Snowflake 2k25 (VI)

Challenge #6

Share your favourite piece of original canon. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I pondered what to post here. As I feel I'm all talked out about my most favourite things, I will go with something new, instead.

I just finished reading "The Refrigerator Monologues", by Catherynne M. Valente. It's a very meta short book inspired by both the Women in Refrigerators term coined by Gail Simone, and "The Vagina Monologues" play by Eve Ensler (which I should pick up someday). It consist in six monologues, with short interludes, by six woman, each directly inspired by a comic book character: Gwen Stacy, Jean Grey, Harley Quinn, Queen Mera, Karen Page, and THEE Alex Dewitt.

I thought I'd share my favourite quotes with you (click on the triangle):

Chapter 2: "Paige Embry is Dead":

Doctor Nocturne was born.

He built his machine, a great, terrible organ buried deep within the city, on which he could play out his symphony of death. With one chord, he proclaimed to every news station, he could electrify the whole of Manhattan. With another, he would bring it crashing down. Tom kept telling me to stay home. After all, I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t help. Just stay home and wait, Paige. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I understood how hypermercury worked, what Nocturne had done. It was my fault. I had to fix it. The last thing I said to Tom Thatcher was: I am not going to stay home like a good little girl. I am going to beat him.

When Tom says shit like that, the universe rearranges itself to make it true. When I said it, the universe pissed itself laughing.

 

Chapter 4: "The Heat Death of Julia Ash":

Nobody had a problem with the new Julia as long as she did their chores for them. Kept the world nice and tidy, took the rubbish out, dusted off the minimalist black-and-white discussion piece morality had be come.

They turned on me, eventually. Oh, they were so concerned, my boys. Only for my own good, only because they were so worried about my delicate constitution!

“She can’t control it,” Paravox whispered to the Professor.

“No one could,” Bruce hurried to say, so I wouldn’t take it personally.

“The more she uses her powers, the less human she gets,” Hal Cyon sighed, looking so fucking earnest while he called me less than human. So fucking sincere.

“What the fuck, Hal,” I snapped. “You can turn into a time-traveling dragon. How human are you?”

Crucible couldn’t even look at me. “Maybe if you could just . . . hold back a little. Until you can figure out exactly what happened out there and whether it’s hurting her.”

They all stood around Professor Yes’s desk like veterinarians discussing a rowdy horse in need of breaking.

“Since when,” I said softly, “is power a problem for any of you?”

“You don’t understand,” Zigzag pleaded.

I stared them all down. “Sure I do. Hold back. Got it.”

If you could just wait until it’s clear that none of the other children know the answer before raising your hand. Don’t read ahead of the rest of the class. No one likes a know-it-all.

 

Chapter 6: "The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Pauline Ketch":

There was a moment, just before I gave up and breathed in all that dirty, soapy, passion fruit bubble bath–scented death, where I thought I had it wrong. Maybe that day in Sarkomand when Mr. Punch said, I thought you were someone else, he’d meant: I thought you were a crippled baby antelope I could chase down across the veldt and pick the lock to this place with your bones. Maybe I was just a funny little clown in the Punch and Grimdark show. Maybe he never once meant I love you when he called me a cunt, he just meant that I was a stupid, useless, disgusting hole he hated only slightly less than himself. What if we were never any little bit alike, except that we wanted to burn the awful old world down? But it was just barely possible that I was the only one who cared what world we blew up. The world of rich men playing in costumes and electric companies turning on the dark everywhere they went and shithead greaseheart daddies all the way down—that was my tune. Maybe my baby was just trying to fuck his way through me and the bed and the floor and the city to get to him. Maybe Mr. Punch was a Bad Daddy, after all.

NAW.

 

Chapter 8: "The Ballad of Blue Bayou":

God, I made all the Union boys so uncomfortable. I got in between them and the mirror they liked to preen in, the mirror that showed them all as Kings of the Known Universe. They all felt safe with their girlfriends’ ambitions—artists and actresses and scientists. Girls you could brag to the alumni magazine about, but no one they ever had to compete with. They were the sparkly shiny special ones in their houses. After all, science is great, but who can compete with superpowers?

Well, the Queen of Atlantis can.

To tell you the truth, Avast hated Atlantis. Up there, he was a hero. He was totally unique, from New York to New Delhi. Down here, with me, he was just like everyone else. He got so angry at me, over nothing, over everything, over having to spend another second in a place where no one cared that he could tell a whale what to do, where no one knew he was a star. He never touched me anymore. If he came home and saw my chest light up with blue at the sight of him, his lip curled up in disgust and he buried himself in his workouts.

