(The following is the first part of a new novel project I have been working on. As this is very much a first draft, I welcome feedback.)

An Address to the Governing Council of Aclia, on the matter of Proposition 14-S, the Keomitar Resettlement Act, by the Hon. Kovias Battlebone, Senator-Prime

We’ve all heard of it at Temple. Our priests remind us every time they want to make a point about the corrupting nature of magic – how Arthan Moonwater, once a Saint of Holy Erewas and the most powerful sorcerer our nation has known, became so obsessed with testing the limits of his abilities that he turned to murder, conjuring a fatal sickness and sending it to afflict twenty of his fellow priests before he was caught and punished at last. When the Council banished him to the Rock of Ateareath, home of the poisonous serpents the good Saint Erysethy had driven from Aclia, everyone assumed they would hear from him no more. After all, had not every criminal sent to Ateareath before then died of the serpents’ bite?

Yet we underestimated him.

He spread his magic across Ateareath’s rocks and cliffs and made it a green and fertile land in the image of our own. He charmed the serpents and made pets of them. He discovered that if he drank small doses of the poison from their fangs, he could keep his strength and health well into his old age. A hundred years after his banishment, he performed his most wicked, most audacious magical feat yet: he took seven serpents, two male and five female, and enchanted them into abominations, partly human and partly serpent, and bade them multiply. He called the new creatures Seshegari – a word which has no meaning, just some syllables he strung together into something that sounds exotic, yet now half of Aclian schoolchildren believe it’s some ancient word meaning “Poison-Born.” Some would call this a harmless mistake. I say it’s important to know that Seshegar is a meaningless word for a race of beings who were not created by Erewas of the Spheres and therefore dwell outside Its Grace.

Today the Seshegari are many. They cultivate the land Arthan made for them; they keep livestock, weave, and craft; they fish the waters off the coast. Theirs is a kind of parody of human existence, yet they know not Erewas. Rather, they worship as a god their own maker, Arthan, who lives yet, preserved by their poisons. For the last three centuries, Arthan has kept their population in check, but now they are growing too numerous as the sorcerer at last begins to weaken. When they become more than their land can contain, where will they go?

Where, my fellow Senators?

 My grandfather cast a vote in favor of the Act which allowed trade between the people of Aclia and the Seshegari of Ateareath. Seventy years afterward, my father spoke in favor of the Act which allowed Seshegari to work and study in Aclia. Unfortunate decisions, both, yet I understand quite well the sentiments behind them. Arthan, perhaps in an effort to redeem his corrupted soul, has been sending medicines made of Seshegari poisons to our shores almost ever since he created the abominations, and yes, I am aware we have benefitted from them. Thanks to these elixirs, we enjoy health that would have been beyond the power of citizens of Saint Erystheny’s time to imagine. We live twice as long. We have more time to learn, to create, to watch new generations rise. Given all that, many would say, we owe the Seshegari our friendship. Is this not true? Have you not been thinking of this, as you consider the justice of allowing these creatures to own Aclian land, perhaps even to form families with Aclian citizens?

I say no! No benefits we may have reaped from the Seshegari’s existence can obscure the truth that they are not a part of Holy Creation, not the work of Erewas of the Spheres.

I say that Saint Erystheny drove the serpents from Aclia for a reason.

We do not want them back.

Proposition 14-S has failed by a vote of five to four, on this eighth day of Dainalt, 718.

(This review contains Spoilers. If you are among the few proud geeks who hasn’t yet seen Deadpool and Wolverine, go see it and then come back to this review. You’ll have a blast. That’s my succint Spoiler-free review prologue.)

In the box-office smash Deadpool and Wolverine, love is a bitch.

When we first see Deadpool’s love interest, she is running across a wasteland plain toward our snarky hero, who watches her in awe. Since she’s clad in a red outfit, Chris de Burgh’s 1980s power ballad “The Lady in Red” scores the moment, leaving us in no doubt that what we’re witnessing is love at first sight.

Unfortunately, Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) has a rival for her affections, a smooth-faced, squeaky clean version of himself known as “Nicepool.” Many a lady might prefer this handsome, upright gent, so perfect that he even identifies as a feminist. But not this bitch. She refuses to be parted for good from her flawed, funny beloved, and later in the film she manages to break free of Nicepool and run to Deadpool once again, this time down a New York sidewalk to the tune of Eric Carman’s 1980s power ballad “Make Me Lose Control.” “Her!” Deadpool gasps, for once at a loss for a quip, and from that moment, the two sweethearts are inseparable. Dogpool’s slow motion leap into Deadpool’s arms is almost worth the price of admission alone.

