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Book Review: Saga, Vol. 4

4/11/2017

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​Book Review:
​
Saga, Vol. 4

​Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples
 
Image Comics, 2014
 
A+

The Basics:
 
With Hazel now a toddler, Alana and Marko are doing their best to get by on Alana’s salary from performing on the Open Circuit, but the high-pressure, drug-fueled work environment is starting to get to her, while the loneliness of taking care of things at home is doing much the same to him. Meanwhile, the Brand has taken up the chase for the fugitive family, and Prince Robot the IV’s son being born in his absence is only the beginning of his newest nightmare.
 
The Downside:
 
There’s a fantastic moment in which Alana tries to defend her addiction, citing the horrors she’s been through as a soldier and claiming that no one could possibly understand, prompting Izabel to remind her that she understands the costs of war possibly better than anyone.
 
Izabel is the ghost of half a teenage girl, bound forever to the physical realm after stepping on a landmine. And for reasons unfathomable, Izabel’s hanging, severed entrails, which by now are such a normal part of her appearance that it’s easy to forget they’re there, are out of frame in this panel which would otherwise be a beautifully horrible moment to re-notice them.
 
This tiny choice in the composition of the artwork for a moment that remains powerful anyway is all the negative commentary I can offer.
 
The Upside:
 
The kidnapping of Prince Robot’s son, by a crazed victim of the Robot Empire’s horrific class struggle, may be the best example yet of Saga’s ability to blur the line between heroes and villains, making opposing sides conflictingly relatable.
 
As for Alana and Marko, this is that standard chapter of an extended romance where the relationship itself, the one good thing that has thus far stood against all adverse circumstances, is called into question.
 
Only it’s not that standard chapter, because those chapters are awful, and this is Saga, the farthest possible thing from awful.
 
Those are the chapters when characters hitherto known for their steadfastness suddenly receive total personality transplants and begin lying to each other for no reason and making life-ending extrapolations from the tiniest of irritations, while the audience throws things at the pages or screen, checks their email, and waits for the happy couple to get over it.
 
Alana and Marko’s issues come from the reality of struggling to raise a child together in the poverty, pressure, and isolation of their fugitive status. They’re living the romantic happy ending of running away from it all together, and discovering that it’s not all that perfectly happy.
 
The drift between them, the breakdown of their trust, is so natural and yet so weighty and devastating, that it’s almost possible to believe that the core of the series -- their marriage -- might actually be over. The worst parts of both of them, not abrupt changes to their characters but elements that have been hinted at from the start, surface catastrophically. They both cross real lines, but because it’s both of them, and because of the solid foundation they once built between them, it’s easy to root for that reconciliation with a fervor so many breakup chapters can only dream of inspiring.
​




Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!
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Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Love Triangles #4: Viola/Orsino/Olivia (Twelfth Night)

8/6/2013

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(You can read the #5 entry here and my defense of love triangles in general here.)

More Shakespeare! ’Tis the season, after all. Well, not really, in the case of Twelfth Night, since the title refers to the twelfth night of Christmas, in spite of the fact that the plot has nothing to do with Christmas whatsoever.

A fun fact not often mentioned at summer Shakespeare festivals!

Anyway, we’re jumping from the most traditional triangle on the list in the #5 spot to the most unconventional at #4. This one’s less a love triangle than a love recyclables symbol.

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It's mostly triangular
If you haven’t seen or read it, here’s how it goes:

Viola gets separated from her twin brother, Sebastian, in a shipwreck that leaves her stranded in Illyria, a place she knows nothing about. This being a dangerous and inconvenient time to be an unescorted woman, she disguises herself as a man, the way all the coolest Shakespearean women do, puts on her best impression of her brother, and gets herself a job running errands for a local Duke.

Seems like a perfect way to take care of herself in a strange place until she can figure out her next move. Except that Duke Orsino turns out to be hot.

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Sure, I could have found a pic from a legitimate production of Twelfth Night, but this was easier and more fun.

Now she has to decide if and when it might be worth the risk to tell him the truth. To make matters more uncomfortable, those “errands” she signed up for turn out to include wooing the lady Olivia on behalf of Orsino, who can be excused for never having read Cyrano de Bergerac on the grounds that it wouldn’t be written for nearly another three hundred years.
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Poor guy.
Viola goes on the errands, being as big a bitch to Olivia along the way as she can possibly get away with, at first for the obvious reason that Orsino’s pining makes her jealous and protective, but then because she genuinely feels bad for Olivia when she realizes where this is going and wants to spare her some fruitless pining of her own.

