already know Ward and are basically his old SHIELD family, and already have a long-standing sort-of rivalry but sort-of understanding with Coulson, and they basically said they'll be back and basically one of them likes Simmons. And she didn't go all frigid or turn him away.
• So now I'm wanting a big multi-directional proper poly relationship between Skye, Simmons, and Fitz, with the occasional visit from Trip to spice things up, because hey, why not?

May had a feel!

• She freaked the fuck out when they said Skye was going to die, and beat the dude responsible to a bloody pulp and had to be physically pulled off of him. It's the first time we've seen her lose control even a little, and it was because of Skye, who she's been cold and distant from this entire time. It might be a weird moment of out of character-ness, but it felt more like she's been being distant because she actually has all sorts of secret feelings**, and she doesn't want them to compromise her--and if that's so, we finally have a reason for her meanness, and some depth to her character!
• She was included when Coulson said "we're her family" and I died and came back to life and died again. If they're Skye's family, then they're all eachother's family, and I'm so flipping happy, because that's what I've been wanting since the beginning, and all the jittering and not fitting together was causing me all sorts of anxiety.

It looks like the rest of the season is going to be a powerhouse! And if it ends really well, any shakiness in the first half suddenly gets recontextualized, and becomes set-up and foreshadowing and necessary pre-conditions for the punch at the end, and then it's all great. And then I fear less for them surviving past season 2, because they will have intentionally hit their stride at just the right moment and can power through the next season.

So what do you think? What are your theories?

NOTES:
* And again, why so much trouble for one guy? Is he already a crazy-big investment that they didn't want to lose, even before he died??
** Motherly feelings?

Twenty(ish) X-Men I'd like to see on screen (even though I probably never will because they're mostly girls)

(it seriously puts me in a specific time-frame that this is what I think of when I think of X-Men)

(also that I have all the comics that, side-by-side, make up this exact picture.)

X-men: Days of Future Past*, as you probably know by now, has approximately 98 characters who are featured enough to have posters out, and that's saying nothing of the Spot The Mutant characters that might be seen off to the side or in crowd shots. We do get Blink, who is one of my favorite characters ever, but she's not the only one I'd like to see in these movies! According to The Internet, the grand total of ALL the X-Men is somewhere around 300, and we've gotten...ten or twenty? A few more in the sidelines, and a lot that seem to have been made up new even though there were so damned many already existing to choose from?

Here's ten I'd like to see:

1. Husk and Chamber - Husk, with the power to pull off her skin and by doing so transform into whatever is needed at the time, and Chamber, made almost 1/3 of psionic energy, are just begging to be in a movie where they could be so cool. Also, if Husk is there, it opens the door for her brother Cannonball--and wasn't there, like, six of those Guthrie children?
2. Jubilee as an actual character with an actual role - Two or three girls have played Jubes, and through almost every incarnation, she's rarely taken seriously, and I think a character who can create pyrotechnics and explosions deserves a little serious, don't you? Plus, in the comics, she and Wolverine had a great friendship, and that would be cool, too.
3. The Cuckoos - Somewhere between three, five and a possible thousand (depending on where in their story you are) clones of Emma Frost who share a group mind and a whole lot of telepathy? Sign me up!
4. Cerise - Shi'ar alien warrior-chick who falls in love with Nightcrawler. And if she comes into the story, you can bet that there's the opportunity for Nightcrawler to come back, too (even if played by someone else), which also brings back the opportunity for that whole Mystique-is-his-mother storyline that I SO MUCH WANT.
5. Synch - One of the Generation X kids like Husk and Chamber, who can match up with and copy other people's powers--I mean, think about the inherent awesomeness of a power like that on-screen, in a big fancy end-of-the-movie fight scene! He could synch with villains, too, and use their powers against them, without the killing-them-or-going-crazy side effect that Rogue has! He doesn't even have to touch them!
6. Shard - We've got Bishop coming up in the movie, so maybe, just maybe we'll get Shard, too (probably to die dramatically and spur him to rebellion or something, tho**)--but I really want to see her as a real character. She's got offensive powers, she's a trained enforcer, she's from the future, and she's the sister of a character that's now movie-cannon. It's getting to be a pet peeve of mine how all the personal interactions and connections keep getting trimmed away*** from the characters we have, and it would be SO NICE if one of them was allowed to stay.
7. Rachel Summers - This one is a possibility, since they've already made the Bad Future cannon, and we're getting Bishop out of it, which leaves the door open for other characters from there, but with how they handled Jean-Phoenix and Cyclops, well...it's hard to exist if your parents died before you were conceived, and we really don't need more complication with that timeline than this next movie is bound to give us! Still she was so much more useful as the Phoenix than Jean was, and so much fun with her violent backstory and heroic future.
8. Widget and Lockheed - The movies are so not the place, so far, for sidekicks, but wouldn't it be awesome to have a trans-dimensional robot-AI and a miniature dragon? I mean, at least Lockheed, since we've got Shadowcat!
9. Joseph - Either as a second role for Fassbender OR as a separately-acted character, depending on how they handle the story, I just think it would be awesome to have another Magneto around, especially one who has complete amnesia and doesn't know / remember that horrible and traumatic past that made Magneto who he is. Especially especially if the regular Magneto, old or young, was still around!
10. Jean Grey Clones - Okay, we got Jean dying because she was getting ready to destroy everything (even though we didn't get the part where she devours a sun and kills a whole planet of aliens, alerting the intergalactic characters I'd like to see in the second bonus-list below). That means that it's possible we could get Jean Clones! They're basically intrinsic to her character, as far as I'm concerned, and if they insist on Scott being dead they can make Rachel one of them. I mean, Madelyn becomes a Queen in the Hellfire Club, which was brought together by Sebastian Shaw, who we already had (even though he died), and then becomes Cable's mom, so...
11. Magma - She makes lava. What's not to want?
12. Siryn - We have Banshee as a kid in the 60s; it's totally possible that we could get Siryn as a baby in the 70s, or, if they do one of the movies in the 80s, as a functioning person then. Although that storyline was messed up by Shaw not being Cassidy's cousin a little, and then, you know, dead.
13. Magick - Colossus is cannon! Why not his metal-armed, kidnapped-to-hell and raised-by-demons sister? Plus, she can teleport, and that would be both awesome on screen and really convenient for stories where the jet couldn't possibly get them where they need to be on time.
14. Domino - Badass anti-hero bounty-hunter with super-good luck, who then joins up with the X-Men? So. Cool. 
15. Longshot and Dazzler - Okay, they're dumb, but they're also really charming, with powers that would look so cool on screen, AND they come with the storylines that involve Mojo and Spiral, which leads directly to how an English telepath happens to be Japanese when she comes back...though we still don't know why both have purple hair.
16. Forge - Sometimes Storm's boyfriend, always the dude who can build or take apart anything. Plus, he has replacement limbs he made himself and he's sometimes shifty, which makes for all sorts of drama. He could be like Q for the field teams--and he could anchor the at-home support characters that currently don't really exist.

