Vid: Misty Knight - Monsters & Angels

Misty! She was one of my favorite minor Marvel characters back in the day. I have an action figure of her that I got in the early 2000s, in her red comics outfit. I was so worried about not liking the live-action version of her, and then I LOVED her; Simone Messick is the perfect Misty Knight. Making this vid made me heartbroken all over again about never getting more of her.

Title: Monsters and Angels
Fandom: Defendersverse (Defenders, Luke Cage, Iron Fist)
Artist: Voice of the Beehive
Pairings: Mainly Misty/Colleen, some incidental Misty/Luke and Misty/Ward, but not really a pairing vid as such; mainly it's focused on Misty, her found family, and her search for her place in the world.
Summary: I'm nobody's wife and nobody's baby. The true OTP of this vid is Misty/happiness.

"Misty Knight - Monsters & Angels" (Watch on YouTube)

Download: 151 Mb MP4 (zipped) | 33 Mb MP4 (zipped)
Tumblr: At my Sholiofic tumblr
AO3: On AO3 here

Subtitles will be added a little later today.

( Lyrics under the cut )

FF Friday: two SF books with F/F pairings

That subject line has a lot of F's in it ...

I recently read a couple of sci-fi books with F/F pairings, so I figured I'd collect the reviews in one post. In both cases the pairing is a relatively minor part of a larger story, but in both cases it's also the protagonist's main and endgame pairing.

Ammonite by Nicola Griffith - Yes, the "Hild" Nicola Griffith! This is her first book from back in the early 90s, and I really enjoyed it; it has a classic SF feel with an all-female cast, which means that all of the traditionally male stock roles in that kind of story are filled by women - it's great. The book takes place on a planet where a virus has killed all the men, leaving an all-female population. The protagonist is an anthropologist investigating how their society works and how they reproduce, but quickly gets sucked into the complicated local political scene, while on the outside, military decisions are being made that will determine the planet's future. I enjoyed the first, oh, 2/3 of the book more than the last third - it ended up being a little "woo" for my tastes and also dangles unsolved mysteries for a presumably planned sequel that never materialized. But it's a good, solid, old-school sci-fi read with lots of fascinating worldbuilding detail, and I liked it a lot.

Provenance by Ann Leckie - So I kinda feel like I'm the last person in my reading circles to get around to this one, but I loved it once I did; it was riveting from start to finish. I very much approve of Leckie's commitment to throwing a new completely batshit complication at her poor protagonist whenever things started to slow down. I enjoyed Ingray, the narrator, particularly her tendency to burst into tears when upset, panic and throw up in space suits, and otherwise basically have -1000 points to badassery at all times while also managing to be level-headed and resourceful under pressure. (At one point one of the other characters accurately sums up Ingray as a person who panics for the first 10 minutes and then comes up with a brilliant and crazy plan to save the day.) I had a couple of nitpicks with the ending, specifically with some of the plot threads feeling unresolved and some characters' motivations that weren't clear to me, but I think this comes down at least partly to Ingray being a somewhat obtuse narrator and just failing to pick up on things that the reader is supposed to pick up on - actually I think I'll expand on those (highly spoilerishly) under a cut. Definitely enjoyed the book, though.

( Spoilers for the end of Provenance )