They never once asked me to join their little club. Even after Megalodon opened the floodgates and half a dimension’s worth of our redneck cousins poured through. Even after I defeated Whitewater and the Werekraken in the Battle of the Bermuda Triangle. Megalodon only barely escaped that one. He holed up in Guignol City like a trust fund baby for months after, licking his wounds. Even then, my husband and his friends never said, Hey, you’re pretty handy; wanna learn the secret handshake?

And fucking hell, they hated my crying at night. I hated my crying at night. But I couldn’t help it, could I? John Heron never heard Angus’s little voice in his head. His father was still puttering around, replacing lightbulbs in his cozy little house. Easy come, easy go. They hated hearing the word baby. Child. It messed up the blocking of their play about themselves. Avast could scream, I shall destroy you for the death of my son! and his boys would all cheer. But if I so much as touched my stomach and whispered that I missed my baby, oh, how they’d sneer!

 

Chapter 10: "Daisy Green Says I Love You":

He didn’t mean to. They never mean to do anything in the beginning. But a superhero is like a black hole. They bend everything around them without even thinking about it. And they’d better be lucky as a goddamned leprechaun wearing a rabbit-foot coat on lottery day, or they’ll never get through one single fight with a D-list villain. So, they just . . . suck it up from everyone around them. Trust me, kiss one hero and the coin will never land your way again for the rest of your life. And all that shit, all that horror they can leap in a single bound . . . all that shit has to land somewhere.

Becoming a porn star is pretty much exactly like becoming a superhero. One day, an intrepid, fresh-faced young woman discovers that she has a talent. She chooses a new name—something over the top, flamboyant, a little arrogant, with a tinge of the epic. Somebody makes her a costume—skintight, revealing, a flattering color, nothing much left to the imagination. She explores her power, learns a specialty move or two, sweats her way through a training montage, throwing out punny quips here, there, and everywhere. She inhabits an archetype. She takes every blow that comes her way like she doesn’t even feel it. Then she goes out into the big bad night and saves people from loneliness. From the assorted villainies that plague the common man. From despair and bad dreams. From tedium. Oh, sure, her victories are short-lived. She finishes off her foes in one glorious masterstroke, but the minute she’s gone, all the wickedness and darkness of the scheming, teeming world comes rushing back in. But when you need her, here she comes to save the day, doing it for Truth, Justice, and the American Way.

[...]

But becoming a porn star is pretty much exactly like becoming a superhero. You start strong, bursting out of nowhere, a bird, a plane, your name on a million needy lips, your name in the papers, your name up in lights, your greatest hits on constant repeat. You’re the fantasy—someone so strong and beautiful nothing can hurt them, not even the worst shit anyone can imagine. In the first flush of it all, you’re so convinced of the rightness of your mission statement that you practically glow when the bad guy’s final spasm stains your mask. The camera loves you. It just feels good to throw down. You do it for fun, just to feel your own strength. When you’re new, everyone’s so fucking impressed with your skill and style. All these roaring, power-drunk men line up just to go one round with you. You blow them all down like paper dolls to rave reviews and the key to the red-light district. But time passes and it hurts more than you let on. You bandage yourself after hours, alone, in a phone booth with filthy windows, wrapping your wounds tight so you can keep fighting the good fight day after day. You get tired now. You get jaded. You get older. And after a while, they begin to despise you. It’s not interesting for you to come out on top every time. To watch your Saturday night marquee smile pop-flash at the end of every climactic scene. You need to keep up your numbers. You need to keep those eyeballs transfixed, Miss Thing. It’s not enough to just work on your craft. You gotta keep up with the times, appeal to modern sensibilities. You have to do something more extreme. Darker. Grittier. More real. You need to be cut down a little. Let ’em see you vulnerable. Let ’em see you bleed.

 

Chapter 12: "Happy Birthday, Samantha Dane":

I can’t bear to think of Jason’s face when he finds me. Us. Simon shoved MacArthur in the crisper drawer. I wish I could feel his fur. It would be comforting. But there’s a sheet of glass between us. How will Jason ever be able to get over it? To forgive Simon? To unsee my blue fucking face smashed up against week-old pizza?

But then I think—and it’s almost the last thing I think—about that avenging thing. Because they will avenge me. I know it. I know it because we’re in a movie now and I know how movies work. This is the second-act break. I’m an accepted part of the structure. Jason Remarque will kill Six Figure because Six Figure killed me. It will be an amazing battle. Really fill the seats. And when it’s over, he’ll move on to bigger and better villains. He’ll be the kind of famous I was gonna be. Eventually, he’ll start dating again. Someone who understands the responsibility. The stakes. Though he’ll probably never get another cat.

I try to cry out. One last effort to be not dead. My lips won’t move.

I belong in the refrigerator. Because the truth is, I’m just food for a superhero. He’ll eat up my death and get the energy he needs to become a legend.

 

And for a less meta, heavy one, behold my new blog description, curtesy of the Harley Quinn expy: