Being more than a Simulacrum (Part 9)

[Link to part 1]

Wade was restless.

Wade was pacing.

It was unusual.  Wade was accustomed to sitting at his computer for hours at a time; he never got restless.  Clearly something was bothering him, but he wasn't sure what it was.

It obviously had something to do with the clone sleeping in his guestroom --she was the only changed variable-- but he didn't think it was about Leela directly.

Something about her creation?  Something she did?  Something she said?

He found himself at his gadget workbench, she'd looked at it and picked out the unfinished grappling hook launcher in a lightsaber toy housing to ask about.  Still turning toys into tech? she had asked.

No.  It had been his last project where he gutted a toy, or other everyday object, and made it incredible.  He never even finished it.  It had been sitting there untouched since he made the new Kimmunicator.

And it was when Team Possible was trying to grow up. Ron decided to stop being a goofy mascot and be a football player. They both got jobs, Ron was suddenly an older brother. Kim updated her look for the first time in forever. Things started to seem more serious. Shiny new tech like the wrist communicator and grapple was in. Reused toy casings were out.

She was right: Team Possible had been trying to grow up.  But what had been wrong with the way things were before?

They'd defeated the Little Diablo scheme with an electromagnetic scrambler that had been a cheap science fiction ray gun toy before he modified it.  That scheme had been the closest any human being had come to taking over the world.  Why grow up?

Moreover, why should he grow up?  Kim and Ron were adults now, but he was still thirteen.  He didn't grow up when he got his first doctorate; he didn't grow up when he got his first consulting job.  Why did he let himself start growing up just because Kim and Ron were?  It wasn't as if he couldn't have helped them without putting childhood behind him; none of the places he'd consulted had minded that he was a child, they just cared that he got the job done.

“It used to be more fun,” Wade said to himself.  Then he sat down started working on the grappler.

* * *

Normally Felix was always happy to talk with Zita about any subject, and video chat was definitely better than a phone call, but at the moment he was exhausted and needed to sleep.  They had played with Wade and Leela well into the night --the girl had an infectious enthusiasm-- and he'd been low on sleep anyway.

He was barely even processing what they were saying to each other.

“It's not like it's weird,” Felix stopped at the look on Zita's face.  “You know, considering who we're talking about.”

“That's not why I gave you that look,” Zita said.

Felix was at a loss for a moment, but then managed, “Ok, why did you give me that look?”

“I gave you that look,” Zita said, “because you said that about fifteen minutes ago and I agreed with you then.  We don't need to go over this again.”

“Ok, ok,” Felix said.  “I guess I'm just tired.”

“I am too,” Zita said.  “It's just that, now that I've had time to think about it, I think we should check things out.”

Felix nodded.  It did make sense.  After going to high school with Kim it was easy to accept things like the idea that Kim had a clone called Leela who they happened to bump into in Everlot and who wanted to keep her existence a secret from Kim for non-nefarious reasons, but Zita was right that they should still verify things before keeping secrets from Kim.

He opened up a chat window sent a message to Wade.

“It's possible that he's not even,” Felix was cut off by a beep.  Wade was always online.

* * *

FlyingZombieKiller: U up?
DaedalusAI: Yeah.
DaedalusAI: What's on your mind?
FlyingZombieKiller: Z wants to verify re:Everlot
DaedalusAI: It was really me.
DaedalusAI: What was said was true.
FlyingZombieKiller: So we should keep secret?
DaedalusAI: I will.
FlyingZombieKiller: Thanks
FlyingZombieKiller: L8r
DaedalusAI: Later.

* * *

Zita watched Felix type for a bit, then he said, “Wade says it was all true, and he plans to keep her secret.”

“He should be able to tell whether Kim needs to know better than we can,” Zita said, “and I'd rather not betray a friend I just made.”

“I agree,” Felix said.  “Besides, it's not like we have to lie; we just don't mention her to Kim.”

“So everything's exactly how we thought it was,” Zita sighed.  Felix looked like one of the zombies in his games.  “And I kept you up for nothing.”

“No,” Felix said.  “You were right.  It's good to check.”

“Get some sleep,” Zita ordered.

“Yes, master,” Felix said.

“I love you,” Zita told him.

“I love you too.”

The connection shut down.  Zita closed her laptop and started moving in a bedward direction herself.  After a few moments she wasn't thinking about Leela anymore.  Two more weeks till she and Felix would be in the same place again.

Two more weeks.

Video chat, phone calls, and multiplayer games helped make a long distance relationship work, but there was no substitute for seeing her boyfriend face to face.

Two more weeks.

* * *

Wade hadn't even slowed down, much less looked up, when Felix contacted him.  Text to voice and voice to text were a trivial matters for him, so whenever he was away from his keyboard he simply turned both functions on.  He'd even set things up so that text messages from friends played in their own voices.

He wasn't tired, he was energized.

