Lady Geek Girl & Friends’ Best of the Blog Sundays

We’re still on hiatus until January 6^th. Happy New Year, everyone, and we’ll be back soon!

Oh, My Pop Culture Unchristianity: Sandman’s Humanizing Subversion of Common Christian Tropes. Syng illustrates how Sandman plays with common Christian tropes.

An imperfect God is easier to believe in. Just as a mystical pregnancy that doesn’t result in special children (because statistically, so few people are likely to become Great; why should children of mystical pregnancies be any different from typical humans?), and the death of a son of god being much more personal than a momentous world-saving act is easier to believe in.

Oh, My Pop Culture Religion: Religious Practice in the Potterverse. Stinekey speculates on how magic and religion work in the Potterverse.

However, there are a few canonical instances where wizards do actually practice (Christian) religion in the series. St. Mungo’s, the wizarding hospital, is actually named for a real saint. St. Mungo, also known as St. Kentigern, was a Christian missionary who performed miracles and founded the city of Glasgow. The Fat Friar is the ghost of Hufflepuff House and was a monk in his former life.

Lady Geek Girl & Friends’ Best of the Blog Saturdays

We’re still on hiatus until January 6^th. Happy New Year, everyone, and we’ll be back soon!

Sexualized Saturdays: A Genderqueer Take on Slash Fanfiction. Pan reflects on their experience with slash fanfiction.

As a genderqueer person I’m fairly certain that my own experience with slash fanfiction differs somewhat from the norm. Only recently have I begun reflecting on how formative both writing and reading fanfiction was at a time in my life when I felt isolated and frustrated by my own seemingly incongruous feelings. Knowing now that there are a surprising number of people for whom the gender binary doesn’t hold true, I like to think that for some small portion of the fan community fanfiction has been an important tool for self-discovery, as it was for me.

Sexualized Saturdays: Teen Wolf and the Turmoils of Male Puberty. Pisces talks about how the cis male werewolf experience is analogous to the cis male puberty experience.

Lycanthropy also serves as a metaphor for the inherent state of physical transition and transformation that is a defining part of puberty. For most able-bodied, non-chronically ill people, puberty is the first time we actively feel out of control of our bodies (potty training notwithstanding). The changes are sudden, violent, bizarre; simple changes in height are nothing compared to the fundamental, irreversible changes to the character and nature of our bodies that happen during puberty. It’s rooted in the same basis that makes all body horror so terrifying—the involuntary changing of and lack of control over the body.

A Scandal in Chinatown: Elementary, Sherlock, and Modern-Day Yellow Fever

I’m still working on catching up with Elementary (no spoilers, please!) but I’ve finally gotten to (and a little past) the Season 1 episode where Joan and Sherlock encounter a Chinese gambling ring. At first, this sort of threw me for a loop, because up until then I’d been enjoying Elementary’s inclusivity and non-token-ish diversity. BBC Sherlock’s “The Blind Banker” had about conquered the market on terrible representation of Chinese mafia, right? Well, yes. But fortunately, Elementary’s “You Do It To Yourself” did not encroach on Sherlock’s absolute monopoly on poor representation—rather, the episode did a far better job of handling the trope of the Chinese mafia than did its more famous cousin.

Then again, hard not to be better than this.

Spoilers and trigger warning for sexual abuse after the jump.

Oh, My Pop Culture Religion: Steven Moffat, the New Feminist

gif via giphy

Few people inspire more division and frustration in the geek world than Steven Moffat. Showrunner of Doctor Who and co-creator of BBC’s Sherlock, Moffat’s storylines and female characters have attracted plenty of accusations of misogyny. But Moffat refuses to acknowledge any problems with the way he handles his shows. It’s abundantly clear that he believes he’s a feminist… and I think he might be right. Although he probably doesn’t know it, I believe Moffat is a New Feminist. New Feminism is a flavor of feminism popular among many religious conservatives, arising from a supposedly “biblical” view of the sexes.

Web Crush Wednesdays: Sherlock: The Game

You know what the best thing is about fandom? You get the chance to make friends based on shared interests. You know what the best thing about that is? Sometimes the friends are so cool and so creative that the whole world gets to experience something fantastic.

