mithen

navaan asked me to name some things I like from the New 52! I'll give you my four current favorite titles and tell you why each one has something I love in them.

1. Action Comics
My favorite take on Superman in the New 52. Greg Pak's Superman is very much Clark, rooted in Smallville (a fair number of his stories have revolved around Smallville, which contains a refreshing mix of names and faces from lots of different ethnic backgrounds), a decent guy and a hero. He's very much in the "You can't save them all!"/"WATCH ME!" vein of Superman heroics, and feels both young and mature at the same time.

2. Batman Eternal
This weekly series had a kind of rough beginning and I think it still suffers from some herky-jerky storytelling due to having a lot of different writers, but it has the advantage of having a bunch of very interesting female characters it's developing, including Stephanie Brown/Spoiler, Harper Row/Bluebird, Julia Pennyworth (taking over for her father while he's injured), and a Selina Kyle who's currently running the Gotham underworld and doing pretty well at it, thank you very much. Basically any title that brings us a Steph Brown who's resourceful, talented, and (maybe most importantly) was never tortured to death with a power drill gets a thumbs-up from me, but it's winning me over as a story of its own too.

3. Gotham Academy
This one's still really young and I'm not sure where it's going, but it's a very fun "Harry Potter meets Gotham" premise: Olive Silverlock and her friend Maps Mizoguchi are students at Gotham Academy, which may be haunted and definitely has a lot of secrets. I've spotted a bunch of little Easter eggs that make me really excited to see where this goes, and the art and writing style are refreshingly different from most of the rest of the New 52.

4. Grayson
I was pretty dubious about this one, which has a presumed-dead Dick Grayson going undercover in Spyral, the secret spy society, but boy have I been won over. Seeley and King write Dick Grayson like a dream, maybe my favorite version of Dick that I've read--not just in the reboot but in modern comic books. The tension in the book is whether Dick can keep his heroic ethics while working for the shadowy and frankly sinister Spyral, and so far the answer is a resounding "He's Dick Grayson, of course he stays a hero." The series also has a rebooted version of Helena Bertinelli, who works for Spyral but also seems like a good person and has definitely got chemistry with Dick. As a side, snarky note, I found it interesting and frustrating when I posted some scans from this title on Tumblr that a couple of people reblogged it and added some pretty angry commentary about how they "made Helena so damn ugly" in the reboot. So what does this take on Helena look like?



Oh, also "Grayson" has some really gripping spy plots that are very well-written! Basically, imagine Dick as an anti-gun James Bond (there was a really powerful issue about his refusal to use a gun) with all of the action and wit and--I won't say none because nothing's perfect, but only a tiny fraction of the misogyny.

jlvsclrk sked me to talk about what I enjoy about writing Clark and Bruce! TWIST MY ARM. :)

( meta and scans below the cut! )

me_ya_ri asked me to name five favorite moments for a character! To no one's surprise, I've gone with Clark Kent. *grin* These actually serve as a good introduction to which trade paperbacks and stories are my favorites with Superman as well...

( Scans from Birthright, JLU, Superman for all Seasons, All Star Superman, and Hitman below the cut! )

northernwalker asked: You've just won the lottery! It's a multi-million dollar win. What are the first three things you'd buy? Would you quit your job/move/make other drastic life changes?

Ooooh, this is actually a very hard question about my job. See, I love my job, I really do--every semester brings new and interesting challenges and frustrations, and it never gets boring. However, in recent years the workload has been slowly accumulating until this year I'm finding it quite hard to keep up with work and fandom, and that's galling. I could potentially drop to a different contract with fewer committee responsibilities, but...then I'd lose my office, and I do love to have an office (with walls and a door! All those years ago I thought Les Nesman of WKRP in Cincinnati was an oddball, but now I realize walls and a door are invaluable at the workplace...my God, I have become Les Nesman).

That said, my choices for what I would purchase with my lottery winnings are clear:

1. College educations for my nieces
2. A personal secretary, bilingual in Japanese and English, to do my paperwork and keep track of my deadlines. *luxurious sigh*

The rest would probably go into a retirement fund, to be honest! I am both boring and paranoid (oh no, I am Les Nesman...)

aralias asked me about being on Freedom City back in the heyday of mailing lists! A little background: Blake's 7 had (has) two major mailing lists--one was more general-interest, and Freedom City was more free-wheeling and open to fic and shippiness. I got accidentally unsubscribed from Freedom City at some point and never got back in, so I'm mostly describing a period of time from 2005-2007 or so (and just my own personal impressions, of course! There are people on my flist who may well have been there too!)

Mostly I remember the meta with fondness! There was a constant flow of discussion about characters and episodes, and because of the feeling of a mailing list, you felt pretty comfortable saying anything, knowing that the people hearing you were all interested in B7 as well. The shift to LJ was actually hard for me, because I feel uncomfortable posting things that are definitely not the reason people followed me. Tumblr is...well, I guess once you reach Tumblr you have to just embrace the chaos, but it still makes me unhappy at times! Freedom City was opt-in, so everyone wanted to talk about B7. And because it's a closed canon that's been over for decades, you could be pretty sure that everyone was well-versed in canon. There were people who had favorite minor characters (Carnell, Jarriere, Og, Bayban, Brian the Spider) that they promoted with zeal and humor, lots of favorite conspiracy theories about how to explain odd quirks in the show. There was also a fair amount of fic, a lot of which wasn't overtly shippy (both a con and a pro for me). There was a lot of focus on creating clever, unexpected, experimental fic, which was a lot of fun to read even if I have no talent for writing it.