Unfortunately, Olivia’s a sucker for the bad boy. She falls harder for Viola’s new male persona the more Viola tries to stop her.

So Viola loves Orsino loves Olivia loves Viola.

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Got it?

Soak in those comic romantic misunderstandings. Enjoy them. The rest of this list was selected for being rip-your-heart-out painful, as most well-executed fictional love triangles must necessarily be in order to do justice to the human realities they’re drawn from.

****Spoiler Alert****


This one’s a comedy, where all will be well. Our heroine gets the guy, and Olivia is not forgotten. Remember that twin brother Viola copied her appearance and mannerisms from? The two of them hit it off nicely when he washes ashore and comes looking for his sister.


****End Spoilers****


So why is Twelfth Night on this list? Because as useful as stories are for brutally mirroring the hardest parts of the human experience, sometimes we need one to help us laugh at a good, silly caricature of our problems. Love belongs in farces as much as tearjerkers.

This is also one of those rare love triangles involving two women who aren’t interchangeable, neither of whom is evil. Those certainly deserve credit wherever they come up.

And the fact that it involves a guy who starts out wrapped up in a shallow, aesthetic, abstract idea of love coming to appreciate the cool, practical girl waiting under his nose, oh, and that it was written in 1602…

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Have I mentioned in the last five minutes how much I love this guy?
Yeah, that qualifies as favorite material.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or join me on Facebook and Twitter for more fictional musings!

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Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Love Triangles #5: Rory/Dean/Jess (Gilmore Girls)

8/3/2013

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August's countdown is going to be devoted to my favorite fictional love triangles. If you missed my post at the start of the month about what could possibly possess me to spend a month celebrating such a reviled trope, you can read it here.

Now, on to Gilmore Girls!


Structurally, this triangle’s about as classic as they come, your standard Girl/Good boy/Bad boy setup. I have a soft spot for it because it was the first one like it that I connected with as a girl, but to this day I think it’s one of the best handled of its kind.

The exceptionally written dialogue of Gilmore Girls certainly helps a lot. Admittedly, it often causes me to overlook the show’s flaws, but in this case, it adds a lot to Rory as a character, a lot that’s often missing from characters acting as the apex of a love triangle.

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Being on a show that prides itself on being smartly written, Rory is smart, obviously, evidently smart, not just indicated to the audience to be smart via a lazy sprinkling of well-known literary classics on the shelves of her room.

She’s sharp, funny, and all-around cool enough to make it uncommonly understandable what both boys see in her. And as exceptional as she is, she’s still a believably confused and inexperienced teenage girl, making it also uncommonly understandable how long she allows this unfair, uncomfortable situation to drag out.

Okay, okay, enough about Rory. We all know what people watch this kind of love triangle to see. We’ll start with the good boy, Dean.

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He’s the good boy, alright, no arguing with that. Not to be confused with the boring contingency boy. He’s the sweet, attentive gentleman every never-been-kissed girl imagines for herself. Early in their courtship, there’s an episode in which Rory brings him to a dance at her private school, and a couple of the resident mean girls start hitting on him in front of her.

Even though their relationship is still in the fairly formal, nonphysical phase, Dean responds very clearly by wrapping his arms affectionately around Rory during the girls’ questioning.

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Watching that episode for the first time as an eleven-year-old girl, I remember my dad telling me, “If you ever meet a sixteen-year-old boy with enough sense and empathy to do that, hang onto him and don’t let go.” Someday I might find myself telling my future daughter(s) the same thing.

How could anyone compete with that? Meet the bad boy, Jess.

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And he is a bad boy, with all the associated ups and downs. He’s no misunderstood hero in scoundrel’s clothing, no noble, responsible potential partner who just happens to have a more confrontational, dickish brand of surface charm than the norm.

Sure, he’s got that charm, and he’s genuinely, passionately in love with Rory, but he’s also unreliable, forever wrapped up in his own problems. He gets into fights without provocation, alienates Rory’s friends and family without a thought, and generally acts almost entirely on id-driven impulse.

Easy choice, right? Jess is the guy you lust after on TV, Dean’s the one you want to marry. Except…

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Remember the bit about Rory being truly, clearly intelligent? Well, unlike so many good boys from less well-written triangles, Dean isn’t just the boring boy to be outshone by Jess’s charisma, but he’s also not perfect.

