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Your Mother Wouldn’t Approve
I don’t really cook Filipino food, or eat it much either, unless I’m back at my parent’s house or a family party. I’m not entirely sure why. I like it! I just don’t make it. And I feel bad about it sometimes when I think about it too hard.
I started cooking when I was nine and the Filipino food thing probably has at least a little bit to do with how I learned, which is mostly on my own. My parents showed me the basics: my dad showed me how to cook SPAM on the stove and my mom let me cut vegetables for pancit and gave me her recipe cards for cookies. From time to time, they’d drop me little pieces of wisdom: why my dad felt soy sauce was important for fried rice, how my mom insisted on scraping all the dough. But before long I was looking things up on my own, learning from TV, from the internet, from books, from eating.
They had a similarly passive-but-encouraging attitude about my career in art. This is the area of my life where I often feel the least “Asian;” my parents never did the thing of guilting me into becoming an engineer, or a doctor, or a lawyer. Instead, they enrolled me in art classes in high school and took me to The City each spring. My dad bought me my first graphics tablet. My mom hung up my drawings. Neither of them said anything when I dropped my Computer Science major after one quarter. I still don’t really know why they did all this.
I was watching an interview with a Filipino chef once who cooked Filipino food in a less traditional style, and she was asked—as so many Asian cooks are—about the idea of authenticity in her food. The thing she said has always stuck with me: “the food I make is Filipino food because I am Filipino”; our identities are inseparable from the food we make.
But I think I also take it in a different direction: the food I make is Filipino because my parents are Filipino, and because of how they raised me, they’re in every thing I do and everything I create. Thanks, Mom and Dad.
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Store-bought is OK
Four years is a long time. In the middle of 2020, like so many others, I found myself with an abundance of both free time and mental illness. So I asked myself, “What if I developed a recipe for King’s Hawaiian Buns, from scratch?” I didn’t know it yet, but big mistake. After doing some research, I decided I also wanted to see if I could do it “the original way,” by which I meant that I could only use honey and pineapple juice as sweeteners. “Easy,” I told myself, “just do some calculations and make sure everything comes out to the right hydration, etc., etc., etc.” Bigger mistake.
I’m writing this now in 2024, and I’ve made so much bad dough.
You learn a lot from repeated failure. For example, early on I figured out I had to use pineapple juice concentrate to keep the hydration levels correct. Months later, I would learn about enriched doughs and osmotolerant yeast. I learned about “the sponge method,” the complexity of gluten development, and pineapple enzymes. I did a lot of math, took so many notes. And I kept messing it up; the dough would never come together, would never rise. I know now that the fix was simple: my recipe was overhydrated; it needed more flour. But sometimes you have to keep making the same mistakes over and over before you can finally address them in any meaningful way. Four years is a long time.
Here’s some other things I tried: I got laid-off and then re-hired. I went through a major break-up. I moved across the country for a year-and-a-half, and then moved back across the country again. I went through two [amazing] therapists. I spent a year watching 1000 movies. One summer, I worked on a sailboat; another fall I worked in a garden. I watched one of my best friends get married. I attended funerals. The whole time I cried a lot, but I also learned how to be less repressed for the first time in my life. I made new friends. I turned 33. Somehow, all of those things were necessary too. Four years is a long time.
So yeah, I don’t know, just buy them from the store.
The ramblings of a mad-Rei. “THIS RECIPE IS IT” gets me every time. It was not “IT!” -
I Guess You Had To Be There
Yeah, Filipinos don’t do Lunar New Year, so growing up, I didn’t either (Rei’s note: I am Filipino). Mostly for me it was an annual event where I was jealous of how much money my friends got.
But over the past few years, LNY has felt more and more important to me. I am Filipino, but I am also Asian, and so while Filipinos may not celebrate LNY, Asians do… right?
I have an inside joke with one of my best friends that I didn’t realize I was Asian until my late 20s. Which like, lol, but there is something in the idea. I grew up in San Jose, California, which I sometimes like to call a little accident. Some weird confluence of fate meant that lots of different immigrant communities from Asia ended up in an (at the time) affordable place, that had the benefits of the California public education system, and also ended up becoming the center of the technological revolution. Because of all that, these Asian communities were able to thrive in a way that unfortunately feels unique in this country. Three decades after I was born, the Asian population in San Jose has doubled from 20% to a nearly 40% majority. Because of this, it wasn’t until a few years and a few moves to significantly less Asian places that the realities of my identity began to sink in.
It’s not like I didn’t know, it was just that it was an easy thing to take for granted, like breathing. To me, it was just regular ass life—not something unique—doing my day-to-day among a bunch of other Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Lao, Thai, Hmong, Japanese, Taiwanese, Indian, and Filipino kids, some with families that had been here for generations and some who had just gotten here. We all had our own cultures, but we were all also united in being this vague thing: being ”Asians” in America (Rei’s note: I’m going to keep using the term “Asian” and not “Asian-American,” which is probably more pertinent for this piece, but it also feels really important to me to be able to be grouped with Sandra Oh).
And like, I promise I’m not high, but it makes me ask, what even is Asia?
In third grade you learn it’s a continent, but what the fuck is a continent? Europe and Asia are on the same piece of land. And so maybe you accept it’s just arbitrary borders, but even then I think about how the majority of Russia’s landmass is in “Asia,” but unless a person looks a certain way most people aren’t going to think of a Russian as Asian.
As a Filipino Asian, it gets trickier: there’s this whole thing about whether Filipinos are “Pacific Islanders” or “Asian”—the first term makes technical sense to me because the Philippines are islands in the Pacific… but so is Japan, a definitely “Asian” country? Once you do enough research, you find all these technical and historical reasons that people get catalogued as one thing or another. Sure, I guess. More made-up rules, ok. But like, to what end?
The obvious and unfortunate conclusion I end up with is the same one that many activists and thinkers had already reached long before me: racial and ethnic identity is mostly defined by and done for the purpose of oppression—I’m more likely to be discriminated against in the same ways as someone from China or Vietnam than I am someone from Brazil or Senegal. It’s all just buckets that people decided on a long time ago to distinguish people into distinct groups of “other.” It’s a bummer.
And as much as it would be nice, when I think about my identity, I don’t think I really get to get rid of that aspect of it. It’s too big, affects too much of my daily life. There’s a difference between being a tourist, being a member of a community, and being the thing itself, and the delta between those, far as I can tell, is degrees of pain.
But I also think about San Jose, and everything it means to me, and if I get to write my own version, I like to think about an identity that isn’t solely defined by oppression, but also adds some other intangibles from the lives me and my friends and our families and our communities shared and created together. So for me, being Asian also lives in the games of Thirteen played in circles at break, and the inevitable confusion when a Pinoy says you all should play Pusoy Dos. It lives in how the “FOB Squat” is simultaneously a cutting case of inter-group racism, and also a mark of pride if you can do it right. It lives in the quiet struggle between whether we were going to commit to calling it “bubble tea” or “boba,” or how we knew anime was cool before everyone else. It’s the way that every grade in every school had 10 kids named Kim and at least 2 of them had the same last name, or how you learned the difference between Wong, Wang, and Hwang. It’s so many fucking garages: the one where your car friend kept his “baby” under wraps, the one where we did too many shots, the one stacked to the ceiling with Costco packs of Cup Noodles, the one that was always too cold but also it had a couch. It’s dry, crushed up packets of MAMA noodles, spiked hair, and knowing that Jack Harlow doesn’t know what the fuck he’s saying when he says those three letters. It’s the strip malls and fancy malls that no one else went to until a few years ago. It’s unfortunately also “Got Rice” by Asian/AZN Pride (Rei’s note: IYKYK, and I’m sorry IYK, but we can all cringe together).
That’s the thing I think, ultimately. I don’t really participate in the firecrackers, or the dances, or the envelopes. But all the same, Lunar New Year reminds me of home, where me and people like me got stuck with some label so we could be deemed lesser, and instead lucked into a place where we got to really live, really thrive. And it’s not like that’s a concept owned by San Jose: Asians are thriving everywhere, in different ways. Just take a look—it’s especially easy to see this time of year.
And so whoever you are and wherever you are, I wish that kind of thriving for you too, in this new year, and all the next.