I learned two important lessons from Freedom City that have been useful in my fannish life! The first I learned when the topic of whether Blake was a sociopath terrorist or not came up for the first time, and the list became embroiled in heated debate on the topic. Everyone had very strong views, forcefully argued. Eventually the dust settled, the debate died down, and I thought, "That was interesting! I'm glad we've got that settled for good now." What can I say, I was young and foolish and had not learned the essential fact of fandom: wank is perennial. It slumbers beneath cordial exchanges, ready to break out afresh with a new stimulus. I think we had basically that same argument every three or four months--someone would make a glancing reference to Blake's character and suddenly we would all be having the same arguments over again. It was like the WWI Christmas Truce in reverse--usually everyone would be playing cricket and singing songs together, and then everyone would dive into their established trenches for twelve hours of intense sniping, then back to the cricket-playing. I thought that was odd at the time, but it was my first lesson in the fact that every fandom has these sorts of flash point issues that are always ready to ignite.

The other lesson I learned when someone--I think it was Predatrix, and am ashamed I don't remember--posted a short story to the list. She's a better writer than I am by a long shot, but I guess I was in a snarky mood or something, because I forwarded it to my husband with some snotty opinions about it.

Except instead of forward, I sent my bitchy message to the whole list.

Words cannot describe my utter mortification--I actually laid down on the floor and wept with shame, I felt so horrible. I'm blushing right now just remembering it. Predatrix was amazingly gracious about it, much better than I deserved, and my humiliated apologies were generally accepted. And this is where I learned to never be snarky at all if I could help it, and if I MUST get something off my chest, to do it as privately as humanly possible. But mostly from then on I have just resisted the urge to rip things up. What the hell, it's just a story or a post, what am I going to gain being nasty about it? If the person in question saw my "clever" remarks, how would it make them feel? Because who knows, they might. To be honest, probably that mistake, coming so early in my fannish life, served me pretty well, because it drove home that being positive is a LOT less likely to make me feel horrible in the long run than being negative. I was very, very lucky that people were forgiving to me--but Freedom City’s atmosphere was like that.

rileyc asked me about this pairing, which I just wrote for the first time for Yuletide, but have loved for a couple of decades!

OK, I could go on for a LONG time about R. Daneel Olivaw and Elijah Baley. They're the main characters from Isaac Asimov's Robot mysteries: the two of them appear together in The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn, and (in flashback) Robots and Empire. Baley is a detective from Earth, while Daneel is a humaniform robot from an Earth colony. Baley--like most Earth people--distrusts and dislikes robots, but comes to first respect and then love (the word is used at least three times to describe how he feels about Daneel--the first time it is qualified to be love "like a friend," but the second two times it's simply love) his robotic partner.

Asimovian robots have three Laws that are necessary to function--later books explicitly argue that they're not programmed that way, their brains will not function without these Laws in place. The third, weakest Law is that a robot must protect its own existence. The Second Law is that a robot must always obey a human. And the First Law of Robotics is that "a robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm." Asimov created these Laws in the 1950s as basically a logic puzzle: most of his robot stories revolve around mysteries that play with the Three Laws. As the books progress and Asimov develops the society he's created, they also become ethics puzzles: what does free will mean to a robot if it must obey the three laws? Are they slaves to humanity, or purely altruistic beings? Or both?

Baley and Daneel make a very classic odd couple: Baley is homely (Asimov's descriptions make it clear, I think, he mentally cast a more rumpled Humphrey Bogart in the role) and Daneel is basically perfectly handsome (I would cast Chris Evans in the role if I were making a movie of it now--superficially blandly blondly pretty, with more underneath than it seems). Daneel is unemotional; Baley wavers between gruff and demonstrative. Daneel goes by the book (or Law); Baley trusts his intuition and instinct.

Asimov writes Baley as moving from resentment to friendship to deep affection for Daneel: there's a beautiful scene where Daneel re-asserts that he would be willing to die for Baley, and Baley, overcome with emotion (for a stoic noir detective, Baley is overcome with emotion a lot in these books) asserts that he feels that would be a poor exchange indeed. There's another great scene where Baley suddenly realizes the villains of the book are after Daneel, not him, and he has to try to convince Daneel to leave him and flee to save himself, Daneel is extremely reluctant to leave him in danger, and Baley is terrified at how the First Law might lead to Daneel's destruction. At the end of his life, Baley asks that Daneel come to him and holds on to life until they can have a last conversation. He sends Daneel away at the last second because he fears the sight of his death would hurt Daneel, and dies the moment Daneel leaves his side. MY KRYPTONITE.

In the long run, the last conversation Daneel has with Baley leads him to an ethical epiphany: the Zeroth Law, that a robot must not hurt HUMANITY. Armed with this breakthrough, in Baley's name Daneel dedicates his life to guiding humanity toward a utopian future.

Daneel is close to immortal. So for 20,000 years he works in the background, trying to ensure the survival and happiness of the human race--all for Elijah Baley, as he explicitly states much later. His efforts eventually cross over into the Foundation series, once a totally desperate space opera by Asimov, where we discover that he orchestrates the very creation of psychohistory, the science that at the end of the series appears to be leading humanity toward a perfectly harmonious collective mind.

And so a grumpy, agoraphobic noir detective ends up shaping the history of all humanity for more than twenty millennia, because a robot loved and admired him. If that's not romantic, I don't know what is.