Just Off the Key of Reason

It's been a lovely birthday weekend.

Friday, Rayne and I went over to fajrdrako's and ordered in pizza and watched RENT because we were in the mood for a musical and I'd been meaning to rewatch it. I'll now have the songs stuck in my head for the next month.

Saturday, our friends Sarah and Alan came over for dinner and brought delicious homemade cupcakes. We had a delicious dinner and played Dixit and sat up talking for hours.

Tonight, Marna, Rayne, Ian and I went out for Greek tapas, which was delicious.

I had Marna take a picture because I thought I looked really cute.


When we got home Rayne came upstairs and buzzed the sides of my hair, thus making it look like I have an actual haircut again.


I've also spent the weekend rereading Matt Fraction-era X-Men comics. This is the era when I got back into reading comics after years away and I just love it. The X-Men are a big, ever-expanding, intergenerational soap opera, and Fraction totally got that. He had a core team, sure, but there were a lot of appearances by mutants from every X-era. Also, it's funny, which is something I can't say about many more-recent X-books.

Tonight's fruit salad of joy: pineapple, apricots, plums (both red and white flesh), cherries and a banana.

I saw X-Men: First Class last Friday with beable and yesterday with fajrdrako. While there are some impressive race and gender issues with the film which make me cringe -- seriously, if you're grabbing miscellaneous characters from anywhere in the timeline there are a LOT of awesome female characters and characters of color to choose from in the x-verse -- I mostly love the movie. Erik and Charles' Big Doomed Romance fills me with absolute glee, as long as I look at it as a completely new take on canon unrelated to any era of comics canon or to the later-timeline movies.

X-Men comics canon is huge and unwieldy and long, and while there are considerable gaps in my knowledge, I'm familiar with rather a terrifying amount of it off the top of my head. (Just ask Beable, who on our way home from the movie was treated to a rant on the grudge I still hold against Scott Summers for his actions in a storyline from 1986.) And as large and unwieldy and sometimes contradictory and illogical and just terribly written as that canon is, I love it. And while I'll never manage to keep up with it all in real-time, or know all its intricacies, and I don't talk about it much, it's one of my One True Fandoms that I will always come back to.

The strength of the movies has always been that, for all they mix and match canon in sometimes truly painful ways, re-write back-stories and are completely arbitrary with ages, they're decently faithful to the spirit of the characters. I'm a fanfic reader, I can handle multiple versions of canon in my head with no problems, as long as I'm not expected to reconcile them to each other. As far as I'm concerned, the various movies are entertaining AU reimaginings of characters I love. And taken that way, with no attempt to reconcile this movie with the other movies, or to make any of the movies match up with comics canon, the fanfic possibilities of X-Men: First Class are damn near endless. I've been having a bit of a Charles/Erik fic reading orgy all week actually, for just that reason.

Now, about the movie: ( at this point I think I need a cut tag: Spoilers for X-Men: First Class behind the cut, with some references and comparisons to comics canon. )

And okay, wow, I think that's more of my X-Men geekery than I've ever before revealed online. I think I'll maybe go back to reading all the halfway-decent Charles/Erik fic I can find.