But here are a couple of interesting posts on the costuming:

• The Importance of Pepper Potts’ Pants at Fantastic Fangirls
• The Costumes and Characters of The Avengers. Part 2: Tony Stark, Pepper Potts, and Bruce Banner at Hello, Tailor.

I don’t pay a lot of attention to costuming myself, but I find it fascinating to read the thoughts of those who do.

I also wanted to link this Black Widow vid: Comeback. It’s an action vid using source from both Iron Man II and Avengers, and I enjoyed it a lot. Because who doesn’t want to watch Natasha being awesome?

I didn’t have to be. Mark Ruffalo is now my Bruce Banner for ever and ever.

Halfway through The Avengers, we have Hulk as the out-of-control monster; at the end, that rage is focused, and the monster becomes a weapon. And I know the sharpness of that change bothered some people.

But in The Incredible Hulk, we see that the monster is capable of recognising the woman Banner loves, of defending her. So the Hulk is not all rage and property damage all the time. He learns, and is capable of compassion. I haven’t read many Hulk comics, but that’s there in those I have.

You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.

When Bruce first Hulks out, he is angry. Natasha tries to talk him down, but she’s the thing he’s angry at. Maybe not the mind, but certainly the hand that dragged him into this mess. She’s lied to him, repeatedly. It’s just you and me. There’s no cage.

And Bruce stays calm, as if he’s okay with this, and he swallows her lies, because what’s his other option? Only the very thing he’s running from.

And if we take the Hulk as an amplification of Bruce’s anger: well, Natasha should be afraid.

But we know from The Incredible Hulk that anger is not the sum total of the Hulk’s emotional range. He protects Betty, whom Bruce loves.

So, if Tony is someone whom Bruce genuinely likes and connects with – it might be a very new connection, but Bruce has few enough friends these days – well, then it’s no surprise that the Hulk would then look out for him, and act from concern for him.

That’s not a leap. It’s not a sudden penchant for team-play that comes out of nowhere.

Now, the Hulk punches Thor in the final battle. To remind us that the Hulk is not entirely under control. Also, because it’s funny.

At this point, we know we don’t have to worry the Hulk might hurt Thor. Thor can hold his own. We know this, and if the Hulk remembers and learns, then he knows too.

So does Bruce. There is a moment, much earlier in the movie, when a comment is made that a whole town was levelled because of Thor.

And hang on, isn’t that something people throw at the Hulk? And Bruce gives Thor this look. Like, he’s not alone. Sometimes masses of property damage are inevitable.

Because of that moment, I have it in my head that the Hulk punching Thor is just the equivalent of a bro-fist. Thor can take it. He just needs to remember who’s boss, right?

So, if I accept that the Hulk has awareness of the relationships and people that matter to Bruce …

… and those that Bruce might never articulate to himself, because that might be to admit that he and the Hulk are one and the same

… and the Hulk has a protective streak

… why, then I don’t find it a stretch that the Hulk would fight alongside our heroes, for something Bruce believes is important – important enough that he would choose to be ‘the other guy’.

Bruce has to set aside his anger, to go back and fight alongside people who have used him. He could have got away clean.

But sometimes you need the Hulk. (And doesn’t Tony have faith that Bruce would be back?)

Bruce becomes the Hulk then because he has a purpose. And the Hulk’s purposes are Bruce’s.

Maybe Bruce wanted to die, at one point. But I don’t think that he and the Hulk are so separate that there wasn’t a part of Bruce that wanted to live.

Basically, this is the binding of Loki and that which lead to it, retold in the Marvel-verse. It feels cozily familiar. And unlike some Marvel stuff, the places this story does depart from the myths don’t feel egrigeous. And have as much to do with the differences in established canon as anything.

I also found it actually made me feel sympathetic to Balder, moreso than the myths ever have – I guess that’s the difference between telling and showing, there.

One change that did make me sad was to not have Sigyn there in the binding scene (not that I know anything about her in the Marvel-verse). And not having the whole one-son-tearing-out-the-other’s-entrails-to-bind-him thing. Which I’m fond of, awful as it is.

But this was a really solid miniseries. I especially liked the fight scene between Thor and Loki, where Loki’s using his shapeshifting to make it an even fight. (I was a little annoyed in the Avengers when Loki was holding his own against Thor in a close range fight. Without magic. This was more believable and more satisfying.)

