The Tradëscan Codex

1.My character tag at the Archive of Our Own. (I don't believe you need my permission to write RPF about me, but you certainly have my blessing. Just don't out me if you know my legal persona.)

2. SCC 1x02 strongly implies that Derek and Cameron come from the same future (the date that Cameron provides for Judgment Day is the combination for the safe). Thus, in the future that Derek comes from, John doesn't skip any years. (Presumably, in the future Jessie comes from, he does.) In short, Timelines B and C are the same.

That would mean any appearance of Cameron in Derek's flashbacks would be an appearance of our Cameron, and the differences between the future of, say, "Dungeons and Dragons" and T3 would be the same as between Cameron's future and T3--the main difference we know of being the date of Judgment Day. (I'm not quite sure I understand the mechanics of T3, though--at first glance it looks like a causality loop, but on further looks it become clear that history is being changed, although I'm not sure what it's being changed from--so it might be better to just ignore it altogether.) Off the top of my head, I can't think of anything problematic about this (other than one would expect his and Jessie's timelines to be more wildly divergent, but we already have weird parallelism existing between timelines: Judgment Day itself, of course, but also the fact that Cameron and Jessie both remember the conversation about Jessie's unborn child despite both coming from different timelines) or any detail to contradict the theory. Can anyone else?

I feel like that, after last week's Dollhouse episodes, there's finally enough for me to write a fic that's not just a cameo (like my last remix was). 60% of that might be Summer Glau, even though I'm not really interested in any pairings. ( spoilers )

In conclusion: Summer.

(Oh, and thank you to all the people who sent me vgifts!)

Dollhouse 2x04

Between this and "Epitaph One," I'm really falling in love with Adelle.

Sarah Jane Adventures 3x04

So, has anyone written K-9/Mr. Smith yet?

Know what I just realized? ( spoilers for SCC season finale )

In other news, I finally booked my plane tickets for writercon. $179. Not bad. (Especially since I'll be reimbursed. Which reminds me, I still need to look into arranging my volunteer work to pay off the scholarship.) My plane leaves Philly at like 6:30, though, which means I'd need to get to the airport by like 5. Blech.

It will, however, be the first time I'll leave the time zone without leaving the country (and, for that matter, the continent). I've never been any meaningful distance west--Colgate is probably as far west as I've been. Well, actually the Abbey of the Genesee, I guess, which I visited while I was at Colgate and is west of it.

Speaking of meeting up with fans, I met up with a bunch of fangirls, most of them MiniMerlin alums, at Central Park on Saturday. We had a blast, pretty much just hanging out and talking and playing a party game. I continue to be amazed at just how easy and stress-free social interaction with other fangirls is. All of my normal social anxiety pretty much just disappears, because I'm free to be myself.

Why can't I be surrounded by fangirls all the time? *pouts*

So I went ahead and watched the pilot.

( not really spoilery )

On the basis of fox1013's recs here and here, I ILL'd Jennifer Lynn Barnes' The Squad: Perfect Cover. It came in yesterday (which is a lot sooner than I had expected) and I read it during the train ride to school and while waiting in the station for the train home (where I finished it and thus resumed listening to The Silver Chair on my train ride home).

And, yeah, I enjoyed it quite a bit. *puts in an ILL request for The Squad: Killer Spirit*

The contents are what you would expect in a young adult novel about cheerleading spies: enough homosociality to power a small lesbian separatist commune, a healthy helping of high-school teenaged angst *glances at Spiderman <3's Mary-Jane and Supergirl and New X-Men on comics shelf*, and will-to-powery plots. Indeed, to my delight the book takes the spy plot much more seriously than I expected, capturing a tone more reminiscient of La Femme Nikita than of D.E.B.S. (Not that I don't love the latter movie with all my passion, but it relies so heavily on its visual aesthetic I don't see how it could possibly translate to book form. Fanfic is another story.) It plays it straight in a way which I really liked.

