Tag: eve moneypenny

Five things that I learned during the “Year of the Spy”

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Sometimes, when it’s very quiet and I close my eyes, I swear that I can hear the brazen, brassy tones of the James Bond theme song playing in the silence. At first, it was a bit worrying. But now, I’m kind of used to it. It’s all part and parcel of what comes with diving headfirst into “The Year of the Spy”.

I’m not sure how this happened, but 2015 officially became “The Year of the Spy” thanks to several major blockbusters, comics, and shows that centered around international espionage. If there were spies in it, chances are that I watched it, read it, and generally was obnoxious about it on twitter. I couldn’t help myself.

It’s been a long year of spies and immersing myself in almost everything to do with this genre of fiction. I’ve learned and noticed a lot. Much of it was… kind of negative, but there were a few standouts.

So instead of giving y’all a twenty thousand word recap of my year of the spy, I’ve written up five things I’ve learned or had reaffirmed over my year being ridiculously invested in all things spy-related!

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[Film Review & Recap] Spectre

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Here you have it, almost 5000 words on Spectre that looks at the film’s plot, its shortcomings, and my expectations for the film. All of the photographs in this monster baby of a post come from antovolk‘s trailer screencaps on flickr .

James-Bond-Spectre-Poster

It feels like almost everything I’ve done has led up to this point.

For me (and many fans), 2015 was the year of the spy. I’ve seen most of the spy films and television shows that came out this year and of course, I spent most of my year watching and rewatching James Bond films so that I could write my column over at The Mary Sue. From Dr. No to Skyfall (with a few unofficial films along the way), I made my way through every single James Bond film made between 1962 and now. Most of these movies I watched a minimum of three times. Others? Yeah, I went way overboard.

I think that after a year of spy comics, movies, and shows, it was inevitable for Spectre to fall short of the hype that I had built up, a crashing force of momentum born from the moment that they announced the title of the film. I’ve spent close to a year of my life eating, breathing, and dreaming about James Bond. I may be behind on Fleming’s original canon, but I am nearly one with Eon Production’s slightly softer canon.

Here’s the thing though: maybe all of that time worked against me. Maybe I was destined not to completely enjoy Spectre because it had been built up to Leviathan-like proportions in my head thanks to this year. I don’t know. What I do know is that I saw Spectre twice – first on November 7th with my Skyfall partner Rob and then on the following Tuesday with my trusty notebook – and it has yet to move me the way that Skyfall did.

It isn’t that Spectre is a bad movie. It’s not. It’s full of lush scenery and pretty people and the most brutal fight scenes. Craig is a good Bond and I’ve got to admit that even his least popular Bond film (coughcoughQuantumOfSolacecoughcough) is better than like ninety percent of the worst Bond films out there.

Spectre is almost entirely my thing.

Except for where it’s not.Read More »

#FlashbackFriday – Stitch takes on the #JamesBond & #00q fandoms

Stitch

To be fair, when I open a video talking about fandom sucking, it’s easy to understand why I’m not more popular in fandom spaces. I’m not necessarily nice about certain things, but then —

I don’t have to be.

Three years ago, the James Bond fandom let me down big time with how their immediate response to Skyfall was to ship James Bond with basically everyone but Naomie Harris’ Eve Moneypenny. She often wound up pushed to the side as an ex or as a sassy Black British friend who hooked the two nubs up and made them see the light.

So of course, I got pissed. Because this sort of thing isn’t okay.

It doesn’t matter what you ship, but rather how you ship it. 00q isn’t an inherently problematic ship, but the fandom that focuses on him and Bond at the expense of female characters and characters of color?

They’re plenty problematic.

The response to this video (on tumblr at least) was so harsh that I deleted the posts I made without saving them and I basically dropped out of interacting with the fandom. I’m sorry but when you get called ‘homophobic’ for criticizing (not disliking, mind you) a fanon ship, you know things are a bit borked.

I’m posting this #FlashbackFriday video to show how little fandom has changed as an institution. We can do better, but let’s be real: it’s a lot easier not to.

Late Last Night – Helena Bertinelli/Eve Moneypenny

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Title: Late Last Night

Characters: future Helena Bertinelli/Eve Moneypenny with mentions of Dick Grayson, James Bond, Q, and The Tiger King of Kandahar

Rating: General

Contains: Flirting, subtle but significant spoilers for Spectre, Grayson #4, and Batman and Robin Eternal #2.

Summary: There are few secrets among spies.

