I came here to try to protect my family.
I love this. It’s such a great, heroic moment for Jupiter.
#I never understand why people think Jupiter isn’t a hero #her heroism just doesn’t come from physical strength #sure she has to be rescued #but y’know she’s also willing to sacrifice herself for the greater good #anyway this is her I’ll Never Turn To The Dark Side moment and I dig it
While the Bolotnikov family could never afford pets, the young Jupiter Jones found herself popular with animals – particularly ones that happen to be from strongly matriarchal species. When she was eight and taken to Lincoln Park Zoo by her mother, Jupiter found the inhabitants of the Lion House particularly attentive. When her mother’s back was turned, one of the lion’s bowed to her. As much as Jupiter insisted that the lion had bowed to her, Aleksa dismissed it as a projection – “Lions do not bow, Especially not to little girls.” A rather sad Jupiter resigned herself to the fact that she’d merely imagining it, and the universe felt a little greyer.
This is one of mine, and I’m particularly proud of it (despite the sloppy wording and erroneous punctuation). Poor ‘lll Jupe.
[Jupiter’s] lack of extraordinary qualities outside of her genetic sequencing does ultimately become part of the movie’s point. There’s nothing that sets her apart, aside from the luck of her birth, and she doesn’t manage to cause a revolution or right the wrongs of the universe or do anything else heroic, in her past or present incarnation. The bravest act she manages, her big moment of agency, is choosing to trade her own life and those of her loved ones for the larger survival of Earth, which may not be a sweeping gesture but is a desperately resonant one. Jupiter chooses not to participate in a system in which her specialness depends on the ruin of others. Dramatic rescues and flying boots and space police and dragon aliens aside, her pivotal choice is to not be the princess.
I really love Mila’s acting here, and I only recently realised that the red marks on her cheek aren’t unfortunate acne scars – that’s the mark left by Balem’s slap. That the slap left such a vivid mark indicates the force with which he must have struck her and how painful it must have been.
You can truly see Jupiter suffering here, struggling to reconcile her love for her family with her responsibility towards the Earth. Mila manages to convey a strong sense of pain and injustice, and I think this is the point where she begins to realise that she’s going to have to let her loved ones die.
I find this moment very powerful, and it annoys me that this crucial scene is often disregarded or dismissed because it doesn’t fit with the prevailing narrative of Jupiter as a weak-willed dimwit.
A thing about Jupiter Ascending and its popularity among fangirls (fanwomen?) that I haven’t seen mentioned yet is: how Jupiter herself is really a marvel just for existing, let alone for being liked. Ok, you’re gonna need some background-
Fandom in the mid-noughties (back at Livejournal) loathed female characters. Like, if you saw someone post a review of a popular movie or the latest Harry Potter book you just had to knuckle down and expect your favourite fictional ladies to be torn to shreds, because they would be, in virtually every arena. Whole forums would spring up sometimes dedicated to hatred of X popular female character. And it could get really nasty. I’ll let your mind fill in the blanks.
Anyway, having your own ‘Mary Sue’ was considered, like…lowest of the low. Writing some silly story about your teen Elf princess getting off with Legolas could open you up to some legitimately quite unpleasant verbal abuse, if you were unlucky. There were massively popular communities dedicated to mocking these wish fufilment fantasies of teenage girls – you’d get Mary Sues sorted by fandom origin and personality (‘annoying origin’ ‘annoying traits’) with the author’s name included so you could go mock them too if you really wanted. It was a clusterfuck…but it didn’t stop there! If you wanted to spew misogynistic garbage about an already established character, there were plenty of massively popular communities where you could do that, too. I can just picture the ‘report’ on Jupiter now:
Full Name, including titles: Jupiter Jones
Full Species(es): Human, reincarnation of space matriarch
Unusual Markings/Colourations: Tattoo to indiate she owns the planet
Special Possessions/Pets: Channing Tatum. Sean Bean. BEES.
Probably followed by a few pages’s worth of her being called useless or a bitch, because (I cannot stress this point enough) olde time fandom really hated female characters.
But anyway-
Basically? Hell yes, Jupiter Jones is that self-insert you made when you were fourteen. Except that now, rather than sitting unloved at the back end of fanfiction.net, raking in four-word reviews consisting of at least one ‘fuck off’, she’s now the central character of a million-dollar movie. Break out the smug, I know I am. Ooh, and you know who else is a glorious Mary Sue? Tauriel. Fanfiction.net used to be packed with Tauriels, badass elf warriors who were BEAUTIFUL and NOBLE and WALKED IN STARLIGHT IN ANOTHER WORLD. People subjected those Tauriels and their authors to endless mockery and NOW. LOOK.
S’like, you know what, I had self-insert characters and I loved them. Why the fuck shouldn’t I go to Hogwarts or Middle-Earth? Why the fuck shouldn’t Jupiter Jones get to have wacky space adventures when Luke Skywalker and Flash Gordon and Captain Kirk have been having theirs for ages? The popularity of Jupiter Ascending in its bizzare glory seems to indicate that yeah, fandom has finally realised what a self-insert/Mary Sue actually is – a shot at playing in the boy’s playground – and reacted accordingly.
I hope that Jupiter Jones was Lana Wachowski’s self-insert as a teenager and I hope she ignored every last bit of the sexist crap about what female characters should or shouldn’t be to be considered acceptable and I hope she’s now sitting in a room full of money laughing her ass off in smug delight. My fourteen-year-old self who angsted for hours about her female characters being too important to their own stories feels downright VALIDATED by Jupiter Ascending. I hope everyone else who ever backed away from posting their female-centric fanfiction for fear of the backlash feels that way too.