February 2016 Romance and Aromance @AlinaMeridon

It’s February again, and romance is in the air – and aromance is in the ir, because hot on the heels of the compulsory happiness that is Valentine’s Day is Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week. And how better to celebrate than with a romantic poe– Er, than with aromantic poetry…

banish the sunset!
aromance is in the ir-
idescent twilight

Apart from the usual dolly mixture of haiku, it has been a quiet month over on Alina Meridon. There are two short poems with an aromantic theme, and a short poem about Supergirl – which isn’t romantic or aromantic, but if you’d like an aromantic Supergirl, here’s one I wrote earlier: An unsought kiss

Her life of aromantic bliss
Was shattered by an unsought kiss
The gloss of fuchsia kryptonite
Instilled confusion and delight
That lessened slowly over years
The poison washed out by her tears

Coincidentally, pink kryptonite was used once, in a satirical way, to make Superman gay – although Superman and Batman do seem to have an enemies-to-lovers thing going on (or did I imagine that?) so maybe Superman’s bisexual (or just bi-for-the-bat? is that a real thing? after all, Supergirl and Batgirl – ‘SuperBat’? – get together so often it’s practically canon). Er, anyway…

On the subject of Supergirl, this month I have been watching, over and over, this video by Heroesaz. It’s a cool video, but it’s the voice of Connie Lim that makes it so compelling.

Seeking Krypton

During a roundtable discussion with journalists, Hayden Planetarium Director Neil deGrasse Tyson explains how he helped Superman find his home planet of Krypton. Tyson appears as a character in the recent DC Comics’ ACTION COMICS #14, “Star Light, Star Bright.” In real life, he consulted a star index and found a real star that supported the backstory of the comic.

It’s unfortunate that parallax measurements of LHS 2520 indicate a distance of 42 light years rather than the 27 light years estimated from photometric estimates that, presumably, Tyson’s maps were based on. Although you could argue that the superluminal journey took 17 years, during which Kal El aged only two years, as a consequence of relativistic effects associated with acceleration up to and beyond light speed.

The same argument could be applied even if Krypton is ‘thousands of light years away’ or even in another galaxy, although I don’t think the journey is supposed to take so long – if it did, all those stories of returning to Krypton would make little sense.

Sense8 & Deadpool

I watched Season 1 of the Wachowski’s Sense8 on Netflix. The diversity of the cast, characters and story is amazing. In fact, it’s so aggressively diverse it feels like a political statement – but it’s the kind of statement that needs to be made, and once you get past that there’s a thrilling story being told. There are eight primary characters whose minds are linked telepathically. Four are men (one in a gay relationship), four are women (one of whom is a trans woman in an interracial lesbian relationship). The story is set in the U.S., the U.K., Mexico, India, Korea, Kenya, Germany and Iceland, and very often a character in one part of the world is interacting with another character in another part of the world, and the cinematography realises all this brilliantly.

Sun Bak (Doona Bae), Korean businesswoman and kick-ass fighter, in Seoul, Nairobi and San Francisco.

Sense8 has its faults – what doesn’t these days? – but it’s fun, sexy, romantic and dramatic, AND it has the wonderful Freema Agyeman, who never really got what she deserved as Dr Martha Jones on Dr Who, in a brilliant supporting role.

Finally, still on subject of fun, sexy, romantic, dramatic and wonderfully diverse, with a definite emphasis on the fun, is Deadpool with Ryan Reynolds and Morena Baccarin. A perfect movie for Valentine’s Day.

Posts

• fire opals falling – I fear no arrows, Round-up of February’s haiku
• Helicopter Consciousness, a short collection of haiku
• As if to be a unicorn, an aromantic anthem
• Disconnected, aromantic, asexual, agender
• Why should I rest upon the ground, Supergirl loves to fly