Darkly Dreaming Demographic.

Provocative title eh? Such clickbait, much attention whoring.

Ok well I was sort of taking the piss, bit of a satire on how this show was heralded as the coming of hipster Jesus by lots of feminist and ‘progressive’ sites just because… baginabaginabagina!

Yeah the main character has a, as noted professional feminist Clementine Ford likes to say “Shame cave”. But luckily this review won’t really dwell on that too long because there’s actually a lot wrong with it that has nothing to do with misogyny and a lot right with it that has nothing to do with feminism. So with that little bullshit footnote out of the way, we can actually talk about Jessica Jones.

I know I’m a little late to the party on this one, but what’s new? And with the news of a second season on the horizon I thought it was better late than never to review the first season.
My girlfriend sort of forced this on me for some reason, not that I don’t love watching stuff with her, but she seemed oddly forceful with this and being the contrarian cunt I am. I always make things difficult and when someone wants me to do something, I first try and get out of it, I don’t why, I’m just an asshole.
So this started a little fight and of course I gave in and we watched it, I like a petulant child trying to pick apart everything from the ‘edgy’ intro where Jessica is all ‘kewl’ doing a monologue from the weird porn music this show has for a title sequence. Which of course turned into another mini spat and after much apologizing from me, we tried to watch it again and shock horror I actually started to enjoy it. It was a painful experience.
I didn’t like the character of Jessica, I just think the person who played her (can’t be arsed to google her name) was too waify (No waify, not waifu, it means like thin or slender) and elflike and too much of a ‘pretty girl’ to be believable as this bad ass detective semi-superhero who answers the phone on the toilet and drinks all the booze, such edge, much noir.
So instantly I was put off because it just seemed to be trying too hard to push the noir buttons and it felt a little forced and none of the characters really seemed to resonate with me. I found Jessica bitchy and annoying, Trish I found insanely consistently annoying, her neighbours are a scale of annoying all on their own. I was surprised Simpson even stayed as a character because he was hollow as a character in my opinion and annoying. Her boss is also bitchy and annoying but probably also one of the most interesting characters. Luke Cage is kind of boring and it’s annoying he doesn’t get more screen time.

But…
Throughout, as I find myself desperately trying to give a shit about any of these characters, a purple spectre looms over them and it’s almost too delicious to ignore.
The show starts off a little lame, Jessica just drinking herself to death for reasons… that become clearer later on. She is trying to get over some traumatic event kept hidden from the audience and trying to assuage a guilty conscience by using her super powers to help people in need and make enough money to buy cheap booze I guess and fix her fucking door!
Seriously, her door is broken at the start and there’s this running gag that drives me nuts where she keeps trying to get it fixed and she either fucks it up while it’s being fixed or breaks it again. And to my girlfriends delight, I found this niggling and incredibly ANNOYING just to have it fixed off screen and the running gag dropped like it never happened. Way to stick it in and break it off Jessica Jones, from me and every other person with tinges of OCD; fuck you!

Ok now that I got that out of the way, I thought the cases and the premise were a little thin, because rather than following the sort of ‘freak of the week’ style made popular by Buffy and supernatural, where something new happens or a new character is introduced every episode. It’s instead almost like an episodic film with the story told more like the wire or a TV show of that nature, which I’m definitely glad they went with because the actual villain had the strength to carry the whole show.

Now finally, getting to the best part, been twisting my legs in fangirlish expectation trying not to squirt all over my laptop. Let’s just say the main villain is boss, like I haven’t loved a villain this much since Sylar from the once great but now utterly shit heroes.
I sneer at your Loki, I laugh at your Ultron and I will without a doubt piss myself when I finally see Ivan Ooze the remake haha.
Purpleman, or Kilgrave in the show because he’s not actually purple in the show because… well that would silly and I doubt David Tennant would want to be painted purple just to stay true to a fucking comic, this isn’t Buffy, no one cares, it would have been dumb. If David Tennant had come out covered in purple paint the whole dark brooding ‘take me serious daddy’ noir elements they were gently coaxing up to that point would have been smashed into a million pieces.
So no he’s not purple and I haven’t read the comics, but I actually might just for Kilgrave, he’s that awesome. If just for Tennant’s performance, you can really tell he’s enjoying every minute of this roll and it adds so much to that playful devilish smile he has.

Kilgrave has the power to control people’s minds, any order he gives, you have to carry out, it’s a little like professor x but he can’t read minds. Which adds this odd dichotomy where he can control people but he never really knows whether they want to do what they’re doing or not. And to add an extra level of fuckery, the people he controls are completely aware when he’s controlling them. So it has this added trauma of feeling completely powerless, having no control over your actions but being completely aware of how powerless you are at the same time. Like a night terror or sleep apnoea. Oh fuck this is already too long.

Needless to say Tennant made the show for me, his boyish charm mixed with the amoral sadism of Kilgrave just appealed to my inner shitlord. All the other characters I could have taken or left and even my girlfriend who is much more easy going than me, was incredibly annoyed by the irrelevance of some of the side characters. Literally almost shaking her fist at some of the scenes like; ‘why is this happening? Why is this important?’. It’s a great show but it has a lot of fluff and Kilgrave is a great villain but he could have been used a little sparingly. And *SPOILERS START* He could have been killed off in a much more interesting way or not at all if they had intended to make a second series from the get go, which I’m not sure was the case. I felt that the writing was kind of poor, not so much the dialogue but just, how some of the characters were dumb for reasons at some points like Kilgrave at his death, when up til that point he’d proved himself very competent at not dying. I just don’t see much of a case for a season two now the main character is killed in such a non-ambiguous way. It’s like these people have never read a fucking comic book, if you’re gonna kill your best main villain and possibly make a second season you might want to make his death a little more ambiguous, maybe blow him up or have him fall off a waterfall, not break his fucking neck with your bare hands, come on. *SPOILERS CEASE*.

Ok now to the gamergate stuff;

IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH GAMERGATE!

It’s just amazing that they let people make such spurious bullshit claims and call it journalism. Just injecting your own bullshit narrative into your favourite show and calling it an article and not a sad attempt at propaganda is…sad. I refuse to link people to anything written by a social justice wanker, no more clicks for them, they’re on a low click diet. But whether you agree with gamergate or not (Which I do, so fuck you if you don’t) trying to project your own narrative into something that literally makes no assertions one way or the other is ridiculous. I mean are these people so immune to fun that they have to make everything about their agenda? They can’t just watch a fucking tv show without wanting to push their bullshit into it?
To say Jessica Jones someone who is essentially fighting a war against her rapist who can also control minds is anything to do with a consumer movement about ethics in games journalism (of which the  article I’m talking about is written by one of the journalists brought into question) is ludicrous.

But people love simple explanations to complex issues, they always have and they always will; “Gamergate is just an evil white cis het misogynist man child that wears purple and just wants to get it’s way and rape all d wimmens hurhurhur horkhorkhork!” – Fuck off.