Ten minutes after Felix had logged of,  Wade put the finishing touches on the grappler and grabbed something at random.  That something turned out to be sunglasses.  Simple metal frames around oval “steampunk green” lenses.  Wade gave a small chuckle when he remembered that description.  The lenses had probably been made from recycled wine bottles, but that didn't concern him at the moment.  He could work with these.

Sensors for various non-visible spectra were easy enough to install, the bulk of the microprocessors could be housed in the temples, a transparent OLED film attached to the inside of the lenses would convert the light picked up by the sensors into visible light, and the control interface would be as simple as two wheels and a button on the right temple just behind the hinge.

Button for on and off; wheels to determine what range was converted to visual light.  One wheel would choose the center wavelength of the range, the other would chose the radius of the range.

* * *

“Everything checks out normally,” Wade said.  “No evidence of the attitudinator --standard or reverse polarizer version-- no evidence of neural compliance technology, no moodulator based emotional disruptions, no cupid ray,” Wade yawned.

“Sorry if describing my brain bores you,” Place said.  She'd said it without thinking and it came out with more of an edge than she intended.  If she wanted to get along with people, she needed to start taking the edge off.  She wasn't even sure when it showed up in the first place.

“No, it's not that,” Wade said. “I pulled an all-nighter.”

“Kim call after I went to bed?” Place asked.  When Wade had shown her to the guest room Wade had been, so far as she knew, preparing for bed himself.  He'd explained that his parents were out of town, thus the empty house.

“No, Leela,” Wade said.  “I just had a good run of building and inventing and didn't want to stop.”

Place registered the words, but wasn't really listening to anything after her name.  Leela.  Leela was her name now.  She needed to get used to thinking of herself as that.  Why was it that she'd been able to shed Kim's name in a day, in spite of a lifetime worth of memories with it, yet she was still thinking of herself as “Place”?

Wade stepped away for a moment, which Place used to repeat to herself, “My name is Leela now,” several times in her head.

When Wade returned he was carrying the grappler she'd noticed yesterday, the housing was closed and it looked like a generic light sword toy from when the curved hilts were popular a couple years back.

“I finally finished this,” he said.

“Ok, I actually had a question about that,” Place said.  Wade didn't make any indication he didn't want to answer one, so she asked: “A grapling hook launcher is usually in the shape of a gun --or a hairdryer-- because then it's easy to point, by making it in the shape of a sword hilt wouldn't it--”

Wade held out his arm, aimed, and fired it off.

“It has basically no kick because--” he started, but Place could take it from there.

“You've compensated for it by having air jets fire in the reverse direction at the moment of release,” she said standing to take a closer look at the grappler in his hand.

“Yes,” Wade said. “How did you know?”

Place leaned over Wade's arm to look down at the device.

“The back blast tousled your hair,” she said.  She crouched under Wade's arm to look up at the device.

“'Back blast' is actually a well defined term that means--”

“I know,” Place said, her eyes inches from the underside of the the device.  “But it's a blast of air that points back, so it seemed to fit.”

“You have a way of looking at things that's … odd,” Wade said.

Place stood up normally, looked Wade in the eyes, and said, “Not unnerving, I hope.”

Wade didn't respond immediately.  Ok, so that's a, 'Yes, unnerving,' Place thought.

The silence went on for a bit too long, Place was about to break it herself when Wade said, “Anyway, the lack of kick means that it's not a problem for your wrist to be in the unorthodox position needed to fire it, aiming and firing it shouldn't be a problem.  The fact that it's in line with the rope means that any swinging done on it will use the same muscles as swinging on a bare rope.”

“Always fun,” Place said.  Then she looked at where the cable attached to the room's wall.  “Did you put a hole in your wall just to prove it fires nicely?”

Wade held it up to her, showing her buttons on the side, “There are three fire modes,” Place resisted the urge to point out that she'd noticed that yesterday, “prongs back like a standard grappling hook, prongs forward for when it needs to dig in to something, and electromagnet for ferromagnetic surfaces,” he said indicating three buttons in turn.  “I used the magnet, so no hole.”

Wade pushed another button and the cable fell off the wall.  Another and it retracted.

“You're too good for that to have taken you all night,” Place said.  It wasn't a question, but she waited for an answer anyway.

“After I finished with it I just grabbed the next thing and went to work, then another,” Wade said.  He seemed to think something over, and then smiled. “I put knock out gas in a lip gloss case for the first time in what seems like forever last night.”

Place wasn't exactly sure why, but she felt like encouraging him, so she said, “You rock, Wade.”

“Thanks, Leela,” he said.  “So, when did you start looking at things the way you do?”

“The leaning?” Place asked.

“The leaning,” Wade confirmed.

She wasn't entirely sure.  She definitely hadn't done it when she was first created, but she didn't really remember starting doing it.  “It just kind of happened, you know?  Product of evil science, lots of stuff around the lab to see.  No one trying to fight me, no time pressure, nothing stopping me from stopping and smelling the metaphorical roses.  By which I mean taking close looks at things.”

Another pause.  Place decided to get back to her reason for being there.  “So, product of evil science, but apparently not under any form of mind control?”

“Nothing,” Wade said.  “Anything operating on you currently would have showed up in the scan, and if you'd undergone any kind of conditioning you'd either remember it or the erasure of the memory would have left marks I'd be able to detect.

“You've got a clear brain.”

It was a relief.  It was what she'd already believed anyway, but it was still a relief to hear it.  “Thanks, Wade.  It's good to know that I can trust myself.”

Wade didn't seem to be sure what to do now, and Place certainly didn't know.  Her reason for coming was over.  Did she just leave?  Where did she go now?  She still had questions, but they were ones that science couldn't answer which left her with ... “I already owe you a favor-- two favors.  One for doing this for me and another for agreeing not to tell Kim.  I already owe you but, who do we know that knows about magic?”

Wade closed his eyes.  He was silent a moment and Place assumed he was thinking.  She was mildly surprised that he wasn't going to a computer to find the answer.

Wade opened his eyes and said, “We never really had someone to go to for that, Kim's magical opponents tended to be one time deals or Monkey Fist.”

Place thought that over.  “Ok, you wouldn't happen to be able to get me to Tokyo, would you?”

* * *

It was interesting for Place to watch Wade look into landing her a ride.  Since Wade took over Kim's website, Kim hadn't had to keep track of her extensive favor network and, as a result, never really saw how complicated the system had become.  Sometimes she knew just who to call for a ride, but most of the time she asked Wade to find her a ride.  When Wade had gone on a tech-free vacation Kim and Ron had been --metaphorically-- lost.  They'd almost immediately needed to take three commercial flights --and didn't even get in first class on them-- because they couldn't figure out who they knew in the area for even one of the trips.

Now Wade was preforming a far more complex task because he had to find someone who was not just going in the right direction, but who would likely give a ride without cashing in one of Kim's favors or telling Kim that she had a clone.

The result was much, much slower than usual, but it was fascinating to watch him go though the possibilities.

Eventually it looked like her best opportunity would be on a plane out of Seattle in three days.  Then she just had to get there.  Probably over land.  Two days worth of driving, leaving one free day.

Place didn't want a free day.  She had promised Shego she'd come back, and wanted to do it as quickly as possible.  Still, it was the most likely option for getting her where she needed to go while keeping her existence secret from Kim.  It wasn't like she had the necessary ID to take a legitimate flight.

So, if she had to spend the extra day, she wanted to spend it usefully somehow.  She tried to think of a way to do that.  There was nothing that she particularly wanted to do in Seattle.  Maybe something en route?

“You wouldn't, by any chance, be able to find a route that goes by way of Montana, would you?” Place asked.

“Montana?” Wade asked.

“I was thinking that I could stop in to meet my uncle Slim and cousin Joss on the way,” Place said.

“Is Kim literally the only person you want to keep your existence a secret from?” Wade asked.

Place thought that over for a bit.  She hadn't made a list of people to tell and not tell or anything.  Was Kim the only one?

Eventually she reached a conclusion, “I guess so.  If I had my way I'd personally introduce myself to everyone before they heard that there was a Kim-clone out there so they could make their own judgments based on meeting me instead of any preconceived notions about evil clones or whatnot.

“And Kim likely would be the last to know because I'm very much not ready for that, but the problems with Kim don't apply to anyone else.  It's not as if I'm a chimera like Drakken's first attempt at cloning, I'm a clone of Kim and Kim alone.  I have her genetics, I have her memories, and that makes the prospect of dealing with her a lot more difficult than dealing with anyone else.

“So, I guess, yeah: Kim is the only one I want to keep in the dark right now.”

Wade visibly thought that over, then looked back at his computer.  “I can get you a ride to the ranch, but once you're there you might be stuck there.”

Place only considered the proposition for a moment before saying, “Do it; I'll take my chances.”

* * *

At first Place thought the reason Wade was showing her equipment was to pass time until the ride arrived and show off a bit.  She came to realize that the reason he was showing it to her was that he was equipping her, the same way he might for Kim, though that he generally did via video.

“Uh, Wade, I'm not sure you want to give me this stuff,” Place said.

“I think I know what I want better than you do,” Wade said.  It wasn't said with any emotion except, perhaps, a hint of amusement.  “Now these sunglasses...”

Place sighed and Wade stopped talking.  “You didn't ask and I didn't tell you,” she said, “but the way I made it out of the lair I where I was created was that Drakken and Shego let me walk out the front door.  I promised Shego I was coming back and I intend to keep that promise, I'm even more sure of it now that I know for certain they didn't use any mind control on me.”  She hesitated.  “I don't know where that's going to lead, but there's a chance that if you give me something you'll have to face it in the field.”

“I don't do field work,” Wade said.  “I was never enthusiastic about the idea to begin with, and the times I actually tried it have convinced me to never do it again.”

“You know what I mean,” Place said.  Now that it had come up she felt bad for not telling him her association with Team Possible's enemies before.  At the time she'd been more concerned about getting her brain scanned, was distracted by his tech, then was playing Everlot, then was ready for sleep.  It just hadn't come up.

“I do,” Wade said.

And Place was lost.  Where had they been?  Right, he was saying he knew what she meant about possibly having to face off against anything he gave her.

Place had barely figured out where they were in the conversation when Wade started talking again:

“Now these sunglasses are operated by--”

“You're seriously ok with equipping someone who's planning on going back to Drakken and Shego?”

“You seem nice enough to me,” Wade said, then shrugged, “and we know you're not being mind controlled.”

“Ok,” Place said, still feeling off about the situation, but accepting it as Wade's decision. “So the sunglasses ... infrared-specs?”

“They can pick up more than just infrared,” Wade said proudly.  Place just went along for the ride as he explained the sunglasses.

-

[previous][Being more than a Simulacrum Index][next]

[Kim Possible Index]

KP EbE - All About Me (Title Sequence)

Remember how I said I might get to this "tomorrow" thirteen days ago?  Oops.

Anyway, not sure at the outset how much there is to work with here.  I originally intended to have this and the theme song be in the same post, after all.

I said, when discussing the theme song, that Kim is a power fantasy.  There's nothing wrong with that, there ought to be more power fantasies for girls and women (and gender non binary people too), and the title sequence/opening credits really plays that up.  It's dominated by Kim kicking ass and taking names (well, not so much the name taking), with being popular and pretty sprinkled in.

First we get a screen that looks all technical because it's got green lines and random numbers at the top and Kim is in green outline and there's a list of phrases:

The phrases read:

KIM POSSIBLE
SHE CAN DO ANYTHING
AGENT FOR CHANCE TO SAVE THE WORLD
MIDDLETON HIGH SCHOOL
HIGH SCHOOL SOPHOMORE
JUNIOR VARSITY CHEERLEADER
WORLD'S LAST HOPE
FEAR NOT
READY FOR ACTION

"Fear not" is a non-sequitur.  Everything else is about her.  There's almost a fixed pattern so that they could all fit in the same syntactic box, but not quite.  Regardless, we get About Kim, About Kim, About Kim, About Kim, About Kim, About Kim, About Kim, Imperative, About Kim.  Little bit odd there, but it's a decent information dump.

Though they don't update it until the show gets canceled and then uncancelled so "High School Sophomore," has a margin of error of ±1 year.  Also seldom is she the world's last hope.  In fact, when the world is at stake it's always someone else who comes through in the end.  When things are at a global level it tends to be the case that she's the last hope of the world order.  She's preventing regime change.  Preserving the status quo rather than doing any real world saving.

It's a minor quibble though.

So, let us move on.

When I mentioned that Kim was not in fact the basic average girl that the theme song described her as a couple of people in the comments put forward what being normal probably means in this context:

white, upper-middle-class, American, cis-gender, heterosexual, and in high school

'middle class neurotypical/mentally well American cis hetero girl'. Possibly with 'white' added on to it, actually very possibly, although that makes me cringe.

We have two winners.  Kim is white, cisgender, heterosexual, American, upper middle class, mentally healthy, neurotypical, and attends a public high school.

Those are Kim's mission clothes.  She actually wears more on missions (usually she goes sleeveless), unlike most female heroes.  That's sensible.  Mind you she's still in a crop top with three quarter length sleeves so there's plenty of skin to get scraped up.

A note on the animation style: only female characters have their lips shown, and then only the upper lip.  Most of the time this works just fine.  Some of the time, generally when they did a poor job of matching Kim's colors to a dark scene, it looks like Kim has a bright orange mustache from drinking glowing super-Tang.  So, be prepared for that in the future.

[Added:] Alert reader WanderingUndine notes that Gill, who we'll meet in episode 11, was one male character who had his upper lip drawn even before he mutated into a fish monster. [/added]

The title sequence contains a lot of running around and swinging around the giant letters of "Kim Possible" while doing average girl things like dodging energy weapons.  There's not a lot to take from that beyond it could have been edited together better, so I'm only going to show a picture, say three sentences, and then ignore all the rest of it, in spite of how much relative time it takes up:

The beam is hitting where she was, she jumped that high via handspring.  She is very athletic.  What I mean about editing can be seen in that you can actually see elements of the background of the scene that shot was lifted from near the beam, and her grappling hook launcher will change color throughout.

Kim's a cheerleader.  Kim is the head cheerleader.  Kim is the best cheerleader.  As stated before, actual high schools vary wildly when it comes to social structure or lack thereof.  That said, in fictional high school social structure that puts Kim at the tippity top.

I don't think this is necessarily a bad choice, power fantasy and all that.  Batman isn't just someone who fights crime in his free time, he's a popular, well-loved, handsome, rich (inherited so no new-money social taint), playboy, [more things here] Mary Sue.

I do think that there's a bit of a missed opportunity here though.  I'm reminded of the Beatles.  When the Beatles first became famous they did it in America.  They're not Americans.  What this meant was that they would come to this side of the pond, play sold out concerts to screaming devoted fans, basically be on top of the world where they could get whatever they wanted just by asking, and then they'd go home.  Home to a country where no one really knew of their fame and people thought they were making shit up if they tried to tell anyone what it was like for them over here.

Obviously, eventually their fame did follow them back to their homeland, but at the beginning they described it as like being in two different worlds.  Here they were celebrities, there they were nobodies.  Not unpopular nobodies, but unremarkable ones.

It's a dynamic that ought to be explored more.  As is the closest we tend to see is superheroes with masks.  Spiderman is famous, Peter Parker not so much.  But it falls apart because Spiderman doesn't meet people; Spiderman doesn't mingle; Spiderman doesn't go to coffee shops.  Spiderman is always aloof.  (It's hard to maintain a secret identity if you're at the center of the social scene.)  It's not so much living in two worlds as having a job that's famous even though you are not.

To a very limited extent the show does explore it, but it does it with Ron.  Except... Ron isn't famous; Ron isn't popular.  Ron is a key component of Team Possible but most people don't know who he is; there is only one villain that (almost) never forgets his name as compared to all the rest who can never be bothered to remember; the most devoted Kim Possible fan on earth has no idea who Ron is; so on, so forth.

Ron saves the world as a nobody and then comes home to be a nobody there too.

This next shot I'm showing just because it's downright weird.  The theme song starts with a bit of instrumental, the words start at about when the cheer scene starts but when it hits "girl" in, "I'm your basic average girl," it switches to this:

Seems sensible enough, the green shirt is part of Kim's standard street clothes, the background is in fact the dining room at Kim's house.  If you're trying to go with "basic average girl" showing Kim in her average girl clothes sitting around the table with family seems to make sense.  Just one problem.  That's not a shot of Kim.

That's Ron.  There's going to be a lot to say about the Kim Possible version of Freaky Friday/the incarnation when we get to episode 6, the body switching fun and games, but for now it's just worth knowing that that is not a girl.

Well, probably not.  Canonically not.  I do think that there's a bit to suggest Ron isn't exactly cisgender, but I don't think that's intended.  I think the parts where Ron comes off as not-cis aren't meant to be indicative of his gender identity but instead signs that he's weird.

Accidental non-cis Ron theories aside, if we take things as the creators seem to have intended, that's a boy in a girl's body.  It's someone who essentially became transgender via mad science and will continue to be transgender until the situation is reversed.  Very much not a girl.

Body does not dictate gender.

Unless you're whoever put together the title sequence.  What follows is known as "back of the envelop math"

The title sequence uses shots from episodes as late in production as number 13.  Given time and frame rate the episodes, minus the title sequence, run at about 30,000 frames (a bit more.)  Each frame is an image (it's progressive frame rate, not interlaced), that makes 390,000 images to choose from.

Given the time between when they switched bodies and switched back only about 19,392 of those frames were of the time when Ron was in Kim's body.  That leaves 370,608.  Except we rounded down to get the frames per episode, so it's more than that.  But, then again, not every frame has Kim in it.  Probably at least a third of them do though.

So, we've got maybe a hundred thousand images of a girl in a girl's body to choose from for when the theme song lands on "girl" but instead an image was chosen from the much, much smaller pool of images where that body housed a boy.

What the figurative fuck?

Managing to send the message that transboys are really girls because their body is more important than their identity in a show that doesn't have any trans characters and never even acknowledges that such individuals might exist is stunningly impressive assholistry,

Especially considering that it was probably done by accident.

It did, however, get noticed.  I wasn't paying attention to that shot at all until I read a discussion where someone pointed it out and then people came out of the woodwork to say, "Yeah, I noticed that and thought it was weird too."  A lot of people picked up on the fact that the "girl" was Ron even though they weren't doing a decon.

Ok, that was a tangent.

Back on target:

This shot goes with "and I'm here to save the world" in fact she's trying to save one person (which is just as noble and people realizing that could prevent scale creep in so many works) and it doesn't work out.  No, the person doesn't die.  The person wasn't a person.  She saved a dummy.

But it's the thought that counts, yes?

We get a couple more shots of her looking cool and heroic and then it's back to the brain switching, which is good because this instance lets me talk about an important disconnect between the title sequence and the show itself.

That is Kim in Ron's body hip checking Ron in Kim's body out of the scene so that she can preform a routine, which Ron had no hope of doing, during a cheer competition.

Also, she's giving Ron a dirty look for not being able to learn in one day what took Kim god knows how long to perfect.

It's one of three times in the credits sequence that Ron comes out looking vaguely competent and it's not even him.

Now the show is called "Kim Possible" not "Kim and Ron" so it's totally understandable the title sequence focuses on her, but it's important to remember that Kim isn't a solo act.  Kim is the head of a team and without that team she can't win.

The team is Kim, Ron, and Rufus.  Rufus is a naked mole rat and Ron's companion.  Rufus actually gets a good showing in the title sequence, but for the moment let's stick with Ron.

