Fic: Mutual Masturbation (New Teen Titans)

Title: Mutual Masturbation
Rating: R
Characters/Pairings: Donna Troy, Koriand'r
Word Count: 1,001
Summary: Donna thinks about her roommate, and other things that don't quite touch.

( The first time Donna walked in on Kory masturbating was a misnomer. Donna never left the room. )

I know I'm late for the party, but... Nightwing Annual 2: Attack of the Clones!

You’re sure this wasn’t a fanfic? It almost seems to count as an inversion of a fanfic, with the traditional destination (the resolution of the characters’ relationship; “getting together”) reversed as a goal. But really, comparing it to fanfic is an insult to fandom. Traditionally, the divide between fanfic and canon can be determined by a simple rule-of-thumb: Fanfic tends to focus on emotional relationships, with the “plot” of the canon in the background; canon tends to focus on the plot, with the emotional relationships as background. You’re as unlikely to find a fanfic about SG-1 fighting the Goa’ld as you are to find an episode about Jack’s friendship with Daniel (at least without an “A-plot” about something bigger).

There tends to be a good reason for this. TPTB aren’t very good at writing emotional relationships as maintext, while fandom has little interest in writing the Death Star being blown up. Exhibit A…

But first, a little history. The big death of Infinite Crisis (because God knows every crossover needs a death to “matter”) was supposed to be Nightwing. He was saved because Geoff Johns liked the character, thus Superboy was killed in his place. As you can imagine, Geoff Johns isn’t particularly liked among fandom. The Nightwing book ended the OYL jump on Dick asking Barbara to marry him, and her saying yes, thus adding some bathos to his tragic death (because God knows the Batfamily needs more to angst about it, after an event designed to reduce Batman’s jerkitude and make him more “light and fun”). With Dick inconveniently not dead, there was some awkward finagling that resulted in Dick and Barbara having nebulously broken up over the time-leap, with Dick next seen having a one-night stand with a woman whose name he didn’t even know (considering that at least one major Nightwing writer left it up to the reader’s discretion whether Dick even had sex before marriage, you tell me how in-character that is). That woman later turned out to be a metahuman fashion designer who became one of the five or so Nightwings running around in OYL DC, perhaps under the principle that if the audience didn’t want Nightwing to die, then surely they would appreciate not just one, but a lot of Nightwings. As for Barbara, she kept shagging Dinah, so business as usual (okay, okay, she was dateless and anguished. Happy?).

So, with the hordes of Dick/Babs shippers wondering why exactly Dick and Barbara had been broken up just to tell exactly the kind of stories DC hoped to avoid by breaking them up (i.e., bad ones), fan-favorite Manhunter writer Marc Andreyko was called in and… I have no idea what went wrong.

Take the premise. Nightwing is injured in the Battle of Metropolis, allowing him to have some good hurt/comfort time with Nurse Barbara (I don’t care if it plays right into the slashers’ hands, just once I want to see Roy tending Dick’s wounds. Or Bruce, or Kory, or Alfred, or Leslie Thompkins, or Cass Cain. The Nurse Barbara storyline has been done well precisely once, and now it’s the equivalent of The Bridge Scene in Spider-Man comics. Stop it and have an original idea). There’s apparently a generous time lag between the end of Infinite Crisis and Bruce sailing round the world with his wards, so Dick has time to get all rested and rehash the same old relationship issues which have been solved and dissolved ad nauseum.

Doesn’t that sound like fanfic? It’s fanfic with pretty pictures attached, but the only reason this couldn’t have been a fan comic is that it doesn’t end with twelve pages of Dick/Babs consummating their love due to some convenient sex pollen (bestowed by Poison Ivy, who in fanfic is the best thing to happen to sex since the condom). And even that would be more in-place than an utterly pointless dream sequence where Nightwing fights off a bunch of nightmares, under the thin guise that this comic isn’t entirely dedicated to who’s going to be snogging who by the last panel. Stop pretending you aren’t a romance comic, Nightwing Annual 2.

