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With historic Oscar nominations for Get Out and record-breaking ticket pre-sales for Black Panther, 2018 is shaping up to be a watershed year for mainstream genre pictures that center Black characters. Acclaimed speculative fiction writers and educators Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes, who currently offer an online course dedicated to Jordan Peele’s box office phenomenon, join Keith for a frank discussion of both films and their place in American popular culture.

Also, Laura Surikul joins to invite our listeners to the first of several Black Panther Blerd Meetups at the Scum and Villainy Cantina in Los Angeles we are co-sponsoring with Black Girl Nerds, Geeks of Color, and a host of other Nerdy POCs including Fatman on Batman co-host Marc Bernardin!

All this and more on Hard NOC Life! Watch it on your screen, hit “play,” and check this. Subscribe to all of podcasts in the Hard NOC Media family on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and NPR One!

As always, our official theme music is brought to you by the super team of Adam WarRock and Chops. Support us on Patreon!

everyone was still confused so i made this pic.twitter.com/PfV5mjw8bV

— Anthony Oliveira (@meakoopa) February 1, 2018

One of the benefits of getting older is making fun of definitions that may have once felt isolating. Thus is the case with this brilliant two-axis model that approximates where MCU characters land along high school movie lunch table lines.

On Twitter, the ever-delightful writer and comics fan Anthony Oliveira (@meakoopa) created an initial chart, then updated in response to people demanding to know where even more of their beloved heroes would land. If you know these characters well, you can’t deny that there’s something incredibly accurate about their placement. You can’t always say why, but it just feels … right.

Thousands of people liked and retweeted Oliveira’s graphs, and many of the reactions were like this:

pic.twitter.com/FrUKLxbaUz

— Yolosef Staline (@GregPogorzelski) February 1, 2018

Oliveria gamely explained some of his choices in response to queries. Take, for example, his explanation of why Ant-Man edges towards goth:

If you are confused about why Ant-Man is trending slightly goth, you must realize all Rogues have an element of goth. Aragorn is goth. Gambit is goth.

He steals. He went to jail. He pines for his daughter. Goth.

If he weren’t semi-goth the Baskin Robbins joke wouldn’t work.

— Anthony Oliveira (@meakoopa) February 1, 2018

Addressing T’Challa’s dead-center position of total balance:

Black Panther is perfect centre.

GOTH: giant black cat.
PREP: literally a king.
NERD: smartest man on earth.
JOCK: did u see the pool he flipped the bitch

— Anthony Oliveira (@meakoopa) February 1, 2018

Whenever folks were confused about how some of these attributes could be combined, Oliveira had examples on hand.

people keep asking what a GOTH JOCK is? like that is so easy. pic.twitter.com/AJRYGpLvar

— Anthony Oliveira (@meakoopa) February 1, 2018

And my favorite explanation, in response to a query about how my boy Loki can be both a goth and a nerd:

he rules by subterfuge and guile and uses his fleeting moments of power to eat grapes and stage Elizabethan-style dramas about himself. Deep nerd. https://t.co/eK8gPqiubZ

— Anthony Oliveira (@meakoopa) February 1, 2018

This is all tongue-in-cheek and in good fun, and it becomes all the more entertaining when you start wanting to argue with the “data points” based on your own gut feels about a character. To wit: I don’t think I’d place my darling sensitive artist Steve Rogers so high up among the convergence of jock/prep, yet the case could be made that in some of the MCU’s depictions, he lands therein.

And, of course, all of these definitions are silly in the end—we all encompass many aspects, as do our super-powered faves—but a well-charted graph is always good to gaze upon.

Who would you position differently—or has this awakened a new understanding of character alignment you’d never considered before? Who is missing, and where would you put them?

This is why Twitter even exists. It’s beautiful. pic.twitter.com/i56r2Nk1IN

— Matt!!! (@Huinks) February 1, 2018

(via Twitter, image: Marvel Entertainment)

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—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—

Every story has a beginning. The Stargate film showed Professor Paul Langford’s discovery of the mysterious device that ended up being a transportation device that could be used to hop between worlds via a wormhole. The movie launched a rich universe that’s traveled around the galaxy to fantastical locations in three television series. And now, MGM is turning back the clock to see what happened in the time between the discovery of the Stargate and the events of the movie with Stargate Origins.

The final trailer for the upcoming web series that will follow Professor Langford’s daughter Catherine (Ellie Gall) has arrived, and it highlights the same spirit of action, adventure, and mystery that made the 1994 film captivating. Directed by Mercedes Bryce Morgan, the series is set in 1939, over ten years after the Langfords found the Stargate, and they’re running out of funding when a Nazi Occultist crosses their path. Yeah, there are serious Indiana Jones vibes.

Catherine appears to be just as take-charge and feisty in her youth as she is in later years when we see her in SG-1. She has to rescue her father, and though she’s enlisted the help of two soldiers (Wasif and Beal), from the looks of it, she might not need them. Since the teaser shows the Stargate being activated, I can’t help but wonder if Catherine’s father has been taken off world.

Stargate Origins is set to premiere on Stargate Command on February 15.

What do you think of the trailer? Are you intrigued enough to subscribe to Stargate Command? Lock the final chevron and travel to the comments and let us know.

Featured Image: MGM

Amy Ratcliffe is an Associate Editor for Nerdist. She’d follow Samantha Carter anywhere. Follow her on Twitter.

Travel through the wormhole with these stories!

• A full size 3D printed Stargate.
• Stargate Universe’s cliffhanger resolved in comics.
• The first teaser for Stargate Origins.

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