-Rei
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Hawkeye, Episode 3: There’s Not Enough Goo Arrows In The World…
The image makes sense later, I promise
“Your ego seeks conflict; it loves nothing better than to win battles for you, sadly as it wins, you often lose respect and friendships. If you wish problems to persist, keep blaming everyone and everything but yourself, for he who persistently blames and criticise only fans the flames of hatred and controversy……..so from now [Clint Barton] and [Sung Kang] [and Kate Bishop] both are my [Hawkeyes]…..”
—paraphrased from Asif Raza Rana, Best Friend of Mudasir and Salman
Y-you guys… I-I think… I think I might like Hawkeye. Like, not just new, Kate Bishop Hawkeye. Clint Barton Hawkeye. I mean, I’m still imagining Sung Kang sometimes, but even when I’m not…
This episode was maybe the first time I felt like we really got to see what Jeremy Renner could bring to the character. I think it helps that Kate is carrying the comedic load, letting Renner play something that he excels at: a straight man tightrope walking between just barely emotionally vulnerable and stoic.
It creates an interesting tension, because as of this episode, Hawkeye is also the most fun superhero in the MCU, and he just absolutely does not engage with it. It’s like watching a goth kid who stubbornly refuses to have a good time on a rollercoaster. And I think most importantly, he’s not doing it because he’s a jerk who’s feels like he’s above it all. He does it because he’s just very dedicated to whatever his mission is, whether it’s saving Kate or escaping the tracksuit mafia. He doesn’t have time to engage with the whimsy. He uses a teddy bear to knock out a dude because it’s the closest thing on hand. He hands out acid arrows like he’s passing the salt because it’s the thing that needs to be done right now. He built an arrow with a plunger on it not because it’s fun or silly, but because it’s practical.
And it made me wonder at the time, “why the fuck is this the first time we’re really seeing Hawkeye let loose with the trick arrows?” I would’ve been on board day one if he was ganking Chitauri with an arrow that released bees or something. But besides the occasional explode-y arrow and grappling hook arrow, he’s mostly been using his bow like a really slow gun (one without trick bullets).
I think the hidden truth of what makes this honestly a very good episode of television is that it takes that character history and really hangs it all together thematically. Which means I’m going to have to do a thing I never thought I’d really do: take seriously Hawkeye’s character history and hang it all together thematically.
“My job is to be … a ghost”
So, Clint started out as a top-level assassin for SHIELD, before taking a hard pivot into the sword-happy vigilante Ronin, and then took another hard turn into an attempt at reform. As a black-ops agent, it absolutely makes sense that his quiver didn’t have many trick arrows: imagine he’s on a top-secret mission in South America to overthrow a democratically elected progressive president or something; it’d be weird if the corpse was covered in goo from his goo arrows, right? He’d definitely stick to the lethal, pointy kind. Then, in his Thanos angst, he ditches the weapon he’s most comfortable with for a much more murder-practical sword and goes on a killing spree. Finally, as part of his own shift away from his “bloody” phase, he focuses on fun, toylike arrows, and is, as much as possible, decidedly non-lethal.
[Rei’s note: Please prepare yourself for the sweatiest transition I’ve ever written]
It’s very appropriate then, that in an episode that’s one long escape sequence, Clint is also internally trying to run from something: his past.
Over the first three episodes, it’s become pretty clear that Clint is trying to perform some sort of penance. He’s personally haunted by the Ronin suit and the parts of his life it represents, and his major motivation so far has been to minimize all the splash damage from the things he did in that costume. Which brings me to a kind of big question that I ask myself all the time, one that Clint himself seems to be working through: what do we owe to the people we’ve hurt?
“Accountability 101” by Dana Variano
The day before this episode dropped, I stumbled upon this piece by visual artist Dana Variano, and it kind of knocked the wind out of me. In a very small, simple package, it put into focus ideas I’d been thinking around for a while, but which had remained blurry in mind. Basically, it’s this: in restorative action, telling the person you hurt that, yes, you did the thing that hurt them is a vital step. It’s not the only thing that needs to happen—those other checkboxes under the egg like context and intent are important too—but you’re also leaving out a critical part if you’re not accountable. I personally don’t know that restorative action can really happen without it.
