Crosswords are for faggots and Europeans anyway. Like the Metric system.

> Sadly, aside from movies like "Chicago", most of the ones in my collection that have conversations that fit the bill happen because one of the females is still young enough not to be involved in a romantic relationship. After a certain point, movie girls seem to have to grow up and stop adventuring, or start associating with men more exclusively as they do so.

In Reviving Ophelia, Mary Pipher suggested that women lose a part of their identities during puberty, and only really regain it after menopause. To illustrate this, she pointed to the fact that most solo female adventurers are either children (Pippi Longstocking, Meg Murry from A Wrinkle in Time) or "old women" (Mrs. Whatsit, also from A Wrinkle in Time). Interestingly enough, The Sarah Jane Adventures features both, in the form of 50-something Sarah Jane Smith (Bettie's inspiration) and her 14-year-old sidekick, Maria Jackson.

Something I've tried to do with most of my female characters, even if they have love interests, is spin them off into their own "worlds," where each one can be The Best There Is At What They Do in their respective realms. Meg is the porn queen, Sydney is the fashion queen, Bettie is the one who knows how to reach the hard-knock life kids, Wendy is the voice of the hard-knock life kids, Bernice is the voice of political dissent, Roslyn is the diplomatic politician, Anna is the engineering genius, and April ... well, she's a bit more of a mixed bag, but then again, that's kind of what makes her similar to Dream, before he evolved into the Agent of Chaos.

What also helps is that I can't bear to rule out options, so most of the romances these characters have remain rather fluid. As much as I hate "love triangles" as they're usually portrayed in superhero relationships, what I really hate is how they freeze relationships in a perpetual state of anticipation without payoff, so I simply did an end-run around that part, and set up "love triangles" with consummation, as with Dream, April and Bettie, or Meg, Louis and Isis (Louis' rarely seen girlfriend, yet another character I need to try and show more often, especially since Dream can't stand her).

> You do manage to discuss the larger social issues quite often in your stories, with some very clever applications to your settings such as the reservation.

When me and my friends used to watch Scooby Doo as little kids, I was the one who was asking, "But ... where do they live, when they're not driving around in that van?" I don't think every use of super-powers should be accompanied with an '80s-era Alan Moore-style OMG THESE SUPER-POWERS WOULD CHANGE EVERYTHING ABOUT OUR WORLD IF THEY WERE REAL type of exploration, but I do think certain implications should at least be addressed. As much as I disliked a lot of Grant Morrison's tenure on the X-Men titles, I loved the fact that he updated the civil rights metaphor of mutants by showing that, if mutants existed in the real world, then suburban white kids would start appropriating mutant culture the same way they've done with black culture. That being said, once you introduce an element of "realism" into your stories, you have to play by the rules you've now established for yourself, or else you'll wind up producing A Pile Of Fail on the scale of Marvel's Civil War. Which, if you've noticed, is why I tend more toward self-contained instances of how superheroes would influence reality, rather than trying (and failing) to produce the next Watchmen.

> Does she see a difference between modern day casual clothing and revealing superhero outfits? I'd think one would be almost as shocking as the other when you're not used to the "norm".

In spite of her origins, she's not quite the Victorian/Edwardian era equivalent of Captain America's "man out of time" deal, simply because, instead of being trapped in an iceberg between then and now, she's grown old and lived in Faerie, where she's gradually gotten used to being able to shed a lot of the bullshit societal baggage that her upbringing saddled her with. In keeping with Wendy Darling, the other character who inspired her, Bettie never harbored any great love of the layers of clothing that she was required to wear, as a "proper" young lady, if only because it's damned difficult to climb trees and fight pirates wearing such billowy dresses. Even when she dresses formally, I'd imagine that she sports young Katherine Hepburn-style pantsuits. That being said, she's not going to go for an outfit that exposes any significant amount of skin, either, and the fact that so many women do so now is probably one of her many sources of culture-shock. In that sense, Bettie is even more "out of time" than Captain America, because she was too forward-thinking for the era she grew up in, but she's a bit too "traditional" by modern standards to qualify as "trendy."

> From what we've seen, Caphans probably puts their emphasis on the House they belong to and then the world as a whole. If your house is famous enough, geographical division likely don't matter at all.

And here we come to another distinction, because while Bettie has allowed Dream's family to "adopt" her, it's also important to her to be her own woman (she's already been left behind by one man she loved, and that burned her too much for her ever to let herself be that dependent again). Having a job and a home of her own, that lie at least slightly outside of Dream's social circles, matter to her.

> Additionally, many of the important people in Miiri's life don't have American citizenship and seem to do just fine: Hallie, Fleabot, Quoth, the Shoggoth, Ebony, etc. While Magweed has it, I'm not too sure about Griffin... there's no existing evidence that he was born in the US.

For someone who's rejected the rules of her proper British upbringing so much, Bettie can't help but still feel the need for some semblance of ritual and ceremony to signify the turning points in her life, which is probably another reason why the process of applying for citizenship would feel so necessary for her. She would want it to be clearly delineated, and to be her choice, so that there would be no mistake that she was taking charge of that part of her life.