#'this is a loss for gay rep' because the character can be in a m/f relationship??? really???????

[sleepingfancies]

Leftism leaving ppl's bodies when an openly bisexual character exists

[astralbooks]

City of Vicious Night (Requiem Dark #2) - Claire Winn

Read: 24/05/2023 - 25/05/2023

Rating: 4/5

Rep: bi main characters, f/f relationship, biracial Japanese-Portuguese main character & side character, chronically ill main character, disabled main character with a prosthetic arm and eye, gay South Asian side character, disabled gay Latino side character with a prosthetic arm, side m/m relationship, aromantic side character, non-binary side characters

CW (provided in front of book): violence, blood, mild gore, death (on-page and past), gun violence, strong language, sexual content (including non-graphic encounters), human experimentation, use of medical needles, alcohol misuse, fictional drug use, terminal illness, suicidal ideation & threatened suicide, mild torture, loss of limbs, vomiting, referenced poverty, referenced prostitution & sexual assault (not involving main characters)

Review:

Four months after runaway heiress Asa managed to get her sister’s consciousness placed back inside her body, the two of them are firmly established members of Riven’s crew. When a hacker starts telling the people of city-moon Requiem that they were the ones responsible for the chaos from around then, and starts trying very hard to kill them, the crew decide that their best option for survival is to have Riven become the new matriarch of one of the Requiem’s five factions, as matriarchs are nigh-untouchable. To do that they’ll need to succeed at a series of trials, and deal with new opponents, all while still fending off the murderous hacker and uncovering a conspiracy involving Asa’s father with horrifying implications for all of Requiem.

I came away from the first book wanting the girls to be friends rather than girlfriends, which feels deeply weird to me as a queer person who’s used to thinking the complete opposite. The four month time skip means that the majority of development between Asa and Riven happened off-screen between books. If you take their feelings for each other as a given then this book works. I didn’t finish this one thinking they should just be friends. I would’ve much preferred it if we actually got to see them get from A to B, though, especially considering how little focus their relationship in any capacity got in the first book. We could’ve gotten a slow burn out of this, and Riven’s tendency for self-sabotage could’ve remained intact in that version of the story, but instead we got none of the development and barely any of the payoff because having a strong established relationship for most of the book is also apparently too much to ask for.

When I read the first book, I was neutral on Riven. There were times when I liked her and there were times when I really didn’t like her. This, unfortunately, did not change in this book. She’s for some reason taken it upon herself to protect poor innocent little Asa who clearly can’t handle herself in any situation at all, but then she constantly makes reckless decisions that puts everyone in even more danger than they were in before. Riven’s view of herself as a protector and view of Asa (and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the crew) as someone who she specifically must protect is just not true to reality, and this is something that never quite clicks in her head through the whole book. I think this is the source of my issues with her. Asa can handle herself and Riven’s assumption otherwise came off as condescending. Leroy Jenkins’ing your way through life doesn’t just put you in danger, but the people around you as well. It’s hypocritical, and therefore irritating.

Why four stars, then? Well, there is still a lot about this book that I did enjoy!

Riven was a lot more bearable in the final act! She hadn’t fully understood what she’d been doing wrong, but she did refrain from doing any of it again, and I can take a win when I get one.

I loved every other member of the crew! Asa is just as fab in this book as in the first. She’s more used to Requiem and more secure in her life and identity away from her father, now firmly a part of the crew and an indispensable part of it. Samir and Diego were just as great in this book as they were in the first, and I enjoyed getting to learn more about Diego’s past and reasons for being here. Asa’s sister, Kaya, was a highlight for me from the first book despite not actually being in it very much, so I was really happy to see her playing a much larger part in this book. She’s so fun! Her consciousness having been transferred to an alien brain means she’s now effectively a technomancer, and seeing her put those skills to use was really cool. The upcoming novella is going to be featuring her as a main character and I’m genuinely really excited for it!

And then there’s Ty! Ty gets his own pov in this book, and I love him. He’s the team healer and he really embodies that. It was great seeing the contrast between characters who have no problem with killing people, and Ty who wants to save as many people as possible even if it’s maybe not the most efficient approach to a problem. Ty has never killed anyone before, and a big part of his arc is about reckoning with that. He goes from being scared at the thought of hurting someone to being entirely prepared to do so but choosing to be merciful anyway, and I loved that.

