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sorcyressOh hey, here is something I never posted, from almost a year ago. It is in three parts, and eleven footnotes. It is about legos, about my own creativity, about being the Special, and about having my heart broken by media that refuses to accept that people like me exist. Enjoy.
***
I just saw The LEGO Movie with jere7my! I thought it was really awesome and great, and spent almost the whole time with a giant smile on my face --it was easily as joyous for me as Pacific Rim, though for completely different reasons.
It was also one of the most alienating movies I've seen in a lonnnnng time. It's not that it failed to pass the Bechdel test, movies never do that. It's not that the hero gets the girl, that pretty much always happens. It's not even that the hero fell in love with the girl because she was pretty, and never much seemed to have other opinions of her afterwards (he thinks her building is kinda weird and her driving-fighting is scary).
The entire movie was a tribute to a toy I spent a significant part of my childhood playing with. Pre-internet, probably 40-80% of my free/playing time was spent on LEGO, on building amazing creations and narrating the stories and adventures my characters were having. Sometimes with friends or siblings, but mostly alone in my room, endlessly happy to figure out what happens next to this world I have created. I have never felt so rosy-nostalgic watching a movie in my life --this was my jam.
And there wasn't a single character in it who looked or acted even a little bit like me or the characters I made. I can think of four female1 characters in the whole movie. Uni-Kitty is not even human, and her personality is relentlessly cheery-perky-girly-girl with pink accents and rainbows. Wonder Woman gets about four lines, none of them significant. The Cat Lady gets even fewer lines. And Wildfire/Lucy?
I mean, I want to like her, a lot. She's amazing at building things, and her hair is so cool! But besides that, here's everything I know about her as a person: She's kinda insecure. She wants to be the Special. She...might like her boyfriend's music, but maybe just because he likes it (see point one)? She...builds...a lot?
She's a plot device for the males around her. She's so breathtakingly beautiful that Emmet ignores his instructions and chases after her, initiating the main plot. She's strong enough to break into a room and beat up a bunch of skeletons, but then gets menaced minutes later such that Emmet gets distracted from his one job and goes to save her instead. She makes an incredible pig-driven carriage in a matter of seconds while fighting robots, but then when it loses a wheel, she is helpless and fully reliant on Emmet to think of something to fix it. In the end, when it seems like she is going to break up with her boyfriend, he tells her "[Emmet]'s the hero you deserve", denying her even the ability to be in charge of her own romantic destiny.
In the opening two minutes of the movie, Vitruvian starts in with the prophecy, and who cares that it was fake and just an excuse to rhyme. "A lass or feller" --not the other way around. In the first two minutes, I heard a Magical Negro2 declare a prophecy that specifically included the possibility of a female winning, and even put the suggestion first. I spent the whole movie, increasingly depressed because no matter how hard I hoped, Lucy wasn't gonna be the Special the prophecy referred to. She was just the trophy the hero won at the end.
Hack Rogers is in her mid-twenties. She has reddish-brown hair that comes down artfully over one eye. She wears a black cape, and cool black sci-fi armor, and a red circle helmet-hat. She fights with a ninja sword sometimes, and silver throwing daggers sometimes, and has been known to put on modified SCUBA armor with orange dragon wings attached so she can fly through the air holding two black axes and with two black axes attached to her shoes so she can rain devastation from above.
She never liked her birth name -Hillary- which is why she goes by Hack. She has a younger brother named Mike. Her mother and sister3 disappeared in a car crash years ago. Her dad is an adventuresome type, who likes archeology and gardening. Hack made her fortune by opening a shop to sell incredibly powerful weapons to the nations of the world. Her shop was on the moon, (because seriously, those moon base pieces were the coolest bases we had except for maybe the castle base with the secret dungeon and the ramp that Hack builds her castles on). When she realized that she had all these weapons suitable for taking over the world and she was just selling them, she changed her mind and took over the world herself instead.
