Month: February 2006

If you could change a superhero, which one would it be, and how would you change them?

On the same topic, there’s also apparently the Sci-Fi Channel’s planned Who Wants to be a Superhero?:

In nationwide open casting calls, potential heroes will arrive in costume to prove their mettle, revealing the true nature of their superhuman abilities and invoking the noble credos by which they live. From these thousands of hopefuls, Stan Lee will choose 11 lucky finalists to move into a secret lair and compete for the opportunity to become a real-life Superhero!

Finalists will leave their former lives behind and live as their brainchild heroes 24/7, all under Stan Lee’s watchful eye. Each week, our aspiring heroes will be challenged with competitions designed to test their true superhero abilities. It’s not all just leaping tall buildings in a single bound, a true Superhero will be tested for courage, integrity, self-sacrifice, compassion and resourcefulness. In the end, only one aspiring Superhero will have the strength and nobility to open the gates to comic book immortality.

I wouldn’t like to be seen as saying that I want Starbuck to be perfect and well-adjusted, but the shape of her disfunction infuriates me. When I watch her, I find myself constantly recalling that genuine feminist SF icon, Farscape‘s Officer Aeryn Sun, whose character starts out, like Starbuck, as a capable soldier who is incapable of recognizing her feelings and who treats sex as recreation. Aeryn grows and changes over Farscape’s run, and although by the show’s end she has traded in her role as an emotionless soldier for that of a wife and mother, it is an empowering journey. Aeryn is flawed and, as a person, incomplete, but at no point did Farscape‘s writers suggest that, in order to experience the full range of human emotions, Aeryn needed to be cured of her strength or her personality. “You can be more”, she is told by love interest John Crichton in their first meeting, and more is indeed what Aeryn becomes. She casts away the parts of her training that, as she comes to realize, don’t mean a damn, and opens herself to new experiences. At the same time, however, Aeryn holds on of the skills that have kept her alive and made her strong, and uses them to safeguard her new, more rounded existence.

Instead of suggesting that Aeryn’s competence and strength are an armor concealing her inadequacies, as Galactica‘s writers seem to be doing with Starbuck, the Farscape writers recognized that those strengths were an integral part of Aeryn’s personality, that they had to be added to, not stripped away. Like all complete human beings, Aeryn had to learn to be vulnerable (although it’s worth noting that throughout their relationship, Crichton was always ‘the girl’, emotionally speaking), but the writers never tried to make her pitiable. Galactica‘s writers use pity as a shortcut to making us love Starbuck–poor abused, lost child–but it is that pity, and the pity that Starbuck feels for herself, that is the most off-putting aspect of the character. It tells us that Starbuck is shamming strength, and that she may never make the journey into adulthood.

1. And when you scan the radio, I hope this song will guide you home
2. When you look inside, all you’ll see is a self-reflected inner sadness
   “It’s Summertime” by the Flaming Lips, guessed by Eric
3. It used to seem to me that my life ran on too fast
   “Back in the High Life Again” by Steve Winwood, guessed by Betty
4. The questions run too deep for such a simple man
   “Logical Song” by Supertramp, guessed by Betty
5. The higher that the monkey can climb, the more he shows his tail
   “Misery is the River of the World” by Tom Waits, guessed by Remi
6. You don’t need no ticket, you just thank the Lord
   “People Get Ready” by Eva Cassidy (or others), guessed by Eric
7. I need to know if you were real
8. There’s a silence surrounding me
   “Keep Talking” by Pink Floyd, guessed by Kim and Betty and Eric
9. We laughed in the faces of kings never afraid to burn
   “Little Earthquakes” by Tori Amos, guessed by John
10. It’s the nukes that the must go and not me

Everybody knows the great sexual scandal known as “Klinton-Levinsky”.
After the relations like this Klintons popularity raised a lot!
It is a natural phenomenon, because Bill as a real man in order not to
shame himself when he was with Monica regularly used Voagra.
What happened you see. His political figure became more bright and more attractive.
It is very important for a man to be respected as a man!

I first read that as “Klingon.” Maybe that’s why I found it so amusing.