I am so conflicted about Ultron and the new Star Wars movie. Star Wars was my first fandom, the one that started me writing. I probably turned out a few hundred thousand words in it. And each new movie took the characters in directions that put cracks in the world in my head. I loved them and resented them,. And now I'm writing and reading extensively in Avengers, and the same thing is happening. The people who are actually in charge of the story are upending everything we've been thinking about.

It's the nature of ongoing stories, of course. We ficcers all saw it happen with Buffy and all the other shows we've gotten involved with, and being anxious about it is more than a little silly. But still. I don't want to try to get in on the first weekend of Ultron, I think I'll wait to see how big a rock is being thrown into pool of the story we think we know.

Brian Daley wrote a few tie-in novels for Star Wars. In them, Han referred jokingly to "the Old Spacemen's Home." Back then, I never really expected that to be relevant.

I have been consistently hopeful about The Force Awakens - a weird case where putting a universe in the hands of a soulless corporation rather than the creator actually seems like an improvement to me - but yeah that teaser helps.

Just having so much of the original cast present is a huge good sign, as they were able to spin gold out of George Lucas' awful dialog previously.

I saw IT FOLLOWS tonight. Damn good creepy horror movie, and one that has a lot of fun with the you-have-sex=you die cliche.

I have no desire to see the new Star Wars movie. I resent the way J.J. Abrams totally trrashed the new Star Trek franchise with the Wrath of Khan rewrite. His deliberate misportrayal of Kirk and whitewashing of Khan just makes me want to strangle him. If he liked Star Wars so much better, he should have turned down the Star Trek franchise.

In addition to what SailAweigh said, I feel that Abrams' ability to tell a story is so bad that he either has some sort of cognitive defect, or outright contempt for his audience. (I've felt this way going all the way back to Alias).

So I might see The Force Awakens, but I will go in with extremely low expectations. It will be a very pretty simulacrum of a Star Wars picture.

If I went, I would just wait for the big red ball to show up. Maybe it will be the source of the midichlorians, whatever that was meant to be.

I said in someone's FB re: Khan that it's not that he whitewashed him (RM was an ethnic minority, but not a racial one, seeing as both his parents were from Spain, and he was in brownface for the TOS episode) so much as that he used him period.

As good as WoK was, Space Seed is an appalling episode, filled with all sorts of problematic crap, and Khan in it is epically rapey and gross.

I think one of the reasons they even considered using RM was because of his accent. I remember reading somewhere about how bitter he was that the accent held him back from a number of good roles. For Khan, it kind of helped that he had one so that the audience was better able to buy into the role; it fulfilled some kind of expectation of the "other." At that period of time in Hollywood, I wouldn't be surprised if that was their main consideration.