I probably would’ve enjoyed it okay if it weren’t for the flashbacks. As contrived as the story is, it’s competently written in a way like okay, there’s nothing to watch at 3 P.M., hey, Law & Order’s on, I’ma gonna watch some murderer get his. It does give an explanation for the split-up that’s not totally bogus (and I can’t very well hold Marc accountable for how this Dick Grayson became the ignoble male model Dick Grayson… although were I more of a continuity-hound, I might wonder how Dick went from pledging eternal love to banging nameless bimbos in New York, but I’m more of a “sweep it under the rug and pretend it never happened” type when it comes to bad stories). But those flashbacks… lordy, lordy, lordy…

Putting aside the questionable value of a Bat-erection flashback to the days of Robin and Batgirl, there’s Dick Grayson cheating on Kory (who he’s engaged to) with Barbara after she’s shot by the Joker, then delivering his wedding invitation on the morning after… and Barbara dropping in on Dick at some point after he’s become sex buddies with Kory, and Kory not telling Dick about it because she thinks he would run off to be with Babs… and she’s right! Our hero, ladies and gentlemen.

You know those romantic comedies where the heroine is with some completely disgusting dick that makes you wonder how this beautiful woman (who could obviously have her pick of men and purportedly highly intelligent) would ever give this jerk a second glance, much less put up with him on an ongoing basis. Of course, we of the audience know that this is just so the loveable slacker hero can swoop in (with a little assist from his quirky but loveable sidekicks), save her from a lifetime of unfulfilling matrimony, and deliver the villain to his just comeuppance.

Kory is apparently the heroine in that movie and Dick is the jerk boyfriend! I don’t know who the loveable slacker hero is; it might be Donna. But think about it. Based on the annual and books of the same timeframe…

1. Dick is a guy who will cheat on his present girlfriend, no matter how much he professes his love or how much he harps on her cheating on him (see NTT, where Dick couldn’t handle the thought of Kory being obligated to have a political marriage to someone else, even when she made it clear that she would return to him and love only him).

2. Despite being in a committed relationship, Dick will drop his current girlfriend like a sack of potatoes to be with a childhood crush who he never really dated in the first place! This does not make me think “epic love affair.” It makes me think Dick should grow the hell up.

3. Combine that with the general man-childishness of how Devin Grayson wrote Dick, completely unable to handle the thought of Barbara Gordon as an autonomous entity from Batgirl the Old Jerk-Off Fantasy. Dick is apparently unable to let go of the past at all, like a football hero gone to seed who can’t stop reliving the glory days. I’d call it a mid-life crisis if he weren’t supposed to be in his twenties.

4. Let alone all the shenanigans he got up to in Outsiders OYL.

5. Some sort of weird casual sex thing going on with Kory, which just seems cruel when you consider that she apparently still wants a committed relationship (or, you know, whatever the Tamaranian equivalent of that is… “May all your threesomes, foursomes, or morgies involve me”?).

6. Did I mention he sexed a woman up before giving her an invitation to his wedding? Admittedly, I’m not trained by the World’s Greatest Detective, but how is that supposed to end well? DC, stop playing Iran-Contra with ship wars.

It’s exactly this kind of overblown melodrama in the name of “epic love” that makes me want both Dick and Barbara to get hit by a truck during one of their endless arguments (call it the “Aunt May Has A Heart Attack” Syndrome, after what many fans wished would happen post-BND). At least with fanfics, even bad ones, you get some resolution. Here, there’s this eternal “wait and see”. It’s like the entire ship is…

You know how you enjoy something, a book, a band, a movie, because it’s obscure and it speaks to you and it’s like no one else knows about it? It’s something you discovered. You want to get all your friends excited about it, you go over it whenever you need a pick-me-up or you’re in-between books, you try to emulate it when you do your own thing…

Then everyone gets wind of it and suddenly it’s Donnie Darko, it’s Napoleon Dynamite. Everyone’s repeating your favorite line, the big song is playing on the radio over and over again, and everything you liked about this little thing that you nourished and grew and kept close to your heart is being exploited. Suddenly there’s a prequel and a sequel and a big-budget English remake and suddenly your thing isn’t special anymore.