Dean recognizes Rory’s intelligence and potential and tries his best to respect it, but he can’t relate to it. The best he can do is display angelic patience while she pours over college prep material and spends recreational hours browsing the bookstore. He can’t talk to her on her level about most of what she does.

Guess what? Jess can.

As hard as Dean tries not to, at his lowest moments, he resents Rory’s ambition. It’s a problem she thinks she can overlook, until she gets a glimpse of what it’s like to be understood.


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****Spoiler Alert****

In the end, it’s a deal breaker. Not that that cancels out all of Jess’s problems. It doesn’t.

So who does Rory end up with?

Neither of them. The deep flaws that make the triangle so balanced and intense also make both relationships impossible. After all, if either of them had been the one, it would have been a lot harder to believe that the other one had a chance.

****End Spoilers****

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or join me on Facebook or Twitter for more fictional musings!

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Book Review: Nobody But Us

7/6/2013

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Book Review:

Nobody But Us

By Kristin Halbrook

Harperteen, 2013

A+
(Click here to order)
The Basics:

Will has just aged out of the foster system. Zoe needs to get out of her father’s house. They’re running away to Vegas to start a better life together, whatever it takes.

The Downside:

A few minor, odd moments briefly break through the suspension of disbelief, including a will-they-or-won’t-they-have-sex scene after it’s just been established that Zoe’s on her period, and this improbable exchange:

Will: When people ask, you’ll have to say you’re eighteen.

Zoe: Why?

Not the question of an otherwise intelligent, practical girl who’s been in the habit of cashing her father’s social security check before he can drink it since the age of eleven, no matter how ethereally innocent her spirit is.

The Upside:

Warning: Undignified fangirl gushing ahead.

This one is special enough to drag a perfect A+ out of me, which is difficult enough when there are no mockable details like those above to overcome, and nearly unheard of when you factor in my usual tastes and the absence of any speculative elements whatsoever.

That’s really frickin’ special.

I lost sleep over this book. I had out-loud, uncontrollable sobbing jags over it and long, intense dreams about it afterward. That’s how vivid and alive Will and Zoe are. The relationship between two damaged people, told from both sides, is what attracted me to the book in the first place (in spite of its lack of monsters or exotic alternate spacetime locales), and it could not have been more beautifully rendered.

Will and Zoe are both deeply scarred in distinctly different ways. Will lashes out at the world while Zoe hides from it. Both perspectives are so clear and close that every problem, uncertainty and floundering decision is inescapably relatable, through all the trouble they cause themselves and each other.

They’re damaged, but that doesn’t mean they’re bad or unsalvageable. The love between them and their determination to start fresh and do right by each other are so pure and constant and genuine that there’s no chance at all to stop rooting for them to come through okay somehow, no matter how hopelessly high the mistakes and misfortunes pile up.

This is going on my list of books to re-read whenever I need a reminder of what a true, orchestral heartstring-playing feels like on the page.

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Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Couples #1: Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully of The X-Files

2/26/2013

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(Click the links to read Favorite Fictional Couple #2, #3, #4, and #5)

Of all the romances on this list, Mulder and Scully’s is the one I’ve found most difficult to describe. They rank number one both in spite of and because of this. They’re what I’d call a meeting-of-the-minds-of-different-kinds, and they’re also one of the great, drawn-out, will-they-or-won’t-they, friends-become-lovers stories.

Because their courtship is so drawn out, the most explicitly romantic parts of it don’t happen until after the show’s most iconic years, after the style becomes more hit-or-miss experimental and the focus shifts from episodic adventures to the not-entirely-thought-out mythos. Most of the milestones of their relationship also happen offscreen and are only confirmed later in passing, so it’s difficult to point to specific, defining moments.

To avoid this problem, I seriously considered saving this pair for a future list of favorite fictional friendships, because that’s the largest, strongest, most extensively explored part of their connection, but that wouldn’t be right. They do end up together, after all, as everyone knew they had to, and the attraction did exist from very early on, if the number of con artists who’ve stolen Mulder’s body to seduce Scully and nearly succeeded is any indication. I also considered a lot of other couples for the top spot, but every one that came close was a lesser, sometimes directly derivative variant of the same story.