This is how we're shown Ron:

Ron loses his pants.  Ron losing his pants is a a running gag in the show.  I haven't kept a tally but I don't think it happened too much originally.  In fact, off the top of my head I can think of only two times it happened in Season 1.  So less than 10% of the time.  But every episode opens up with him losing his pants so in later seasons you'll have him being known as the person who loses his pants, have them come off for no good reason whatsoever (at least in season 1 it was because climbing equipment was attached to his belt which makes some sense unless you try to figure out the physics of the shot above) have him lose so much clothing that he starts to shiver and villain tells his henchmen to get the kid a towel, and finally have a super belt given to try to fix "the pants thing" be the critically important thing that allows Kim to regain her memories in the obligatory amnesia episode.

When Kim and Ron meet Kim's biggest fan, who happens to be one of her cousins, said fan knows every detail of every mission except for Ron.  No idea who he is.  Ron finally resorts to pulling out Rufus, who is instantly recognized, and Ron describes himself as the person in whose pocket Rufus is carried.  Finally, a faint glimmer of recognition, "Oh yeah, you're the one who's always losing his drawers."  (No, actually, that's the only part he's allowed to keep.)

One wonders if losing his pants would have become such a big thing in the show if they hadn't shown the above scene at the beginning of every episode.

Then we get Ron running scared (and oddly) while Kim keeps her cool:

That scene doesn't even appear in any episode.  They had to take Ron running scared solo and put it behind Kim running determined solo in order to create the contrast between Ron the scaredy cat and Kim the cool keeper.

Ron doesn't have his usual outfit or his usual haircut which makes it very easy to place where the "him running away" animation is from.  Deadly energy beams are being a shot at him.  Being scared is a reasonable reaction.  Kim is in her usual mission outfit which means the scene could have come from almost any episode.  For all I know she's not even in danger there.  (She usually does more acrobatics and less running when she's in mortal peril.)

[Added] And oops, I was wrong.  It does appear in a blink and you'll miss it way and the only significant change is that they swapped the direction.  However it's weird when it shows up.  The reason that I missed it is because it follows a "running, infiltration, hop over walls, dodge the searchlights" sequence in which Ron is running normally (pretty much the same way Kim is) and then suddenly for a brief bit at the end he suddenly switches into "this is how I run when I have to cross an open space with deadly energy blasts being shot at me and there's litterally nothing I can do to keep safe but pray" mode for no apparent reason.

Anyway, it's still scardy Ron against cool keeping Kim, even though in the context from which it's lifted Ron ... isn't actually afraid.  He's annoyed bordering on pissed off and will momentarily be bewildered.  No fear, yet the only other time he runs like that is when he comes inches from being blasted by a deadly energy beam.

Like I said, it's weird in context.  For now, though, context doesn't matter.  He's shown as afraid to Kim's cool headedness.[/added]

So, Ron loses his pants.  Ron runs away scared.  What else can we do?

I honestly don't even know what to do with that.  It seems to be from a deleted scene from the third episode.  Because of the whole "deleted" part of "deleted scene" I can't say much about it definitively but, given the context it appears in here it looks like Ron, who has severe pithecophobia due to being traumatized as a child, is responding to four monkeys trained as ninja lunging forward to attack him.

So, basically, his irrational fear is given form, dialed up to eleven, multiplied by four, and sent to kick his ass.  Note that irrational fears are so difficult to deal with because they're irrational.  Rational fears can be often be dealt with via rational means, irrational ones not so much.  So the foundation here is that Ron would be afraid even if he were seeing the nicest monkey on earth on the other side of bulletproof glass.  What's then added to that foundation is that these four are trained attack monkeys being sent to attack him, which ought to scare someone without an irrational fear of monkeys.

Not surprising he doesn't manage to put his best face forward.

We do get one shot of Ron that's unambiguously good:

Ron and Rufus high five after a job well done.  In context it is, perhaps, overly enthusiastic considering how little the job in question entailed.  Really it wasn't a job at all but more of a warm up, when it gets time to do the job, well...

That's the next Ron shot and it's from a bit later in the same episode.  Fearful Ron and Rufus being saved by Kim.

We started with Kim giving Ron a dirty look, so we should probably close with that, but first can we make Ron look silly and incompetent one more time?

Of course we can:

When dealing with Bond-level gadgets, wait for your personal Q to tell you what it does before fiddling.

Ok, so to close all of this Ron out, here's the last shot of him:

We'll get to talk about this relatively soon as it comes from the second episode.  The short version is this: Kim wanted a jacket she didn't need (the picture of it is taped to a nacho cheese dispenser) and so took a job she didn't want.  To take the edge off she decided to have Ron along.  She applied for the job for him without asking, and then emotionally manipulated him into taking it.

Then it turned out that Ron was really good at it and Kim wasn't.  He's managed to find joy and fulfillment in this, and Kim is pissed the fuck off at him for it.

Now that we've finished the Ron scenes, here's why I went through them:

Kim Possible is not, as the name sort of suggests, a show that centers on the exploits of Kim Possible.  It centers on the exploits of Team Possible.  Kim, Ron, and Rufus save the world.  They help each other with their social lives and school work.  They function as a unit.