She got bored of ruling the world pretty fast, and so delegated the responsibility away, and retired to her first awesome castle. Pretty early on, she learned how to dimensional travel and went to hang out in Valdemar. She met bunches of Heralds, including her interdimensional clone, who was named Trina and had a Companion named Tanazelot. And also she met Queen Selany. And seriously, there was one point where I had commandeered every white LEGO horse4 in the house so that I could have like eleven heralds and three trainees (including Harry Potter, shut up, he wears all grey okay it made perfect sense).
Then there was an evil White Queen, who had a big silver crown and sword, and decided to be Hack's nemesis. They had a SUPER EPIC and also fairly traumatic final battle, on top of a flying platform powered by the heads of all the good people the White Queen had ever killed. Hack finally won when her friend (and sometimes boyfriend, one of several5) Wolfgang knocked all the heads away from the power source, breaking the White Queen's power. Hack was heavily injured and spent a very long time recovering, physically and especially emotionally.
Sometime after the fight, Hack's mother and lost sister came back into her life. Turns out her mother is a sorceress. Her sister (Elizabeth? I think it's Elizabeth) had a fiancee and was super excited to have found her long-lost twin just before the wedding. After much argument with her female relations, Hack did not have to wear a dress to the wedding.
The White Queen wasn't actually dead. She resurfaced occasionally to stir shit, and gaslight Hack. The White Queen was also pretty freaked out about the fact that she had a serious crush on Hack, despite wanting to kill her6, and spent a lot of time angsting about it to her skeleton minions. I think one of her skeleton minions might've escaped to go join Hack's team, but that might be conflating this canon with the Katectures7.
Out of the Fold8, I got internet, webcomics, poor grades, an abusive boyfriend, and college. Hack came with me to college, as did Trina and Wolfgang and some of the other players, but didn't come out much, and I had a much more limited amount of time and building material.
My junior year of college, I got the Black Witch at a garage sale, and made her amazing trap-filled castle. She was out exploring in her evil dragon-balloon when Hack and her crew stumbled across this awesome new castle, and took it over. There was a battle, which Hack and hers lost --they ran home to their own castle. The White Queen and her minions joined forces with the Black Witch.
My 23rd birthday, Genni gave me an amazing monster hunter. Hack's werewolf boyfriend is super concerned by this development.
And...I think that's about it. There's a lot of stuff I'm skipping, like the jousting horses10, and the Avenging Oar11, and the Silver Eagles, and the amazing rock-climbing wall Hack made, and the fairy who stole all her money, and the cat she adopted when she moved to her new castle, after her first one got wrecked when I accidentally dropped a box of winter clothes on it and basically all the adventures with Raj and his dad, and her mom's protegee who was also learning magic, but being tempted by evil, and the door that appeared on her house one day that's probably evil and she's still never gone through it, and and and and AND
(And the pirate ship, and Captain Katarina Sublime.)
Hack was the best ever. She was a master fighter and amazing with computers and could build awesome things and travel everywhere and lead groups as big as armies or small as her close circle of friends. She's smart and clever and snarky and powerful...
Hack is the Special. The most interesting and important in the universe. She is everything that The LEGO Movie is about. Watching that movie was like watching my childhood, seeing the stories I imagined as brought to the big screen, made real by the telling. I loved that movie, I smiled damn near the entire time, laughed at all the jokes, teared up at the ending.
But ultimately, it's just another movie with nobody like me in it. And what does that say, except that I don't belong here. Hack, and all that she did, is dismissed inconsequential because pfft, girls don't have anything to do with LEGOs. They aren’t the characters and they aren’t the players.
Maybe if I didn't love it so much, it wouldn't hurt as bad that it doesn't love me back.
~Sor
MOOP!
1: And no non-binary-gendered, though I identified pretty solidly as a girl for all of my childhood, so that's a little bit less immediately relevant.