The length of Mulder and Scully’s platonic phase is what gives their bond its special and unusual depth. It’s what makes them the classic and favorite that they are. Instead of constant sexual tension, which comes in just a few standard, universally recognizable flavors, the show explores who Mulder and Scully really are as people, how they see each other, how they work together, what they actually talk about, the elements that can easily get lost in a story that’s simply about falling in love. The romance between Mulder and Scully may be harder than average to find and pin down, but the love is everywhere.

Mulder and Scully first meet when Scully is assigned to discredit Mulder and his work investigating the paranormal. Instantly, they’re put in an adversarial position, but theirs isn’t the enemies-become-lovers story, even at first. They maintain their opposing outlooks, skepticism versus openness, long into the series (even once it becomes ridiculously obvious that their universe is full of the paranormal), but it’s almost always a friendly point of debate. They both delight in predicting the other’s take on unexplained phenomena. In one episode involving a killer doll, Mulder suggests the presence of witchcraft, and Scully declares her doubt that they’re dealing with any of a long, specialized and technical list of witchcraft variants. Mulder’s joking response? “Marry me.”

It’s also a very private debate. Scully is ready to defend Mulder to the rest of the world long before she counts herself a “believer,” however much she might criticize him to his face. She protects him from the regular attacks against his job, at the price of her own reputation, and Mulder refuses to hold the fact that she started off as part of one of these attacks against her. He’ll go to any lengths necessary to protect her too, usually from the more dangerous paranormal threats he understands better than the FBI politics that are her domain. He’s broken into secure government facilities, tried to let himself die by “heavy salt” poisoning (among many, many other things) and, of course, trekked through Antarctica to keep her alive.

The bond between them, deeper than the work they do together but still nonphysical for so much of the series, doesn’t always have to be demonstrated so dramatically either. My favorite moment between them happens when they’re stranded overnight in a forest full of the latest paranormal monster they’re investigating. Scully stands watch first, and Mulder asks her to sing so that he’ll know she’s awake. After warning him that she can’t hold a tune, she finally sings him to sleep in her lap with “Jeremiah was a Bullfrog.”

When their romance finally does become official, as stylistically odd and practically confusing as the story becomes, it does touch all the necessary, waiting points. Scully has to choose between Mulder and a respectable life, Mulder has to choose between Scully and his obsession with all dark and secret truths. The two of them sailing off into a tropical paradise together at the end may be tonally silly after the rest of the series, but it provides the sorely needed confirmation of what all the best moments of the series were leading to.


Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!
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Guest post by Adrienne Monson, author of Dissension

2/23/2013

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Today, on Confessions of the One and Only F.J.R. Titchenell (That I Know of), I'm proud to be hosting a guest post by Adrienne Monson, author of Dissension, which hits shelves and their digital equivalents today, yes, today, 2/23/13, so go on and grab your copy now! We'll wait :)

Adrienne has kindly indulged my fictional couples theme for the month of February, so without further ado, here she is with a sixth entry in our countdown!

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One of my favorite paranormal romance stories is the Fever series by Karen Marie Moning. So, I’ve chosen the two main characters from this intense paranormal saga as the love interest to look at today.

If you’re not familiar with these books, here’s a brief summary: The Fever series revolves around MacKayla Lane, a seemingly normal girl in her early twenties living in small-town Georgia, USA. When her sister is brutally murdered while studying abroad in Ireland, Mac decides to travel to Dublin and track down the killer herself. When she arrives, however, she quickly realizes that all is not what it seems in the Irish capital. She isn’t even all that she thought she was. For one, Mac learns that the Celtic folklore concerning 'fairies' is true, but not in a pleasant way. For another, Mac discovers that she is a sidhe-seer (a person who can see the Fae for who they are, even when they are casting a 'glamour' in order to appear human).

Delving deeper, she realizes that her sister's death is linked to the search for dark and mysterious book - the Sinsar Dubh - which has gone missing from the Faerie realm. Many others are attempting to track down the book as well: the wealthy and enigmatic Jericho Barrons, the tantalizing Seelie Prince V'lane, the powerful 'Lord Master' Darroc, and the secretive Sidhe-seer society.

The interesting thing about this love story with Mac and Jericho Barrons is that we don’t know if they’re actually going to get together until the last book (there’s five in the series). Mac’s character is almost like a southern belle cliché. She has blonde hair, loves to wear pink, and sunbathe. When she comes to Dublin and meets Jericho, he is everything that’s dark and mysterious. Broody, demanding, and rude are his main characteristics that we see. However, as the story progresses, Jericho gets softer towards Mac. He definitely becomes more and more protective of her and she tries to do nice things for him, like getting him a birthday cake (His reaction to this is great!).

