Magical Mondays: “The Smartest There Is” Takes on Magic

(via comicsalliance)

The recently concluded arc of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, “The Smartest There Is”, opened on nine-year-old protagonist Lunella Lafayette learning that, thanks to her results on a test created by Bruce Banner, she is the smartest person. Not the smartest kid, or the smartest girl, or the smartest human, or the smartest being on Earth; she’s flat out “the smartest there is”, hence the name of the arc. The other people on the list (mostly adult men) are a bit salty about a little Black girl from the Lower East Side stealing their thunder, but none more so than one Victor Von Doom.

Doom sends robots to attack Lunella, and they’re unlike anything she’s fought before. Namely, they’re powered by Doom’s magic rather than by some kind of quantifiable science. So what does the smartest there is do when faced with something that defies scientific understanding? Attempt to explain it scientifically anyway.

Sexualized Saturdays: Is It Gay if It’s in Space? Queerbaiting and Marceline Gone Adrift

Gentle readers, I am tired.

Last week, I purchased the trade paperback collection of the Marceline Gone Adrift comic series. In the vein of previous Adventure Time Presents series like Fionna and Cake and Marceline and the Scream Queens, Gone Adrift is a six-issue story with a finite beginning and end. I missed the first few issues of it when it was coming out, so when I saw it was finally out as a trade I immediately snatched it up. And while part of me enjoyed it, I was left in the long run wondering why I’m still so invested in a relationship that’s constantly hinted at and doesn’t look, at this point, like it will ever be canon.

Spoilers below the jump.

Stakes Is a Welcome Reversal and a Step Forward

For much the same reasons as Moe explained earlier this summer, I have kind of grown away from Adventure Time. While an eleven minute episode once a week isn’t a huge time commitment, I felt that the show had lost its idea of who its audience was and had abandoned the latter half of its “here’s a weird premise with a good message” mentality for utter absurdism and often unpleasant conclusions. Also, I’m still pissed that Finn’s arm grew back.

Because of this, I didn’t know about the Stakes miniseries, which comprises several episodes out of the still-ongoing Season 7, until after it had finished airing. Thankfully, a Bubbline blog that I still follow on Tumblr reblogged a rash of posts about it, or I’d still be in the dark. I began watching it out of loyalty to Marceline more than anything—she’s always been my favorite character—but I finished it unexpectedly excited to see what will happen next in the Land of Ooo.

Spoilers through the end of Stakes after the jump.

Sexualized Saturdays: Noodle’s Top 10 Headcanon Bi Characters

I basically live for representation of LGBTQ+ characters. As a bi person, I’m especially starved for good bi representation. Unfortunately, such characters are especially difficult to come by. Then there are wonderful characters who could be great bisexuals, and that’s where headcanons come in. A headcanon is something that is not explicitly stated in the text, but doesn’t contradict it either, and you like to imagine it’s true. It’s not as great as actual representation, but it can be great fun and provide comfort when actual representation isn’t there. So, today I want to share with you my Top 10 characters whom I like to imagine are bisexual and who would make excellent representation if they were made canonically bisexual.

Lady Geek Girl & Friends’ Best of the Blog Mondays

We’re still on hiatus until tomorrow. Happy New Year, everyone, and we’ll be back soon!

Magical Mondays: Sleeping Beauty, Fairy Tales, and Inserting Magic Into Magic-less Narratives. Here, Luce explores the hows and whys of magic becoming part of fairy tales.

[Fairy] tales used to be dark, moralistic stories to teach people lessons, yet as time went on, people decided that fairy tales ought to entertain children as well as educate them—they weren’t meant to please ancestors of Hannibal fans. Throughout these versions, themes of rape, adultery, and cannibalism were gradually erased from the overall plot, leaving a sanitized version behind. To fill in the blanks with respect to the characters, numerous writers used magic instead. Evil fairy solves all your problems, right? Then the king doesn’t commit adultery and the queen isn’t a heinously one-dimension villain and the princess isn’t raped, but just kissed without her consent, which is… better.

