Asexual Sighting: Yolanda Buenaventura (BoJack Horseman)

This character was actually introduced on BoJack Horseman last year, but I waited until after this season to give her an Asexual Sighting because 1) she’s a minor character and 2) her asexuality is revealed in her final scene in season 4, so I needed the new season to have more to say about her (a few Yolanda-Todd-related spoilers.)

Todd first encounters Yolanda during a particularly-insane season 4 misadventure, his clown dentistry.  Yolanda is sent by the Better Business Bureau to assess his incredibly-dubious business venture and is pretty quickly established as something of an anti-Todd.  While Todd is kooky, imaginative, and optimistic to a fault (and I mean to a fault!), Yolanda is dry, pragmatic, and, of course, business-minded.  However, their association leads to Yolanda getting tangled up in Todd’s whacky adventure, and as their profession relationship concludes, Yolanda suggests pursuing a personal one.  When Todd explains that he’s asexual, Yolanda simply replies, “Yeah, I know, so am I.  That’s why I’m asking you out.”

This is where Yolanda’s purpose in the story comes in.  Less of an actual character, she’s there to be someone who dates Todd as a fellow romantic ace – one who’s clearly not right for him.  She’s a way for the show to demonstrate how tough dating can be for romantic aces, a point it spells out explicitly in the season 5 opener when Todd discusses the value of a potential dating app for asexuals.  He says that, without something like an app to bring different people together, romantic aces may just fall in with whatever romantic aces they come across, even if they’re not romantically compatible, for lack of other options.  And to be sure, the season later explores a will-they won’t-they between him and Emily, his sexual ex that he reconnected with in season 3 and kicked off his coming-out arc.  Those two have the opposite problem as Todd and Yolanda:  while their personalities and interests are fairly compatible, they haven’t figured out how to have a relationship in which both are comfortable and get their needs met.

As such, Yolanda herself winds up being more of a function than a character.  There are some amusing moments with her, like her flat admission that she once met Paul Rudd at a party and “did not find him charming,” and I like that she’s nervous about coming out to her extremely sex-positive family.  But really, the point of her is to be a romantic ace who’s wrong for Todd and possibly pave the way for a future relationship with Emily.  So… underwritten mid-game love interest?  Not the most exciting, and even as relatively-minor characters go, the show has had much better (Judah for the win!)

It doesn’t seem super-likely that we’ll see Yolanda again, and she’s never been more than a minor character.  But I do still appreciate her existence.  BoJack Horseman is the first story I’ve even seen to feature two asexual characters at once, and even if the plotline doesn’t serve her very well, it’s good to show that two people being romantic aces doesn’t automatically make them right for each other.  After all, I’m not about to say no to an explicitly-ace plot involving explicitly-ace characters!

Alien3 (1992, R)

Each movie in the original Alien tetrad is such a reflection of who made it.  Ridley Scott’s Alien is a visually-stunning, claustrophobic horror movie.  James Cameron’s Aliens is an impressive action-hero horror movie.  Alien:  Resurrection is a Joss Whedon space-opera horror movie with Jean-Pierre Jeunet production design.  And Alien³?  In the hands of David Fincher, it’s an unrelentingly-dark, dystopian-feeling horror movie (some spoilers for this movie as well as Aliens.)

After the events of Aliens, a catastrophic failure on Ripley’s ship leads to her crashing on a prison planet, killing Hicks and Newt in the process.  Surrounded by murderers and rapists in a filthy, dimly-lit, lice-infested facility, Ripley fears that all that is the least of her problems; she’s convinced that an alien somehow got onboard the ship and made planetfall with her.  It isn’t long before her fears prove well-founded, and with the Company fast-approaching, hungry to bag their prize at last, the only hope for humanity is for Ripley to get the prisoners to band together and help her destroy the alien before the Company gets their hands on it.

Okay, so it’s not all bad.  The prison creates an eerie, gritty backdrop for our story, and some of the individual prisoners are interesting.  Pride of place, unsurprisingly, goes to Ripley’s early ally Clemens (played by Charles Dance, a.k.a. Tywin Lannister,) but I also like Charles S. Dutton’s morally-fluid Dillon and former Doctor Paul McGann’s troubled Golic.  Sigourney Weaver knocks it clean out of the park with Ripley, who’s been battered and beaten almost to oblivion but sure as hell isn’t going down without a fight.

But it’s just so dark.  I know it’s an Alien movie and everything, but let’s be real.  The film almost seems to take a perverse pleasure in stripping every good thing from Ripley’s life.  Granted, Aliens begins with Ripley waking up to learn that a malfunction kept her in cryosleep half a century too long and her daughter died of old age waiting for her return, and the film then proceeds to lay waste to nearly every character in the movie with extreme prejudice, but even though victory there is very hard-won, there are shreds of hope, too.  There’s Hicks and Newt, and while neither was them was ever going to have an easy time of it in another Alien movie, to kill them in the prologue seems unnecessarily cruel.  Bishop, too, proves to be hopelessly beyond repair, and after Ripley briefly gets him working in her quest to find out what went wrong on the ship, he begs her to deactivate him.  Even Clemens, who’s positioned as the one possible bit of softness in the harsh place where Ripley now finds herself, is killed in front of her before the big action even really kicks off.