Notes: Instead of writing the Spectre review I took 12 pages of notes for this morning while I was in the theater, I just sat down and wrote a story about two of the most powerful Black women in the spy genre (James Bond‘s Eve Moneypenny and Grayson‘s Helena Bertinelli) having a friendship and maybe (eventually) a little something more. If you squint, there are definite allusions to Moneypenny/Q/Bond and Helena/Dick too. Because that’s how I roll.

There are no secrets in SPYRAL.

Not even for its current director.

No – especially for its current director.Read More »

The Techniques of Erasure

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Word Cloud - Techniques of Erasure

This is part one of a hybrid essay-rant series focusing on fandom (the collective community) and its intense race/racism problems. If you’re new to my blog and to this project, start here with the introduction post. Make sure to click the links and read the content because they’ll add further nuance to the essay here.

In addition to talking about race and racism, this post also mentions incest (with regard to how fandom interprets familial relationships to suit their shipping needs).

One thing that becomes overwhelmingly clear when it comes to the treatment of characters of color is the lengths that fandom is willing to go to in order to get them out of the way of their favorite white character ships. There are so many techniques that we could tackle, many of them framed subtly enough that it’s difficult to combat them, but for the purposes of this post we’re going to look at five of the most popular:

  1. Distancing
  2. Willful misinterpretation of relationships
  3. Theorizing that a character of color is really evil (and therefore shouldn’t be shipped/the relationship should be placed under suspicion)
  4. Deciding that a character of color in a POC/White Fandom Darling ship is actually asexual and/or a “strong [race/ethnicity] man/woman/non-binary person that don’t need no significant other”
  5. POC reduced to an agony aunt character to get white characters together

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Fandom. you’ve got a huge race problem — An Introduction Post

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poc in fandom image

Sam Wilson. Abigail Mills. James “Rhodey” Rhodes. Eve Moneypenny . Joan Watson.

What do these characters all have in common?

Well, they’re all characters of color in popular films or television shows.

They’re all shippable with fandom’s white dude darlings (Steve Rogers, James Bond, and Sherlock Holmes for example).

And oh yeah –

Fandom constantly desexualizes them and removes them as valid canon or fanon love interests for said white dude darlings so that a white character can swoop in and fandom can have fantastic ships.

Let’s face it: fandom has a major racism problem.

The clearest sign of this is how characters of color and the fans that defend them are treated.

Fandom, we need to do better. We need to talk about the fact that there’s no balance. We need to talk about how either fandom is hypersexualizing characters of color or desexualizing them.

We also need to talk about how fans and characters of color do not get treated well in fandom and yet it keeps getting glossed over as if it’s not a sign of serious racism in fandom. Reduced to drama or ship wars, discussions about the methods that fandom undertakes to deliberately distance characters of color from white characters (either with regard to friendships or romantic relationships) are frequently pushed to the side.

Whenever someone makes a post or writes an article about the way that fandom pushes these fans and characters to the sidelines, it rarely goes well.

I know this for a fact. I’ve written my fair share of those posts and the negative responses have been both intense and immediate.

Even on my previous posts about fandom’s racism problems, I’ve gotten dismissed by people who otherwise seem like they’re great. I’ve had nasty messages sent to my inbox. Fandom friendships have suffered. After a while, you get labeled as a trouble maker because fandom is supposed to be this carefree place where oppression is ignored unless it’s that of actually diverse fictional characters and the fans wanting representation to carry over to the fandom.

Despite that, I’m not going to keep quiet about it.

I’m here to talk about this racism problem in detail by using different fandoms and ships as examples along with my personal experiences and those of fellow fans.

For the next five months, we’ll be looking at how fandom mistreats and misuses characters of color and how fandom spaces tend not to be so safe for fans of color who are vocally uncomfortable with this treatment.
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SPECTRE – Teaser Trailer + Reaction

Stitch

I’m going to be honest with you guys: I’m a million times more excited for Spectre than I am the next Avengers film and this trailer just solidified that excitement.

The trailer is everything I ever wanted and it’s just a teaser. How am I going to survive the actual trailer when it comes out?

I am 100% here for the explosions and the general badassery and I love the hell out of everything that Sam Mendes has been doing with James Bond, but I am also ridiculously excited to see Naomie Harris’s Moneypenny. It’s been too long and I’m going to have to admit to a little overdramatic swooning when she was speaking in the trailer.

Here’s hoping that she gets even more to do and that we get to see a bit of the back and forth banter that the Moneypenny/Bond relationship is famous for.

I’m so excited for this movie! If I could preorder tickets from now, I’d do it just from that trailer!