While their relationship is tense and rocky, their interactions entertain the readers through witty humor and incredible action (as in fighting – I know what you were thinking!) Almost every fan of this series instantly becomes attached to the enigmatic bad boy that Jericho embodies. It’s almost torture at how drawn out their “courtship” is, but that only makes it much more thrilling when they do actually become a couple.

If you like to read about couples who have to earn their love for each other, I would highly recommend the Fever series to you.


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About Dissension:

Leisha was once a loving mother with an ideal family. Though this was over two thousand years ago, Leisha still holds that time dear to her heart. But for now, she must focus on trying to escape the eternal and bloody war between her kind—the Vampires—and the Immortals, an undying race sworn to destroy her people. Soon, Leisha finds herself captured by the government only to be saved by a young and mysterious human girl. What entails is the beginning of a long and torturous journey as Leisha and her newfound friend run for their lives while searching for the one thing that can end it all—the prophecy child.

DISSENSION will be available where books and ebooks are sold February 23, 2013.


About Adrienne Monson:

ADRIENNE MONSON, winner of the 2009 Oquirrh's Writer's Contest and the Utah RWA's Great Beginnings, has immersed herself in different kinds of fiction since a young age. She currently lives in American Fork, Utah, with her husband and two kids. Besides reading, she enjoys Zumba, kickboxing, and weightlifting. She also loves yummy foods, so she doesn’t look like a workout guru. ;)

You can find her on her homepage, Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, and Amazon.

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Fi's Five Favorite Fictional Couples #2: The Joker and Harley Quinn of Batman Comics, Batman: The Animated Series, and related works.

2/20/2013

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(Click the links to read Favorite Fictional Couple #1, #3, #4, and #5)

Oh, this one’s going to be fun!

I gave fair warning that this is a list of favorite couples, not good couples. These two are what I was talking about.

I doubt there’s anyone out there reading this who isn’t familiar with The Joker, Batman’s archnemesis and quite possibly my favorite villain of all time. I could easily type away this whole post and several more just analyzing him, and in future months, I’ll probably do just that, but for now I’ll try to stick to his ongoing and horrifying love story.

For those who only know the Heath Ledger Joker, Harley Quinn is the comic/TV/videogame Joker’s sidekick, on-and-off girlfriend, and former therapist (seduced as part of one of his many, many escapes from Arkham Asylum). She’s one of the biggest additions to the DC universe drawn from the 90s Saturday morning cartoons, and she’s the only person other than Batman himself who can get under Joker’s skin. Together, they make a dangerous supervillian team, but not nearly as dangerous as the crossfire when they’re apart.

Harley’s about as different as can be from all the other women on this list. Her strongest defining traits are childishness and codependence, yet she still manages to be one of my favorite characters. I’ll freely admit that it’s partly because I relate to her for all the worst reasons. My badboy phase was pretty epic, occurring, as it did, in conjunction with my first love. And of course, even then, I went for the guy who could make me laugh.

I get Mad Love, both the storyline and the general sentiment, the obsession that can’t be shaken no matter how obviously destructive it becomes. But there are lots of sick, abusive couples in fiction, and often the more abusive they are, they more unpleasant I find them to read about or watch. So what makes Joker and Harley’s twisted train wreck of a love story so irresistibly special?

For one thing, the combination of complexity and caricature possible in modern comic book universes really works for them. Their relationship is deeply explored, never two-dimensional, and only occasionally played for laughs, but the colorful extremes of their supervillain lifestyle prevent them from straying into crushingly serious Lifetime Channel or after-school-special territory. Harley is more than just a victim. The good, intelligent, ambitious psychologist she was before she met Joker still exists. She often uses two voices when her old self surfaces (sometimes indicated by different colored speech bubbles in the comics), the thick Brooklyn accent she’s reverted to as Harley Quinn, and the carefully studied diction she once used as Dr. Harleen Quinzel. As Dr. Quinzel, she fully understands how wrong her life has gone, and when Harley Quinn inevitably takes over, she’s giving in not just to Joker but to everything he represents to her, an escape from responsibility.