2: Oh come on. This was also a pretty gross thing, because he's what, the *only* character of colour in the whole thing? Don't you dare say that because Emmet and Lucy and Benny are yellow they count, the way race is normalized in our society, that yellow minifig face is *definitely* a shorthand for white.
Oh, and the black guy is literally the only person to die in the entire movie. Like, he doesn’t even outlive the bad guys. Whaaaaat theeee fucccck. The fact that he comes back as a ghost does not exactly make this less fucked up.
3: Twin? I don't actually remember this part, it's been a while since she came up.
4: Veronica used to make them do the wave with their heads, which I would claim pissed me off, but I never really fixed them so it can't have been that bad.
5: Wolfgang was her oldest partner and boyfriend, and if I'd read the Modesty Blaise books earlier, I probably would've just straight up called him Willie and been done with it. But Hack also dated Raj, an Indian prince who lived in an awesome scorpion palace full of traps that everyone called the Taj, and a shy werewolf boy whose name I can't remember, and probably Trina occasionally. Often at the same time, with all of them aware --Hack was canon polyamorous before I even knew what poly was.
6: That's right, not only did I make Hack poly before I knew what it was, I made the White Queen have feelings of kismisitude before Homestuck even existed. Suck it, Hussie!
7: Stick figures I drew near constantly from about 6th-10th grade. They were awesome and I have about a billion drawings I should scan somewhere out in Chicago.
8: "Out of the Fold" means stuff that happened in the "real" world, as opposed to stuff that happened inside my canons. Hack Rogers is one of maybe two characters9 to ever have the permanent ability to leave the fold --she knows I'm a real person, and has the capacity to understand that she is a toy.
9: Dante de Stormchilde is the other one. Not sure why she is (I don't really use the concept of the Fold much anymore) but probably just due to how damn long she's been around --since 2005!
10: I believe jousting horses was the idea of my friend Norman, who I played a lot of LEGO with on the rare occasion we hung out. You put wheels on the bottoms of horses and shoot them towards each other. IT'S AWESOME!
11: The average age of my livejournal is old enough to get this joke, right? SOMEONE has to have been reading Mad Magazine in the '70s?
***
I just saw The LEGO Movie with jere7my! I thought it was really awesome and great, and spent almost the whole time with a giant smile on my face --it was easily as joyous for me as Pacific Rim, though for completely different reasons.
It was also one of the most alienating movies I've seen in a lonnnnng time. It's not that it failed to pass the Bechdel test, movies never do that. It's not that the hero gets the girl, that pretty much always happens. It's not even that the hero fell in love with the girl because she was pretty, and never much seemed to have other opinions of her afterwards (he thinks her building is kinda weird and her driving-fighting is scary).
The entire movie was a tribute to a toy I spent a significant part of my childhood playing with. Pre-internet, probably 40-80% of my free/playing time was spent on LEGO, on building amazing creations and narrating the stories and adventures my characters were having. Sometimes with friends or siblings, but mostly alone in my room, endlessly happy to figure out what happens next to this world I have created. I have never felt so rosy-nostalgic watching a movie in my life --this was my jam.
And there wasn't a single character in it who looked or acted even a little bit like me or the characters I made. I can think of four female1 characters in the whole movie. Uni-Kitty is not even human, and her personality is relentlessly cheery-perky-girly-girl with pink accents and rainbows. Wonder Woman gets about four lines, none of them significant. The Cat Lady gets even fewer lines. And Wildfire/Lucy?
I mean, I want to like her, a lot. She's amazing at building things, and her hair is so cool! But besides that, here's everything I know about her as a person: She's kinda insecure. She wants to be the Special. She...might like her boyfriend's music, but maybe just because he likes it (see point one)? She...builds...a lot?
