child and i watch teen wolf

Mostly work is caught up as much as it can be, and there's no air conditioning, so Child and I consoled ourselves catching up to current with Teen Wolf.

I kind of get why people like fannish roommates now. Child recently picked up a mild fanboy thing for Sam Winchester (don't ask, please), so it was Vecchio Versus Kowalski Redux, but luckily all the eps are on the server, so he can't hide SPN from me, and thank God, winterlive was pushing like the best dealer ever, so.

I get why people think this is a lot like Buffy; I see the resemblance in the secondary characters if Stiles = Willow and Lydia/Jackson make a very uncomfortable Cordelia, but Scott is no Buffy, and neither Derek nor Allison could pull off Angel, but Child and I did entertain ourselves in recasting how that would work.

This is incredibly random and unorganized, so.



Child's torn between Danny and Derek and Stiles like whoa when not telling me about how much he likes my friends' Dean/Castiel fic (if you are on my flist, yes, Child has read your fic. Is this what raising a child on LJ fandom feels like? Terror?).

My main objection are their jumps; they do not transition between scenes even a little. I'm used to it now, but sometimes, I want a little more than someone cowering in the vets office then for no reason appearing in a jeep like, five seconds later.

I'm getting annoyed with what they're doing with Allison. And I say this bitterly because she and Stiles were seventy-five percent of the reason I stuck around after the first four eps. She was a teenage girl! She has a boyfriend and does silly teenage girl things! It was fun. Then he acts sketchy and she tells him what the problem is and breaks it off for him to get his shit together! It was magic. Then there were crossbows and family conflict and she handled it like a teenager but awesomely so. And then season fucking two.

First season, she was amazing, and this season, I don't know what the fuck they're doing with her after mapping her reactions to stress being less weepy and more proactive, especially the utterly amazing scene with her and Kate talking about power.

(I'm still getting over last night's ep; I keep thinking they'll knock her out of the depression and let her get shit done again soon if it's supposed to just be the stress she's under, but seriously, she was under stress last season and didn't shatter like this.)

I honestly think the Stalinski family may be the most awesome family ever. God, Sheriff Stalinski and carrots and celery at dinner and getting put on leave and not taking it out on Stiles (Dude, that's fucking magic parenting; I hope I have even a tenth of that kind of grace).

A lot of this is because I really think that he knows his son well enough that the entire Jackson thing felt so out of character that the reasonable explanation and Stiles' total confirmation of it being teenage dickery felt like a complete and utter lie and that was what hit him at the station and still kind of is. Like, he has no idea what's going on, but he knows whatever it is, Stiles is just not the kind of kid that does this kind of shit, and it's fucking with his head.

The really surreal thing is watching this while also watching reruns of SPN and having moments of severe cognitive dissonance, even though I honestly--and this surprises me--love Chris. I also think I get why Chris hasn't seen Gerard for a while; I get the distinct impression that he's far more of the Dean-and-Sam school of hunting and always has been; if it's not killing people, let it the fuck go. With Gerard around, the new lines aren't just making him uncomfortable (for a character who is very good at keeping his thoughts to himself, the execution of the omega very visibly upset him); on top of Kate's outright stalking and murder of the Hale family (and I still don't know if he knows just what she did to get the info to kill the family, much less the torture she commits onscreen on Derek), his entire fairly simple worldview is being rocked.

Leaving out the events from last night (and talk about bread upon the water returning tenfold), I wonder if this is what actually will end up nailing him even more firmly into his view of what hunting means to him when he sees the results of what happens when you don't have those lines, and why there are reasons that those lines exist. Jackson as kanima is blurring that a lot (and Gerard's and Victoria's death to all attitude), but I wonder if the reason he's so into training Allison is giving her the right lines and a way to slowly reaffirm to himself what he's supposed to be doing as well as protect her from picking up Gerard's and Victoria's bullshit.

There's a part of me that thinks that while Chris doesn't support her relationship with Scott (and I get this, he's a parent, and this isn't just a boy, this is a boy with superpowers and a personality disorder around the full moon; he has a right to be wary until he's absolutely sure Scott won't kill her by accident; the show was pretty explicit on Scott during the full moon is too volatile), he is taking advantage of her natural sympathies to nail the value of their code into her when she has every reason to not only understand it but want to follow it. Jackson is the big problem with the code, as while he's only a weapon and not acting on his own, he's a fucking lethal weapon, and while I don't agree with killing him, I get why Chris feels they have no choice right now with something that is far more powerful than even the werewolves and on a mission.

I love Lydia. I loathed Cordelia in Buffy, but Lydia for some reason pings so much more on the scale of literally creating a persona for herself to deal with her life. I love that she's incredibly smart and while she hides it from her peers, she's not letting it affect her education at all, and that she can read archaic Latin (as one does when one is bored and has some free time to learn something; why not?). And I hate, hate, hate that no one is telling her what is going on, because this is literally going to bite everyone in the ass. And it's pissing me off because there's no reason not to tell her what's going on; it's actively destructive not to, and not just to her mental health.

