Randomosity on Fridays: Comic Con Edition (4)

Hah, you thought this was over, but it's not! I took a long-ish break, but there is still more Comic Con recapping to be had. See, I told you a lot happened!

Anyway, I was going to just let this go, but both the Sister and Alz agree that I must finish this exhaustive Comic Con recap because I didn't even get to the really good stuff yet - which starts with Day 3: Saturday.

DAY 3 / Saturday (Part 1)

Saturday had an interesting start because we slept for about 4 hours in our room before dragging ourselves out of bed and down to the convention center at 3 in the morning. Yes, 3AM. That wasn't even that early, considering people had been camping out since 9pm Friday night.

The line for Hall H was - at 3AM - already down to the marina and PAST the Assassin's Creed pirate ship and into the park. This is hard to visualize if you've never been, but basically it was a REALLY LONG LINE, practically running from one end of the convention center to the other.

We settled in for sort of sleeping on the grass in the park, huddled in the towel I'd received as a wedding favor at G's gorgeous wedding in March. I was in galaxy tights, my Tokidoki THOR hoodie and freezing. That breeze coming off the marina water? COLD.

This is us at 3:30AM in the most intense line of our lives.

Anyway, at around 6am, the line started moving because SDCC staff was truncating the line. We moved up quite a bit and ended up sort of near the Hilton Bay Front Hotel. We briefly saw our cousin who was going to get coffee at Starbucks. We didn't see her again for another hour because the line at Starbucks was that long.

The Hall H lawn/tents when empty.

At some point, the line truncated more and we found ourselves under the tents on the lawn outside Hall H, which pretty much meant we were guaranteed to get in.

While we were waiting in line on the lawn, the Sister went back to napping. Her glasses left an imprint on her face because she was sleeping with her face on her knees. She was that tired. I was going to do the same thing, but I checked Twitter first to see if there were any line updates or whatever. That was when I was very fortunate to catch a tweet about bag swapping.

I have digress for a little bit to give you some background on the amazing bit of serendipity that is to come. So when you pick up your badges at the beginning of the con, you also get a free giant bag (provided by Warner Bros) to carry all your stuff. This year, the giant bags were actually backpacks (much better for carrying than totes) and they came with little capes you could unfurl. The bags had a bunch of different designs featuring TV shows and movie posters.

The Sister and I both got bags featuring The Big Bang Theory, and while we don't watch the show, we weren't disappointed at first because the design of the bag was cute. It was one of the better looking ones. What was disappointing was that we both got the SAME bag, and when there's 2 of us, it'd be nice to get 2 different bags. The only way to get a different bag is to trade with people. Soon after our bag pick-up we found out there were SUPERNATURAL bags, and of course, we kept seeing them all the time in the coming days. We even tried to trade once or twice, but it was impossible. My friend suggested I pay someone.

Then SATURDAY happened. As I was saying, I checked the Hall H hashtag and saw someone wanted to trade bags - and they wanted a BBT bag and were trading a SPN bag!! It was fate. So after much tweeting and exchanging of outfit info (she was wearing a Loki shirt; I was in a Thor hoodie - how freaking appropriate!), we managed to find each other and trade bags!


And I didn't have to pay anyone for it. :)

Inside Hall H

We made it inside and settled in for an entire day of big movie panels. We were kind of to the side and right under an AC vent, which was bad because I stayed wrapped in my towel all day but good because it kept me more awake. Once the panels started, it was seriously a stream of celebs and A-listers and exclusive footage. So awesome.

There were panels where I didn't take any pictures (Lego movie, Godzilla, etc.), so we'll be leaving that chronology out since from here on out, it'll just be pictures.

The Seventh Son panel (moderated by the hilarious Chris Hardwick/ the Nerdist):

Chris Hardwick fanboyed over Jeff Bridges (as one does).

Also, there were these handsome young men: Ben Barnes (I LOVE HIM) and Kit Harrington (Jon Snow knows nothing)


The Gravity panel with Sandra Bullock (ahhhh!)

The Edge of Tomorrow panel with Emily Blunt and Tom Cruise (his first SDCC)!

The Sis and I are ambivalent about Tom Cruise, but it was still kind of crazy cool that we were seeing him in real life. Chris Hardwick seemed to be of the same mind because he was fanboying like mad and even had an unreal sing-off with Tom Cruise because they both had played Stacee Jax in the musical Rock of Ages.

TC and CH also photo-bombed each other's pictures.

The Frankenstein panel. This movie honestly looked kind of terrible, but hey look Aaron Eckhart!

Exciting thing! The Hunger Games: Catching Fire panel!!

Jeffrey Wright and Jena Malone. Jena was wearing a Mockingjay pin.

We also have Willow Shields (Prim) and Lenny Kravitz and our leading men, Liam and Josh.


And of course, our District 12 Victors. As to be expected, Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson were hilarious together. I'm pretty sure this picture was taken when they were talking about a kissing scene and how J.Law got snot all over Josh because she was crying during the scene. This came about as an answer to a fan question about whether or not the romance would be steamier in Catching Fire. They told this story of snot-swapping and then said, "Yeah, it's real hot."

Pleasant surprise and super awesome panel - EW's Women Who Kick Ass panel.

Maggie Q, Danai Gurira, Tatiana Maslany, Katee Sackhoff, Michelle Rodriguez

I can't tell you how amazing it was to hear these talented, smart actresses talk about their work, the industry, and also about sexism and representation, feminism and male privilege to a room of 6500 people.

Of course, not all reactions were favorable (though thankfully people in my section were respectful), but I love that this discussion was given such a large audience and there were indeed cheers from the crowd. I was expecting a day full of geeking out and being starstruck brain fluff, so it was even more awesome that I actually got some intelligent and important topic discussion/ brain protein in there.

And I think here's a good place to stop for the first half of my Saturday recap. Before I go though, this last panel about Women Who Kick Ass leads nicely into recent discussions about "strong" female characters. The panelists made some great points about different kinds of female roles and about the need for more female stories. But something Katee Sackhoff said really ties into the recent discussion of "strong" female characters.

She talked about how she wanted to see more female characters like her mom, who she admired growing up - not because she was any kind of superwoman but because she was a loving mother and a great female role model. She wanted to see more female characters who were strong for their every day strength. And basically, the panelists agreed that there should just be a bigger variety of female characters - more nuanced, more developed, and just more of them.

For a great recent and on-going discussion of the above, check out Erin Bowman's blog post on Publishing Crawl "On Strong Female Characters."

It's a long weekend here in America, so I'll be having an extra day of fun. Happy weekend / Labor Day!

Q4U: What do you think of strong female characters? OR Who would you like to have seen at SDCC?


For more SDCC goodness, here are my previous related posts:

1) What's Up Wednesday (7) / RSW (6)
2) SDCC Recap No. 1
3) What's Up Wednesday (8) / Our Comic Con Fashion
4) SDCC Recap No. 2
5) SDCC Recap No. 3
6) What's Up Wednesday (10) / Our Comic Con Swag