She's a plot device for the males around her. She's so breathtakingly beautiful that Emmet ignores his instructions and chases after her, initiating the main plot. She's strong enough to break into a room and beat up a bunch of skeletons, but then gets menaced minutes later such that Emmet gets distracted from his one job and goes to save her instead. She makes an incredible pig-driven carriage in a matter of seconds while fighting robots, but then when it loses a wheel, she is helpless and fully reliant on Emmet to think of something to fix it. In the end, when it seems like she is going to break up with her boyfriend, he tells her "[Emmet]'s the hero you deserve", denying her even the ability to be in charge of her own romantic destiny.
In the opening two minutes of the movie, Vitruvian starts in with the prophecy, and who cares that it was fake and just an excuse to rhyme. "A lass or feller" --not the other way around. In the first two minutes, I heard a Magical Negro2 declare a prophecy that specifically included the possibility of a female winning, and even put the suggestion first. I spent the whole movie, increasingly depressed because no matter how hard I hoped, Lucy wasn't gonna be the Special the prophecy referred to. She was just the trophy the hero won at the end.
Hack Rogers is in her mid-twenties. She has reddish-brown hair that comes down artfully over one eye. She wears a black cape, and cool black sci-fi armor, and a red circle helmet-hat. She fights with a ninja sword sometimes, and silver throwing daggers sometimes, and has been known to put on modified SCUBA armor with orange dragon wings attached so she can fly through the air holding two black axes and with two black axes attached to her shoes so she can rain devastation from above.
She never liked her birth name -Hillary- which is why she goes by Hack. She has a younger brother named Mike. Her mother and sister3 disappeared in a car crash years ago. Her dad is an adventuresome type, who likes archeology and gardening. Hack made her fortune by opening a shop to sell incredibly powerful weapons to the nations of the world. Her shop was on the moon, (because seriously, those moon base pieces were the coolest bases we had except for maybe the castle base with the secret dungeon and the ramp that Hack builds her castles on). When she realized that she had all these weapons suitable for taking over the world and she was just selling them, she changed her mind and took over the world herself instead.
She got bored of ruling the world pretty fast, and so delegated the responsibility away, and retired to her first awesome castle. Pretty early on, she learned how to dimensional travel and went to hang out in Valdemar. She met bunches of Heralds, including her interdimensional clone, who was named Trina and had a Companion named Tanazelot. And also she met Queen Selany. And seriously, there was one point where I had commandeered every white LEGO horse4 in the house so that I could have like eleven heralds and three trainees (including Harry Potter, shut up, he wears all grey okay it made perfect sense).
Then there was an evil White Queen, who had a big silver crown and sword, and decided to be Hack's nemesis. They had a SUPER EPIC and also fairly traumatic final battle, on top of a flying platform powered by the heads of all the good people the White Queen had ever killed. Hack finally won when her friend (and sometimes boyfriend, one of several5) Wolfgang knocked all the heads away from the power source, breaking the White Queen's power. Hack was heavily injured and spent a very long time recovering, physically and especially emotionally.
Sometime after the fight, Hack's mother and lost sister came back into her life. Turns out her mother is a sorceress. Her sister (Elizabeth? I think it's Elizabeth) had a fiancee and was super excited to have found her long-lost twin just before the wedding. After much argument with her female relations, Hack did not have to wear a dress to the wedding.
The White Queen wasn't actually dead. She resurfaced occasionally to stir shit, and gaslight Hack. The White Queen was also pretty freaked out about the fact that she had a serious crush on Hack, despite wanting to kill her6, and spent a lot of time angsting about it to her skeleton minions. I think one of her skeleton minions might've escaped to go join Hack's team, but that might be conflating this canon with the Katectures7.
Out of the Fold8, I got internet, webcomics, poor grades, an abusive boyfriend, and college. Hack came with me to college, as did Trina and Wolfgang and some of the other players, but didn't come out much, and I had a much more limited amount of time and building material.
My junior year of college, I got the Black Witch at a garage sale, and made her amazing trap-filled castle. She was out exploring in her evil dragon-balloon when Hack and her crew stumbled across this awesome new castle, and took it over. There was a battle, which Hack and hers lost --they ran home to their own castle. The White Queen and her minions joined forces with the Black Witch.
