Sexualized Saturdays: Ace’s Top 10 Headcanon Asexual Characters

Well, it’s that horrible, horrible time of year again, when Lady Geek Girl forces all of us here to list our Top 10 fanon and canon pairings, successfully turning our blog and mission of equality into a giant shipping war for a day. This post, however, is not that list. You’ll get that later on today, but in the meantime, let’s talk about asexual characters. Asexuality is not well represented in popular culture, and when it is, it’s not represented very well. Unfortunately, this leaves me with very few characters I can related to sexually. Coming to my rescue, though, are headcanons. Headcanons are hardly the same thing as representation in the source material, but at least they’re something.

So without further ado, here are my Top 10 characters who I think could be asexual.

Fanfiction Fridays: Mad Friends by Lauralot

The Batman mythos certainly holds a special place in my heart. I daresay it’s one of my more favorite comics out there. Sadly, for a story about people suffering from various disorders, both mental and physical, Batman does a pretty shoddy job at actually portraying disabilities. In fact, it in many instances actively encourages violence against people with disorders, instead of delving into what those disorders actually are and how best to respond to mental illness.

I suppose this doesn’t surprise me. I highly doubt that Batman would be as enjoyable if it wasn’t about a violent vigilante and the various criminally insane rogues he fights. It leaves me feeling torn. On the one hand, I’m insulted by how the narrative handles mental disorders. On the other, I’m still in love with both the story and the characters.

Enter fanfiction. And a trigger warning for gore and self-mutilation under the cut.

Fanfiction Fridays: Coffee by JackVelvet

Coffee by JackVelvet is a fic I read back in the day at the height of the Nolanverse Batman craze. I was obsessed with the pairing Jonathan Crane/Bruce Wayne (aka Scarecrow/Batman), which was, unsurprisingly, a rare pairing. It is just like me to get hooked on a pairing almost no one is writing about. And when I did find any Wayne/Crane fic, a lot of it was just smut. No lengthy fic, no plot, no character development; it was boring. There were maybe two other lengthy, well-written Wayne/Crane fics out there, and I had already read them both. And then, dearest JackVelvet (admittedly a friend of mine from my LiveJournal days) wrote Coffee, and blew me away.

I mean look at all the chemistry they have! And their names rhyme! Seriously there should be more fic for these two.

Not only is this pairing a rare one, but both Batman and Scarecrow hate each other. And while many fanfic authors would idly brush that hatred aside in favor of sex and romance, JackVelvet takes the time to build a believable setting in which these two characters would grow to fall in love with each other.

In Brightest Day: Batman and the Problem with Mental Illnesses in Comics

Comics have an issue with portraying many of their villains as mentally disabled. This is especially true in DC Comics, where many of the villains have mental illnesses, but almost none of the heroes are portrayed as also having mental illnesses. Furthermore, the heroes punish the villains for their illness and in no way attempt to help them with the treatment they need. The statement this ends up making is that people who suffer from mental illnesses are evil and deserve to be hurt and locked up. This obviously creates a lot of problems with how people are then taught to view mental illness in real life—especially when our heroes respond to mental illness with violence and a lack of care and concern.

“There You Go” with Dino Andrade: Part 3

First parts of the interview here and here.

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MadameAce: Now the Scarecrow, he’s a Batman villain that has been re-imagined a lot, over and over again. How did you envision him when you first started playing him? I know you talked about the demon in the human body and whatnot, but I’ve just seen so many different versions of him.

Dino Andrade: Being a long-time Batman fan, the first thing that I did was look back at the first, the original Arkham Asylum graphic novel which then I got the script and discovered that the two had absolutely nothing to do with each other. After that, I started looking at darker versions of the Scarecrow. One of my favorite versions of the Scarecrow, although he’s not in it for very long, is in the series Batman: Vampire where Scarecrow has human fingers sewn into his costume and stuff like that. He’s this terrifying character and I really liked that interpretation.

That was kind of my jump off point from there because I knew that Arkham Asylum was going to be much grittier than anything that had been seen or done before on video games or comics and so on because, of course, Chris Nolan’s Batman, which took a grittier tone, was so successful. I believe that was part of the mandate for Arkham Asylum: to go for darker territory than Paul Dini and company were allowed to do in previous television incarnations. That’s why I purposely studied Batman: Vampire which is probably the darkest Batman story there is.

“There You Go” with Dino Andrade: Part 2

Read the first part of the interview here.

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MadameAce: I know you said that you experienced some disappointment when you did that role, but in the early days what were your thoughts on doing voice overs?