The title sequence takes one third of the team, half of the human members, and cherry picks moments that show him in an extremely negative light.  With the exception of the Ron-Rufus high five the only time Ron is shown doing anything successfully is the shot immediately above this.  A shot where Kim is clearly not happy with Ron.

Kim having trouble with Ron's success is something that will come up a few times, but in general we see a team that works very well together.  Except for all that the team gets things done, it's Kim that gets the credit.

In-world we see this in the fact that no one even knows who Ron is.  Right here we see it in the title sequence.  Every episode begins with Ron losing his pants, Ron running scared, Ron with a look of [whatever you call that] and a terrified Ron being saved by Kim.

This is an even bigger disconnect when we consider that while the show is supposed to be about a strong female character with help from her friend, it ends up being Ron and Rufus to the rescue way more often than it should.  One theory, which I'll explore as we go through the episodes (or, at least, which I plan to explore) is that the show's creators didn't know how to do the strong female character protagonist thing and ended up accidentally letting the heroic role fall to Ron.

A quick, and possibly wrong, tally has Kim being the one to win in the end in seven of the twenty one episodes in Season 1.  Ron does just as well.  (With the final seven including one tie, one monkey, one ambiguity, and four times human males not on the team did it.)

Definitely Kim's impossible athletic skills are always a key component, but so are Wade's gadgets and so is Ron's goofy ability to distract.  (And Rufus being Rufus is vitally important.)

All of this goes together to deliver the twisted message that the only way for a female character to succeed is to tear a male character down.  Giving Kim all the credit while making Ron look like an incompetent coward is how Kim becomes the girl who can do anything.

That's fucked up.

The message could easily have been that you, female target audience, can do anything with a little help from your friends.

There's also just poor choice with regards to the things excerpted here in general.

Kim scores high on the looking heroic and looking cool points, but she doesn't get to do a lot of substantive stuff.  Saving Ron is her big moment really, moment two involves dynamite strapped to a snowmobile but without context you don't know that she managed to steer it away from an oil pipeline, you just know that she jumped off a vehicle that then exploded:

It absolutely looks cool, but you don't know what's going on so for all you know all she did was save her own skin.

The jetpack scene continues for long enough that you see her actually catch the dummy, so if you take a close look you realize that she wasn't actually saving anyone there.

Most of what Kim does is move.  She does a lot of jumping and swinging around a giant rendition of her name while dodging energy blasts, you know... running away.  In one excerpt it's even explicit because she's shown running from Shego's green plasma encased hands:

Don't get me wrong, she runs away well.  She's got awesome run away scenes that were used to make the title sequence, but if you really think about what you see it seems like all style, not so much substance.  She saves Ron, but given how incompetent he comes off, how hard could that be?

And while lack of context takes the significance away from the snowmobile scene, context makes other scenes worse for our hopefully-strong female character.

We see her facing off against robots, turns out her dad is going to be the key to victory that time.  In contrast to Ron losing his pants we see her scaling a wall after using her grappling hook successfully.  That mission ends in failure.  She rescues people who were being held captive, but they were only being held captive so there would be time for a robbery, and the robbery worked.  If she hadn't shown up they'd have been freed almost as fast.

We see her running through a school hall in a hurry as if there's something very urgent.  There is, but the urgent reason for her to disrupt everyone --knocking a girl's papers everywhere and accidentally kicking a boy's book out of his hands-- is that she waited until the last possible moment to print out her term paper.  Nothing heroic there.

We see her dramatically appearing as a safe opens.  Robbery stopped: good (though there were enough regular law enforcement people there that it probably could have been done without her.) Villains get away: Bad.

When she saved Ron?  It was because she almost dropped a giant robot on him.  (Though, to be fair, that could happen to anyone.)

We see four villains.  Two (Drakken and Shego) are a team, the other two (Monkey Fist and Gill) are Ron's villains.  Neither of Ron's is nearly as central as Drakken or Shego, but from the opening credits you wouldn't know that.

Here's a scene where she looks cool and determined and tough:

Context ruins it.  There's not even a fight.  She's captured without incident.

Without context the title sequence has Kim looking like a badass action hero (which she is) and Ron looking useless and stupid (which he isn't.)

With context the title sequence makes Kim look a lot less competent than she is and, oddly, makes it seem like Ron-centric villains (as opposed to Ron stealing the show vs. Kim villains) is an equal or larger part of the show than Kim-centric villains.

The whole thing is a mess.

So let's close with things that are nice.  Rufus:

It'a impossible to capture it with a still, but Rufus gets to do very impressive things with that stick.  His martial arts abilities are not to be underestimated.  He's also the on site mechanical genius and electronics wiz.

The voice-with-an-internet-connection hacker and gadget-maker is Wade:

While what they timed to "girl" in the song was bad, they did a good job with "Call me; beep me," including this shot:

So, anyway, that's all for now.