And it’s the hardest part! I think even beyond the social pressure that gets hammered into us from day one that says making any mistake is the worst thing you can do, there’s probably also a little chimpanzee in us that just knows the consequences of hurting one of the other chimps is isolation (and death). But we’re not chimps anymore, and I even think we’ve grown beyond the need for punitive social pressure. But the fear is still real, and it continues, and it’s a thing Clint is grappling with.
I’ve gone a long time in this piece without really talking about Maya, which feels kind of crazy because Darnell Besaw and Alaqua Cox’s Maya Lopez is right up there for me with watching Kate threaten a dude with a USB arrow. I think different writers will have great and more substantial things to say about her, but it does feel clear to me that Maya has been told her whole life that despite living in an entire world that’s hurting her every day, she’s owed absolutely nothing. Instead, she needs to learn to adapt, or die. For a lot of people, this kind of assimilation becomes a mark of success, not a failure of a system. Maya’s like that, too. She stops questioning the requirement that she “[jump] between two worlds”; she even turns assimilation into a kind of superpower (if “assimilation” seems like a weird word here, I mean… what else do you call an ability to observe and mimic the people around you in order to survive?)
And then, Clint, as Ronin, kills her dad.
It’s not clear that he knows who Maya is and his connection to her father, but nevertheless, every time he refuses to admit that he was Ronin, Clint is denying her the chance at his own accountability.
” … I’m not a role model to anyone. Never have been.”
It feels impossible to Clint that he can ever really be a hero. And right now? Honestly, he’s kind of right. Because he’s still missing a piece. Clint can change his methods, help train a new, better protege, and even understand the weight and context of what he was doing, but he still hasn’t done this key part of owning up to the harm he caused.
And it doesn’t just affect his superhero life. He knows he’s fucking up with his kids, to the point where they expect it, and even say it for him (“It’s okay if you can’t be home for Christmas”). And he’ll explain, and defer, but I don’t think we’ve seen a scene yet where he’s said something like, “Hey, I’ve been missing out on a lot of your lives, I know it’s led to a lot of hurt, I’m sorry.“
I’ve seen enough MCU products to know not to hold my breath for well-executed thematic catharsis. At this point, the MCU storytelling style is like this weird game of bowling where they love to set up the pins but never knock them down. So with Hawkeye, right now I’m at the same point that I always feel like I end up at with these shows: halfway through, saying, “I’m interested in where this could go.” I don’t know where Clint’s story takes him, and honestly, I’m not optimistic that we’ll ever see the kind of real restorative action I’ve been describing here. Which is disappointing to me, but also sucks for Clint. Because unfortunately, there’s no trick arrow…
…for accountability.
Other Thoughts:
- That Asif Raza Rana quote was originally just a joke, but let me tell you, dude knows from accountability.
- A key thing to the Clint/Kate dynamic that really works here, that I didn’t really get to mention above, is that Kate plays everything the exact opposite of Clint. While he’s just trying to get them to safety, she’s extremely jazzed with everything. Classic buddy-comedy/odd-couple writing is a classic for a reason.
- Sorry to the evolutionary biologists, I know that’s not how evolution works. I willingly used shoddy science to write a metaphor. This is me also being accountable.
- I linked their work like three times above, but I can’t say enough that you should check out more of Dana Variano’s work. Here is their site. Click it!
- In the first episode, I joked a little bit about how every scene Clint had with his family felt very weird, in an unintentional way. And I stand by it! But it also made another part of this episode really surprising to me, in that I was actually really invested and along for the ride during the scene where he’s on the phone with his son.
- I was kind of half joking about “Ronin only hunts minorities” in that last piece, but I mean… after this episode… Plus, his own protege is a ridiculously wealthy White girl? But really, I do think there’s enough here to think about a variation of the themes above, which is this: what do those who benefit from a lopsided system owe to the people who get hurt by it?
- The development title on this one was “Sick Arrows, Bro,” but I changed it to part of one of the sweaty lines that I cut: “There aren’t enough goo arrows in the world to outrun your past.” I need to take a shower.