Also, when we saw Loki engineering Balder’s death, I liked the sense that it wasn’t so much a malicious act, but a curious one. Gods don’t die much, so what happens once you start that ball rolling? When one death becomes three becomes now you have something to get revenge for, even what was your own fault.

I thought it was a really interesting portrayal of Loki, without making him not a villain, or playing up the angst. And I would recommend it.

Part of it is the need to be gritty: grr, argh, violent men! Blood and guts! Torment and torture! And … I am not opposed to these things? But I feel like Wood fails to express anything else.

Then there’s sneaking suspicion I got that Brian Wood was not especially interested in historical accuracy. Even though it feels like that’s what the grittiness is meant to be. This became clearest in volume three, which features a story about three women who have survived the destruction of their village. And at one point, one of them says, ‘You talk of our future. What future is there without men? What good is wealth? What can we spend it on? What can we be allowed to own?’

So, what everything I learnt about Vikings as a kid was wrong? Women didn’t get to keep the property they brought with them to a marriage? They couldn’t own land?

I think Wood is actually making Vikings less interesting.

Also in the issue ‘The Viking Art of Single Combat’ there is this commentary on Loki as a god of war.

The young among us will happily chirp out ‘Thor!’ when asked about the gods of war, but a proper warrior, the sort who won’t do something as cowardly as bleed out in a shield wall when he’s supposed to have your back … that man will smile and talk of Loki.

Slippery, slippery Loki. The ideal war god, sure, but also the god of poetry, education, deceit and trickery, all rolled into one.

Which is … no. As a description of Odin, that would do well. With Loki’s name there, I don’t buy it.

The other problem with that issue was the sheer amount of narrative text, which detracted from the flow of the art. The issue is a single fight scene, which you’d assume goes by relatively quickly, but the narration slows it down so much that you can hardly make sense of the action. Maybe it’s deliberate, and he wants to slow the fight scene down and imbue it with meaning … but in slowing it down, it doesn’t parse as a fight scene any more.

The artists, at least, are all excellent. I am a big Ormston fan, of course, and his issues were the ones I enjoyed the most, but I also thought the other artists did some gorgeous work.

It’s just a shame about the writing.

In my playthrough, Tali dies. She kills herself.

(In-game, it’s after Thessia that Shepard starts breaking down; for me, it was Tali.)

I could have prevented it. I could have asked Legion not to uplift the Geth; I could have let the Quarians win that war.

But it wasn’t one they should have been fighting. And if they’d withdrawn, they could have lived.

If there is a theme to the choices my Shepard makes, it’s that xenocide is not the answer. Sure, the krogan are aggressive. Maybe their population will race back up and they’ll start wars again – but you deal with that when it happens. You don’t decide you know better, and you don’t interfere with another species ability to reproduce.

Ashley killed Wrex on my playthrough, because I could not bring myself to argue on that point. My Shepard always considered curing the genophage something worth fighting for. And she did it, in the end. (And that’s why Mordin’s death felt so poetic – he was setting something right, and it was a cause worth dying for.)

And she let the Rachni queen live, twice. (Even when I thought Grunt had died and I felt awful for it.)

And she let the Geth defend themselves.

Which gutted me. Tali has always been a favourite, and I could have saved her people, but I did not. It was not a pragmatic decision, that the Geth would be the greater ally. It wasn’t anger that the Admirals had considered us reasonable losses in their war.

(And I don’t consider the Quarians reasonable losses.)

It was just, this is the right thing.

Sure, it’s only a game. But the choices I make in-game reflect my own morality (unless I am consciously trying to play against that, but even then it’s hard). They’re choices I would never have to make in real life, but they still tell me what I think.

It’s only a game, but even then, I want to be a moral person. Even when I’m pretending to be a rogue space commander or an apostate mage. And playing RPGs makes it a lot more evident what that morality is.

In the end, my Shepard chose to control the reapers. I almost backed out (until the cut scene took over), but not because I thought it was a bad choice – it was because I misinterpreted what the Catalyst said, and thought that Control was the only ending that destroyed the Mass Relays. The destruction of the Mass Relays was an awful enough idea that I considered sacrificing the Geth for it.

And if that was the choice, then maybe I would choose differently. But it wasn’t.

