Fanfiction Fridays: Brand New Empire by pyrodynamo

“The press storm’s just about as bad as I’d imagined,” Herc said, when he visited. “You’d think they’d at least wait till the both of you are out of medical.”

“They’re asking us to consider ambassadorship to the reconstruction project,” Mako said. For someone who’d handled hours of interviews she was holding up extremely well; most of the time Raleigh just tried to stay both vertical and conscious.

“I got the same offer,” Herc said.

Raleigh looked up. “Are you taking it up?”

“I’m thinking about it,” Herc leaned back a little more in his chair. “It’d do a lot of good, I think, and especially since—”

Herc stopped. Some days Raleigh felt like he was looking in a mirror again, when grief sat in his gut like a solid thing, when it roosted under his ribs and clawed through his throat when he tried to breathe. He saw it in Mako’s eyes in odd hours, woke up to the sound of her stuttered gasps and remembered.

“You don’t have to talk about it,” Raleigh said.

Herc breathed out hard, and shook his head. “This is exactly what I mean. It’s good to keep busy now, and— if I’m in the rebuilding I want to get up to my elbows in it. I wanna see some good.”

Raleigh glanced at Mako. He’d pushed his bed close enough that their knees would touch if they sat face to face on the sides, the way they did sometimes at night. It was a little strange knowing that in a few more weeks they’d never see the walls inside the Shatterdome again.

“We could do a lot of good,” Mako said.

Pacific Rim is one of those movies that might be a little cheesy, but the cheesiness factor doesn’t detract from how good the characters are. There’s a prequel comic and there will be a sequel at some point down the road, but the comic largely covers how the Jaeger program started and there aren’t too many details about the sequel yet. Because Pacific Rim was the movie that came up with the concept of Drift partners, what I’d really like to see is more stories that focuses on the characters and their relationships. And fortunately, a lot of fanfic does focus on just that. Enter today’s fanfic rec: Brand New Empire.

Pacific Rim, Shut Up and Take My Money

Thursday night we hit the drive-in to celebrate my roommate’s birthday, grabbing a double-feature of Pacific Rim and Man of Steel. I’d already seen the latter, but it wasn’t exactly a hardship to watch it a second time. Mostly I was just really, really excited to see Pacific Rim, which I’ve been looking forward to for months.

As you might know, Pacific Rim is that rarest of creatures: a science fiction film not based on any existing source material, written and directed by a person of color and starring several actors of color in its main roles. It looked to be a smart, exciting, kaiju-smashing epic, which was really just an added bonus, because I’d have paid good money just to watch Idris Elba dramatically read a phone book.

Thankfully, and unsurprisingly, it was just as good as I hoped it would be.

Trailer Tuesdays: Pacific Rim

Okay, so here are five quick and easy reasons why you should see this movie.

1. This movie has kaiju. Don’t know what kaiju are? Think Godzilla. Mothra. King Ghidorah. Giant multidimensional mutated sea beasts—this movie has them.
2. This movie has giant robots. Giant robots are also awesome. Here is the big budget, live-action, Hollywood-produced Gundam movie you never thought you’d see in real life.
3. The kaiju will be fighting the giant robots. I cannot stress this enough: this is a movie about giant multidimensional sea beasts fighting human-piloted giant fucking mechs. And it actually looks like it’s going to be really good.
4. I have nothing against Tom Cruise in theory, but he’s been in a lot of freaking action movies. I am hella excited to instead see a nonwhite person getting a chance to play a leading character in an action film, and I am seriously in love with Idris Elba, so I am totally on board with this choice. The cast outside of Elba is also pretty awesome, including among others Ron Perlman (Hellboy in Hellboy) and Burn Gorman (Owen in Torchwood), and it’s directed/partly written by Guillermo del Toro of Pan’s Labyrinth and the Hellboy movies among others, so that’s gonna be awesome.
5. This movie is not a remake, prequel, sequel, adaptation, or gritty reboot of any existing work. It is a bona-fide original sci-fi movie. And what a breath of fresh air that is.

This movie comes out summer of this year. There are my five reasons for being excited. What do you think? I think it’s going to be kickass.