Morning Coffee (8/25/15)

Trust me, you want to take three minutes out of your day to watch Hot Historical Maniacs. IT IS WORTH YOUR TIME.

You should also check out new web comic Defunct, about your discarded gadgets.

Taylor brought Alanis on stage to duet on "You Oughta Know" and IT IS EVERYTHING.

The August stock slide, explained.

The Right-Wing Hate Machine

Linda Holmes is writing some great stuff at NPR about the state of television.

Black Arts: The $800 Million Family Selling Art Degrees and False Hopes

And with it: The Best, And Perhaps Only, Response To An Article About One’s Family That Opens With “Black Arts: The $800 Million Family Selling False Hopes”

My Favorite Thing About Pitch Perfect 2... (SPOILERS)

I realize this post has an inane title; it's basically because I couldn't come up with a more specific title that didn't include spoilers. And now I'm rambling about that fact in order to give a little buffer space here, because yes, some spoilers for Pitch Perfect 2 are below, so if you care about that you should click away now!

I liked Pitch Perfect 2 a lot in general, but my favorite thing about it was really the lack of something. I loved the way they handled Skylar Astin's character Jesse. I liked the development of Beca and Jesse's relationship in the first movie, and I was so afraid that they would break up and get back together in the second just for the sake of drama - partially because I hate the idea that happy, functional relationships have no place in fiction, but also because it seemed unnecessary and like it would pull focus from Beca's story.

I was all ready for the movie to try to give Jesse his own story, or to make Beca's story about him - to make him jealous of her success, or to suggest that her busy-ness was making him feel neglected. But they avoided all of these easy, traditional options. Instead, he was just there, clearly proceeding with his own life but, for the purposes of this story, present as an interested, supportive boyfriend, popping up to yell "That's my girl!" whenever Beca did awesome things but never making the audience think about him other than in relation to her, because it wasn't his story. And that was just so refreshing.

This partially jumped out at me because of recent discussions on Tumblr about the character arc of Andrew (the male lead/love interest) on Classic Alice, in which show creator/writer Kate Hackett said this:

1. This is Alice’s story, not Andrew’s. She’s our focus and always should be. Even within the story, this is Alice’s story & not Andrew’s. He’s focused on her within the narrative for the story you guys get to see. But bigger picture, I didn’t want to write a story about a dude. I wanted to write a story about a lady human.

There are so many stories about dudes. So, so many. And there are so many stories in which ladies exist purely to support or service the dude's story. And yet when a story revolves around a female character, it's so common to see almost automatic reactions of "But what about the guys?" With their treatment of Jesse, the writers of Pitch Perfect 2 make it clear: This is not a man's story, and that's okay.

Morning Coffee (11/3/14)

Me elsewhere: Thoughts on last week's Bones, pilot posts on The McCarthys and Benched, the week's TV news.

A few belated Halloween links that I found on Halloween:

7 charts that explain Halloween

When Did N.H. Towns Start Calling The Shots On Trick-Or-Treating?

This Halloween history video featuring Kate Hackett of Classic Alice is cute.

Whoa: Starbucks delivery is coming. Probably not coming here, but still.

#GamerGate's scary plan to wipe Gawker Media from the face of the Earth

They're publishing the first bilingual Goodnight, Moon. Awesome!

Sarah Rees Brennan is parodying The 100 and it's as funny as you might expect.

Amazing: Dirtbag Mrs. Whatsit