My 23rd birthday, Genni gave me an amazing monster hunter. Hack's werewolf boyfriend is super concerned by this development.
And...I think that's about it. There's a lot of stuff I'm skipping, like the jousting horses10, and the Avenging Oar11, and the Silver Eagles, and the amazing rock-climbing wall Hack made, and the fairy who stole all her money, and the cat she adopted when she moved to her new castle, after her first one got wrecked when I accidentally dropped a box of winter clothes on it and basically all the adventures with Raj and his dad, and her mom's protegee who was also learning magic, but being tempted by evil, and the door that appeared on her house one day that's probably evil and she's still never gone through it, and and and and AND
(And the pirate ship, and Captain Katarina Sublime.)
Hack was the best ever. She was a master fighter and amazing with computers and could build awesome things and travel everywhere and lead groups as big as armies or small as her close circle of friends. She's smart and clever and snarky and powerful...
Hack is the Special. The most interesting and important in the universe. She is everything that The LEGO Movie is about. Watching that movie was like watching my childhood, seeing the stories I imagined as brought to the big screen, made real by the telling. I loved that movie, I smiled damn near the entire time, laughed at all the jokes, teared up at the ending.
But ultimately, it's just another movie with nobody like me in it. And what does that say, except that I don't belong here. Hack, and all that she did, is dismissed inconsequential because pfft, girls don't have anything to do with LEGOs. They aren’t the characters and they aren’t the players.
Maybe if I didn't love it so much, it wouldn't hurt as bad that it doesn't love me back.
~Sor
MOOP!
1: And no non-binary-gendered, though I identified pretty solidly as a girl for all of my childhood, so that's a little bit less immediately relevant.
2: Oh come on. This was also a pretty gross thing, because he's what, the *only* character of colour in the whole thing? Don't you dare say that because Emmet and Lucy and Benny are yellow they count, the way race is normalized in our society, that yellow minifig face is *definitely* a shorthand for white.
Oh, and the black guy is literally the only person to die in the entire movie. Like, he doesn’t even outlive the bad guys. Whaaaaat theeee fucccck. The fact that he comes back as a ghost does not exactly make this less fucked up.
3: Twin? I don't actually remember this part, it's been a while since she came up.
4: Veronica used to make them do the wave with their heads, which I would claim pissed me off, but I never really fixed them so it can't have been that bad.
5: Wolfgang was her oldest partner and boyfriend, and if I'd read the Modesty Blaise books earlier, I probably would've just straight up called him Willie and been done with it. But Hack also dated Raj, an Indian prince who lived in an awesome scorpion palace full of traps that everyone called the Taj, and a shy werewolf boy whose name I can't remember, and probably Trina occasionally. Often at the same time, with all of them aware --Hack was canon polyamorous before I even knew what poly was.
6: That's right, not only did I make Hack poly before I knew what it was, I made the White Queen have feelings of kismisitude before Homestuck even existed. Suck it, Hussie!
7: Stick figures I drew near constantly from about 6th-10th grade. They were awesome and I have about a billion drawings I should scan somewhere out in Chicago.
8: "Out of the Fold" means stuff that happened in the "real" world, as opposed to stuff that happened inside my canons. Hack Rogers is one of maybe two characters9 to ever have the permanent ability to leave the fold --she knows I'm a real person, and has the capacity to understand that she is a toy.
9: Dante de Stormchilde is the other one. Not sure why she is (I don't really use the concept of the Fold much anymore) but probably just due to how damn long she's been around --since 2005!
10: I believe jousting horses was the idea of my friend Norman, who I played a lot of LEGO with on the rare occasion we hung out. You put wheels on the bottoms of horses and shoot them towards each other. IT'S AWESOME!
11: The average age of my livejournal is old enough to get this joke, right? SOMEONE has to have been reading Mad Magazine in the '70s?