I’m not sure whether to be excited for this season, or to dread it. Last season left me very ambivalent—parts of it, like the Governor’s storyline, I really hated. Yet some things, such as “The Grove”, I absolutely adored. I can only hope this season has learned from the shortcomings of the last one.
A few weeks ago, Lady Geek Girl wrote a nice article describing the precarious position of witches in current pop culture media. Witches only finally started to reach some level of acceptance (still a work in progress, that’s for sure) largely thanks to the enormous expansion of the religion of Wicca in the past fifty years or so. This led to a curious occurrence: witches weren’t just in fairytales and fantasy books anymore; they were bookstore clerks and nurses and teachers too. It opened the doors for the possibility for modern people to reclaim and identify with the word “witch”. We can see other seemingly outdated or maligned words being used by contemporary folk, from druid to heathen to shaman (though words like sorceress and wizard seem to be lagging in popularity), but I would argue none to quite the degree of “witch”. So while I believe that Wicca was a large—I would say the primary, in fact—reason for the modern reclaiming of this word, I think it is inappropriate to treat “Wiccan” as a monolithic synonym for “witch”. There are simply too many witches out there who are not Wiccan.
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Hello lovely readers! Since it’s been roughly one week (and 2000 years, give or take) since one of the most famous resurrections, I thought I’d talk a little about some slightly more recent examples from pop culture. More specifically, I’m gonna talk about that awkward moment in a sci-fi/fantasy show when a character gets resurrected, and then, a season or two later, some other character does not get resurrected. Whoops. This is even a scenario that takes place in the Bible. We have stories of Jesus raising Lazarus in one of the Gospels, and the daughter of Jairus in the others, clearly establishing Jesus’s ability to raise the dead. But how many other people around him and his followers died without being resurrected?
This happens frequently in any story world where resurrection is possible. Why does this happen? Oversight? Quota filled? Price hikes? Join me on a tour of some of the more notable instances of this phenomenon in some of geekdom’s favorite shows. Character deaths are obviously major spoilers, so spoiler alerts below for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Warehouse 13, and Charmed.
Yo, Buffy, I’m really happy for you, I’mma let you finish rising from the dead, but Jesus had one of the best resurrections of all time!
This season of True Blood introduced two cases of PTSD with the characters Lafayette and Eggs. I wouldn’t call Lafayette’s case subtle, but Eggs’s was much more apparent as the show progressed. I think this may be because Lafayette is a recurring character for multiple seasons, so the show will have more time to deal with his issues; however, I don’t foresee Eggs coming back after this season, and his character in some ways seemed to be defined by his PTSD and relationship to Tara.
Again, spoilers ahead.
The second season of True Blood has left me with a lot of mixed feelings. I really liked the Maryann plot, while loathing the Fellowship subplot. Sam’s character even started to grow on me for a little bit, and I no longer completely detest Jason either. However, my opinion of Eric dropped dramatically this season, and Bill kind of bores me. But my feelings are most torn on Tara’s and Egg’s relationship with Maryann and how she manipulates them.
Once again, there are spoilers ahead.
A couple days ago, I started reviewing the first season of True Blood, a popular TV series based on The Sookie Stackhouse Novels. I went into Sookie’s relationship with the vampire Bill, and talked briefly about how Christianity is portrayed, something that I’m going to talk about more in-depth in a later post. However, True Blood has a lot of characters and brings up a lot of issues through them, so I was unable to properly discuss everything I wanted to last post.
More spoilers after the jump.
Out of the blue, I decided to watch True Blood. I hadn’t been too keen on getting into it for certain reasons, but I finally figured what the hell? Let’s give it a shot. For those not familiar, True Blood is a series produced by HBO that premiered back in 2008, so it’s been around for a couple years already. Based on The Southern Vampire Mysteries series, also known as The Sookie Stackhouse Novels, True Blood follows a young, telepathic woman named Sookie Stackhouse, a waitress at a bar down in Louisiana.
In the True Blood universe, vampires have “come out of the coffin” and revealed themselves to humans. Two years prior to the start of the series, a Japanese company developed a synthetic blood called True Blood that satisfies all the nutritional requirements vampires need. This prompted both the reveal of and a huge political war between people who are opposed to vampires and those who want to give them equal rights as citizens. Not known to the public, however, vampires have their own system of government, and many of them do not wish to go “mainstream” by drinking True Blood.
Our story starts with Sookie at the bar, waiting on customers. This job, which requires interaction with numerous people, is difficult on her, due to her telepathic abilities and always having to concentrate in order to not hear what other people are thinking. In comes vampire Bill, looking for a bottle of True Blood. Intrigued by Bill, and excited to actually be seeing a real vampire, Sookie hurries to wait on him. Over the course of the first episode, she discovers that she cannot read his mind, and the two of them start to form a relationship.
Essentially, it’s like Twilight in reverse, only with plot and character development. And it’s possible to enjoy without feeling guilty. Weird, I know.
Also, everyone is an adult, so there are no creepy pedophilic relationships.
Spoilers be ahead.
Ah, Buffy, how I have such fun memories of thee. I remember always getting excited to sit down to watch some good old fashion vampire murderage, until my parents entered the room to watch it too. Coming from a conservative Christian home and growing up with parents who forced me into joining the middle-school basketball team every Tuesday night right during airtime—under the threat that I couldn’t watch the show unless I joined up, no less! Sense?—Buffy the Vampire Slayer wholeheartedly and irrevocably reverted the hour it aired every week into what Lady Geek Girl and I once nominated as the Parental Bitching Hour. It was the cause of debate, for more reasons than my being blackmailed into unwanted sports that I won’t bore you with the details of.
I don’t know how Buffy managed to piss my parents off so much, as it wasn’t the kind of show they normally invest themselves in, but it raised many an argument in my home. Normally, it went something like this:
“I can’t believe you watch this garbage, Ace! Why don’t you play some sports?”
“…Because I like vampires?”
“You don’t need this fantasy crap when you have the news. Besides, not everyone’s a lesbian!”
“I just want to watch my show. Please?”
Yeah, in order to actually know what was going the hell on in the plot over the tantrum brought on by Willow—the evil slut!—I had to wait for the DVD releases and watch the series all again in the quiet of a dorm room, right underneath the drunken party the floor above me.
Those of us here at LGG&F worked tirelessly to compile and vote on the Top 10 canon and Top 10 fanon pairings in Geekdom. You have no idea how hard it was to come to a consensus on what was actually canon or not!
Lady Geek Girl and Friends 