The Harley Quinn side alone isn’t all games and puppy love either. The pure id she runs on allows for plenty of tantrums. She’s tried to kill Joker during more than one lovers’ quarrel, and when she’s separated from him involuntarily, her determination to get back to him is notorious enough that, in one of the vignettes in the Joker’s Asylum anthologies, the Gotham police pull out all the stops to catch Joker just because they decide it will be easier and less dangerous than trying to keep Harley in Arkham without him on Valentine’s Day.

As pitiable as most of Harley’s life is, she still represents a fantasy as much as any comic book character does. Everyone fantasizes from time to time what it would be like to give up the daily struggle to do what’s good for them, and the glamorous and powerful (if violent and debasing) costumed life that Joker offers Harley is a lot more than reality provides as an alternative.

Of course, there’s no denying that a large part of the magic of Joker and Harley comes out of the pure, terrifying magnetism of Joker himself. He’s far less sane than Harley and almost as capricious and unpredictable when it comes to her as he is about everything else, enjoying her attention in one panel, indifferent in the next, charming when he feels like it, but always on the verge of rage or sadistic mania. He doesn’t love her back, exactly, but the relationship isn’t one-sided either. Love requires compassion, something The Joker has never been capable of in any interpretation, but he is capable of attachment, possessiveness, and obsession. Even Batman admits on multiple occasions that Harley knows Joker better than anyone, in spite of her blind devotion, and that even if she was just a mark to him when she first broke him out of Arkham, at some point along the way, whether Joker likes it or not, he let her in for real. It’s the only reason (other than her popularity as a character), that she’s still alive after having been within easy reach through his full spectrum of moods so many times. Half the fun of watching them together, just like watching Joker with Batman, is seeing something break Joker’s total confidence and unconcern, just a little.

There’s also something perversely beautiful about the eternal nature of superhero comics as it applies to Joker and Harley. Yes, they break up all the time, they both have weird, long-winded separate plotlines, but in the basic form of their existence, how any fan of both of them will imagine them, they are, as Joker would say in his more charming moods, two of a kind. Their relationship is like Zeus and Hera’s perpetual cosmic marital disaster, with just a little more of the good times sprinkled in. He can throw her out a third story window, and just as she’s lying in a hospital bed swearing to leave him for good, of course the rose arrives with the little note tied around it,

“Feel better soon, -J.”

And that’s that. There’s no escaping it. They have a passion much too volatile and unstable to exist without either fizzling or killing one or both of them, but through the magic of a serialized floating cannon, they live this way forever.


Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!
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Fi’s Five Favorite Fictional Couples #4: Phillip J. Fry and Turanga Leela of Futurama

2/7/2013

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(Click the links to read Favorite Fictional Couple #1, #2, #3, and #5)

At number four, we’ve got a comedy couple. For those who don’t know, Futurama is an animated sitcom revolving around Fry, a cryogenically frozen pizza delivery boy from the 1990s, and his coworkers at Planet Express, the interstellar delivery company he goes to work for when he gets thawed out in the 3000s. His pursuit of Planet Express Ship’s captain, Leela, is one of the main overarching storylines of the show.

I’ve got a soft spot for give-me-a-chance romances (mostly because my marriage is, in large part, the result of my husband’s remarkable patience and persistence), and Fry and Leela’s is one of the best. Like the rest of the show, Fry and Leela’s relationship is usually treated with light irreverence. The escalation of Fry’s attempted romantic gestures and the lengths the writers have to go to to keep them apart (and the balance of the show intact) have both developed into acknowledged running jokes.

But as any comedian (or anyone who’s ever watched an episode of Fawlty Towers) will tell you, comedy and tragedy really are two sides of the same coin. It’s hard not to laugh at Fry’s endless, ill-fated efforts, Leela’s stubbornness and disastrous attempts at a love life away from her obvious destined counterpart, but it’s impossible not to feel for them as well. Futurama recognizes this and runs with it, usually keeping a balance of funny sweetness between them but occasionally pushing further.

In one episode, the Planet Express Ship crew find themselves skipping forward in time with no memory of the missed hours and days. After a bad skip, Fry and Leela return to consciousness at the altar, newly married, and Fry spends the rest of the episode trying to figure out how he won her over, so that he can convince her it wasn’t a mistake. When he’s left with the task of rearranging celestial bodies with a gravity ray to set time straight (it’s a sci-fi sitcom, what do you expect?) he finds the love note he wrote her in the stars, using the ray during the skip. He calls for her, but before she gets there, the stars are sucked into a black hole they’re using for the time fix. When she asks what happened, he says, “Nothing,” and the episode ends on him staring out into empty space. If Futurama used a laugh track, there would still be silence here.

