The Pop Tart's 3 Things From 2012

When the thought struck me that I ought to do an end-of-the-year list, I dismissed it at first. I don't really see much point in compiling a "Best of" list (or a "Worst of" list, for that matter), since film, television, books, and pretty much every other medium through which we partake of pop culture are not things with true objective scales by which to measure them. What's a good film or book to me won't be to someone else, and that's fine--it's one of the things that makes life more interesting.

So, I present to you, in no particular order, Three Things in 2012 That I Thought Were Pretty Neat.

* Female-led Successes in Television and Film

I mentioned this in part in my post about Action Women. Film studio Lionsgate this year had two films make over $125 million, and, guess what--both of these films starred female leads (the films are, if you're wondering, The Hunger Games, starring Jennifer Lawrence, and Twilight:Breaking Dawn, Part 2, starring Kristen Stewart). Female led comedies like Pitch Perfect have opened doors for women to lead in movies outside of the typical RomComs. Those things would be great on their own, but let's look also at television: Lena Dunham's Girls has been making news, good and bad, all over the place; Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are set to host the Golden Globes later this month; Pixar gave us Brave, its first film with a female protagonist; we finally got to see Legend of Korra, the female-led sequel to Avatar: The Last Airbender. These are the sorts of things I can get behind.

*Ensemble Cast Shows

I don't think my love for NBC's Community is any secret, but Community alone isn't why I chose to include this topic.  Let's face it, a larger cast means there's more opportunity for more types of people to appear on television. Shows like Community, Warehouse 13, Alphas, Glee and others show us that casts don't have to include exclusively men or exclusively white people. There are plenty of ensemble-cast shows that are guilty of only showing us more white people, and some of these shows are better at providing the viewer with a diverse cast than others, but the aforementioned shows have seen critical success, if not necessarily commercial success. Which is a step in the right direction, certainly.

*Some Pretty Awesome Talks at TEDx Events

 I've talked about Anita Sarkeesian once or twice before. In case you were unaware, this woman found herself the target of some pretty intense abuse for asking people who were interested--just people who were interested, mind you--to support her attempt to create a series of videos on YouTube to show the types of tropes that female characters fall into in video games. At one of the TEDx events, she discussed her experience.

FOX and Friends anchor Brian Kilmeade said some pretty insulting things about how the female anchors at the conservative news station were hired (it's all in the linked article, but the short of it is he said they just tried to find Victoria's Secret models who were capable of speech). Maybe if he had heard Cameron Russell's TEDx talk about the power of image, he would realize that beautiful women can easily be smart women also.

These were a few of the things that caught my attention in 2012. Use the comments section to share some of yours.

Tell You Something Good: Warehouse 13

I've taken a Saturday to talk about something that makes me angry.

I've taken a Saturday to talk about something that makes me sad.

It seems only right that I take a Saturday to talk about something that makes me happy. Stupidly, ridiculously, fantastically happy.

My job, which is wonderful in that it gives me money so that I can pay rent and buy food, kinda stinks because the hours I work make it impossible for me to watch any prime time television that isn't aired on the stations I work for as it airs,so I am way behind on fall premieres. It's really not that bad--I have to avoid spoiler-heavy sites (which is much more challenging than it really ought to be), but I get to spend my mornings picking my favorite programs and watching them at my leisure, which, inevitably, leads to personal marathons.

Recently, I've been binging on the SyFy original series Warehouse 13.

For those of you unfamiliar with the show, imagine a police procedural, but replace the station house with the giant warehouse where the Ark of the Covenant is sent at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark and swap out chasing criminals for chasing down magic objects with historical significance.  Secret Service agents Myka Bering and Pete Lattimer, while saving the president from an attempt on his life, stumble upon an "artifact"--a piece of historical brick-a-brac imbued with magical properties that are a manifestation of some aspect of the personality the object's original owner or user. In a typical "they know too much" way, Pete and Myka find themselves whisked away to Univille, South Dakota, home of their new workplace, Warehouse 13, where they learn they will be sent out into the world to "snag, bag, and tag" artifacts that are out in the world and apt to "ruin the world's day."

I'll make no secret about it--I love this show. So much. After Community, it's probably my favorite show currently on TV.

There are a ton of subjective reasons that I like this show--I wanted to be an archeologist when I was a kid, so the bits of history thrown in delight me; and I'm a big fan of procedural shows in general. But I'd like to focus on some more objective things that she show does right.

