Fathers have a long and storied history in our media. Unlike mothers, who are only sometimes around in our hero’s stories, fathers are usually the rock of the family and play a large part in our protagonist’s character development. At least, that’s true if the protagonist is a guy. If the protagonist is a girl, however, fathers exist more often to protect their daughters than to raise them, giving rise to omnipresent tropes like the Overprotective Dad and the Papa Wolf. As Taken’s Liam Neeson says, if you hurt his daughter, he will look for you, find you, and kill you.
Tag Archives: mako mori
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.
Top 20 Romantic Couples in Geekdom (10 Canon/10 Fanon): 2014 Edition
This Valentine’s Day, as all Valentine’s Days, will not succeed in bringing our city down. This Valentine’s Day, as all Valentine’s Days, will soon recede into painful memory, fading with time, until another foul Valentine’s Day is upon us again.
—Welcome to Night Vale, “Valentine”
It’s that time of year again, nerd friends. That awful time of year known as Valentine’s Day. Once a year, before Valentine’s Day, our authors nominate and then vote on ships for our Top 20 Romantic Couples in Geekdom (10 Canon/10 Fanon) list. It is during this time that the LGG&F writers go from peaceful coexistence straight into full-blown anarchy as each writer battles for their favorite ships to make the list.
So now, blood-stained and bruised, it is my job as Supreme Overlord of LGG&F to bring you this year’s Top 20 Romantic Couples in Geekdom.
The Mako Mori Test—A Good Alternative to Bechdel?
Hopefully you’ve all heard of the Bechdel test. For years it’s stood as shorthand for indicating that a movie does a decent job in representing both women and female relationships. If one said that a movie passed the Bechdel test, it meant that that movie: 1) had two named female characters who 2) talk to each other about 3) something other than a man.
But now, in the wake of Pacific Rim‘s enormous online success, there have been calls for a Pacific Rim-inspired feminist test to join the Bechdel test. The Mako Mori test, as defined by Tumblr user chaila, states:
The Mako Mori test is passed if the movie has: a) at least one female character; b) who gets her own narrative arc; c) that is not about supporting a man’s story. I think this is about as indicative of “feminism” (that is, minimally indicative, a pretty low bar) as the Bechdel test. It is a pretty basic test for the representation of women, as is the Bechdel test. It does not make a movie automatically feminist.
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.
Lady Geek Girl and Friends 