Fandom has depressed me a little with its Indoctrination theory and the idea that Destroy is the only correct option. Because it wasn’t the wrong decision for my Shepard. If I let the Geth have the ability to defend themselves, why would I consider them acceptable losses, just for a more decisive victory? If I consistently chose not to wipe out entire species, why would I stop now? Why, when there’s another option?

And I never thought that it was wanting to control the reapers that made the Illusive Man wrong. It was the willingness to commit atrocities in the process. If it weren’t for that (and how, by the end, he’d obviously lost it), Shepard would have been tempted.

But this, in the end, was her choice: save the galaxy by sacrificing herself, or save the galaxy by committing multiple xenocides. Wiping out a species when they’re trying to kill yours is one thing; doing it when another species is collateral damage and there is another option is another.

Defeating the reapers was never the point. Saving the galaxy – as much of it as I can – was.

Keloglan vs the Black Prince

First Turkish movie I have ever seen! It is quite silly, and quite fun. I suspect there are lots of jokes I didn’t get.

The movie is set in the land of fairy tales. Our hero, who used to have lovely golden hair until a dragon burnt it off, is stuck doing task after task in attempt to marry the sultan’s daughter. Only she keeps getting out of it. Because she doesn’t like him, which is fair enough, and also she’s in love with someone else. Her parents are just really insistent on her marrying Keloglan.

He’s pretty over it, at this point. He’s still infatuated with her, but he knows she’s just not into him. It’s made him somewhat suicidal. But when the sultan sends him on yet another quest, he cannot disobey. Even if he really really doesn’t want to go steal that fierce giant’s belt.

Luckily for his safety, because the giant turns out to be ripped, his best friend convinces him that, after all this time being good and completing ridiculous tasks, he should just cheat. They just need to find a circus giant to help.

There are crossdressing women! Lady giants who perform Hamlet! Wandering tribes of gay men! Dance competitions! Just lots and lots of dancing. Oh, and the ‘villain’, who is quite awesome. He has a support group and everything, and he just wants the story to be named after him, dammit.

I’m not sure how good a movie it was, but it certainly entertained me.

Now I’ve finished Mass Effect 3, and I know. Because my thoughts on finishing the game were, ‘Wait, what the hell just happened?’

It didn’t help that after the Catalyst explaining my options to me, I promptly forgot which one was which. And then when I figured it out, I was still really unsure and almost changed my mind, but then it was too late and the cut scene had taken over :p

Not that it matters. Because the only difference is the reapers closing up and going away as opposed to the reapers going boom. (I was not awesome enough to bring up the third option, apparently.)

But that is not the bit that makes no sense. If it had been that, and then an epilogue like in Dragon Age, that would have been okay? ‘The fleets who came to earth were stranded in our part of the Milky Way, but the scientists who built the Crucible are busy looking for ways to replicate the Mass Relay technology. Other habitable planets are being reached by conventional FTL. Kaidan is very sad.’

But no, that would have made sense and might have provided closure. Instead the Normandy gets spat out on a garden planet.

And Joker comes out.

And Kaidan comes out (which, okay, why was he back on the Normandy? Wasn’t he leading his biotic team?)

And Garrus comes out.

Hang on.

Garrus was with me when I went for the Citadel.

So either he is dead, or he also made it to the Citadel. (Because the other option is that he just swanned off in the middle of a mission, which is not Garrus.) Either way, the ending is impossible.

In which case I just have to think that my Shepard passed out at some point and that was all a dream. Maybe it was a bug that Garrus showed up, but I legitimately cannot be sure. If it weren’t for the post-credits cutscene, I probably would have decided that the garden planet was the afterlife.

Clearly all a dream. After Hackett radioed Shepard, he got one of my teammates in to press the button and make the reapers go boom. They bring medigel, we all live happily ever after (except the people who died). If I have to make up an ending for it to make sense, I’m making up a happy one :p

But other than that, really good game! I will probably post more about it soon.

It makes a lot more sense now. But it is the very latest issue that is most wonderful. See, Hope and Namor are stuck with the condundrum of how to placate a city of lake-dwellers they have no language in common with …

but wait. There is one language Namor is fluent in that all speak. And he goes and seduces the lake-dwellers’ queen. To Hope’s horror. ‘Ick, ick, ick!’ she says. (They’re not the most attractive of species.) And later she asks Namor if he’ll judge her if she calls him ‘king of ab-lantis’. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘favourably.’ (Okay, Hope is not really very good at jokes, but she doesn’t have much experience, does she? And the kids her age she’s not really on an even footing with, because of the team leader minor-mind-control thing. Shame. Anyway!)