-

[Kim Possible: Episode by Episode - Index]

[Kim Possible Index]

StarfirexRaven and the worry that I have somehow become trapped in teenage slash

The first time I found Kim Possible I was channel surfing, probably bored, and likely deep in the weeds of untreated depression.  The second time I found it I sort of slid sideways into the fandom and suddenly knew about the children of Shego and Kim and, and who they were shipped, with, and learned the history of the family for three generations (or some such) before I knew what hit me.

If you poke around at stuff eventually you come across a crossover (Magneto and Professor X manipulate Kim and Shego in various directions and then ... wait, wrong crossover) and then suddenly you find yourself sucked into another fandom.

Thus Teen Titans.  The titans of mythology are best known for choosing the sort of leader who would castrate his father and eat his own children, thus Robin leads the title characters of the show Teen Titans.  Teen Titans, which was adapted into a parody comic called, "Teen Titans, Go!" which was adapted into a TV show the kids like to watch all the time in spite of it having very little in the way of redeeming qualities, is about teens.  Half mechanical, half demon, all alien, or shape-shifting teens.  And Robin.

And, of course, it doesn't take much for Starfire/Raven to seem like a totally awesome pair:

At a meeting of the Titans: 

Starfire, full of joy and enthusiasm: Raven and I have something to tell you *pause for deep breath without which the following volume would be impossible* We Are Lesbians! 

*dead silence* 

Robin: Uh... Star, I don't think you're using the right word. 

Raven, her voice flat: Actually, she is. 

Starfire, continuing in enthusiasm and joy and generally gushing with feeling: We are the lovers now!  Are you not all so happy for us?  Is it not wonderful? 

*the other three look at Starfire and Raven in surprise*  

Cyborg: You're . . . 

Raven, voice still completely flat: We are.

But, back up a moment, end of the paragraph about the Teen Titans.  Alien teen.  Half-demon Teen.  I have no objection to demons (or half demons) dating aliens.  These things happen and we should respect the rights of consenting non-humans and semi-humans.  It's the teen part that gets me.

Now a good deal of Kim/Shego fiction takes place after the show, and for good reason.  Kim and Shego are probably five, six, or seven years apart.  No problem when they're in their twenties or thirties, but if you pair a 16 year old Kim with a Shego who just got her college degree the squick factor goes through the roof.

Teen Titans, on the other hand, have an age limit.  Unless it's the Teen Titans reunion attended by the non-teen former-titans, any story that pairs Teen Titans in any permutation is going to be about teen romance.  And there's nothing wrong with that, but (a thousand variations on Twilight might not seem to indicate this but) I'm not actually that interested in teen romance.  (Though I do have a backlog in my head from my time as a teenager who came up with ideas for stories without looking too far beyond present circumstance and apocrypha.)

And yet I've gone from no ships I really care about, to one ship that involves a character who is, in all of her canon appearances, a teen, to now two ships in which three out of four characters are teens (Kim, Raven, Starfire.)  I'm not actively looking for new slash ships to sail on, but I wonder if looking at these ships with teens will suddenly having me stumbling into, and being drawn in by, the world of, say, Jubilee/[some other teen] and so forth the way that looking into Kim Possible fanfic led me to Raven/Starfire.

Image matching software (looking for recomendations)

Looking at cartoons, such as Kim Possible, tends to remind me of a project I've had in mind for a while.  Said project would require matching up 2d images.  Cartoons remind me because traditional cartoons are flat.  A pan in real life actually does some complex things because how something is captured by a camera depends on which part of the lens the light is coming through and such.  In a cartoon to pan the picture moves sideways so it's a much simpler process.

Anyway, what I want is software that can go through a lot of images and automatically sort them into categories of ones with overlapping portions.

Weirdly, if I wanted to do this with the much more complex task of photos of three dimensional objects, I'd already know which software to use even though that is much more complex and difficult task.

As an example of what I'm talking about here's how cartoons remind me of this stuff.  All of these are the same picture, they've been cropped, resized, or in one example had an obstruction added, but there's none of the changes that we'd have if they were actual photos of a real life thing:

Scaled down so you can see full original image

Portion at original scale:

Cartoon Pan:

Cartoon Tilt:

Cartoon Pan-Tilt

Obstruction:

They all contain the center of the original picture, which means that they all overlap and thus any two of them (without looking at the others) can be appropriately concluded to have originated with the same 2d image.

But, there are various different scales, various different portions of the original, and so forth.  I don't know how to automate determining that they're versions of the same image and that is what I'd like to do.  I'd like something that can look at every image in a given directory and sort them by putting ones that contain versions of the same image together.

Somewhat oddly, as noted above, I know software that could do that, in a roundabout way, if I were doing a more complex version.  For example if that were a real house and and each of the images was a different photo of it.  If I wanted to do that I could not only get  the fact they were of the same object, I could also get a rough idea of the three dimensional shape of the object (based on the differences between the photos.)

What I want is a good deal simpler and, hopefully, faster.

I can see sort of how one would do it for things at the same scale (because you'd end up with the exact same pixels on the overlap, with the only differences being a result of artifacts of the image format) but when it comes to matching across scales I'm at a bit of a loss.

Anyone have any advice?