So I know it’s been a while. Sorry. I started a new full-time job and we have been dealing with a bunch of miscellaneous real-life things, and also I’ve been working on updating my Marvel name compendiums to include every character on the wiki, not just on the first page of search results; that laborious project is finally complete (and I will probably do more names in similar style, but so far the winners are John variants with 1034 total and Charles variants with 25 live-action showings).

Don’t Worry Darling has been surrounded by drama and controversy since it first showed up on the 2019 Black List. Olivia Wilde’s sophomore film involved a great deal of (alleged) casting drama, as well as an (alleged) on-set relationship between director Wilde and her replacement male star Harry Styles, a…

Yeah, I’m doing part 2 already. This just interests me. Once again: I’m going through name popularity lists in the US (where Marvel is published), this time at the #2 and #3 spots (which will be grouped together), from 1939 (when Marvel Comics started) to 2021, and seeing how many Marvel characters have those names (or popular variants) on… the first page of search results on the Marvel wiki (or if I remember other ones).

Marvel Comics burst onto the scene in 1939, and since then, they’ve been recycling names. …

So drift partner and I were on the phone with my parents the other night, and my dad was telling a story about a woman my grandma knows from her retirement community. I’ve heard stories about this lady before, and she sounds like a character. Very gossipy, very much not someone you want to share secrets with, very in-your-face. This can obviously be a problem, but she sounds like a relatively harmless old woman.

Spoilers, obviously. So we didn’t get to see Thor: Love and Thunder opening weekend, since we were sick, but drift partner found out about the end and we weren’t thrilled. There was some comics-canonical basis for what goes down, but it didn’t strike our fancy. We are Jane Foster defenders (and adamant Jane/Thor shippers) for life. (We also weren’t pleased that the “Valkyrie finds a queen” subplot disappeared, but that’s not what this is about.)

Despite being thirtysomethings, drift partner and I have a pretty high tolerance for young adult literature and the equivalent cinematic media; furthermore, we are both queer women. We have with at least vague aspirations of crafting stories that appeal to other queer women (including young adults), and as I’m sure…

So there’s been a lot of discussion and speculation about how and if characters from the pre-Disney+ Marvel TV shows will be integrated into the greater MCU. We the audience kind of thought, at least at first, that they were part of the greater MCU, but the advent of Disney+ made it pretty clear that they weren’t. I wrote a piece for CBR about why that would be a bad decision almost a year ago, before any pre-D+ TV characters had made the switch over; I also think the points made in this more recent piece of mine about Laura Barton, Bobbi Morse, and the Mockingbird role make some important parts.

A little while back, we talked about the cartoon My Little Pony ‘n Friends, specifically its storytelling and also its surprisingly forward-thinking themes. All well and good! We both still prefer ‘n Friends (G1) — the plots are generally more interesting and it skews a little bit less young (it’s…