They are so funny and delightful together. It’s nice to see Hope having a positive relationship with someone! Not that I’d have picked it. Plus, it’s nice to see someone remember how young Hope is. Namor doesn’t treat her like a messiah or an abomination. Just a human who can be reasonably entertaining and just needs to be brought up right.

I’m getting quite fond of Namor, really. Doesn’t hurt that he goes around half-naked, using his wiley wiles for diplomacy and all.

I read this issue in the morning and it basically made my whole day 10x better. Maybe some other stuff happened in it, I hardly noticed over how awesome Hope and Namor were.

A thought: it is possible to portray rapid-fire romances that do work for me. (I read an interview with Clive Barker that was all, the people who are wtf about Gazza just don’t understand my art, and it annoyed me. I refuse to believe I just fail as a reader, thanks for that suggestion CB.)

So: iZombie doesn’t conflate insta-attraction with insta-love. The romance comes from the fact Gwen and Horatio spent this awesome evening really connecting. You know? I can buy the speed of the intensity because you can see the way they click.

Tamora Pierce’s Mastiff, which I read recently, does have a really rapid falling in love – but it still happens over the course of the book, we explicitly see how Beka becomes comfortable with Farmer, we see enough of his personality to understand the attraction and why she would come to love him. Plus intense circumstances and all.

Maybe Gazza would have worked better for me if we’d spent any time with him before he met Candy? I feel like it’s important to understand why both partners are attracted to one another – and we the reader already like Candy, but we know nothing about this Gazza fellow or whatever charming qualities he has. Candy doesn’t have any time to see them. And maybe you want to make a point about their trans-lifetime connection but if you want me to buy two characters being in love I have to know what there is to love.

Even if it’s something really shallow like he’s a badass monster hunter.

I find the speed force kind of bewildering. How does being able to go really fast result in all these different abilities?

But, I find Barry kind of adorable and I really like the art. I never intended to read The Flash? But it was apparently my mother’s favourite when she was young, and the covers were pretty …

All the good characters are really decent people, which is a refreshing change. Particularly when some characters you don’t expect to have a nasty streak end up having one …

Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman I have yet to get the latest issue. The first couple of issues were great but it’s rapidly gone meh for me. Also I expect Wonder Woman to be a superhero, not a Vertigo heroine. And I’m not opposed to Vertigo heroines, but Wonder Woman going to shows and smashing glasses into people’s hands (gods or no) and having an identity crisis is not really what I signed on for.

I’m just going to blame it on Brian Azzarello. It was his run I stopped reading Hellblazer the first time I was reading it. (Which I think is a pity now – because I was so close to Mike Carey’s run! Which I loved! But hey, the comics aren’t going anywhere.)

Demon Knights

Demon Knights is still fun. The dinosaurs are still wtf. I enjoy the tone of it, the mish-mash of high fantasy and all the things Paul Cornell thinks are awesome. I’d quite like to be consuming it in larger chunks.

Batwoman

Amy Reeder is good, but I feel a bit sorry for her, taking on Batwoman. Because she’s no JH Williams III. Some people might find the layouts easier to follow though! And Kate doesn’t look quite as anaemic.

Journey into Mystery

JiM is still charming. I like Hellstrom better here than anything else I’ve read him in.

Also, Leah has a lot of nice moments. Even the ones when she’s not there. ‘Even in a dream, Leah wouldn’t be nice!’ Loki says. Yup. Also, the bit where Thori’s  asking Hellstrom to be his master … it’s just great :D

Avengers Academy

I may be going off Avengers Academy. But then, I dislike time travel so it may just be this particular plotline. And Gage has a lot of characters to juggle now. (I just want my Finesse + Quicksilver bonding.) I’m not sure how well that’s going to work out? I would have preferred sticking to a smaller group. More time for character development. Less forgetting people exist (Sentinel boy).

Supergirl

I am a sucker for felt-tip colours at the moment. Still quite enjoying this, ignoring how on earth Kara managed to survive this issue (other than the power of love). There are some rather touching moments, where you see how young and on-the-verge-of-living Kara is.

Also, I have always been biased towards Supergirl :D