There's even a brother, although he's not quite as 'cestastic as he should be (although I did enjoy his squee at seeing his sister in cheer shorts) and, frankly, I don't quite buy him as a complete human being. Which could go for a number of the characters in the book, but in general the point of the book is that the cheerleaders act like cardboard cutouts while actually having unexpected depths, and Barnes' nicely foreshadows where those depths might lie in a couple of places, and I'm interested in learning more. Whereas the brother is the protagonist's frakking brother; his sister should be aware of his depths beyond "horny heterosexual teenage male" since, you know, she's known him his entire life.

At the same time, there's an emotional realism and down-to-Earth-ness to the characterizations, rooted as much in feelings of pain, frustration, and alienation as optimism and pep, which is refreshing. Insofar as it goes easy on the camp, it actually works that much better as a wish-fulfillment fantasy, because one can actually see oneself as the protagonist. It's more realistic than D.E.B.S. while still being more will-to-powery than Bring It On, which is really a totally awesome place to be.

It might just be me and my particular privilege, but I've always seen D.E.B.S. less as a movie about a lesbian romance than as a a quite brilliant deconstruction of a certain type of pseudolesbian mythology. In its way, The Squad is much less radical/postmodern in its method but just as important for its liberal/modernist move: while the former work of art interrogates the het male gaze (and its relation to the queer female gaze), The Squad sidelines it altogether (mostly anthropomorphized in the supposedly-laughably-pathetic portrayal of the brother, see above). Fashion and cosmetics and clothing--yes, including the skirt--are thus, I think, more forceably reclaimed as nexuses of female power. Part of this is the medium: there's a process of objectification inherent in film which can be avoided in the novel. When the Squad equips the protagonist with the necessary equipment and knowledge to seduce a man, it's clear that she's doing so as an agent in her own right and not as a het male (or even queer female) fantasy, a fact which the first-person narration emphasizes. Rather than destabilizing a narrative, it provides a new one--something that the young readers who would make up The Squad's primary readership need desperately in our world.

This is not, of course, to say that this alternative narrative is not unproblematic from a radical feminist perspective--what isn't? Like in both Bring It On and D.E.B.S., the female homosocial community is empowering but at the same time embedded in the larger structures of male power. All three texts problematize this embeddedness, but in different ways and to different degrees. Bring It On, I think, mostly leaves it intact, as the characters settle into heteronormative relationships and remain within the sphere of the socially-sanctioned sport. D.E.B.S. recognizes the way in which the queer relationship is unsustainable within that structure and requires an exiting from it. I don't want to spoil the book (I'm assuming you've already seen the movies--if not, go do so), but The Squad does make moves in places to problematize the legitmacy of the specific male power structure which is making use of the female labor--in particular in one specific (spoilerish) way that I expect will be taken up in books to come.

And The Squad never glorifies the situation or pretends it is ideal. Some of the girls manifest their "cheerleaderiness" as an authentic aspect of their femininity--and part of the protagonist's journey is coming to terms with the conclusion that that's okay. But for others that is not the case, and each girl gets her own unique (well, the twins share one) path and history which, while filtered through the somewhat opinionated perspective of the protagonist, is ultimately treated with sympathy. There is no wrong way to be a female, but there is a sense of loss in the idea of a society that won't let girls play with lightsabers.

The premise of the book is based on the assumption that cheerleaders are never taken seriously and thus make the ideal covert operatives, but this isn't painted as just or fair. The novel recognizes the pressures a young woman feels to conform, to be pretty, to not be too smart, to be an object, and it shows a group of women subverting those expectations, but without ever justifying them. Instead, it simply takes the assumption that we live in a frelled-up world and women simply have to live in it as best they can (perhaps while doing their best to change it). In the very process of working to preserve patriarchal society, the Squad by its nature reveals the sexism inherent within it.

Are the ( spoilers for tonight's SCC ) supposed to be taking place in the future Cameron remembers (her subjective past) or the new future which exists in the timeline Cameron created by taking Sarah into the future and not having her die of cancer? I missed last week's episode and I'm so confused.

( more spoilers )

I have to say, they're certainly doing a good job of keeping the intensity. That was a really good episode of television. I just hope they're managing to have it make sense while they do it.