The Lunar Chronicles: Fairy Tale Heroines in the Future

The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer may not have caused as much public excitement as some of the other female-led sci-fi/dystopian YA series of the past several years, but it doesn’t mean it’s less deserving of our attention. In fact, it’s a very solid series, led by a team of awesome kickass teen heroines. The plot is engrossing and action-packed and has an intriguing twist to boot—the main four books of the series offer loose, but still recognizable, retellings of four well-known fairy tales: Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and Sleeping Beauty.

Spoilers below for Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, and Winter (the main four books of The Lunar Chronicles).

Noodle’s Killjoys Season 1 Review: Bounty Hunters in Space!

These days I try to limit the number of shows I watch, but it’s summer, most of the shows I watch are on hiatus, and a friend was gushing over this new show about bounty hunters in space called Killjoys. So, I decided to give it a shot. The pilot got me hooked. The first season just concluded and it was a fun and feels-inducing romp, introducing characters with mysterious pasts and setting up conspiracies.

Spoilers for the first season of Killjoys below.

Throwback Thursdays: Babylon 5

In this week’s Throwback Thursday, I want to talk about my favorite sci-fi show of all time—Babylon 5. I feel like the voice-over intro which begins each episode is a pretty good summary of what the show is about:

It was the dawn of the third age of mankind – ten years after the Earth-Minbari War. The Babylon Project was a dream given form. Its goal: to prevent another war by creating a place where humans and aliens could work out their differences peacefully. It’s a port of call – home away from home – for diplomats, hustlers, entrepreneurs, and wanderers. Humans and aliens wrapped in two million five hundred thousand tons of spinning metal… all alone in the night. It can be a dangerous place, but it’s our last best hope for peace. This is the story of the last of the Babylon stations. The year is 2258. The name of the place is Babylon 5.

Babylon 5 has had a special place in my heart since I was a child. Unlike Stargate SG-1, which I wrote about a while back, Babylon 5 used to be on late at night (like, 10pm) and my dad used to watch it every week. So, sometimes after my mom had put my brother and me to bed, I would quietly get up and sneak into the living room and ask my dad to let me watch it with him. And he would sometimes let me.

Unfortunately, not much of the show stuck in my memory and what did stick might not not been very accurate, so a couple of years ago, I decided to watch it all again. I hoped it would be good, but I didn’t expect to love it as much as I did.

On Marvel’s Mega Minds and Missing Women

Marvel’s 2010 crossover storyline Fall of the Hulks, which occurs sort of concurrently with the events of the Siege storyline, details among other things the plot of a cabal of evil, brainy superheroes to kidnap the world’s eight smartest people. The Intelligencia [sic], as they call themselves, arouse the ire of various Hulks in the process, leading to all sorts of hijinks and craziness, as well as the World War Hulk story and its two issue miniseries, Hulked Out Heroes.

Try not to imagine the kind of mindboggling destruction that an entity equal parts Hulk and Deadpool would wreak. Instead, let’s go back and talk about the fact that Marvel has offered up a list of its terrestrial supergeniuses. This is great! I really want to know who the smartest people on Earth-616 are, don’t you? Let’s take a look at who was worth capturing (in no particular order):

Teen Wolf and Feminism: Is It This Generation’s Buffy or Does It Need to Be Slayed?

Lady Geek Girl: Now that MadameAce and I have gotten our overall review of the series out of the way, it’s time to analyze some of the themes and issues in Teen Wolf. We’ve split these into parts because otherwise this post would be way too long. Our first post, as you can tell, will be about feminist issues in Teen Wolf, but we will also be addressing race issues, LGBTQ issues, and disability issues in the future.

Buffy was praised for being a feminist show with strong female characters in the 90s, launching Joss Whedon’s career and making his name synonymous with strong women in fiction. Now, don’t get me wrong; Joss Whedon and Buffy aren’t perfect, but they did make strides, and recently, comparisons have been made with Teen Wolf. Teen Wolf has gotten rave reviews for being a show with strong female characters (and good representation of minority characters in general) and Jeff Davis is even being called the new Joss Whedon by some.

And yes, I will agree, Teen Wolf is a great show for women. There are many complex female characters and the show passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors. Like Buffy, I think Teen Wolf is a show that’s moving in the right direction, but also like Buffy, it isn’t perfect. Let’s talk about some of the good and bad in Teen Wolf.