Magical Mondays: The Mundane and the Magical in Welcome to Night Vale. Earlier this year, Lady Geek Girl talked about magical realism in Welcome to Night Vale.

Welcome to Night Vale makes the magical mundane and the mundane magical by drawing our attention to something weird and magical, but then focusing on the mundane aspect of the event so that we cannot escape or ignore it. The magical element essentially acts as a big blinking sign pointing to the mundane and inescapable element.

Fanfiction Fridays: So we all are growing young by CherryIce

by Natasha Allegri

The Bubbline-shipping side of the internet dissolved into hoopla two weeks ago when Marceline’s voice actress appeared to confirm the fan-favorite pairing’s canonicity at a Q&A session. “Bubbline is canon!”, everyone from shipping blogs to geek journalists declared joyfully. However, to paraphrase one of The Mary Sue‘s commenters, everyone seemed to be playing fast and loose with the idea of ‘canon’. It’s nice if the creator has an extensive backstory for a character, and nicer if that backstory includes queerness, but canon means it happens in the show. Like, where cute little LGBTQ+ kids can see that not all romantic love has to be between a girl and a boy.

Anyway, frustrated with all the shenanigans, I decided to turn to fanfic, where I knew I would find people with the guts to actually include queer characters in their narratives. And in honor of the source of the drama, I’ve got a lovely Bubbline fic for you this week.

Princess Bubblegum and Unclear Morality

Adventure Time is one of those shows that gives its viewers just enough to get invested in large plot arcs, but keeps enough away so that we always want more. For example, what exactly is going between Marceline and Princess Bubblegum? Is Finn destined to lose his arm no matter what universe he’s in? Where is Betty and what is she doing? These kinds of questions lead fans to speculate much about the world’s properties, stories, and characters. One character that I enjoy analyzing in particular is Princess Bubblegum, especially where she falls on a scale of morality.

Magical Mondays: Magic and Science

Magic and science are generally considered antithetical. You have one or the other, and never the twain shall meet. That’s why one of them is the realm of fantasy and one is the realm of science fiction. Even within science fiction, powers like telepathy are explained using science, and in fantasy, technology like long-distance communication or transport is the stuff of magic. And while there’s nothing wrong with that, I think that a society where magic and science exist in some sort of relationship with each other is much more interesting.

via mimiskelie on deviantArt.

Fanfiction Fridays: There’s No Spark On A Dampened Floor

If you haven’t noticed, we’ve been making an effort recently to spotlight femslash fanfics. It’s a tricky business, if only because we have tremendous difficulty finding good fics of the quantity and quality that exists in m/m slash fics. As just one example, Archive of Our Own has over 7.5k fics in the Tony Stark/Steve Rogers section, the most popular of which has over 230,000 hits. If you look at the same stats for the Carol Danvers/Jessica Drew ship, a pairing with a similar dynamic (military blonde Avenger and snarky brunette Avenger with a troubled past), there are only 83 fanfics, with the most popular receiving just under 30k hits. It’s a damn shame and so we’ve set out to bring attention to the notable lady-lovin’ fanfics we’ve found.

This week’s is an Adventure Time story, entitled There’s No Spark On A Dampened Floor, by shoutoutout. It’s set after the season six episode “Sky Witch”, in which the Princess Bubblegum/Marceline relationship was so clearly romantic that it could barely be called subtext, and I was delighted to find a followup to the story.

Gayyyyy.

Spoilers for “Sky Witch” ahead.

Adventure Time: Fionna is Crushed

I was excited to finally get a new episode Adventure Time with my favorite genderbent fanfiction females, Ice King’s Fionna and Cake. I was ecstatic when I heard Marshall Lee the Vampire King would finally speak (voiced by Donald Glover). As the episode went on I became less and less happy until I was just agitated, especially with Slime Princess’s suggestion of “What if there was a little more romance in the story?”Damn it Adventure Time, didn’t we already go over this?