I feel that’s what’s happened to Dick/Babs. It used to be cute and charming back in NML, but now it’s been so crassly exploited that other people’s little special things are getting trampled on. You liked Dick and Kory together? Sorry, Kory was just a little road bump on his way to true happiness with Babs (with, again, makes Dick look quite the cad for playing games with someone’s heart when he was utterly in Twue Wuv with someone else). Oh, and that true happiness? You might see at some point in the indefinite future if you keep buying the comics and if DC doesn’t kill one or both of them off and if DC doesn’t reset the entire universe once again so that Tim has always been Robin and Barbara is still Batgirl.

It’s like your favorite band just sold out. Call it Deathstrokification, where if you like something in small doses, then you must like it being RAMMED DOWN YOUR THROAT EVERY MINUTE OF EVERY DAY! And it makes me really happy that so far, Black Cat isn’t a part of Brand New Day. I prefer my ships starving to having them smacking their lips, having picked clean the bones of someone else’s ship.

Thumbs down.

Cloverfield (mild spoilers)

So, Cloverfield.

Let’s start off with the good. This is a movie that has learned its lesson from similar “ground eye view” disaster movies like Signs and War of the Worlds. I know a lot of reviews are harping on the characters being unlikable, but I found them refreshingly human and thankfully not as urbane as these kinds of characters usually are (look at the cast of Smallville, who have a none-too-witty quip for any occasion, to see what I’m talking about). They’re people. Stupid, smart, witty, friendly, bitchy, flirty, heroic, frightened… people. No one has a dark secret, no one has a tearful confession to make, and although there is some requisite melodrama to the love subplot, it’s all very tastefully underplayed. No one kisses in the rain while complete strangers clap, is what I’m getting at.

The monster is great, if a little… generic? You don’t really get to know it well enough to see what makes it special. It doesn’t even get a name. It’s good that it’s mysterious, but unfortunately Cloverfield takes the Lost tendency to say “we know the whole story, but we’re not telling you it (but trust us, there’s a whole story)” and extrapolate it to the big screen. You know how frustrating it was when they wouldn’t just come out and say what the Rabbit’s Foot was in M:I3, and thus made it cloyingly transparent that it was a McGuffin? Same thing here.

And much like its predecessors, which also never knew how to really tie up all the action they’d presented (and this has a great action/other stuff ratio), Cloverfield suffers from a weak third act/ending. ( Spoiler. )

Something I do have to commend the filmmakers on is just making a proper thrill ride. Basically, they take a very real fear – an attack on New York City – and put it in the “safe” realm of the fantastical – an attack on New York City being perpetrated by a giant fucking monster! Now, some might call that exploitative, but I think the images of 9/11 have become such a part of our cultural landscape that anyone looking to scare audiences pretty much has to deal with it. Falling buildings and roving dust clouds belong to terror the same way that Yakety Sax belongs to comedy. And besides, Godzilla dealt with nuclear weapons, so this is a part of the genre from the beginning. And it isn’t anywhere near as ham-fisted as movies like Land of the Dead are. Some might criticize Cloverfield for “not saying anything”, but I’d rather stand beside a silent person than one who screams into my ear with a megaphone.

I guess the biggest disappointment is Cloverfield being a victim of its own success. The monster is… just a monster. Tremors did that, and the Graboids still had personality (even when they went aboveground). There’s no twist, no totally out-there bit where the monster turns out to be Cthulu or something. It’s just a monster. After all that hype, it’s just a monster. So it’s a great thrill ride, which is rare enough in this day and age, but I wish there were something more. Isn’t there a compromise between Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and Cloverfield, a movie that has a heart to go with its thrills?

Well, it probably won’t be Rambo, coming out next week, but damn if I’m not seeing it anywhere. They did draw first blood, after all, those Vietnamese Commie small-town America Burmese bastards!

The love meme...

...is love.

Because, you know, where else can you say nice things about me?

Booyah, any and all forms of writer's block!

Ha ha, take that plot bunny! See that resolution? That is the sound of your pwning. Savor it! Now we shall see whether this emotional climax shall be followed by the dirty kind of climax.

[Poll #1125328]