And as a quick BONUS, here's two more (sort-of) lists:

Ones I might get to see, if the X-Force movie goes through:

1. Psylock - I seem to have a thing for telepaths who are better at being telepaths than Jean was / is. Psylock as a complicated storyline, but it ties up with some really interesting characters (mentioned above) AND broadens the world because of her being a) not American and b) sister to the greatest hero in Britain, the English version of Captain America--think how cool that could be played out. AND her psionic blades would just kill as special effects.
2. Cable - But only if they keep his ridiculously giant guns and shoulderpads, and tiny spatula hands.

Related characters I really, really want:

1. Lilandra - I love Moira, and she's nice and dynamic in the movie, but if Charles needs a new girlfriend, I vote for Lillandra. She's an Empress of a star-spanning, futuristic, bird-descended race of awesomeness. Who wouldn't want to be Consort to that? And with Guardians of the Galaxy out soon(ish), this right here is a perfect way for the X-Men franchise to expand into space in an X-Men way and keep up!
2. Corsair - Cyclops's and Havok's dad is a space pirate who is engaged to a woman who looks like a reverse-color anthropomorphic skunk, who doesn't mess around. If the X-Franchise goes into space and he doesn't show up, I'm going to be SO ANNOYED.

So who would you most like to see on screen?

NOTES:

* X-Men: First Class 2: Days of Future Past, or The One Where The Old Movies And The New Ones Meet Up And So Actually X-Men 5?

** grumblegrumble Man Pain = dead women grumblegrumble

*** Like how, reportedly, they've made it so Quicksilver isn't Magneto's kid in the new movie AND in the other-company-owned new Avengers movie?  

Why I loved Fangasm and was sort of insulted by King of the Nerds

 

VS

 

In case you didn't see them, Fangasm is the documentary-style nonfic story of a group of super geeks getting to work for Stan Lee's very own convention, and King of the Nerds is a competition-reality show trying to see who's the biggest nerd of all. One was charming and humanizing, and the other quickly devolved into glorifying in people yelling at each other.

That, right there, is the crux of it.

Fangasm was on SyFy and King of the Nerds was on TBS, and, for the first time in, like, ages, I'm pretty sure SyFy was more gentle and loving with its audience--and I think TBS sort of missed the whole thing and settled on stereotypes.

See, both shows feature really geeky and nerdy people. Both shows show social awkwardness and childlike love of popculture. Both shows have contrived activities for the people on them to do, and focus a little too much on the kneejerk reactions that tend to pervade geekery. But only one show really let the people on it be intelligent, well-rounded, multi-dimensional and real. 

And I think the difference was the competition.

See, Fangasm had things they had to accomplish, but they were things they had to accomplish together. Because of that, we watched these strangers (or, at least, virtual strangers) get to know each other, learn to settle into each other's weakspots and support each other to get the job done. King of the Nerds, which should have been fun, focused instead on making what was mostly a group of introverts choose sides, form terrible backstabbing alliances, and resulted in lots and lots of people screaming at each other in ways that made them seem unstable and possibly dangerous--and that's not at all a good way to get people to stop thinking of geeks and nerds as weirdos that need to be avoided.

I've had a theory for a while that competition shows bring out the worst in people. My favorites on the few I watch are always the ones that are fair and honest and kind through the whole thing--Christine and Luca on Master Chef, for a very good example. And the shows that feature mostly fighting and backstabbing--The Bachelor, Other Worlds, Survivor--are so low on my list of shows I want to figure out how to plan the schedule around that I gave them up ages ago. I've never even seen Survivor because the commercials make me want to slap people.

There were all these little moments where Fangasm could have gone that way--and instead, they chose to go the way of realism, honesty, and humanity, and for that, they stand at the top of my list of Shows Aimed At Nerds, and the only one off the top of my head on the list of Shows That Don't Insult Me On A Personal Level. It wasn't perfect, but it was a damn sight better!

Veronica Mars opening scene!

::hyperventilation ensues::



Good reader, five dollars of this movie is due to me, and I couldn't be happier!