Two characters having a psychic link where they can directly communicate with one another and even hear each other’s thoughts is a trope I really enjoy, especially when it leads to the characters becoming closer with each other.

I enjoyed the competition aspect of the plot! However, I wouldn’t describe this entirely as a ‘competition book’, because it takes up a much smaller part of the story than is probably expected. Things go off the rails very quickly thanks to two opposing antagonistic forces. There’s Luca Almeida, Asa and Kaya’s father and the one responsible for a host of suffering and death, and there’s Redline, a hacker saboteur who holds Asa responsible for her father’s factions and is trying to exact revenge on her. There are a lot of questions surrounding Redline, and not all of them are answered by the end, which isn’t a bad thing. It leaves room for there to potentially be more set in this universe.

So many books have their big climactic moment and then just end right away, as if once the confrontation has happened and the big bad has been dealt with there’s nothing of value anymore so it might as well not continue. This book didn’t do that!! The final chapters are a proper denouement, where the characters now finally have a chance to recover and breathe and be okay. Winning the battle isn’t all there is and I really appreciated that we got to see some of what comes after!

This is in all a fun cyberpunk duology that I’m happy to recommend to people looking for something fast paced and cinematic. 

Thank you to NetGalley and North Star Editions for providing me with an e-arc of this book, and to TBR and Beyond Tours for having me on this tour! You can find the full tour schedule here and the rest of my tour stop (there's a playlist!) here

[templeofshame]

i feel like in conversations on the bury your gays trope, people never talk about the reliance on death and grief for drama. like i tend to agree with what people do say about the trope, i understand that there’s a lot of history and unchecked biases and that mainstream representation ending tragically is very different than some little theatre stuff.

but it’s also been an issue i’ve run into with queer writers and straight writers alike when they’re actively trying to bring queer rep into what they’re writing and then they realize... fuck but how can this work without one or both of the characters dying? i’ve had instances where characters had to, a couple drafts in, had genders change to make it a m/f relationship because the arc of the story was defined by the loss of the partner, so it was bury your gays or get rid of the gays. i’ve also had a situation where we could have a character survive and go be a hermit and the partner got some ~ambiguity~ of like maybe he faked his death but maybe he was dead. that wasn’t the worst solution, but it was really a scramble we had to go through when we realized that the story we were telling was falling into the trope and we really wanted to retain the dynamics of the queer relationship.

i think lately i have been chafing at how much fiction is primarily about suffering generally. but i think also if we rely fictionally on telling stories that hinge on death and grief, we’re also painting ourselves into a corner where we either can’t have queer characters in some important roles or we end up perpetuating a harmful trope. but maybe there are more creative (but maybe less easy) ways to get drama and intense emotion besides killing off someone (most commonly, someone with a partner to grieve them and evoke that pathos). 

[flying-elliska]

Just watched The Old Guard yesterday....I have Emotions. Compelling characters, excellent rep, great action scenes. I see why tumblr is obsessed with it.

SPOILERS + lil essay incoming

It's not perfect obviously. It drags in places and I think it needed more flashbacks for the immortals that would have given that extra oomph (maybe they definitely couldn't afford that - the few historical flashbacks we got looked kinda cheap tbh). You feel like there is so much interesting stuff under the surface that isn't explored fully - how they got where they are because it does, at times, seem even more compelling than the present (which is already quite interesting, don’t get me wrong). The bad guy doesn't feel as scary as he should be, either - he lacks presence, he could have been more pathetic or more unhinged. The dialogue was a bit overly sparse in places. But overall, I loved it. Charlize Theron as queerish action queen badass with a gruff exterior but a core of goodness is like...my jam. And it NEEDS a sequel.

Some more thoughts :

- The tone of deep melancholy and sadness that pervades the film is so interesting. Yes, most of the main characters are the gruff action hero type who say little ; but there is so much underlying emotion there too, love and loyalty and loss, in the way they are played and interact with each other. So it doesn’t come over as the stereotypical macho cliché of ‘gotta repress those feelings and BE TOUGH’ - you really feel as if 1) those characters have spent so much time together that they function really well as a unit, they don’t need to talk a lot of the time, they just understand each other and 2) there is so much real grief and sorrow there that words wouldn’t properly adress it and it’s no use trying. AND at the same time, they still get an arc of ‘caring about the world is still good, actually.’ As an action movie fan who hates the ‘cardboard stoic is the only way to survive’ tropes of the genre, this movie just made me very happy. They have this intimacy within the group that feels so real and like...battle forged found families, again, my jam, but they’re also tied together by loss and loneliness and having no one else who understands. It’s so JUICY in terms of character dynamics. Nile’s more innocent but still a fighter thing fits very well with the older, more cynical ones. The ending, where they punish Booker with a century of loneliness for betraying them but ultimately still recognize why he did what he did and that he’s still part of the team...but that he might not ever see Andy again...my heart. 