(Be warned: this post will contain spoilers through season 3 and up to the fifth episode of season 4. If you haven't watched the show but think you may want to, it might be best for you to skip this post until you're caught up. Seasons 1-3 are on Netflix Instant Watch, and, as of this post, the first five episodes of season 4 are on Hulu.)

As a person who has made it her business to study how different types of people are represented on television and various other media, I am frequently disappointed. There are exceptions, of course, but on the whole, we see TV characters falling into certain types of roles based on their gender, race, and sexuality, and there's a emphasis on sexual male-female relationships between main characters, while male-female platonic relationships are largely ignored.

While it's important to note that Warehouse 13 is not completely immune to this--people of color are numerically underrepresented, and though at least two of them have authoritative roles in the world of the show, they don't get nearly as much screen time as their white counterparts, and we haven't yet seen any cannon non-hetero romantic relationships on the show among the regular characters--the show is full of complete female and  non-hetero characters and the most significant relationships in the show are platonic and/or familial.

Warehouse 13 has no shortage of incredible female characters.

(image found here)

Myka, even before her transfer to the Warehouse, was a top Secret Service agent, and she's clearly the brains of the team of agents. Leena, keeper of the bed and breakfast that houses the Warehouse agents, knows the artifacts and Warehouse as well, if not better, than senior agent Artie and keep the artifacts from negatively interacting in the Warehouse. Claudia, who, it's worth mentioning, is the youngest employee of the Warehouse,  was able to hack into the Warehouse and is constantly creating new tools for the agents to use and upgrading the computer systems and imaging technology in the Warehouse. In season two, it's revealed that Claudia will be the next Caretaker of the Warehouse, a role with just as much power and responsibility as the title implies. And H.G. Wells (yes, that H.G. Wells and yes, she's a woman) is a martial arts expert and inventor in addition to an agent of the now-defunct Warehouse 12 all before she even appears in the series and joins the Warehouse 13 team.

These four are competent ladies; they get the job done. They're also flawed, funny, and charming.  Their storylines are interwoven with those of the male characters, but not dependent upon them. They get to do just as much ass-kicking as the guys. Sometimes more.

They prove that it's possible to have amazing women in a TV show without detracting from the equally amazing men in a TV show.

And the men are amazing. Mentor agent Artie is a curmudgeonly but deeply caring father figure to the younger agents, and Pete is charming, charismatic, and refreshingly sincere. I could write pages on the both of them, but, even though characters as memorable and lovable as Pete and Artie are a rarity, there are tons of great straight male leading characters on TV.

And this is more a post about what Warehouse 13 has that other shows don't.

I mentioned earlier how rare complete non-hetero characters are. Frequently, gay, bisexual, and lesbian characters are either played as jokes or reduced to their sexuality in characterization. Warehouse 13 does it right: Steve Jinks, who is gay, and H.G. Wells, who is bisexual, are both multifaceted and engaging characters that are also non-hetero. While no secret is made of either character's sexuality, and--wonderfully--neither character is shamed for their preference, they're not limited to being gay/being bisexual as an identity. They have aspirations and motivations that are given just as much weight (and aren't much different) than their straight companions.

The show also subverts the trope Bury Your Gays. But since there's a good possibility that not everyone reading this has seen the show, I won't go into how. (But, seriously, why haven't you watched this show? It's beautiful.)

As if outstanding female and non-hetero characters weren't enough, non-sexual relationships are not only featured, they're put in the foreground and given focus, treated as if they're more important than the sexual ones.

There are so many great friendships.

There's the father/daughter dynamic between Artie and Claudia that shows pretty much the full spectrum of parent-child interaction at one point or another.

 And Myka and Pete, who have not only mostly avoided the Will They or Won't They trope (though how well they've avoided it depends on the opinion of the watcher, I suppose), but also reverse gender roles-- Myka is the more logical and Pete is the intuitive one.

And Claudia and Steve, who pull off the straight-girl-gay-guy friendship without going to Will and Grace extremes and who literally feel each other's pain.

So, yeah, this show has a lot about it to love.

Clearly, since this is my longest post yet.

Between politics and television and the rampant sexism in internet and nerd culture, it's easy to say that there's nothing encouraging about the media.

But then, a show like Warehouse 13 comes along and does it right. And, more importantly, does it right and makes it.

And that, Saturday crowd, is something that makes me very happy.

(Season four of Warehouse 13 is currently airing on Mondays at 9/8 central on SyFy, and the previous three seasons are out on DVD and up on Netflix.)