Paper Girls (Amazon, 2022)

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shevek
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Those who read popular indie comics probably know about Brian K. Vaughan from his two well-known titles: Saga and Y The Last Man.
Those who pay a bit closer attention probably also have heard of two of his other long-running series: Ex Machina and the more recent Paper Girls.

Paper Girls was adapted this year into a series on Amazon.
The basic background premise is boringly similar to a lot of other franchises: there's a war between progressive rebels (known here as the STF) and conservative imperials (called The Old Watch), and it happens across time. So Star Wars, Doctor Who, Sliders, TimeCop, Marvel Multiverse, Umbrella Academy, and a bunch of other similar things like that. There's a fight between two mecha-robots so might as well throw in Transformers and a bunch of Japanese animation.

On top of that, Brian K. Vaughan decided to overlay the idea of four girls from 1988 who deliver newspapers on bikes. (Full disclosure: I myself was a paperboy, on foot, for a couple years in the early 80s). And wouldn't you know it: one's a Jewish lesbian who chafes under wealth disparity; one's a poor white-trash lesbian who deals with male toxicity; one's a black girl genius who is super arrogant yet also somehow super cool; and one's a Chinese girl with the stifling burden of nuclear family. Wait, where have we seen these people before? Pretty much everywhere. Because that's how you make a Netflix pitch (previously known before 2014 as a "comic book") in Current Year.

One thing I can say about the series is that unlike with many shows (including the "Y: The Last Man" series which tore the comic book's premise apart at the seams), this above description is chillingly faithful to the Paper Girls comic book. It's pretty much exactly the same. So Brian K. Vaughan should be happy with that.

What he probably isn't happy with is that although this series did garner a small fan club of the usual Internet 'stans', overall nobody gave a shit. (You've never heard it mentioned by a Youtuber, have you?). Except of course for The Mary Sue, which called it "the underrated show of the year."
Mainly because once or twice an episode, one of the four main characters tells someone else they shouldn't do something racist, sexist, or homophobic, or randomly lectures the viewer about how terrible the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is (yup, you heard right).
Luckily, nobody who actually spends money on pop culture (as opposed to posting on Twitter) actually takes their cues from that website.

What's the series like? The four main characters I described above are well-fleshed out. Everyone (and everything) else is a two-dimensional caricature that serves to support the saga of the four. The time war? We don't find out *when* or *where* either the STF or the Old Watch come from. The Old Watch has a flying purple headquarters which is part Death Star and part Hotel Obsidian, and it would have been nice to explore it, but it only appears in the final episode in the last few minutes, as does a random gigantic Pteranodon named Tessa.

But as I said, nobody paid attention, so the show got cancelled. Not as tragically bleak a cancellation as, say, Vagrant Queen, but it's up there.
I wouldn't recommend wasting the time, especially since you'll never see what occurs following the cliffhanger.
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batgirl1969
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Hmmm..A Jewish lesbian huh? I can relate to that!!
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shevek
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batgirl1969 wrote:
1 year ago
Hmmm..A Jewish lesbian huh? I can relate to that!!
Well, if the series was called "College Girls" (like a whole bunch of porns are, I'm sure) you'd probably relate perfectly.

Unfortunately, this is a series about girls who haven't even reached puberty (I forgot about the really long 'empowerment' scene where the
Chinese girl tries to figure out how to use a tampon!) and we're watching a scene where a bunch of children say the word 'vagina' over and over.
To be perfectly frank, it seems a bit 'groomy' now that I think about it.

Not a good look, and I'm not sure if this was in the original comic as well (it does seems like something Brian K Vaughan might do)
or whether it was injected into the script by showrunner Stephany Folsom, who quit before the series was released (I wonder if this
was one of the reasons why?).

So, the only lesbian kiss you see in the whole season is this Jewish proto-lesbian girl secretly watch her older 22-year-old self kiss her fellow NYU Film School filmmaker girlfriend in 1999. There's actually many scenes of these four girls watching their older selves do things that surprise them, both in 1999 and 2019 (not sure why they skipped 2009, but OK) which seems to part of the overall theme of the series and/or comic which relates the paper girls to their time travel predicament.
Last edited by shevek 1 year ago, edited 1 time in total.
Dazzle1
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Has the Mary Sue which like Wikipedia bans people without cause, ever bashed a show that attacks the white cis male partiarchy?
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