Dino Andrade: At the time most of what I wanted to do in voice over was basically to [have it] work as a stepping stone. I really wanted to get into doing on-camera. I started doing a lot of commercials at the time. I was doing commercials for McDonalds, Delta Airlines, various things like that kind of working my way up. I was also doing a lot of training with The Groundlings comedy / improv. I’m a very physical actor, physical comedian. This was something that I felt might be the future for me, but it was very disappointing: unfortunately it seemed that 90% of what I was being sent out for was one Mexican, cholo gangster after another. It is so not me! That was very discouraging and I decided that, “you know what, if I’m going to get into these projects I might as well make them myself.” So I decided to leave acting for about ten years and spent the 90’s being involved in independent filmmaking, writing screenplays—I sold six screenplays, none of which were produced. [laughter]

Stewi: You still got paid

Dino Andrade: I still got paid. I think it was Kurt Vonnegut who said that the best thing that could ever happen is to sell a screenplay and have it never get actually made so your work isn’t screwed up. [laughter] So my work has not been screwed up six times, but it was kind of cool that I sold them. I also produced one independent film called Bob’s Video that ran the film festival circuit for a year and got me to travel around the country which was really fun. In the end, in the 00’s, I decided to go back to acting and to my original love, which was animation and fantasy, which then meant voice over. Even that was somewhat accidental.

There was a director who was working on an anime show called Vampire Princess and I was being told about that. And I thought, “well maybe I can get in on that as a writer. I’ve never done anime writing, but maybe I could give that a shot.” It turned out that he was also working on another show called Saint Tail and his wife was casting it and when I was contacting him I wound up contacting his wife and his wife thought I was an actor calling in for a scheduled  telephone audition. I said, “…sure! Yes, that’s me,” and so I wound up auditioning completely cold, had no copy at all, so I just had to make up something about, “oh yeah, I didn’t get it. The courier didn’t make it. The fax machine died,” or something. I don’t remember. So they fed me the lines and I auditioned and they said great and I got a small part on Saint Tail. I took that as a sign and said, “okay! I guess this is what I’m supposed to be doing.” I returned to voice over at that point.

“There You Go” with Dino Andrade: Part 1

So today I have a special surprise for everyone. Thanks to my friend Stewi, I had the privilege to interview Dino Andrade, a famous voice actor who did one of my all-time favorite characters, Scarecrow from Batman: Arkham Asylum. He’s been in numerous other things as well, such as Wolf’s Rain, World of Warcraft, so on and so forth. On top of all that, he’s the founder of a geek dating site called Soul Geek, and all of you can check out his own website here. Furthermore, you may notice on his website that he does voice-acting lessons, so if any of you are interested in that, make sure to head on over there.

Additionally, I’d like to thank Dino once again for agreeing to do this interview and I would also like to thank Stewi for helping me with the interview process.

I hope all of you enjoy it. Unfortunately, what I have transcribed as of current is not the full interview, and I will be posting it in numerous installments—so most of my other reviews will be on hold until I get all this up, maybe—and I am also trying to figure out how to edit and post the recording of the interview for everyone, so you can all look forward to that eventually too. There are some things Dino said that are a little hard to transcribe; he did do the Scarecrow voice for us, after all.

Anyways, enjoy!

Holy Movie Reviews Batman It’s The Dark Knight Rises

MadameAce: So this movie is okay. I like it. I certainly like it more than other movies for DC. But I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I thought I would. Maybe that’s because I built it up so much in my head before watching it that it couldn’t possibly live up to my expectations. Or maybe it’s because the conflict is the exact same conflict in the previous films, only with an even drearier tone. Or it might just be the fact that I couldn’t understand Bane’s character at all. Among other things, of course. And that’s Bane, not Bain, dear Rush.

Lady Geek Girl: I was actually fairly pleased, probably because I didn’t build the movie up in my head. So it actually went beyond my expectations. Here’s the thing, if you were expecting the movie to be just as good or better than The Dark Knight then you were probably disappointed. I was so worried about being disappointed that I ended up liking it instead. That’s not to say that this movie isn’t without flaws though, because there are probably more flaws in this movie than in Batman Begins or in The Dark Knight.

The Good, The Bad, and the Review: Green Lantern

Lady Geek Girl: So yeah, the Green Lantern movie was… okay.

MadameAce: It was terrible.

Lady Geek Girl: Oh, come on. It wasn’t that bad.

MadameAce: Not that bad? It sucked. Yeah. That pretty much sums up how I feel about this movie, and I think that accurately sums up how a lot of people feel about this movie. By no means is Green Lantern the worst thing I have ever seen. I mean, very few movies are ever going to dig a deeper hole than Eragon did.