In more recent seasons, the show’s become more random and episodic, having more or less wrapped up its longer plotlines in time for its first cancellation, and Fry and Leela end up being plugged into whatever couple spot each week’s premise requires, but the sweetness is still there, and the show’s multiple deaths and revivals do have the benefit of confirming where Fry and Leela’s story has to end, no matter what strange corners it has time to explore first.

The first “last” episode involves Fry making a deal with the Devil (and by Devil, I mean Robot Devil) for the ability to write an opera for Leela. The deal naturally goes wrong, Fry’s enhanced musical ability is revoked, and we close with him alone onstage, Leela alone in the audience, and the words, “Please don’t stop playing, Fry. I want to hear how it ends.” The first revival, through direct-to-DVD movies, ends on a kiss, as they and the rest of the main characters steer into a wormhole, toward the unknown. A hilariously convoluted season premier was necessary to undo that one, when the show got yet another reprieve. The Fry and Leela romance is always the most vital loose end to be tied up just right, and the unraveling of it while the show survives is a particularly delicious case of having your cake and eating it too.


Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!
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Fi’s Five Favorite Fictional Couples #5: Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark of The Hunger Games Trilogy

2/1/2013

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In honor of Valentine’s Day, I’m going to be posting a month-long countdown of my five favorite fictional couples. Narrowing down a top five wasn’t easy, and they’re not all what you’d call “good” couples by any means, but I don’t think a list of the five happiest, most perfect fictional couples would be anywhere near as much fun. These are five very different love stories, told through different media, all of them beautiful in different (and sometimes horrible) ways, and each one is my favorite of its particular type.

(Click the links to read Favorite Fictional Couple #1, #2, #3, and #4)

***Spoiler Alert***

At number five, we have Katniss and Peeta of The Hunger Games trilogy, our representatives of the YA novel and the love that beats impossible odds.

There really isn’t a worse place for love than the Hunger Games. If there’s anyone out there reading the blog of this YA Horror author who’s somehow managed to remain virgin to the Hunger Games concept, here it is: As an intimidation technique by a dystopian government, a boy and girl from each of twelve districts are selected annually to fight to the death on live TV. The last one alive wins. With only one survivor allowed, there’s no happy ending in sight for a couple. Of course, you’ve probably guessed by their presence on this list in this particular category that Katniss and Peeta do both escape the game alive, but even once they do, they find themselves trapped in the middle of a bloody civil war, attacked and exploited as a symbol by both sides.

The Hunger Games trilogy is as dark as its seminal concept. No emotional punch is pulled, no one is safe, and on her own, Katniss is everything a dark epic hero should be. She’s tough, hardened to a fault, capable of anything except for happiness and all its associated vulnerabilities, driven by will, pragmatism, and a moral core that slowly erodes under the waves of horror she survives. By the last book, she sinks to depths that equal the evils she’s defeated, voting to allow a final Hunger Games for the children of the deposed government and upper class. Without Katniss and Peeta’s love story, the trilogy would be a pure descent-into-madness tragedy, undeniably effective but nearly unreadably bleak (and it takes a lot of bleakness to stop me from reading). Their romance, the one light in the darkness, is what transforms the story into something better, something powerfully hopeful.

More even than most fictional couples, Katniss and Peeta complete each other. Peeta on his own isn’t quite cut out to be any story’s hero. He doesn’t have Katniss’s determination, her will to succeed and survive, her willingness to act, but he has what’s missing from her. He has the desire to find happiness and goodness, the faith that they exist. He can’t do what she does, but he’s arguably the better person, maintaining his humanity while hers is chipped away. He can’t drive the story, he won’t start a rebellion, but does keep loving Katniss, through the no-win circumstances of two rounds of the Hunger Games, through his own kidnapping and brainwashing, through her darkest moments and her near-pathological inability to reciprocate, which she sheds even more slowly than her sanity.

When Katniss has lost absolutely everything else, including sight of what she stood for in the first place, when there doesn’t seem to be any possible happiness left for an ending, Peeta is the one force strong and good enough to pull both her and the story back from the abyss. In reference to something as awful as his brainwashing ordeal and the exercise they did together to restore his grip on reality, he asks the question that ends the story not with the inevitable-seeming soul-crush but with that miraculous, much-needed rush of warm and fuzzy.

“You love me. Real or not real?”



Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!
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