Protective!girl vid

green_wing linked me to this music video: Brandon Flower's Crossfire. And it sent my heart aflutter. Not the song itself, but the vid. It turns the whole "damsel in distress" and "knight in a shining armor" cliché totally on its head. In this vid, the guy gets kidnapped all the time and the girl rushes to his rescue. And it's not just that, it's the little things, like, that it's her driving their escape car and it's her laying her arm around his shoulders so that he can rest his head against her. So, so cool!

Why can't there be more stuff like that out there? Usually, it's the guy saving the girl or them being equals with the guy still having the upper hand a bit. Why is it so unbelievable/unpopular to have the woman kick major ass and do the life saving?

I mean, take urban fantasy books. 99% of them are told from the POV of the female heroine - yet she always has to find a man who is taller, buffer, older, richer, a better fighter than her and has special abilities of his own that are equal or better than hers. The only part where she's really allowed to shine is her sex appeal that draws men to her like honey flies - and most men just get her between the sheets and then pat her on the head and push her in a corner as to not get underfoot. And when the author does allow her to make a decision, take action, it's usually a dumb one. So, you know, the guy can rush in and save her.

WTF?! No, seriously, WTF?! These books are written by female writers! Is this some wish fulfillment of theirs? To be good but not better than a guy to "get him"? Women tend to criticize how heroines are written in movies/shows/books but when they write a book themselves, they follow the same rigid rules instead of breaking them. Why not write a book where the woman is the stronger one? The older one? The better fighter? Battle-scarred and not self-conscious about it? Where she doesn't wear fuzzy slippers and secretly collects stuffed animals so that the reader sees her "feminine side"? Where she's the aggressor in bed? Where she's a supernatural being and her male lover a human who has to be sheltered and protected? If there's one book in a hundred with this twist, it's a miracle.

And in the paranormal romance genre, these books are completely non-existent, there, women are allowed to be smart but always smaller, more fragile, weaker than their buff supernatural male counterparts, watch me gag on the cliché.

I just want society in general to stop forcing women into the roles of betas, posing no threat to the position of the male alpha. Is it so wrong?

Podfic rec: Sherlock

"The Whore Of Babylon Was A Perfectly Nice Girl" by out-there, read by aethel | Sherlock/John | Sherlock walks into a room and takes all the space right out of it. He does the same inside John's head. | 3hr. 36min.

"Over four hundred?" John hears himself say in a really discomforting, high-pitched whine. It's not that Sherlock's horribly disfigured, or doesn't know how to dress his stick-insect figure to best advantage, but still. John had been imagining about a tenth of that. Maybe. "You've slept with over four hundred people? I'm amazed your genitals are still attached."

I'm smitten with this fic/podfic! It's mostly about sex - not them actually having sex but rather talking about it - about their different takes on it. Sherlock is his mad self, John is bewildered and Mycroft meddles as is his usual MO. Fantastic!

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

With all the talk about dominant, protective women, I was overcome by the sudden craving to re-watch The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, one of my favorite anime!

And, you know, watching it now, a scary thing occurred to me: Haruhi is so much like Sherlock Holmes from BBC's Sherlock it's eerie. She's a genius, headstrong and easily bored, she has no respect for rules or personal boundaries, always craving new adventures. And the perfectly normal, long suffering Kyon with his dry wit? John Watson!



Oh, Kyon. The sole sane person around. I just adore his running commentary on Haruhi's craziness. Like when she started smooshing Asahina's breasts because she was told people loved big breasts - and his "News to me." Or when she admitted that she "arrested" Asahina because she was cute and small and had big breasts - his "She must have been born dumb."

Yet Kyon's also the catalyst for everything that Haruhi does. And it's lovely!