- Also, it reminds me of this essay I read about how violence/battle/injury in film is often used an excuse to show male intimacy in a way that is not allowed anywhere else but in this movie, you both have platonic intimacy (and also between Andy and her team, which is cool! love a good m/f platonic soul bond!!!) AND you have a couple of dudes who both fight together and are actually lovers, which is awesome. The scene in the van is just so bloody brilliant because you have that idiot soldier who is at the level of homophobic taunts, ‘haha is he your boyfriend’ as if that was supposed to threaten their masculinity (because in their world it would). But Joe and Nicky are just way beyond those puerile games - they also met in this context of violence but because of their immortality, they were able to turn it into love. And it’s the thing that allowed them to survive the centuries with a relative level of happiness compared to the two others because they have each other. I love this because it 1) grounds gay love in history and clearly shows it as something that has always existed and can be an epic love able to withstand almost a thousand years (whereas gayness has been so often coded as something both modern and ephemeral) and 2) presents it as wiser, deeper and a lot more badass than the path of repression and violence as a baseline for men to interact even as a lot of male socialization is build up as brutal to avoid it so like YEAH !!!!! GOOD!!!!

- This is another movie that really REALLY shows the importance of having ppl who are not white and/or dudes behind the camera. (It was still written by one but I still feel a difference).The two leading ladies are never objectified, and their main emotional dynamic during the movie is with each other. The audience surrogate, who is also the emotional pivot of the movie who causes the other characters to change, is a young Black woman (especially since apparently Nile’s role and her relationship with Andy was expanded from the comics). Andy is the leader/main badass and mystery of the story in a way generally reserved for men. There is that scene, too, where Andy gets her wound patched up by a random woman in a pharmacy, which causes her to reflect on the good of humanity and the importance of good actions in a chaotic world. Chiwetel Eijofor’s villain being allowed complexity and a sort-of redemption. But it’s also more specific things in the way the movie is shot - especially in the non-Western countries. In action movie tropes, you have this cliché of ‘picturesque but dangerous’ ‘exotic’ locales, who are often used as the backdrop for action scenes, which is...not awesome tbh. This movie does take us to those countries, and there is action, but it’s also shot in a very humanizing way that reminds us that this is a real place where real people live : Nicky saying hello to the locals in South Sudan in their own language, Nile asking the Afghan women for help in the beginning, shots of kids playing with balloons, etc. The team accepts a mission in the beginning to rescue kidnapped Sudanese girls in the beginning - in most action movies often the populations to save are white/Western whereas locals/POC are shown as ‘tragic but acceptable collateral damage’. Or for instance, that scene in Marrakech’s Jemaa El-Fna square - a lot of the time foreign markets only appear as a ‘chaotic, dangerous’ backdrop for action to be ransacked through without a care ; here it’s just a cool lively place for the team to meet their contact, normalized instead of exotified. It’s shot the same way as the scenes in France, it’s interesting to look at and the shots take advantage of the beauty of the location but there are no weird color filters or shots that suggest that the place is bizarre, threatening, Otherized, etc. (Also interesting that most of the scenes in France take place in abandoned buildings like a church that’s half in ruins, a mine, etc...interesting reversal lmao.) The movie is not anti-imperialist by any means but it’s still...a tangibly different gaze, especially for an American movie, and it makes it a lot more humane and interesting.

- Overall, it left me wanting more, mostly in a good way. This could have made such an excellent series too. They seem to be setting Quynh as a villain for the next movie and that could be really interesting but I really hope they’re going for a ‘tragic villain gets redeemed in the end’ (with a side of lovers to ennemies to lovers with Andy...their story seems to have so much potential in such an epic tragic way) instead of ‘psycho lady too far gone to save’ thing. And that we get more flashbacks from the immortal’s pasts. Since it seems very successful, I hope we do get that sequel once the film industry starts again.