#myquake

[badrowboats]

BirthdayForDaisy2 Day 4 Chloe Bennet Appreciation 

[badrowboats]

It matters who you are

BirthdayForDaisy2 Day 1

[badrowboats]

Ten Daisy Johnson Harry Potter headcanons:

BirthdayForDaisy2, Day 2

1. She’s 9 (actually 10, but she doesn’t know that) when the first Harry Potter comes out in the US, but she doesn’t read it until a year later when her foster mother is an elementary school teacher who encourages her to read. Technically, she'll realize about fifteen years later, she's Harry's age in the first book as she reads about him finding out who he really is, as she’s able to devour the first three books pretty much in a row. The books are frowned upon back at St. Agnes, which of course only makes her love them more.

2. It's not like Harry Potter gives her the idea to find out about her family and her place in the world – she would have had that drive anyways, already had that drive anyways  – but it makes her feel connected to see Harry’s journey, and it’s hard not to think of him as a hero a lot like her. A parent-less child finding his place, learning that he always already had a place and a sort-of family out there in the world – she can’t help but dream of it for herself.

3. She gives up on the idea of actually finding her parents pretty early, definitely doesn’t expect (at least doesn’t dare admit to hoping) that they might be two living people who have searched the globe for her. Of course she needs to know who they are and who she is, but what she really wants is more of a godfather, a Sirius Black – someone who’s just about connection and hope, who she could call when she gets lonely or scared. 

4. The last Halloween she goes trick-or-treating, she’s in the 7th grade, and after re-reading all four of the published books, her foster-mother helps her make a costume to dress as Cho Chang, with a broom and a paper mache golden snitch. 

5. In 10th grade – her last full year in school – she has a crush on her lab partner in chemistry, and it’s not only because her name is Hermione, but that’s at least part? It’s sort of a thing for her, if she’s honest – crushing on Hermione. 

6. She’s 18, at least as far as she knows, when The Deathly Hallows comes out. Her van is still a few years in her future, and she’s just homeless – mostly staying where she can around Manhattan, spending a lot of time in public libraries with no money to spend on books – but she still gets her hands on a copy and reads it while camped out in the back room of an internet cafe where her friend works.

7. She wonders if Harry counts as a high school dropout, too. 

8. In her short life, she’s lost a lot of precious things, has mostly learned not to care too much about physical objects. But as she’s shouldering her backpack and culling her belongings to what she can carry with her, she wants Hermione’s purse with the extension charm as much as she’s ever wanted anything.

9. As she gets older and reads more, it’s impossible not to grow more critical of the series, of the way Lavender and Fleur and especially Cho get treated. It makes her angry, and Harry Potter is her first real experience of loving a problematic thing, of trying to hold onto the parts that mean something to her even as she acknowledges the myriad flaws of the source material.

10. The last movie comes out the summer she leaves Austin for LA, when her search feels like it’s finally starting to go somewhere. She and Miles go together, one of their last dates, and it's a testament to how much Miles means to her that she explains how important Harry Potter was to her growing up, that she lets him see her get emotional about something in her past, something so comparatively trivial given that she’s now looking for ways inside a top secret spy organization. He’s good about it, though, which she knew he would be, and it’s a nice way to move into another chapter of her life.

[badrowboats]

BirthdayForDaisy2, Day 3 Daisy Johnson is a Morally Flawless Superhero

Without getting too dismissive about the entire rest of the world of superheroes, it feels like in this, the age of the GrimDark, our heroes are morally grey or else tortured by their attempts to fit their moral code into the constraints of the real world. And I’m not really here to say that this is automatically bad, or that there’s not value in having female characters embody these kinds of traditionally male roles. But, personally, I find it exhausting. 

And one of my favorite things about Daisy Johnson is that, however much her moral code has pulled her in difficult directions and however much she hasn’t had an easy life by any stretch, she’s just always doing the best thing to the best of her ability. 

In the very first episode, sure she’s trying to get inside SHIELD and find out about herself, but she’s also legitimately trying to help Mike, to keep him away from scary men in suits, and to find out what’s going on with the Centipede organization. And when it comes down to doing the right thing vs. finding out about her past, we see which one Daisy will choose every time. (Also, I will go to my grave screaming about how people have consistently misread the beginning episodes of this show, which was never about Coulson recruiting her and always about Daisy deciding that SHIELD was good enough for her to work with and not just infiltrate as a spy.)

And throughout the show, Daisy is put in tough situations – dealing with intimate betrayal, shooting one person to save her team, siding with Afterlife or SHIELD, dealing with violent xenophobes, handling the aftermath of Hive, and just…a lot more. None of that is easy, all of it has left scars, but she still consistently does the right thing, including changing course in a blink if she gets new evidence about what the right thing is. 

It means a lot to me to have a woman on television who is so consistently fighting the good fight, standing up to injustice, doing the right thing, and who is celebrated in her universe for that. I don’t think Daisy is necessarily about only seeing the world in black and white, but rather a hero showing that there’s such a thing as hard moral stances – doing the right thing – even in a world of nuanced grays. It’s something that gets lost too much in the GrimDark, and I love that we get to have this in the world: a morally flawless female superhero, always fighting to do the right thing.

[badrowboats]

You have a hold of me now Vera Blue - Hold

[badrowboats]

Chloe Bennet at the Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2  premiere 

[badrowboats]

Chloe Bennet at the premiere of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 (part II)

[badrowboats]