Just loss piling on loss, building up to the scene in which Ripley realizes the most horrible truth of all.  I like a good emotional gutpunch in my cinema as much as anyone, but this is just too much.  It’s a glut of darkness, emotional torture porn under the guise of being “hard-hitting.”  Ripley may have been through a lot – too much to expect any one person to actually withstand – but this takes it way too far.  You don’t do Ripley like that.

Warnings

Graphic violence, sexual content (including attempted rape,) and language.

News Satire Roundup: November 25th-November 29th

Okay, caught up on last week.  Now, onto this week!

Sunday, November 25 – Excellent episode on current U.S immigration policy.  While a lot of the information here was familiar, it was still sharply incisive and hard-hitting.  Lots of statistics, both on rates of deportations/reductions of the refugee cap and on crime statistics for immigrants, pointing out that, despite Trump’s penchant for talking about “bad hombres,” the main thing that’s gone up under his administration is non-criminal deportations.  I loved the Franco brother-ICE analogy, with the human-traffick-investigating branch of ICE (Dave Franco) wanting to “leave the family” because of how bad the detaining-and-deporting branch (James Franco) was making it look.  Hasan highlighted just how utterly ridiculous the idea of ISIS members hiding in the caravan is (“You have to route through Florida!”), and his summation of the administration’s whole message was great:  “Melanin monsters are coming to kill you.”

Monday, November 26 – Fun opening with some very excited NASA folks, followed by Elon Musk admitting how harsh living on Mars would be – I loved Trevor imagining white people as “slaves” on Martian fields, singing “Sweet Caroline” as a spiritual.  We covered the clash at the border, focusing on the different ways liberal and conservative media framed it:  innocent women and children being tear-gassed versus the military bravely stopping an invading horde of immigrant criminals.  However, I feel like the story missed the migrants rushing the border in part because Trump kept saying he’d refuse to let them seek asylum the legal way.  Next up was the newest climate change report, with Trump’s own government saying time is running out to stop the worst of it (and Trump very much denying that.)  will.i.am was the guest, talking about the Black Eyed Peas’ latest album, getting back to their political roots.

Tuesday, November 27 – I agree that gender-reveal parties have gone too far if they involve explosions (that then cause forest fires!), and Trevor’s vision of the uncertainty involved in funding a state government on Bitcoin was great.  I liked the bit on charity bell-ringers wearing white nationalist insignia, upset that no one was focusing on the good they were doing for the Salvation Army.  Good story on massive layoffs from GM, despite Trump’s repeated campaign promises to the contrary.  Trevor’s remarks on the Emantic Bradford Jr. shooting were really powerful, especially his refrain, “The Second Amendment was not made for Black people.”  We’ve seen so many of these senseless shootings, and he finds new ways to speak about them every time.  I always like Diego Luna, so I enjoyed his interview, talking about Narcos and its story of how drug cartels wove themselves into many aspects of Mexican society/government.

Wednesday, November 28 – First up was Paul Manafort possibly playing both sides, Trump claiming to be too smart for climate science (while insisting that Earth’s water is “at record clean,”) and Ivanka Trump insisting that her use of a private email for government business was totally different than Hillary Clinton’s, while almost using Clinton’s exact wording/explanation.  Fun story on the largest steer in the world, with Trevor pondering why all Australian animals are so weird and laughing at being “too big for the abattoir” as a definite white-people problem to have.  Ronny did a field piece “exposing” a Texas district attorney for being in a “motorcycle gang” (you can tell it’s a gang because they’re mostly Mexican :eyeroll:)  The guest, Al Gore, talked about climate change, naturally.  I liked what he said about Trump becoming the (very ignorant) face of climate denial.

Thursday, November 29 – Opening blurbs:  the last midterm race finally decided, college professors being armed with hockey pucks against shooters (“What’s something Americans care about as little as gun control?  Hockey!”), the new trend of black Christmas trees (with Dulce as a Black Christmas tree,) and an unfortunate girl whose parents named her Abcde.  Really good story on failings at the VA caused by a 50-year-old computer; it was horrible that the VA just wasn’t going to make up the payments until people got up in arms about it.  We also had Michael Cohen singing like a canary and Trump covering every base – “I didn’t do it, but even if I did, it was very legal, plus I didn’t know about it, so…”  The guest was author Lindy West, discussing the “Shout Your Abortion” movement she began to normalize abortion as part of healthcare.  I appreciated her note about how, regardless of official stance, abortion crosses party lines.