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Hawkeye, Episode 2: Kate Bishop is a Lockpick Kid
The first sequence we see in Hawkeye is an origin story for Kate Bishop, the person who will eventually (spoiler alert) become the second Hawkeye. We find out that as a kid, she lived in a Manhattan high-rise during the Battle of New York, and that her dad died during the Chitauri attack. We’re meant to understand that this loss of security, combined with a chance viewing of Clint Barton kicking alien ass, pushes Kate to develop the skills she’ll need to become a superhero. It’s honestly the origin story equivalent of missionary: very vanilla, gets the job done.
But the moment we catch up to Kate in the present, I immediately forgot about dead dad. I understand that there are other flavors of grief besides guilt and angst, but it just doesn’t seem to drive her the way an Uncle Ben drives a Spider-man or a Thomas-and-Martha drive a Batman. When Kate Bishop writes her, “Why I Became a Superhero” essay, I will absolutely not buy it if she talks about her dead dad. But the weird thing is that there is a thing that did explain her whole deal to me: within the first two episodes of Hawkeye, Kate Bishop uses a lockpick twice.
Kate Bishop is a lockpick kid.
If you’re all like, “What the fuck’s a lockpick kid?,” don’t worry, it’s a term I’m officially minting now. But it’s very possible you already know the kind of person I’m talking about.
To start, lockpick kids are kids who become interested in learning how to pick locks. Not all people who learn how to pick locks are lockpick kids, but all lockpick kids know the basics of how to pick a lock. Whether a lockpick kid ends up owning a lockpicking kit is a question of means, but they definitely spent some time figuring out how it works. Do you know what it means to “rake” a lock, or what a “pin” is, and what you need to do with it? If you answered no, then you’re not a lockpick kid.
Lockpick kids tend to have other overlapping interests; they’ll usually be interested in combat skills like fencing and archery, and potentially some sort of martial art. They’ve probably flirted with parkour, and they probably love puzzles and problem-solving, too. Basically if it’s a thing that feels like it would come in handy on an “adventure,” a lockpick kid has, at the very least, googled the basics.
The skills a lockpick kid spends time on are not about practicality or survival. A lockpick kid never focuses on learning how to swim really well, for instance (although they may know how to swim). Lockpick kids don’t go out of their way to learn CPR, or first aid, or triage. A lockpick kid probably doesn’t know how to shoot a gun.
There’s a very good chance that at some point in their life a lockpick kid has adopted an atypical fashion accessory, like goggles, or a bandana, or weather-agnostic gloves. Lockpick kids may be boys and men, but they’re rarely very masculine. Lockpick kids were probably in high school band. Lockpick kids have been called weirdos at least a few times in their life, possibly by themselves.
And now, I have to raise an important point: the type of person I’m describing is decidedly “uncool.” And while we don’t know how much swimming she does or whether or not she was the second chair violin at her Manhattan Prep School, we do know that Kate Bishop is undoubtedly cool. I mean, just look at this shit:
So I think it’s important to qualify that Kate Bishop is a lockpick kid in the way only a fictional character can be: she is both aspirational and an impossibility. Similar to how the MCU asks us to suspend our disbelief that geniuses can build nanotech armor, and boys can become Spider-Men, Kate Bishop’s superpower is her ability to be “cool,” despite being a lockpick kid.
And to be clear, in real life, a lockpick kid is never cool. They don’t become alt-cool kids or cool theater kids or punk kids who become cool in retrospect; they’ll never be the person who gets She’s All That‘d. Lockpick kids don’t find other lockpick kids and make a cool lockpick kid gang. Lockpick kids understand that there’s a whole secret social language swimming around them, but also know it’s unintelligible to them for unintelligible reasons. And the whole thing really just doesn’t make sense to a lockpick kid—after all, they can pick locks!
The ironic thing is that a lockpick kid has never had the chance to apply their lockpicking knowledge in a real situation. For one thing, lockpick kids aren’t in the game for theft. But even beyond B&Es, no lockpick kid has ever been in a scenario where they were, say, locked out of a house, and the one way to get in was by using their trusty lock picking kit. They may have picked a few locks on their own, but only for practice. A true lockpick kid has never been in a situation where their knowledge about picking locks saved the day. And they might not know it, but in the back of every lockpick kid’s head is the quiet, yearning fantasy that this exact scenario will play out, that there’ll be a day where their lockpicking skills will be vitally important, and they’ll get to hear someone say something like thank God you knew how to pick a lock. That day would be the best day of their life. It never comes. If that sounds kind of sad, it’s because it is.
