Think you don’t have them? Wrong.

Here are the reasons I make an annual trip out to San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC):

a) To get my picture taken by multitudes while dressed in costume (cosplaying) as my favourite characters from comics, television, and film.

b) To order drinks that match the designer dresses I have no other opportunity to wear while eating delicious, bacon-wrapped, finger-sized appetizers and catching glimpses of celebrities at star-studded parties that I, a weirdo commoner from New Jersey, have no business being at.

c) To attend panels, tweet the news, and take in the general ambience of the whole thing so that I can write about the experience for awesome websites like The Toast.

I’ve been attending large comic conventions since 2011, though I didn’t start actively participating in con culture until I decided to squeeze myself into a red jumpsuit and become Marvel comic heroine Misty Knight for New York Comic-Con (NYCC) 2012. That same year I began writing and reporting on my con experiences, so I can look back at a fairly robust record of my time at conventions to help me conclude that, overall, my participation has been a fairly decent experience — full of good times and great panels paired with only the occasional, if predictable, occurrences of behavioral BS and outright racism. (My 15+ years of participating in online fandom spaces has, without a doubt, been more far more unpleasant in that regard.) Perhaps the man I saw as I left Chicago’s C2E2 convention this year who was dressed in some strange combination of Rocky Horror Picture Show and Nazi drag cosplay probably should have been a sign of the change in my convention luck that was to come.

SDCC 2015 was simultaneously the best and the worst comic convention I’ve ever attended. Its highs surpassed that one time I ended up doing karaoke with a group of my favourite comic writers and artists into the small hours of the morning after NYCC. Its lows surpassed even the old man cosplaying in Nazi drag with red swastika bands all over his arms.

And I get it: a weirdo commoner from New Jersey like myself can’t expect to be blessed with eye contact, a smile, and a compliment from Matt Bomer without The Universe immediately realizing it’s had too much to drink and making a hard left to correct. I just feel like that hard left could have been, say, the revealed Batman vs. Superman trailer sucking spectacularly; as the one person in the world who genuinely loved Man of Steel, that would have been punishment enough for me. The unsolicited viewing of a stranger’s genitals — which is what The Universe chose to go with — really seemed like a bit much.

I had a wide variety of interactions with people at San Diego Comic-Con this year. Some of them were amazing. Some of them made me consider paying United Airlines any amount of money it asked for, a vial of blood, and my firstborn so that I could fly out as soon as the convention floor closed on Sunday. I ended up taking a red-eye out instead, and while I was in the air I scribbled down some of the real thoughts I had about some of the real live adult people I interacted with at SDCC 2015.

Sulagna Misra’s previous work for The Toast can be found here. Note: This article contains spoilers for Avengers: Age of Ultron.

There’s a lot one could say about Avengers: Age of Ultron, but the thought that struck me most often during my 10:30 AM screening was, Why does this feel like bad fanfic? 

I turned to my friends in the crowded theater and whispered, “This is bad, right? This is bad writing?” They agreed, laughing at my eagerness to condemn the film, but I was genuinely puzzled. I had enjoyed the first Avengers movie, and everyone and their dog knows how much I loved Captain America: The Winter Soldier. But the feeling I had about Avengers: Age of Ultron was very specific: not only was I disappointed, I couldn’t believe how disappointed I was.

Where was the fun, the wit? There was a romance between two very good-looking people with a ton of angst and some pining thrown in; how was there no heat? And if you’re going to have fight sequences that look like literal trash, why weren’t there more funny quips during? In Age of Ultron, the Avengers did what so many fans most wanted them to do: they hung out like pals and made jokes and acted silly. But their jokes fell flat for me.

It didn’t help that the movie was riddled with cognitive dissonance. Do these people exist in an alternate universe in which a man who creates an all-powerful omniscient murderous AI is brushed off with a “boys will be boys”? Joss Whedon has publicly pointed out that he and Marvel tussled over various parts of the script, and maybe that is what drove what was previously a winning formula straight into the ground.

Part I of this article, which ran yesterday, can be found here.

I didn’t start reading Jane Austen novels until my 20s – or rather, it was only after trying Pride and Prejudice for the fourth time that I finally got into it. While trying to get through them all, I also picked up the book A Jane Austen Education by William Deresiewicz, which discusses the morality lessons of the Austen novels. Deresiewicz’s exploration of Emma is my favorite section of his book, a quote of which I want to extract here:

By eliminating all the big, noisy events that usually absorb all our interest when we read novels – the adventures and affairs, the romances and crises, even, at times, the plot – Austen was asking us to pay attention to the things we usually miss or don’t accord enough esteem, in novels or in life. Those small, “trivial,” everyday things, the things that happen hour by hour to the people in our lives: what your nephew said, what your friend heard, what your neighbor did. That, she was telling us, is what the fabric of our years really consists of. That is what life is really about.

This perfectly describes one of my favorite genre of fanfiction: Alternate Universe fanfiction, or AU fanfic. AU fanfic is something you find mostly dealing with action/adventure science fiction, but it does a curious thing and strips them of the science fiction — and most of the action and adventure –and places the characters in a smaller, cozier community. These AUs can be set in a coffee shop, a news agency, a high school, a college, etc. – anywhere people have to gather in large groups that tend to break up into communities (or regulars, as coffee shops are wont to have). Marvel Nine Nine is an AU of the MCU.

AUs focus on those everyday things. Instead of being blockbuster events of life and death, the characters’ relationships become the impetus, the focus, because underneath those explosions are the beating hearts of humanity.