What, you might be asking, is the name of this feisty and indomitable love interest? It’s Mary Puppins, also known as “Dogpool.” Her tongue hangs out, her eyes are lopsided, and most of her fur has fallen off. In short, she’s practically perfect in every way for Deadpool. Even if I had enjoyed nothing else about the movie, Mary Puppins, a.k.a. Dogpool, would have sufficed to make me glad I saw it.

In my previous post, I cited Deadpool and Wolverine as a movie brilliantly crafted to entertain its male target audience, though at that point I had only the trailer to judge by. I also mentioned that my husband was eager to see it. Well, he saw it, he loved it, and he told me I should see it. No other human understands what I like better than he does, so I asked him if he’d be willing to see it again, and take me this time. He answered “yes” without hesitation, and two nights ago, we went. Not only did I have a great time, but I understood why Matt wanted to see it a second time. The movie sets a breakneck pace from the very beginning and does not let up. The action and the jokes come so fast that “blink and you’ll miss it” is no figure of speech. You have to see it twice (at least) in order to take everything in, which might explain, at least in part, the movie’s sky-high box office take.

Another explanation, aside from it just being fun as all-get-out, is that it has more big-tent appeal than the trailer had led me to believe. In the trailer, the only female character we see in the action sequences is Cassandra, one of the film’s major villains; “villain” is one role the Anti-Woke Brigade doesn’t mind seeing a woman play, since the villain’s key responsibility is to threaten the world and then have her butt kicked in the climax, in this case by the two “silly boys” Deadpool and Wolverine. The trailer led me to believe that in this movie, hero-ing would be solely men’s work. Yet now I can see why the trailer misled me. To show an important female character other than Cassandra in the action sequences would have counted as a Spoiler. So, Spoiler Alert: there are women on Team Good, and while they don’t get quite as much screen time as I would have liked, they do get to shine.

The movie’s (human) female MVP is Laura, or X-23, played here (as in the film Logan) by Dafne Keen. She is one of the leaders of the Resistance, a group of superpowered fighters in opposition to Cassandra, who rules “the Void” with an iron fist and wickedly cruel telepathic fingers. Throughout the film’s first half, Hugh Jackson’s Wolverine, whom Deadpool is trying to recruit to save his corner of the multiverse from destruction, has resisted the Call to Heroism. But even though this Wolverine is from a different universe from the one we saw become fire-forged friends with Laura in Logan, something in her draws him out, and she persuades him to take up the heroic mantle and become the man he thinks he’s lost his chance to be. But lest I give the idea that Laura exists in the film solely to motivate Wolverine, be assured, the character is every bit the badass she was in Logan. In order to defeat Cassandra, Deadpool and Wolverine must neutralize the telepathic powers she uses to torture her subjects, and to do that, they need the mind-blocking iron helmet of the Juggernaut, the same “mofo” that a song over the closing credits of Deadpool 2 claimed could not be stopped. Laura apparently never heard that song, for stop him she does, and then decapitates him, throwing his helmeted head to Deadpool as she is drawn back into the battle with Cassandra’s henchmen. Our titular heroes could not save the day without her help.

I won’t Spoil the identities of the other members of the Resistance. I will say only that Laura is not a Smurfette.

Would I still have enjoyed Deadpool and Wolverine if Laura hadn’t been in it? Possibly. After all, I would still have had Dogpool. Yet I loved having Laura there, as it assured me that superheroines may not be a dying breed in cinema, after all. They may not get to be headliners; they may be only part of a team; but at least women’s roles in superhero films won’t be reduced once again to Love Interest or Villain, and I find that a relief.

The movie has its problems. For one, despite being well played by Emma Corrin, Cassandra isn’t a very interesting villain. Unlike the complex bad guys who are the heroes in their own mind, fighting for a cause they perceive as righteous, she loves to hurt people just because she can, and when an opportunity comes her way to hurt people on a massive scale, big surprise, she leaps at it. (Only Gravity Falls‘ Bill Cipher manages to get around my general disaffection with this type of villain.) The movie’s other bad guy, prepared to commit atrocities to accomplish a goal he believes in, is a bit more complicated but gets less screen time. Also, I’ve never been a big fan of Vanessa, Deadpool’s human love interest, whose entire identity can pretty much be summed up by the word “hot”; I’d hoped she might be better served in the third film after having been done so dirty in the second, but no such luck. She’s the movie’s dullest character by far.

All the same, I had fun, and I recommend the movie. Three and a half out of four stars.

Now, if Dogpool had bitten Cassandra to distract her at the climax, I would have given it a full four.