Most of them don’t realize it, but lockpick kids are lonely.
This warm, cozy apartment has definitely hosted a bunch of house parties.
” … People don’t want that cynical, cool thing anymore, they want sincerity. Not self seriousness, but heart-on-your-sleeve sincerity. You [Clint] are very contained. You keep your cards close to your vest, which… you wear over a suit of armor and like sixteen other layers of self-protection, all of which, under, finally, is your heart. So, not exactly on your sleeve.”
I agree with Kate’s general vibe here; I’m exhausted by cynicism and over-invested in sincerity. And I’m also hyperaware that, for a certain type of person—maybe even a certain type of kid—sincerity can be just as much of a suit of armor as she claims Clint’s stoicism is here. There’s a specific kind of demoralization that comes with not understanding the social rules of the world and knowing that this ignorance makes you kind of worthless. And there’s a specific type of coping that tells you if you’re loud and sincere enough about yourself, you can drown it all out. And then there’s one more type of coping that kicks in after that, when you realize that it’s all still insufficient. And it tells you that if you focus, and work at it, then through sheer force of will, you can collect the right aptitudes, and participate in the right things, and it’ll make people finally look your way, and they’ll see you for who you are, and things will make sense, and then maybe, after all that, you can finally unlock the value in yourself that everyone else seems to have, innately.
Other Thoughts:
- Or maybe I’m projecting
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Hawkeye, Episode 1: Sung Kang Should’ve Been Hawkeye
Disclaimer: this review of Hawkeye Episode 1 requires so much nerd movie knowledge bullshit that it may very well be unpalatable for everyone except me. The one on Episode 2 is much less insider baseball, maybe try that one.
I am the number one, player-hatingest Hawkeye hater out there. Every time I see him on screen, I just think, “What is even the point of you?” I wish he died in Endgame instead of Natasha. If I had the full infinity gauntlet, I’d snap my fingers but only Hawkeye would disappear. Yet here I am, despite myself, watching his fucking TV show, because I’m also the type of person who has marathoned all the MCU films multiple times, has watched most of the Avengers movies in theaters twice, and has watched every episode of every Disney+ show rain or shine. I’m a self-capturing captive audience. The only person I may hate more than Hawkeye is myself.
Admittedly, hating Clint is up there with “The Beatles made good music” in terms of opinions that are boring for how common they are. My reading is that most MCU observers are neutral on Clint at best, and generally see him as a punchline. Even Disney and Marvel are aware of this; they knew you wouldn’t care when he sat out the entirety of Infinity War, and in this episode they create a fake musical where the joke is that he gets outshined by Ant-Man, who wasn’t even there. Hawkeye fuckin’ sucks!
I think one of the biggest problems with MCU Hawkeye is a pretty basic one, in terms of writing: he’s the character equivalent of a double beat. What I mean is this: what would you say if you had to describe Clint Barton? “Cool assassin, often a little in over his head because he’s got no superpowers but has to mix it up with gods and supervillains anyway, and secretly he’s got a big old heart and loves family? Also, arrows.” Something like that is pretty much it. And also, change some pronouns and lose the arrows and you’ve just successfully described Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow. Unfortunately for Clint, he also spends most of his first major appearance brainwashed and off-screen, so Nat gets there first. Not to mention, Natasha is also a little more interesting; her whole angst with her dark and murder-y past thing adds another layer of character psychology that Clint just never gets—that is, until this series, where he’s reckoning with his past as the minority-murdering Ronin. No matter where you look, Clint is an also-ran.