Scott is probably the only character that I really cannot decide how i feel about him. He has these moments of pure awesome, and then he's like, not even a teenager idiot, but an idiot in the context of the history of humanity. I will say that mostly, the show does seem to call him on it, but in this way that I feel the script writers just needed someone to do something stupid to forward the plot and Scott just happens to get the shit job of fulfilling that role.

I love Derek and Stiles and Lydia and Allison like air, so that is all.

Child and I Observe

[Preface: Child was raised by a fangirl, so keep in mind that below is condensed observations from no less than two IRL flame wars we had over several weeks, not a set of Deep, Meaningful discussions regarding social justice or anything other than checking each other's radar on particular points.

Also, keep in mind his school actually has classes on ethics and character and the composition of the school skews heavily toward Muslim both white and POC in both population and the majority of teachers and administrators and a lot of newly immigrated people as well as first gen, so race discussions are an active issue. I don't know if I ever publicly posted about the day Child came home to talk about how his social studies class had a speaker about the Israeli/Palestine conflict from a native resident who was visiting the US, but suffice to say, I have never emailed so many people so fast while googling in my life. Ask amireal.

It's not that either of us are perfect about this, but his entire environment is much, much, much more conductive than high school when I was a kid in socialization into race issues when the school itself has had problems--including with the legislature and fucking news programs--so racism, as far as he knows, has always meant 'institutional racism'. It does tend to make discussions with him interesting. I can't really take much credit for how much he notices problems in the media, to be honest; among his classmates and friends, it's a thing they talk about. There is nothing on earth more surreal than critique of Disney in chatspeak. Just saying.]

Child was the first to mention that the female costars in the credits stayed fully dressed, Allison with a goddamn weapon, while Scott and Derek got the naked-to-waist and potentially wet treatment (or covered in strangely sexy powder). God I love that crossbow.

Considering the dearth of shows with non-white, non-heterosexual characters as more than non-interactive background, it was surprising to have not only a gay teenager, but a gay teenager integrated into normal life both as background and as tertiary character with plot points that his sexuality was simply an accepted part of instead of a Very Special Episode (this may be one of the few shows that could pull off one of those realistically within the confines of the plotline without being objectifying or creepy or just way too preachy about it; Danny as a character is so well established that it wouldn't feel like a quota or token attempt was involved for Social Awareness; I kind of want them to try, just because I think they could integrate it so well into the plotline). The guy's a first line lacrosse player whose bff with the co-captain of the team and is smart in school, and also, by the way, takes a guy to prom and that's normal.

(I will admit in my heart that Derek's slightly oblivious strip tease (and Stiles sudden moment of inspiration) for the purposes of encouraging Danny to help was both, well, hot, but as a woman, really goddamn nice to see equal representation. I also liked the fact it wasn't explicitly and inappropriately sexual, and honestly, I'd have zero problems with women in this position if they were filmed with this kind of playfulness in execution. Things can be hot and not offensive; someone take notes.

Adding; this is my own reading of it; I respect other people may have still have problems with it and I can see where that comes from. I like it as much for the representation as the way it was handled in normalization without even a hint of gay panic or mocking parody. It wasn't even a big dramatic thing; it was, hilariously, to Stiles, an obvious method of persuasion. I rethought it with a girl and a heterosexual guy in the same position and, excluding the social implications, it would have played pretty much exactly the same).

Child loves Danny and according to him, the behavior of the other teens casual acceptance as an interactive part of the life of teenagers is consistent with his friends at school, which under the circumstance I accept as trust me, this he would notice.

There is a fairly even split on roles; Scott, Derek, Boyd, Isaac, Erica, and Allison are the fighters (please put Allison back in shooting shit, Jesus), while Lydia and Stiles are the brains of the operation and Jackson is--well, leave that one aside for now. The only real problem I have is the lack of race representation, as Boyd and Dr. Deaton are the only POC in an active role (the actors playing Scott and Danny are as well, I know, and I really appreciate having an actor with a Mexican heritage in a show set in California, even if the show isn't explicit on his race, but demographically speaking, more Black characters would be very welcome). On the other hand, I really, really hope Boyd is used more--while I like volatile characters, Boyd's calm is extremely welcome with the current lineup of unstable and frankly slightly disturbed characters.

Fine

So, ballpark, I know it's hot in California and everything, but I have never in my life seen so many random (non-random, inexplicably shredded) shirts vanish into the ether. The moment of true blank appreciation was Jackson wandering out of a pond with an aesthetically slashed shirt. The show has no shame whatsoever; plot-related shirtlessness, whatever, I feel the question the writers as is "Does anyone need a shirt in this scene?" and often? The answer is no. I like this in a show.