Such is the case of Sherlock: The Game. I found out about this game via a friend I’d met through Sherlock fandom, which just goes to that the internet is not, in actuality, driving us unto a lonely hellscape with only computers for company. During the two-year-long hiatus for series 3, two fans got together and decided that Sherlock would translate very well to an old-fashioned RPG. The original plan was to just do a “small project”, as one of the creators told The Daily Dot; yet fast forward a year, and those two fans have turned into 200; the game itself has turned into a massive undertaking complete with main cases and side cases. From The Daily Dot:

Sherlock: the Game begins, of course, in 221B Baker Street. The starting concept for the game revolves around a month in the life of John Watson. The object? Keep Sherlock’s boredom meter from getting dangerously high by solving crimes—and keep your own money meter from getting too low.

Sounds amazing, right? At this point the only thing that might stand in Sherlock: The Game‘s way is if the BBC decides to insist that the game infringes on its copyright. The creators say that the game is legal under fair use law in both the U.K. and the U.S., but if the BBC contacts them, they’ll have to shut it down. As a fan of both Sherlock and collaborative fan endeavors, I hope that doesn’t happen. Just listen to all the accents in their behind-the-scenes video (which also has captions in twelve different languages). This is a truly international effort of love.

If you’re interested in this game, you can find out more about it via Sherlock: The Game‘s Facebook, Tumblr, or Twitter. If all goes well, the team will release the game for free as a downloadable PC game. Despite not being much of a gamer myself, I can’t wait to play this!

Sexualized Saturdays: Femslash and Fandom

We mention femslash a lot on this blog, namely that there isn’t enough of it in fanfic. Well, since we’ve previously discussed why there’s so much slash in fandom, I thought it only proper to discuss why there isn’t that much femslash in fandom.

Sherlock: “His Last Vow” Review

So here we are, the last episode of Sherlock before another agonizing wait. As much as I’ve enjoyed the first two episodes of series 3, they felt incomplete to me. My feelings about each episode are pretty much summed up in both Saika’s and Luce’s reviews. This series has felt much more character-driven than the past two series, which were much more of a “case of the week” or “overarching villain” nature. The first episode was very much about repairing John and Sherlock’s relationship, and the second episode dealt with how Mary would fit into that dynamic. Now I see that both episodes were absolutely necessary to prepare the audience for this series’ final act, “His Last Vow.”

Spoilers abound under the cut.

Sherlock: “The Sign of Three” Review

I actually disliked a lot of “The Empty Hearse”, unlike Saika, so I wasn’t much looking forward to yesterday’s “The Sign of Three”, either. Imagine my surprise when this episode of Sherlock turned out to be the fluffiest, most fun episode of TV I’ve seen in a long while. Spoilers after the jump!

Fanfiction Fridays: Seeds

The cracker was square and made of thin strands of baked wheat that all ran in the same direction, and there was a grid pattern on it from having been stamped with something like a meat tenderizer. So all the crackers were formed in a very long sheet, then stamped en masse, baked, and then shuffled into a bag and packaged in this box that had a square (cracker) shaped hole cut into the back, with a dotted arrow pointing at it, commanding that he “GROW DILL!” in all capital letters, just like that.

There was a larger square of cardboard glued to the back of the square hole, and Sherlock tore this off and tossed the rest of the box back onto the table. From this square of cardboard, one could apparently GROW DILL! Sherlock retrieved the box and read the instructions. See what the idle hours had reduced him to? John would regret ever having sought gainful employment when the flat was overtaken by DILL! on account of Sherlock’s new and determined agricultural pursuits. “Get a hobby,” John had said. Well.

—from Seeds by thesardine

In honor of the BBC Sherlock premiere (finally!) this past Wednesday, today’s Fanfiction Fridays is a lovely Sherlock fic by thesardine.

When there are suddenly no interesting cases in London, Sherlock falls into what John might term a “massive strop”. As John has rather frankly told Sherlock to get a hobby, Sherlock decides to appropriate all of John’s kitchen utensils to start a garden. The results are more touching than you might expect.

Sexualized Saturdays: “Stereotype” Doesn’t Always Equal “Bad”

Saika and I have been watching our way through Orphan Black after Stinekey’s excellent recommendation of it (we aren’t finished yet! no spoilers, please!) and we both love Felix, Sarah’s gay foster brother. Felix is… well, it’s not technically incorrect to say he’s a gay stereotype. He’s an artist, he’s ~fabulous~, and when he ends up roped into babysitting duty, he asks the kids he’s looking after if they want to be crossdressers for an evening. He gets all the snark, all the sass, and all the cool clothes. He is actually gayer than a daffodil.

However, being a stereotype doesn’t necessarily mean that Felix is a poor representation of the queer community.