Fun thought experiment: replace any instance of Clint in this episode with Natasha, and it not only makes sense, I also think it often plays better. Nat would definitely be haunted by her past and the people she’s lost, it’s kind of her whole thing. Nat would definitely be exasperated by some kid dressing in her murder bondage. Nat would definitely be able to catch a molotov cocktail and throw it back at a bunch of street punks (literally the one cool thing Clinteye has ever done). Plus, since she doesn’t have Clint’s nuclear family, you get the bonus of not having to watch these awkward dinner scenes where all the line readings have me convinced that Clint is only pretending to love his kids, and that his kids secretly despise their dad for being the Worst Avenger.
You really gotta watch the show with the Disney+ Thought CaptionsTM on.
The other thing that has always confused me about Hawkeye is why Jeremy Renner is playing him. He’s always felt like a too-tight shoe or something. Especially because I think there is the slightest of wrinkles that the MCU tried to use to differentiate Clint, but it never really worked with Renner behind the bow: he’s also the down-to-earth funny guy, the only one who really seems to understand just how ridiculous everything they’re doing is. You see it a little bit in his writing in Age of Ultron and Civil War, but eventually it fell by the wayside.
A while ago I started to do the classic thought experiment of “who would be better-suited for the role?” Who is someone that could balance competent badass with surprising sentimentality and add a dry sense of humor? Ryan Reynolds was my first thought—imagine a less 75% less annoying Deadpool and I think you’ll see what I mean. Once I started thinking beyond white guys, John Cho was next; in this case, imagine nu-Trek Sulu but with better [read: any] character writing, or a less cartoonish live-action Spike Spiegel, and sprinkle either of the two with some Harold. But my favorite mental-casting has been Fast and Furious’s Sung Kang. I mean, Han basically is Hawkeye, with a car instead of a bow and arrow. Now any time I’m watching an MCU thing, I mentally replace Jeremy Renner with Sung Kang and then mourn the reality. Try it for yourself (or if you’re not an FF fan, you can swap in Cho or Reynolds). It’ll break your heart.
Put simply, the MCU has a Hawkeye problem, and it knows it. So in addition to all the other standard storytelling/thematic wrangling you’d expect from a narrative, Hawkeye also has the fucked-up task of justifying its main character and its own existence.
All of this leads me to why, despite myself, I’ve been having a lot of fun with Hawkeye so far, and I’m actually kind of interested in where it’s all going. The new Hawkeye, Kate Bishop, is basically a Frankenstein of the two things I’ve been talking about, a sort of millennial mishmash between Natasha and a funny Hawkeye. It’s even been kind of working thematically: I get the sense that Clint’s reticence to train her is partly because of how much she reminds him of Natasha (and possibly his jealousy that she knows how to deliver a quip). Hailee Steinfeld as Kate Bishop has the potential to go where no MCU Hawkeye has gone before: being likeable.
Other Thoughts:
- Okay, so how far along in the process do you think they got in having Lin-Manuel Miranda write the song for the Rogers musical? Like, the show art is definitely a nod to Hamilton, and Miranda is deep in the Disney family, so at the very least it must have crossed a writer or producer’s mind, right? I want to know if they ever actually made the ask, and if so, how much money did he end up saying “no” to? What’s the price point on getting LMM to scribble a few rhymes about Captain America?
- In my notes, re: guy at the Rogers urinal who wants a selfie: “Not sure which is the bigger tip off that this guy is evil: the lack of personal urinal boundaries, or the fact that he’s obviously lying because he claims Hawkeye is his kids’ favorite.” Calling it now, that guy is The Kingpin
- Also in my notes: “This show starts with maybe the most unbelievable premise in all of MCU: That out of the lineup of the OG six avengers, someone thought Hawkeye was the most inspiring” Bazinga, got ‘em, burnt and turnt, hey-yo.
- I almost titled this one “Only Hawkeyes in the Building” due to the New Yorky rich vibes (and to stay current), before I landed on this title, which years ago was the title of a Podcast that I pitched to one of my friends where we would talk about ~*~Azns~*~ in Pop Culture (except I hadn’t watched any FF yet at the time so the title was still “John Cho Should’ve Been Hawkeye”)
- I do mention it briefly, but among the many Just Hawkeye Things, is like… did anyone else think it was weird that we know that, canonically, during the Thanos timeskip Hawkeye went around murdering Mexican and Japanese people?
- I really do hate Hawkeye!
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Rei Dot Soy 